Will The Dragon Deliver: Fill & Download for Free

Release the Living Lures: maidens bearing shiny gold and jewels.Once the LLs have the dragon's attention, they are to proceed with all due alacrity to the designated field.The field will have a fast getaway vehicle for the LLs. It will also have bales and bales of marijuana.As the LLs flee, the dragon will get angry, causing it to shoot fire. The fire will ignite the weed.While the dragon is calming down, a flatbed of Cheetos will be delivered.Some time later, the dragon, now mellow, will (clumsily) fly off, having quite forgotten why it came a rampaging in the first place.You can't believe the looks I got when I suggested to my City Council that they add a line item to the budget for “a fuckton of weed, for the purpose of subduing a dragon.”

Well let’s see…..The Dragon II has successfully flown its unmanned demonstration flight delivering cargo to the ISS, the CST-100 has not with a planned first flight in August.The Dragon II can support up to a theoretical maximum of 7 crewmen. The CST-100 can carry up to seven crewmen (I believe that this was a spec requirement.)The Dragon II has the life support features to provide for independent missions of up to seven days; the CST-100 can support 60 hours of free flight.The Dragon II has a LEO cargo capacity of 6000 lb to orbit and 3000 lb return. The CST-100 apparently has the capacity to carry 880 lbs of pressurized cargo to LEO.The total R&D program for the Dragon was about 1/2 of the cost of the CST-100. CST-100 -$4.2B Dragon - $2.6B.What do you think?

What would have been the media treatment of the Dragon capsule first manned flight, if it had taken place in the early 80’s, after the first space shuttle flights?Derision, mostly. Early 1980s means “before the Challenger and Columbia disasters,” so the response to the Dragon capsule would be derision, probably. The shuttle was enormously more capable and more reusable than the Dragon, even if it was a hangar queen. The Dragon capsule cannot:Launch four satellites, unlike the shuttleRecover satellites, unlike the shuttlePerform in-orbit satellite grappling and repairSupport construction of the space station, unlike the shuttleCarry a large (bus-sized) space lab to act as a mini-space station for a week, unlike the shuttleSupport USAF dirty ops that required single polar orbit flights over RussiaLand at a flexible range of airports, unlike the shuttleRecover most of its launched components, unlike the shuttleFurther, there was the course of history to consider. The US public was tired of throwing fortunes away on expendable rockets like the Saturn family. It was tired of little capsules. The future, as the US had been told since the 1960s, was reusable spaceplanes. They knew they’d be getting something like this after Apollo:The public was told that the shuttle would support high, reusable flight rates. And in the early 1980s, the shuttles were proving that: the shuttle fleet was ramping up toward 12 launches per year.The Dragon capsule isn’t going to pull off dramatic stunts like this, a 3-man spacewalk to capture and repair a satellite.The Dragon capsule - even a Falcon 9 - isn’t going to carry three satellites for launch, a free-flying and recoverable experiment platform, six “Getaway Special (GAS)” experiments, and human-tended experiments in the crew areas ranging from a materials furnace to biomedical experiments like Discovery’s STS-51-G mission.If this 1980s Crew Dragon capsule got any respect in the early 1980s then it would be because (unlike the real Dragon capsule) it was entirely privately funded. The shuttle was entirely privately built but it received huge amounts of government funding and guaranteed government contracts. Since the 1980s Crew Dragon wouldn’t be useful to the USAF or NASA in the era, it would’ve been built entirely by private funding.Of course, the 1980s Dragon wouldn’t have a market. The shuttle was going to build the Space Station Freedom and then deliver crews; the Dragon can’t compete with that. (It competes with the little Soyuz.) Private industry didn’t have a need for a capsule that couldn’t build a station, couldn’t maintain satellites, and couldn’t host lots of experiment racks.The Falcon 9 might be a bit more competitive, but how could a partially-reusable rocket that gets 3–5 uses out of its first stage really compete with shuttles meant for 100 flights each? (The shuttle still holds a faster turnaround than any Falcon 9 first stage.)Obviously, the shuttles’ history turned out quite different after 1986. Flight rates were never that high again and satellite operators turned back to expendable rockets. The Dragon and Falcon 9 might shine in the late 1980s.