Four civilians in orbit three days

This Dragon has a cupola for viewing scenery during 3 days. Not sure how many cupholders.

I have not seen a reason for higher-than-typical orbital altitude. Have you? Maybe just checking out the deceleration capacity of Dragon on somebody else's dime.

Actually about a billion dimes, according to price rumors.

 

someone from tesla said they wanted to break a record

 

Well they will bury bezos and branson with altitude and time.

 

Gemini XI orbited at (up to) 850 miles in 1966. They needed to dock with another firestick for a push to get up there. Delta V used to be very hard to acquire. 340 miles up this time, so maybe it's a record*. Anyway it's 5.7 Bezos.

Will 12 person-days be a record test for the on-board loo? Would hate to lose that amenity.

*Asterisk should be followed by ... something. Ad astra per asterisk?

 

It has no in-between chamber for pressure, so the whole inside goes to vacuum if they open a door. That all seems feasible, but not for 4 tourists. But I see no reason why 2 or 3 actual crew could not go to Hubble and do that thing. There is no hook-me-up so everyone outside would be on tethers. Again, seemingly feasible.

For something in the 30 to 150 million dollar range. So change out all the spinners at the same time. They are all old.

==
BTW it seems a shame that all Falcon 2nd stages get tossed, Those vacuum engines always provide great video while they are cooking.

 

The hype machine for this launch is tiny compared to all the silliness of Bezos and Bransom who didn't even go high enough to orbit. And now I'm having a hard time finding coverage of how things are going up there.

 

Watched it live, but then I'm old enough to remember a time when 4 demographically interesting ODCs getting flung into orbit for 3 days aboard capsule propelled by a privately funded rocket would have been 'above the fold' news.

 

They are having fun and looking out the cupola:

Inspiration4: All-amateur space crew enjoy views of Earth

Seems challenging to come up with much to say about their confinement. They are doing biomedical monitoring in name of science. Kinda boring. If they had planned some type of performance or demo, they could get 'air time' I suppose, but it seems they did not.

Earth-bound audiences are simply supposed to donate to the target hospital, without photos of needy pediatric patients floating around in zero G (the only demo I could think of). So, there it is.

If the container springs a leak and they forgot to bring duct tape, that would be newsy. Or (as I mentioned above) if the sanitary facilities go offline and occupants have trouble taking leaks.

There definitely ought to be re-entry selfies to viewing later. I hope they thought of that at least.

 

What goes up…..
About 10 hours to de-orbit and get wet.

Kinda makes me wonder if they did a touchdown pool……

I’m thinking that inspirational Sun-synch ‘plus a little’ orbit may have more that just NASA looking in their sofas for spare change….
Does SpaceX have ev-gear?

I’m reminded of those first Star Wars commercials so long ago where they mentioned that millions were spend and years expended…….”just for fun.”
Maybe all those years ago it was a little…….ah….“inspirational” too.

Those not growing up in a world where Sci-Fy had to compete for air time on the big 3 (and lose, because special effects cost BUCKS!!) might not fully understand…..

 

Turns out there was an alarm from the sanitation device, but not severe enough for early return. Seems undisclosed how severe though, really:

SpaceX had a problem onboard the first all-tourist flight. It could have been much worse - CNN

 

"Toilet-paper LOW" warning light came on?

…although reading more about how space-khazis work, I dare say that they were worried that the s*** hit the fan (literally)!

 

Space is harsh mistress, and nothing is as straightforward as it seems.
As is true in the submarine service, getting the poo to "go where you want it to" can be somewhat non-trivial at times.

Apollo 8 famously had an incident where the skipper (Borman) took ill with really bad things happening on both ends of his GI system.
NORMALLY flyers are sequestered at least a few days before going into space, but then (as now) social distancing was only a thing that the "little" people had to do, and some DJT-like person up the food chain wanted a grip and grin with the astronauts...EVEN THOUGH there was this Hong Kong flu thing going on at the time.
Tom Hanks (Playing Lovell) even made reference to it in the Apollo-13 movie.
Borman was a pretty sick puppy, but he ordered his crewmates to stay radio silent about his condition and he self medicated himself with some stuff from the med-kit.
They informed the head-shed (through a private circuit) only AFTER Borman got better enough to stick with the script.
NASA was understandably a little peeved - but hey....what could they do?
Things were so bad inside the capsule that Anders used the emergency O2 system briefly to (unsuccessfully) evade the effects and the NAVY UDT diver that cracked the hatch was very visibly affected by what he found (smelled) inside the spacecraft!!

Globs of goo did....what 0-G globs of goo DO.....and all three astronauts were "anointed" twice.
Once when it happened, and once again when the spacecraft up-ended when things got back to 1G.

Fun fact about Anders.
He went on a specific "low residue" diet....that worked!
However (comma!!!) he was attending to very urgent business on the carrier when they got the call from POTUS, and they had to hand an extension line into the head for his required duty-call........during the duty call.

Space flight sometimes......isn't 'pretty.'

 

Oct 12 - William Shatner is going 11 billionths of a light year above Blue Origin's place in west Texas.

 

I caught a blip on social media throwing shade at him for "stealing" the Funk's thunder, but she's pretty spunky.
I give her even or better odds at thumbing a ride in a few years to reclaim her title.

James Doohan (Scotty) beat James T........twice if just an up and back counts....

 

I should have written 11 trillionths of a light year. Embarrassing.

==
James Doohan's orbital ride was in cremated form. So, with an ashterisk at best.

 

At least his trip was, and apparently still is (from some items I'm finding), "orbital". Whereas Denny Crane isn't getting to actual orbit.

And Scotty has logged a couple light hours of space distance.

Though for 'human' (remains) space travel distance, I think Clyde Tombaugh holds the current record, at over 7 light hours, to and beyond his discovery.

 

From the terrestrial nutrient cycling perspective (more my thing), almost every human ever is still here, chemically speaking. A very small number of people have broken out of that so far. Wise guys

 

A portion of Scotty's ashes hitched a ride on Falcon-1's third flight, and wound up in the Pacific after "crossing the line."
Fortunately, the people who got paid to loft his ashes didn't put all of their eggs on one rocket...part of the package deal and Scotty orbited on a subsequent Falcon-9 shot.

My initial wishes were to be ejected out through a torpedo tube, something my CFO vetoed adamantly.
So....Plan 2 involves a for-real bio-friendly pine box and direct burial (no juice.)

"From dust you came and to dust you shall return"

As for the skipper of the Enterprise / Enterprise A....if you're gonna pay big bucks for a rocket ride, you might as well take the ride while you can still see out the portholes......