{"id":5907,"date":"2014-05-29T14:20:49","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T20:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=5907"},"modified":"2014-05-29T14:20:49","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T20:20:49","slug":"spacex-unveiling-dragon-2-0-tonight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2014\/05\/29\/spacex-unveiling-dragon-2-0-tonight\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX Unveiling Dragon 2.0 Tonight&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The headline pretty much says it all: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spacex.com\/\">SpaceX<\/a>, the commercial spaceflight company that&#8217;s leading the pack with its amazing Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft, plans to finally reveal its human-rated version of the Dragon in a live <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spacex.com\/webcast\/\">webcast<\/a> this evening at 7 PM Pacific time. This variant of the existing Dragon design will reportedly have seating for seven astronauts, a major step up from the three-person Soyuz capsules that have been ferrying personnel to and from the ISS since the space shuttles were retired three years ago. And it couldn&#8217;t come at a better time, either, considering <a href=\"http:\/\/www.space.com\/25339-nasa-suspends-russia-cooperation-ukraine.html\">the impact<\/a> that the current diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia is having on our joint space operations.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/spacex_dragon-v2_announcement-1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5910 aligncenter\" alt=\"spacex_dragon-v2_announcement\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/spacex_dragon-v2_announcement-1.jpg\" width=\"360\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/spacex_dragon-v2_announcement-1.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/spacex_dragon-v2_announcement-1-180x300.jpg 180w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I confess, I still miss the sight and the runway-landing concept of my beloved shuttles &#8212; as an aside, I&#8217;m looking forward to the first orbital flight of the shuttle-like DreamChaser being developed by Sierra Nevada Corp., currently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.universetoday.com\/108487\/sierra-nevada-dreamchaser-will-launch-on-first-orbital-flight-test-in-november-2016\/\">planned for 2016<\/a> &#8212; but those guys at SpaceX have become heroes of mine with their rapid string of successes. Remember that this company designs and builds most of its own hardware in-house, and that it&#8217;s only been around for 12 years. In that time, it&#8217;s gone from square one to operating a field-tested, reusable, <em>reliable<\/em> spacecraft and booster system, a pretty remarkable achievement any way you look at it. And Elon Musk, the company&#8217;s founder, seems to have a strong and audacious vision for the future, with talk of sending humans to Mars and the company&#8217;s exploration into landing spacecraft on their tails <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/ZwwS4YOTbbw\">like the old-fashioned movie rocketships<\/a> of the 1950s. This is all potentially very exciting stuff&#8230; we may still get that spacegoing future we once believed in&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The headline pretty much says it all: SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company that&#8217;s leading the pack with its amazing Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft, plans to finally reveal its human-rated version of the Dragon in a live webcast this evening at 7 PM Pacific time. This variant of the existing Dragon design will reportedly have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}