It’s their 7th launch and they’re still fighting issues with keeping the fuel where it should be. Elon has successfully created a machine that can kill any number of astronauts in sub-orbit and land to do it all over again. How is anyone not getting this? I’ll never forgive him for taking back intellect on space travel to the 1950’s .
Wasn’t this meant to bring back those stranded astronauts next month? Guess they better they extend their travel insurance. Good thing Elon doesn’t have a history of fishing for publicity with bold statements and little follow through.
No, that’s a different and largely unrelated rocket.
The one which will be bringing back the astronauts is literally the rocket with the best track record in history, and usually flies at least once a week.
This explosion was a prototype for a new rocket, which has only been sent to space a handful of times
Please forgive the naive question
If it goes every week, why does it need to wait to go get them? I’m thinking it has to do with something like flight plans, but I have no idea
Because sending an entire rocket up to collect them would be very expensive, so NASA would prefer to leave them up there until the next routine flight so that they can send other things up and down with them on schedule.
There might also be limited space on the space station to dock a capsule. There are only so many docking ports, and I think they’re often full
The most frequent launches are carrying Starlink satellites on an adapter, not a Dragon capsule. The capsule may need to be refurbished or manufactured, there may not be a suitable mission available to be bumped, etc.