NIKON D3X
ƒ/8
1200 mm
1/500
200

I am at SpaceX mission control and plan to spend the night to see the berthing to the ISS just before 5am PST.

Here you see the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft approaching the International Space Station on May 24, 2012 for a series of tests to clear it for its final rendezvous and grapple on May 25. At 3:58 a.m. (EDT), Dragon performed a height adjust burn to bring it to a path 2.4 kilometers below the station. During this “fly-under,” Dragon established UHF communication with the station using its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Ultra-high frequency Communication Unit (CUCU). Dragon performed a test of its Relative GPS system, which uses the relative positions of the spacecraft to the space station to determine its location. On May 25, Expedition 31 Flight Engineers Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers will use the Canadarm2 robotic arm to grapple the supply ship about 8:06 a.m., with the berthing to the Earth-facing side of the station’s Harmony node following about 11:20 a.m. Dragon is scheduled to spend about a week docked with the station before returning to Earth on May 31 for retrieval.

And here’s the NASA video of the fly-under.

19 responses to “Dragon as seen from ISS”

  1. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE Avatar
    PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

    Have fun with Elon and the Team !! Bring back great memories, stories and photos for us to look back at history =)

    Reply
  2. jitze Avatar
    jitze

    Errrr, thanks for the heads up Steve (I think) – so now I can look forward to pulling yet another all nighter… This is just ravaging my beauty sleep. Way to go – thumbs crossed….

    Reply
  3. Astrocatou Avatar
    Astrocatou

    Very impressive performance,especially with such limited fight testing.

    Reply
  4. scleroplex Avatar
    scleroplex

    best wishes!!

    Reply
  5. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    How cool is this… the ISS crew watching the SpaceX launch:

    Inside ISS

    And I have been posting a number of photos and video links in the comments of this earlier post

    Reply
  6. P^2 - Paul Avatar
    P^2 – Paul

    That Dragon is 2km away. Pretty good good resolution there: a few arcsec. Exif says it’s a D3X with a 1200mm F/8. What’s astonishing is that, no matter how many kilobucks that camera hardware cost, it was cheap compared to the cost of launching it.
    I hope Elon succeeds in making those costs more comparable.

    Reply
  7. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    great moment for Space X and everyone:)

    Reply
  8. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Just had dinner with the head of the the Russian Space Agency and his director of manned space flight, overseeing the ISS. For context, they spent $1B in 2004, and now they have fully budgeted $5B this year, $6B for 2013 and $7B for 2014. By 2025, they expect to have new capabilities. They were quite interested in how SpaceX did it all with a fraction of that.

    Alarm set for 4am.

    Reply
  9. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE Avatar
    PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

    And vice versa when a Dragon is flying toward a giant Lego into Space =)


    "SpaceX’s Dragon capsule sees the International Space Station in a thermal imager."

    Reply
  10. Spaceaholic.com Avatar
    Spaceaholic.com

    How can the budgets of RSA and SPACEX be analogous? The difference must be a reflection of capability/capacity – for example RSA has responsibility for deployment of robust ground and space based TT&C infrastructure (not cheap) – isnt SPACEX heavily reliant on TEDRIS and ground relay from other externally owned assets to enable global TT&C? Who owns operates and maintains the launch facilities for each respective company/agency? Number of annual missions (and industrial capacity to produce the launch vehicle, spacecraft), differences in cost between flying HSF vs Robotic mission ect.

    Reply
  11. Astrocatou Avatar
    Astrocatou

    Great twitter feed….
    twitter.com/#!/spacex

    Reply
  12. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Whew! The ISS arm has the Dragon by the tail now. Huge cheers at mission control. Now the arm brings it in at 7cm/minute. In 3 hours, it should berth with the station.

    Go SpaceX!

    Reply
  13. P^2 - Paul Avatar
    P^2 – Paul

    Go Canadarm!
    Canadarm snatched a flying Dragon!

    Reply
  14. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    Wow! Steve, there are incredible rocket scientists in Russia – for most part nobody believes in these large sums used efficiently, everyone knows large part of these sums will be stolen one way or another…it is a pain that we have Russian brilliance on one side (needed for everyone, not just Russia) and incredible stupidity, rigidity and corruption on another – large bottleneck and obstacle of progress)…thus Elon, who is a real hero can do a lot more with less! Cheers for him and his courageous team, and for you!!!!!

    Reply
  15. bike-R Avatar
    bike-R

    Jeeze….. looks like the one we launched the same thing back in the 60’s with our ESTE’S Rockets.’cept it never got that high………………..

    http://www.estesrockets.com/

    and how soon will AURORA have a model kit of it?

    Reply
  16. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    and they just berthed to the station!

    NASA TV briefing now.

    Reply
  17. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    Congrats! XX

    Reply
  18. Ramones Karaoke Avatar
    Ramones Karaoke

    Remarkable achievement. Plus he’s managing to run a car company at the same time – nice work!

    Reply
  19. Chucil Avatar
    Chucil

    Awesome!

    Reply

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