Crew could have ridden in Dragon, claims Musk

(Image: Michael Altenhofen)

With his company's Dragon space capsule safely back on Earth, SpaceX founder Elon Musk can turn his thoughts to the future. The company that launched the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station will spend the rest of this year upgrading the Dragon capsule to handle astronauts.

Musk claimed in a news conference today that, in principle, the Dragon capsule that just returned from space could have been crewed. "If someone had stowed away on Dragon, they would have been okay," he said. "We could have taken people to and from the space station with the cargo version of Dragon. That's important to appreciate and I think a lot of people don't realise it."

The next version, designed specially for astronauts, will be much more comfortable, though. Dragon's splash-down landing off the coast of Baja California was nearly perfect, with initial reports saying it hit within a mile of the targeted landing spot. "It appears we were really hitting the bull's eye with accuracy," Musk said.

But Dragon 2, which will be built with astronauts in mind, will have a much cushier landing system. Rather than landing in the ocean, it will use propulsive thrusters to hover above and touch down on dry land with the accuracy of a helicopter.

"I think that's really cool -- it's how spaceships land in sci fi movies," Musk said. Such a landing system would also let Dragon land on other bodies in the solar system with thin or nonexistent atmospheres. Musk expects it to be operational in about 3 years if things go well, or up to 5 years if they "encounter some challenges along the way".

Dragon's first flight seems to have been problem-free. In a news conference, Musk and NASA's Alan Lindenmoyer called the flight a "100 per cent success". But despite his confidence and ambitious plans for the future, Musk seemed almost dumbfounded that it actually worked.

?"This may sound sort of odd, but when you see it actually work you're sort of surprised," he said. "Which is not to say that we didn't expect it to work, but it's just you can see so many ways that it could fail, and then it works, and you're like, Wow! It didn't fail!"

good friday f/a 18 f 18 crash virginia tenebrae the lake house petrino arkansas roy williams