Falcon 9 and Dragon launch to the International Space Station in T-1 hour. Commercial era of space travel is about to begin! Watch live here beginning at 7:55PM ET.

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

i posted the last one in GC a while back.. but it was another commercial launch docking with the ISS.
i hope the space travel industry gets huge...

sweet caught it at t-20 seconds

Well it's just baby steps. Right now there's really nothing up there, the ISS is basically a joke, a waste of money, not all that exicting for most people who have this kind of money. Now if they apply themselves to useful applications maybe. They're going to have to make life support a lot better (Make it virtually life like) and make it a lot cheaper to go up.

A space hotel by the 22nd century would be cool, and unless propulsion technology significantly improves commercial space travel may just amount be people going up to live in space stations and the cargo that goes with it.

a moon hotel.... or a space station hotel... take a broad there and have unprotected sex without fear of impregnation!
would need SPF 1000sun tan lotion..

how is the ISS a joke?

Space hotel would probably be cheaper but yes imagine the jokes.



Extremely expensive, extremely uninovative. The money is better spent on developing technology that will actually be useful to us, not on experiments we can do on earth with simulated conditions that don't cost extra millions to ship it up there.

prolonged weightlessness is indeed easy to simulate

It is, they train on conditions almost identical to the ISS for months before new astronauts/cosmonauts go up.

Besides, they have plenty of research information on that anyway, and it's not like when we have permenant space stations they'll actually have weightlessness. Time and money should be made on pratical and applied technology, not garbage research.

This post was edited by Caedus on Oct 13 2012 04:00pm

I actually find the process pretty disheartening.

It's no longer one giant leap for mankind. It's privatized.

just means the giant leap is farther away is all, we still have that drive to go there