Presentation: September 2021

This month's AE presenter: Jeff
Date of presentation: 27 Sept 2021
Subject: Private Spaceflight
Description: For this month's ordeal, Jeff talked briefly about the history of private (non-national) spaceflight, starting as early as 1929 with the Opel RAK rocket plane and continuing to the present with the recent well-covered missions by Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson), Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos), and SpaceX that made some of their earliest crewed flights in July and September of this year.  Virgin Galactic has plans to offer rides to the public (only $450K!) as early as 2022.

Presentation: April 2019

This month's AE presenter: Jeff
Date of presentation: 15-Apr-2019
Subject: Crew Dragon
Description: In this month's scintillating presentation, Jeff talked about the project called "Crew Dragon", a NASA-funded project being designed by SpaceX.  Crew Dragon is one of two variants of the larger project "Dragon 2", which itself is the successor to the earlier Dragon series of cargo transports by SpaceX.  The Crew Dragon variant is designed to carry up to seven astronauts, while the Cargo Dragon variant is exclusively for cargo.  A trial run successfully docked with the International Space Station on 8-Mar-2019.

Aerospace Minute by David

On 25 January, David talked about the Dragon 2 program from SpaceX. SpaceX is a commercial spacecraft company founded by Elan Musk, who also founded eBay and Tesla. The goal of SpaceX is to build reusable commercial spacecraft. The Falcon 9 booster has successfully launched capsules to the ISS and been recovered using rockets to soften the landing. To date, it has not successfully landed on its landing gear, but they are close to making it work. The Dragon 2 will be a manned capsule. It will also be recovered using rockets. Currently, it is undergoing testing tethered to a crane. Tests will culminate with it being dropped from a helicopter and recovered on its landing gear.