Crew Dragon: Go For Docking

[Stephanie B]

After 10AM ET:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg

It's harder than it looks, which you can experience for yourself with this sim (https://iss-sim.spacex.com/).

[Stephanie B]

It appears that they are running ahead of schedule.

[Caballoflaco]

300 meters from station as of 08:16 cst.

It still blows my mind we’ve got folks orbiting over the planet in a space station, and we can strap other people to rockets and shoot them up into space to rendezvous with said space station.

[blues]

Watching it on NASA channel on DirecTV. Channel 352

[farscott]

YouTube is streaming the NASA feed as well. It is amazing that we get HD video, more or less in real time (delay is due to speed of light), of a spacecraft taken by a space station.

[rayrevolver]

Woot! We are watching on youtube NASA TV. 176 meters to go.

[Blades]

Watching now. I'm ready to live on the moon. It will make getting out of bed a lot easier.

[Stephanie B]

Less than 90 meters....

[Stephanie B]

Soft capture complete...

[5pins]

Soft capture complete.

[Stephanie B]

..... hard capture complete!

[LittleLebowski]

This has been wonderful to watch, today and yesterday.

[peterb]

Wow. Watching the dance of the attitude thrusters during the docking approach, or the fin movement during the first stage descent — that team wrote and tested a lot of good code.

The orbital mechanics for docking are strange. I remember being amazed when I first read about it.
————
However, the Gemini 4 attempts at rendezvous were unsuccessful largely because NASA engineers had yet to learn the orbital mechanics involved in the process. Simply pointing the active vehicle's nose at the target and thrusting was unsuccessful. If the target is ahead in the orbit and the tracking vehicle increases speed, its altitude also increases, actually moving it away from the target. The higher altitude then increases orbital period due to Kepler's third law, putting the tracker not only above, but also behind the target. The proper technique requires changing the tracking vehicle's orbit to allow the rendezvous target to either catch up or be caught up with, and then at the correct moment changing to the same orbit as the target with no relative motion between the vehicles (for example, putting the tracker into a lower orbit, which has a shorter orbital period allowing it to catch up, then executing a Hohmann transfer back to the original orbital height).[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_rendezvous

[5pins]

They just entered ISS.