That undisclosed overseas location you blog from is looking more and more like Russia the way you gush over Progress, Soyuz and Zond. исправить?

“Russian Progress already do this”

And that’s great for Russia. Now the U.S. has that capability too – a true American would want that, so where do you stand?

Also, as usual, you don’t understand the technical differences either.

o Dragon has a full-sized hatch for large cargo – Progress doesn’t.

o Dragon can carry large unpressurized cargo – including all the LRU’s to keep the ISS in full operation – Progress can’t.

o Dragon can bring back up to 3kg of cargo to Earth – Progress burns up on re-entry.

o Dragon represents choice – Progress represents a monopoly.

Понимаешь?

Russian Progress already do this — ‘perfecting’ the technical skill set to do it nearly 35 years ago- and can automatically dock w/a LEO space platform, too…

Correct.

No. There is no natural market for this.

“Alas, it is too bad that for the last year they have been distracted from advancing real space commerce by the byzantine safety dances and other contortions that come with NASA HSF contracting.”

You keep babbling about this, but you have failed to provide any evidence of it.

SpaceX has been working on perfecting a cargo vehicle that can autonomously deliver pressurized cargo to an exact point in space. Don’t you think that’s a feature that makes them more valuable in the future? Bigelow would find that valuable, especially since they will be relying on cargo and crew providers that have already proven themselves.

“I hope they mature Falcon 9 to the real business of launching actually useful satellites soon.”

In case you haven’t noticed, they have been working with a customer that has bought 12 launches from them. Don’t you think that makes that customer important? You really don’t have much business sense, do you?

Besides, if you had watched the pre-launch briefing that NASA held before the first launch attempt, you would have heard Gwynn Shotwell state what their launch tempo ramp-up was going to be for the next two years – IIRC three more this year, six next year, and one per month the year after that.

Of course you are also ignorant of their manufacturing plans, which calls out for changing production from the current Merlin 1C/Falcon 9 v 1.0 to the Merlin 1D/Falcon v1.1 after flight #5. That will bring them up to their long-term production configuration, and that has been part of the reason they have not launched during the past year.

You see conspiracies.

I see a well planned business strategy to maximize their learning curve, and maximize profits. Other than hand-waving and references to witchcraft, so far you have failed to provide any proof otherwise.

All this talk about economics as if it only means cost reflects a preposterous misunderstanding of economics. Economics is first and foremost about value. Of what value is ISS, and thus its cargo, to humanity? Almost nil. It is just another bizarre dead-end project spun off the pages of long-obsolete, but occasionally still entertaining, sci-fi. Launching worthless cargo at lower cost is still not economical. Falcon 9 still has a good chance to advance the economics of space development by launching actually valuable satellites for less cost. But with Dragon the Space-X crew are contorting themselves into economic pretzels for the sake of long obsolete sci-fi dogmas.