"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

"Greg \(Strider\) Moore" wrote on Thu,
30 Aug 2018 22:02:42 -0400:

"JF Mezei" wrote in message ...

On 2018-08-30 07:10, Jeff Findley wrote:

That's my understanding. Conversion to cargo configuration will
involve
taking out the seats, crew consoles, life support, and etc.
Essentially
it means unbolting, unplugging, and removing components that simply
aren't needed.

And adding the structural supports for cargo. (aka glorified
shelves/racks or whatever).

However, if the insides of the Dragon are re-usable easily and not
damaged by a flight/landing, why go through the trouble of changing in
inside config from a crewed one proven to work to a cargo one ?

It isn't just the "bolted on" consoles, but also all wiring harnesses.

I wonder if Musk/SpaceX will ever explain what arguments were used to
decide that crewed shouldn't be re-usable as crewed.


NASA is always conservative (other than crewed STS-1 :-)

So my guess is it ultimately came down to: "because we said so" and
everything else was justification for that.

And my guess is after 3-4 flights, NASA will relent and go with a
refurbished crew capsule.


This was apparently a SpaceX decision and not driven by NASA. NASA
offered both SpaceX and Boeing the option of reflying capsules. Boeing
plans to do so, flying each crew capsule up to ten times. SpaceX
decided not to do that for their own internal reasons. The Boeing
capsule is going to land on land while SpaceX is going in the water.
That difference in refitting costs may be the difference, although
SpaceX plans to refly Crew Dragons as cargo carriers after their
single manned flight.



Huh... I had only seen comments about NASA pushing it. I'm a bit surprised
it's a SpaceX decision.

Then again, right now I think the current contract only calls for 6 flights
by each company, and SpaceX probably wants to iterate through some design
stuff as they go, so building 6 crewed capsules gives them more experience
than building just one and flying it 6 times (or more likely 2, so they'd
have a backup). And if something DOES go wrong, they can just incorporate
the fix into the next capsule, not have to rebuild the existing one.

That said, I do expect a future contract and I can see them reflying then.
And I do expect a Bigelow Hotel or similar in the next 5+ years.


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/