Space feud

As anyone who’s ever served on the condominium board knows, perfect neighbors are hard to find.

And so it is with the International Space Station. In retaliation for our response to Russia’s annexation of part of Ukraine, Russia’s deputy prime minister is threatening to ban U.S. astronauts from taking the Soyuz spacecraft. He tweeted that we’d need to send our astronauts to the station “using a trampoline.”

I think that as Americans, we all agree that if any nation could build a trampoline powerful enough to send astronauts into low earth orbit, it would be us.
But Elon Musk, the electric car maker and founder of SpaceX, also knows how to tweet, and he’s offering to send the astronauts using his Dragon 9 spacecraft – which is re-useable and which has already made four successful cargo runs to the station; the most recent one returning safely just yesterday.

And if you listen to the recording of the Dragon 9 docking with the space station last month, you’ll note an astonishing coincidence, “Capture is confirmed. This Dragon spacecraft, the capture time is 4:31 a.m. central time while the dragon and the international space station are just flying over northern Ukraine at 243 statute miles.”

It was right over Ukraine!

Even though it was just a cargo run, Musk says SpaceX will be ready to shuttle astronauts much sooner and for a lot less money than anything NASA’s building – and since his Dragon 9 doesn’t rely on any Russian components, it can launch no matter what happens 243 statue miles below.