Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "How SpaceX Beat Boeing In The Race To Launch NASA Astronauts" video.
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@jeovannijuarez9518 who is having trouble understanding that NASA and SpaceX are partners on the ISS supply and crew flights?
What's being talked about here is the NASA mission to the mars which is via SLS, compared to the SpaceX mission to mars which is via Starship.
NASA has nothing to do with Starship, so that's not a partnership (though NASA will probably buy into Starship later, when they realize how far ahead it is)
And yes, the astronauts on Dragon are from NASA, because they are the paying passengers on the rocket, which is why NASA gave SpaceX any money.
Now, that said, SpaceX would not exist without NASA having hired them just before they went bankrupt, and they have worked very closely for years now, trading engineers, giving each other full access to their designs and knowledge, and they really have been working as partners, and they are years ahead because of the NASA support, but that doesn't mean that they aren't still going to beat NASA to Mars by a long shot.
Though probably by then, NASA will have bought tickets and sent one of their astronauts along lol
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@jeovannijuarez9518 guess who trained the NASA astronauts on all the systems involved in the launch and operation of the capsule? And where that training was done?
Hawthorne by SpaceX.
The space station training was done by others, because that's not SpaceX technology, but anything SpaceX builds, it's going to be doing the training for.
And when SpaceX builds a rocket to Mars, it's the only one who will be able to train the astronauts to fly it.
And remember, Boeing has their own astronauts, one will be flying on their first manned Starliner flight along with 2 NASA astronauts.
Training astronauts is a specialized program, and has to be down by the people creating the technology, so even if NASA employed astronauts fly on Starship, they will have been trained by SpaceX, so SpaceX can train their own just as easily.
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@jeovannijuarez9518 oh, you are right that NASA is more experienced at training astronauts, and so I fully expect that when SpaceX begins their training programs for the Dear Moon mission, and whatever other missions they want their own astronauts for, that they will make a deal with NASA for use of their facilities that don't need to be specific to SpaceX equipment, and that NASA astronauts will be involved in the training program, supporting the SpaceX staff.
Or maybe SpaceX will just hire NASA astronauts like Bob and Doug, people who have all the NASA training and experience, and also understand SpaceX well, and have them set up the training program.
And for missions to the ISS, even just tourist missions, Tom Cruise, movie crews etc, part of the training will occur at the NASA ISS training facility, and maybe some at the Russian ISS training facility, and if they are going to be doing any evas, they would probably use the neutral buoyancy facility, but SpaceX can get access to all of this as a customer, and do the training themselves, except maybe for the ISS specific parts.
And considering that all the NASA training stuff is decades old, as is their training program, I would expect to see SpaceX developing new EVA space suits, in which case, building a swimming pool and making a new neutral buoyancy training facility for the new equipment isn't very expensive, and for anything to the moon or Mars, there isn't much that NASA has that would be applicable to the training, but anything that it does have, SpaceX would have access to.
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