I would ask a SpaceX engineer about this first. The ones I've talked to about this very point have cringed with even the mere suggestion of this idea. And yes, they've been asked.

No, SpaceX could not duplicate the flight of Apollo 7 tomorrow. They are gearing up to be able to duplicate that flight though in a fashion, so no doubt they will get there somewhat soon, but the Dragon 1 capsule as it currently stands is not crew capable and neither is the Dragon 2 capsule prototype.

You are confusing science with technology. The equipment necessary to send a crew into orbit simply doesn't exist right now in America. Yes, the science in terms of how it can be done has been created and you can look at previous designs to see how it was done in the past can be done, assuming of course that some of the really critical steps done by previous engineering teams was even recorded and documented.

It also helps to know that previous designs were successful, so you are attacking this engineering challenge with the knowledge that somebody has solved this problem before and that it can be done. That doesn't mean that any particular design will be successful though. It is also far more than political issues right now. Going into space on any current American spacecraft would get that crew member killed. Period.

Considering that both launch pads 39A & B have been completely dismantled for new rockets, that the Shuttle processing facility to get the vehicles ready for launch has been also rebuilt to do other things, and there are no external tanks available nor even a manufacturing plant capable of building them, I'd say those Shuttle orbiters are going to stay mothballed permanently.

At this point, even the engines have been torn apart and are currently being repurposed and reworked for use on the SLS.

No, there is no way they will ever launch again and it would be years of effort to even try with billions of dollars spent in an effort that would be akin to building a whole new Shuttle by the time you are done. The capability of launching the Shuttle is definitely gone.

The Dragon has no life support right now and is very much incapable of carry a human crew. Elon Musk jokingly said that you might be able to get a ride with a cot and a scuba tank, but it definitely would not be capable of bringing a crew into orbit with its current configuration. The Dragon 2 (which still isn't flightworthy by any stretch of the imagination) is going to be crewed and like I said, some effort is currently underway to get that crew capability to return. I think you are underestimating the effort that SpaceX still needs to take in order to get people into space.

And no, I'm not just talking flight worthiness standards either where you might say NASA is being too cautious. That might be a legitimate gripe as arguably the Space Shuttle also failed to meet those standards too. It also isn't just the FAA-AST nor a NASA flight certificate as the Dragon capsule that just flew into orbit would literally kill a crew member if somehow somebody stowed away themselves inside that capsule. While docked to the ISS the capsule uses the ISS ventilation and life support system with merely a couple of fans inside of the Dragon that help to circulate the air. That is definitely not life support equipment.

As it stands, the Dragon capsule can't even be used as an emergency escape devices if somehow the Soyuz was damaged in a disaster like depicted in the movie "Gravity".... even assuming that the ISS crew could improvise something to act as emergency couches by stuffing in a bunch of soiled clothing and odd soft parts of the ISS. It is a nice thought experiment though.

No doubt that SpaceX is close to the caapability and having the capability to do downmass of several metric tons of supplies is definitely a key step to crew capability. It will be happening in the next couple of years, but SpaceX is still definitely incapable of sending or even recovering a crew from space even in an emergency.

The Dragon can't carry a crew right now, so you are wrong.

It didn't help that Sergei Korolev died right before the Apollo moon landings. It was even apparently due to a poorly trained surgeon for what should have been a routine medical procedure that caused his death. Had Korolev been around to provide strong leadership to the Soviet Moon program, I think there might have been an outside chance for a Soviet crewed lunar landing to have happened by about 1970 with the N-1 rocket becoming successful.

The funny thing is that the N-1 engines that should have gone to the Moon ended up being used by Orbital Science for sending supplies to the International Space Station. Then again, when one of those engines exploded shortly after launch, it destroyed one of the cargo modules and a couple of satellites... so the disaster of the N-1 seems to keep repeating itself.

America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard. There are some efforts to try and build some new spacecraft that might actually be useful in the future and they are currently under development, but none of them are flight worthy. If some alien creature was discovered orbiting the Earth and simply asking for somebody from the Earth to meet with them in orbit in exchange for huge amounts of cultural and scientific data, it would have to be done right now with a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft or with a Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft. America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that.

Yes, the technological capability of going to the Moon has been lost in the past 40 years and needs to be rebuilt from scratch. All we know is that it was done in the past, where sadly an entire generation of kids are starting to believe the Moon hoax guys because the technology to get to the Moon no longer exists.

NASA funding since the Nixon administration has been pretty flat and generally is something like social security.... a death trap politically speaking if you try to cut it. Just look at how quickly Barack Obama changed his tune about NASA when he was running for President and needed the votes in Florida after he proposed a virtual elimination of NASA (if anybody has that kind of memory). People talk about shutting down programs at NASA, but it really doesn't happen.

There have certainly been some disasters at NASA in terms of program management like Constellation and the James Webb Telescope that have eaten up almost all funding at the agency as it should be seen as a zero-sum game for any new programs that get done within the scope of NASA. But none the less I dare you to show any deep cuts to NASA after the damage following the cancellation of Apollo happened!

I do agree though that when you ask those of older generations (especially those over 60) how much money is being spent on NASA, they think about 5% of the federal budget is still going to that agency. It is even a figure they think is where it should be at too, and are greatly surprised when you tell then that the actual figure is less than 1/10th of that amount.

This was true until a sultan decided arbitrarily that science was no longer useful to his sultanate and order it to be stopped. It is one of the problems with monarchies, and also why it was the Spanish and not the Chinese who conquered the Incas and Aztecs (with some evidence that China had reached South America before the famous voyage of Columbus and definitely sailed past modern-day South Africa).

It is the end of this period of enlightenment that should be of concern, as it shows even some very intelligent people who made some amazing contributions to the knowledge of mankind as a whole could have essentially that whole sub-culture destroyed due to the whims of just a very few people... or even just a single person. In other words, it should be a cautionary tale how Muslim science was destroyed.

Could you elaborate on this? Some governor elections are held in odd numbered years simply to remove the distractions from presidential election politics and the congressional races, but how is that manipulation when it is specified by law to happen on a regular basis?

This certainly is nothing like elections in the UK where the PM can decide an arbitrary date to hold the next round of elections to the House of Commons when the polling numbers are looking really good... or put off elections for awhile if they aren't looking so nice.

Rhode Island and Deleware might beg to disagree with you on that point. It isn't really all that much larger now than it was in 1787 when the concept was being set up in the first place where those two states in particular really didn't want to get lost and absorbed into Massachusetts and Virginia respectively. They wanted to maintain their independent nature and strongly objected to plans treating them as insignificant in the greater republic.

Yes, this is definitely working as intended, where those two states are still independent sovereign entities with their own identities. If anything, the population disparity between the original 13 colonies has lessened to a great extent over the past several decades too. I would call that working as intended.

This is intentional and deliberate. The Senate was never supposed to be even an elected body in the first place as it was supposed to be essentially a counterpoint to the UN General Assembly. In other words, it was supposed to be a body made up of representatives of the various state governments and definitely not supposed to be remotely representative of ordinary citizens.

You might be advocating an elimination of the Senate in the fashion that the House of Lords has sort of faded into obscurity in the British Parliament, but there is definitely no reason for it to become even more of just a horrible copy of the House of Representatives, something that was never the original intention in the first place. The disparity is that for better or for worse, the U.S. Senate seems to have grown even more with regards to political power, where individual senators sort of think of themselves individually as vice-presidents ready to step into the "top job" at any time and definitely command their staff as if they will be the next president. The ego needed to become a senator is definitely something right now that basically is a waypoint for many who have presidential ambitions.

Complaining about the disproportionate nature of the Senate is just downright silly and ignoring its purpose in the first place.

It should be pointed out that SpaceX has a huge presence in Texas, with the Texas state legislature doing some rather recent.... enticements as it were... to get SpaceX to spend a few hundred million dollars more in their state.

In other words, Ted Cruz would be crucified in his home state and would even hurt his future presidential ambitions if he were to be in public opposition to SpaceX as a company. I certainly expect to see him show up at the ground breaking when SpaceX starts to pour concrete at the Brownsville spaceport that is being built.... in Texas. For that matter, I wouldn't put it past him to show up at McGregor for an engine test or a test flight of the Falcon 9-R. A great photo op and with his dual hat as the chairman of this committee it is going to be an extra reason to appear for stuff like that.

As chair, he will also get a good insight into space policy issues, which I think will be a good thing too. Somebody with presidential ambitions would be good to become educated on those issues too.

I agree that the AC was simply showing a lack of knowledge about the topic. Russia is the world leader in propulsion technology (the next generation engine called the Raptor that SpaceX is building is based upon Russian technology), so I wouldn't dismiss Russia at all in terms of spaceflight technology on any level. None the less, there have been some other attempts by people other than SpaceX to get a reusable flight vehicle to do a controlled landing.

There are also some scholarly papers that have attempted to prove that what SpaceX is doing here is technologically impossible as well, trying to demonstrate that reusable systems for stage recovery will eat up all of the payload mass making such a rocket useless on a practical level. I believe some Russian propulsion scientists were involved in one of those papers that included some hardware tests. Seeing a rocket stage successfully deliver a payload to the ISS of several metric tons of cargo and land in a near-miss but for the want of a couple gallons of hydraulic fluid sort of shows that those papers might not be entirely accurate or at least there might be ways to reduce the mass of such recovery systems and still deliver a practical payload into orbit.

There was the DC-X program that tried to do mostly the same thing that SpaceX is doing here with this barge landing, but the DC-X never made the trip into orbit and only did pretty much what the Grasshopper did earlier. The DC-X was supposed to lead to a rocket that went into orbit and could be similarly reusable, but funding for that program was cut during the Reagan administration. Surprisingly, it is Blue Origin that purchased all of the IP rights to that technology and not SpaceX... but that is another story.