2:42 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 2 is the target for splashdown. they undock on Sat.
The last time they were not hard on the new guys led to the Apollo 1 fire and NASA trust Musk as far as they can throw him.
Plus the Dragon capsule was pretty heavily redesigned for use, one of the reason why the delays happened.The number of crew was reduced to 4 and the land landing cancelled.
It bears not much resemblance to the Crewed Dragon unveiled in 2014.
On the other hand SpaceX did not kill 300+ people due to a flawed 737 Max that is still grounded 18 months later. Falcon 9 has over 80 good launches. BTW I’m not a fan of Musk, just pointing out some facts. My son worked for Tesla Solar and did not like it.
they might be delayed due to the hurricane hitting Florida Might arrive Monday or Tues
They can plan accurate landings on the ground, I wonder where they will bring the capsule down. Will it be brought down by NASA or Spacex?
I think NASA calls the shots but they might work together.
The Apollo 1 fire had nothing to do with being “not hard on the new guys”, and while NASA has historically had some skepticism of SpaceX and Musk, pretty much all that has evaporated away at this point, with their launch going almost flawlessly, but Boeing’s capsule riddled with 80+ design flaws.
It’s Boeing that has to prove themselves at this point; that they can overcome their defective corporate culture and still produce a reliable product. It’s not looking too good for them right now and SpaceX is currently NASA’s golden boy.
Despite his occasional Twitter stupidity, Musk has been right about reusability, right about rapid iteration, right about cost-plus contracts, and right about a ton of other stuff. NASA has seen the fruits of that for a while now but we haven’t seen it in such stark contrast as the comparison with Boeing. You usually don’t get all three of “better, faster, cheaper” and yet here we are.
SpaceX ships will recover the capsule and astronauts , NASA people will be there too. No Navy ships like they used for Apollo and Mercury and Gemini. They might land in the Gulf of Mexico, that’s probably likely now with the storm. For now still looking like a return Sunday.
A slight hijack, but here is a BBC Horizon documentary from 1965/66 with Frank Borman and it illustrates just how cramped the Gemini spacecraft was.
Admittedly a modern Gemini might have a tad more room since a lot of the more bulky controls could be dispensed with and they probably would replace ejection seats with couches.
they are in the capsule to prepare for splashdown. they are going to make final decision in a few hours.
A funny bit came up on the radio. Bob (I think) complained that his tablet wasn’t showing the timeline correctly, and just got the response. Paraphrasing slightly (since it’s from memory):
There’s a problem with the caching due to the lack of connectivity. We expect Doug’s tablet to fail the same way. Can you take a screenshot on Doug’s tablet so that you can still see the timeline, and then Airdrop [Apple direct file transfer feature] that to Bob’s tablet? You’ll have to turn on WiFi; it doesn’t matter that it won’t find a hotspot, it just needs to be on. Also there are some PDFs of the timeline, but you’ll have to bring up Acrobat to access them.
Apple tech support to orbit!
weather ok so they are due to arrive near pensacola at 2:40
In the home stretch now! Trunk deployed, deorbit burn complete, nosecone closed. Nothing to do besides wait before reentry. BTW, I’m watching this stream:
I thought maybe that guy in the front of the mission control consoles looked like it might be Elon Musk himself.
Didn’t they manage to eliminate the communications blackout on the Space Shuttles? (IIRC they aimed an antenna up at a communications satellite in orbit, which then relayed the traffic back down to Earth.) I suppose it’s not a terrible important deal, though. There’s nothing anyone on the ground can actually do at that point.
Yeah, pretty sure that’s Elon and Gwynne. They’re frequently there for important missions.
I see that unlike at NASA, everyone at SpaceX is wearing masks and (mostly) respecting social distancing. Even the announcers seem to have a partition between them.
I don’t think SpaceX uses the TDRS comm birds.
They are probably looking forward to getting Starlink operational.
They’re through the blackout and the major part of reentry. Sounded like some wind in the background of Bob’s comms 
.
Woo! All main chutes deployed! Splashdown imminent.
Splashdown! Everything seems to be fine, speed boats on the way.
It was Musk and the CEO of SpaceX in the middle front row.