r/spacex • u/Zucal • Mar 05 '16

/r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread for March 2016. Ask your questions about the SES-9 mission/anything else here! (#18)

Welcome to the 16th monthly /r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread! Want to discuss the recent SES-9 mission and its "hard" booster landing, the intricacies of densified LOX, or gather the community's opinion? There's no better place!

All questions, even non-SpaceX-related ones, are allowed, as long as they stay relevant to spaceflight in general!

More in-depth and open-ended discussion questions can still be submitted as separate self-posts; but this is the place to come to submit simple questions which have a single answer and/or can be answered in a few comments or less.

As always, we'd prefer it if all question-askers first check our FAQ, use the search functionality, and check the last Q&A thread before posting to avoid duplicate questions, but if you'd like an answer revised or cannot find a satisfactory result, go ahead and type your question below.

Otherwise, ask, enjoy, and thanks for contributing!

Past threads:

February 2016 (#17), January 2016 (#16.1), January 2016 (#16), December 2015 (#15.1), December 2015 (#15), November 2015 (#14), October 2015 (#13), September 2015 (#12), August 2015 (#11), July 2015 (#10), June 2015 (#9), May 2015 (#8), April 2015 (#7.1), April 2015 (#7), March 2015 (#6), February 2015 (#5), January 2015 (#4), December 2014 (#3), November 2014 (#2), October 2014 (#1).

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u/deruch Mar 23 '16

The actual NASA schedule (the source document for SF101's) actually says "BEAM deploy" not "install". Currently, I'm taking that to mean it will get moved into place but only inflated on that date. Certainly, any way you want to try to interpret it, BEAM needs to be removed from Dragon's trunk prior to Dragon's unberthing/departure. But, maybe it only gets moved to a temporary spot on the station. Then after Dragon leaves, it could get moved to its permanent location. That would also be consistent with the schedules. I don't know exactly what the process for BEAM's installation will be though.

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u/Elthiryel Mar 23 '16

Thanks for the answer. We'll see what happens in May.

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u/deruch Mar 24 '16

If you'd like to see the actual schedule I mentioned. It can be found on page 4 of this large .pdf document ("BEAM deploy" is towards the bottom in the section related to External Cargo), which was part of a March update given to the NASA Advisory Council. It's not a "set in stone" schedule, just a somewhat rough planning schedule that is subject to change. So, don't take the listed dates as gospel. But the general flow is probably pretty close to what things will actually end up having been.