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The John Batchelor Show

S8 Ep256: THE CHUTE SHOW AND THE RACE FOR COMMERCIAL CREW Colleague Eric Berger. SpaceX competed with Boeing to restore NASA's ability to launch astronauts, a program politically legitimized by Boeing's participation. Developing the Crew Dragon required rigorous te

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Books, Society & Culture, News, Arts

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

THE CHUTE SHOW AND THE RACE FOR COMMERCIAL CREW Colleague Eric Berger. SpaceX competed with Boeing to restore NASA's ability to launch astronauts, a program politically legitimized by Boeing's participation. Developing the Crew Dragon required rigorous testing, particularly by a team nicknamed the "Chute Show" who tested parachutes in the desert. While Boeing and SpaceX faced similar challenges, SpaceX optimized its Falcon 9 Block 5 for rapid reuse, hardening parts based on lessons from previous flights. Despite the inherent risks of human spaceflight, SpaceX ultimately succeeded in flying veteran astronauts to the station, maintaining reusability as a core requirement. NUMBER 7
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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:27.9

dot i.U. Please gamble responsibly. This is CBS I on the world. I'm John Baxter with Eric Berger,

0:34.8

a senior space writer for Ars Technica.

0:42.4

I recommend the magazine because it's got all these things I don't understand in it.

0:44.0

I love to read that kind of thing.

0:48.8

But also Eric's reporting keeps you up to date on space engineering.

0:54.8

Elon Musk at SpaceX is the go-to space engineering right now.

0:59.1

Didn't start out that way in the early part of the 21st century.

1:05.2

All the sovereign powers dominated space, big space, including the U.S. and Russia.

1:06.8

China's the newcomer.

1:11.3

There are other programs, but commercial space is now so routine.

1:15.6

It's sometimes difficult to remember 10 years ago when it wasn't routine.

1:22.5

We're going now to NASA trusting Elon Musk's innovators on the scene.

1:25.7

There's a lot of improv at SpaceX.

1:31.3

They don't have a huge number of people to assign to any particular task. When they launched a red Tesla into space, they put a sheet up in the corner of the

1:36.3

factory, and that was their secret keeping of the payload.

1:40.3

So we're not looking at something like Boeing, but that's important here.

1:45.5

Boeing is a troubled company now.

1:47.9

Once, however, it was understood by NASA to be the supreme builder of anything we need to get to the moon, to get into low Earth orbit.

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