S8 Ep662: 7. The "Shoot Show" and Returning Humans to Orbit To secure funding for a manned spacecraft, SpaceX relied on Boeing’s participation to legitimize the Commercial Crew Program in Congress. Development of the Crew Dragon involved the "Shoot Show," a team of
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
7. The "Shoot Show" and Returning Humans to Orbit To secure funding for a manned spacecraft, SpaceX relied on Boeing’s participation to legitimize the Commercial Crew Program in Congress. Development of the Crew Dragoninvolved the "Shoot Show," a team of young engineers who conducted grueling parachute drop tests in the desert to ensure safe water landings. The program culminated in the successful launch of veteran astronauts on the Falcon 9 Block 5, a rocket optimized for safety and reuse. This milestone ended NASA's reliance on Russia for transport and moved SpaceX closer to its deep-space exploration goals. (7)
1897 WAR OF THE WORLDS
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Call my wife. |
| 0:01.5 | Calling UK Wildlife. |
| 0:03.6 | Voice assistance not working for you. |
| 0:05.7 | BlackRock Investment Trust has a lot working for you. |
| 0:08.2 | Get to know them at blackrock.com. |
| 0:10.0 | Capital at risk. Marketing material. |
| 0:11.4 | BlackRock Investment Management UK Limited. |
| 0:13.0 | Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. |
| 0:15.9 | This is CBS I on the world. |
| 0:18.0 | I'm John Baxter with Eric Berger, a senior space writer for Ars Technica. |
| 0:22.8 | I recommend the magazine, because it's got all these things I don't understand in it. |
| 0:27.5 | I love to read that kind of thing. But also Eric's reporting keeps you up to date on space engineering. |
| 0:34.9 | Elon Musk at SpaceX is the go-to space engineering right now. Didn't start out that |
| 0:41.3 | way in the early part of the 21st century. All the sovereign powers dominated space, big space, |
| 0:48.4 | including the U.S. and Russia. China's the newcomer. There are other programs, but commercial space is now so routine. |
| 0:56.9 | It's sometimes difficult to remember 10 years ago when it wasn't routine. We're going now to NASA, |
| 1:03.1 | trusting Elon Musk's innovators on the scene. There's a lot of improv at SpaceX. |
| 1:15.4 | They don't have a huge number of people to assign to any particular task. |
| 1:21.4 | When they launched a red Tesla into space, they put a sheet up in the corner of the factory, |
| 1:24.6 | and that was their secret keeping of the payload. |
| 1:29.8 | So we're not looking at something like Boeing, but that's important here. |
| 1:37.1 | Boeing is a troubled company now. 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. And SpaceX and NASA and another company called Sierra Nevada that has a neat machine |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.