Watch SpaceX launch its historic first NASA astronaut crew mission live

6 min readNov 15, 2020

SpaceX and NASA have spent years working towards today’s Crew-1 mission, which is set to launch from Florida at 7:27 PM EST (4:27 PM PST). This is the first time that SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket will be officially used as a spacecraft certified by NASA for human flight on a regular astronaut transportation operation. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will also be aboard the Dragon spacecraft and, barring any weather delays, on their way to the International Space Station later Sunday night.

SpaceX has already flown people using Dragon — NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley had the honor of being the first humans ever to be launched to the ISS aboard a commercial spacecraft when they took part in SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission earlier this year. That was obviously a historic achievement, but it was also technically the last stage in SpaceX’s test and demonstration program for Dragon and Falcon 9, whereas today’s Crew-1 launch no longer qualifies as a test. Think of it this way: If Demo-2 was akin to the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight, Crew-1 will be the equivalent of the first U.S. scheduled commercial airline flight in 1914.

Crew-1 will be the first time that a full complement of astronauts are flown on Dragon (there are six total seats but NASA has said it will only ever fly a max of four of its and partner agency crew to the ISS on these flights). The astronauts will join the existing crew on the ISS for a regular tour of performing experiments, maintaining and upgrading the station, which will also see the active ISS population swell by one additional astronaut for the first time during a standard rotation, which means more science can get done according to the agency.

The launch system is designed to work in a completely automated way, which means that it requires no action on the part of the crew on board from launch all the way through its docking with the ISS. That’s also true of the return trip, which will take place sometime around next June.

SpaceX will also be attempting a recovery of the first stage booster used during this launch, using its autonomous drone landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Everything should get started closer to the liftoff target time, but NASA will also have programming all day related to the Crew-1 mission, the Dragon program and much more via the livestream above.

But notable in DoorDash’s impressive results is the impact of COVID-19, accelerating secular trends already in place, and boosting the unicorn’s growth. Before we get into pricing this IPO and guessing what the company might be worth, let’s strive to understand what portion of its 2020 business gains could stem from the pandemic — and might not persist into the future.

We’re not being pessimistic; we merely want to better understand the company. And DoorDash agrees with our general thrust, writing in its S-1 filing that “58% of all adults and 70% of millennials say that they are more likely to have restaurant food delivered than they were two years ago,” adding that it believes “the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated these trends.”

Even more, elsewhere in its filings DoorDash states plainly that COVD-19 led it to experience “a significant increase in revenue, Total Orders, and Marketplace [gross order volume] due to increased consumer demand for delivery, more merchants using our platform to facilitate both delivery and take-out, and improved efficiency of our local logistics platform.” The company then went on to warn investors that the “circumstances that have accelerated the growth of our business stemming from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may not continue in the future, and we expect the growth rates in revenue, Total Orders, and Marketplace [gross order volume] to decline in future periods.”

We’re not idly speculating.

Let’s observe how DoorDash’s growth accelerated from 2019 through 2020 and then peek at how the company’s economics improved during the same period, giving the company a shot at adjusted profitability for the full year, a nearly unheard of result in the on-demand market.

Growth
DoorDash generates revenue when a customer orders food via its service, splitting the total bill of food costs, taxes, fees and tips, distributing them to itself, the merchant creating the goods and the delivery person.

In an “illustrative” example that DoorDash notes its 2019 “approximate average per-order information,” the split works out as follows:

Bill: $32.90
Merchant: $20.10, or 61%
DoorDash: $4.90, or 15%
Delivery person: $7.90, or 24%
Given that the company is giving us old data and DoorDash’s performance has been stellar this year in terms of generating more gross profit, I wonder what has happened amidst 2020’s upheaval. But, the old numbers do for what we need, which is to understand the link between gross order volume (GOV) and DoorDash revenue. When the former goes up, the latter goes up.

Watch SpaceX launch its historic first NASA astronaut crew mission live

Written by Pkhan