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SpaceX

40 Comments

…returns human spaceflight to America (and southern California).

I’m glad this is happening, but it should have happened years ago.

[Update just before launch time]

Welp, I guess they’ll try again Saturday. Florida weather.

[Thursday-morning update]

American spaceflight is now in Elon Musk’s hands.

[Bumped]

[Saturday-afternoon (in Florida) update]

Trying again in less than an hour.

[Bumped again]

[Update after the launch]

Looks like everything went perfectly, with weather cooperating in the last hour. On orbit now, and heading for a rendezvous with ISS tomorrow morning. Vodkapundit live blogged it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Loren Grush’s story.

Another report from Emilee Speck.

[Sunday-morning update]

And, they’re docked. They named the ship Endeavour. Jonathan O’Callaghan has the story.

40 thoughts on “SpaceX”

  2. The prelaunch show is pretty good. The influence of SpaceX is apparent and its a good look for everyone involved.

  3. Can’t believe that WaPo guy said they’re currently under a “tornado warning” (Discovery channel).

      2. My mistake, thought it was a typical DC media salad-head with a similarly challenged producer.

  4. I’m worried about weather, but hopeful that the weather only needs to be good over the pad. Shuttle needed good weather over the pad, runway, and trans-Atlantic abort sites.

    1. No, they also have to worry about weather downrange in case of an abort. I read there’s a tropical storm downrange off the coast of South Carolina. It wouldn’t be cool to have to parachute down into a tropical storm.

      At the moment, the range is red for weather. I can only hope it clears soon.

  7. The coverage was really good! And there were no vehicle/GSE issues. Hoping weather improves on Saturday.

  8. Meanwhile, Commander Douglas Hurley sported a sleek polycarbonate helmet with a sprightly visor tipped at a jaunty angle, and the “tuxedo of attrayant space suits” having darker panels down the sides to visually taper and mold the torso, squared-off shoulder lines, aerodynamic seams from collarbone to knee and matching knee-high superhero boots.

    Crewman Bob Behnken was wearing…(ouch!) the same thing. I’m guessing that Mrs. Behnken greeted him tonight with tapping toe, and nothing for supper! (Other than the demand that he wear that slinky spacesuit he purchased while in Hong Kong a few years ago!)

  9. Between Jan 16 and Feb 20, 1962, it took 13 tries to get Friendship 7 aloft, including numerous consecutive weather cancellations between Jan 20 and 27. I was 11 and remember how frustrated I was! Happily, the school I went to put TVs in the classroms so we could all watch. And on the day of the successful launch, it was only after more than two hours of holds. What a sight it was, even on a little black & white TV.

    1. I was 6 and remember watching it at home on our B&W TV. I also remember watching Alan Shepard’s flight from the neighbor’s house on their invitation the previous year on their B&W TV when I was 5. Walter Cronkite broadcast that launch from the back of a station wagon I believe. All this was going through my mind yesterday watching the SpaceX-DRM2 countdown. Seen a lot of incredible STEM in my lifetime, including the moon landing when I was 13. The first shuttle launch I witnessed in person when I was 24. Yesterday I was feeling old, physically fine, just wow what a life!

  10. I watched the first Shuttle launch from the Press Site. I was 30 and managed to parlay having published two SF novels through Ace Books into a press pass. Funnily, this resulted in one of the few personal pieces of evidence I have existed. The most common video of the STS-1 liftoff shows the countdown sign in the lower foreground, and to the left you can see me watching through binoculars, long 1970s style black (!) hair and all. My memory says the guy to my left, jumping up and down and shouting, is the late space artist Dan Gauthier. No one will ever connect that with the author of my books, though, because the jacket photos show me in my 1990s gray hair and beard, so the guy watching the launch is just some anonymous reporter.

    1. Ive seen you in that video. My two friends and I made the 1200 mile trek down all crammed into a Renault ‘Le Car’ after a 24 hr drive. After a brief detour to Disney World due to the infamous T-33 abort, we settled for watching it from the causeway overpass outside KSC. Quite a bit further away than you but still spectacular to see.

  11. Gee, the Kings of the High Frontier would never let such insignificant things as lightning and tornadoes stop a launch. But real-life space, even private space, has to consider the problems of weather, which is why it’s still a problematic issue. And if a private launch is damaged or worse yet destroyed by weather, it will be a massive image loss.

    1. I spoke to one of the pioneering rich guys who were paying customers for a Russian launch to the ISS.

      I wanted to, but couldn’t bring myself to ask if he observed the Russian ritual established by Yuri Gagarin, of, um, relieving oneself on the side of the rocket gantry prior to boarding. He, like American Alan Shepard, had to “go.”

      1. You do realize that pressure suits do not have flies? That would have required him fully to undress, and then get back into his suit, both of which operations required help.

  14. America is back!. I also heard that the first stage of the Falcon 9 was successfully recovered. The 2nd stage of the Falcon 9 my understanding is not recoverable yet? How long if anyone knows before that (2nd stage recovery) becomes feasible?

    1. Fro Falcon they have no plans to ever make stage 2 recoverable. Starship and its booster are intended to be fully recoverable and will replace Falcon as soon as there is a decent-sized fleet. Recovering S2 from orbit is a tough problem, and not cost-effective.

  16. Congratulations to Elon and all involved parties. Truly the dawn of a new era in manned spaceflight.

    1. “Congratulations to Elon and all involved parties. Truly the dawn of a new era in manned spaceflight.”

      Yes indeed; it should effectively silence all the remaining critics saying the SpaceX and Elon Musk are “charlatans” or “conmen”. Nice looking space suits to. I wonder if Musk has had any communication with MIT’s Dava Newman of Space activity suit fame?

      “Dava Newman: Space Suit of the Future”
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEaX2DAjol8

      https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/470274386084301679/?autologin=true

      Now that is a true Golden-Age Science Fiction spacesuit.

      1. Aye. I was a skeptic early on, but it’s long since Elon made a believer out of me. I’m still in awe of the Heavy Metal launch of the Tesla.

  18. Meanwhile, over at Nasawatch, the top 2 stories are:

    Joe Biden’s Comments On The Demo-2 Launch

    and

    Commercial Crew Started Before Trump Showed Up

    As of 9:10 pm EDT, neither had any comments. Ever since I got banned on the site, I’ve noticed that the comments have really dried up. It’s a shame, as there used to be some good “inside baseball” stuff there. Now it’s just obits and Orange Man Bad.

    I just viewed the Everyday Astronaut video about SLS vs Starship and I nearly spit out my coffee when he referenced the anti-SLS legions as people who kept saying Orange Rocket Bad.

    1. I’m sure the Trump speech drove them batty but we all know if Obama was President, the pre-launch show would have been all politics and the progressive marxist space nerds would have loved it.

  20. Hope they sent a price list to Russia. Their Cosmonauts might like a ride in something designed this century. Bound to be cheaper too.

    1. The new agreement is one for one seat swaps with no money changing hands. We keep sending people up on Soyuz, and for each one, they send one up on Crew Dragon or Starliner.

  21. “Endeavour”. Jeez guys. Some one over at NASAspaceflight.com figured “Excalibur” would be a good name because we have a Dragon riding on a Falcon powered by Merlins.
    I was really hoping for a quick comment after liftoff: “Serenity is heading for the Black”.

  22. This is the third US manned spacecraft named Endeavour (after Apollo 15 and a Shuttle). The tradition is supposed to be famous exploration ships of the past, whence Calypso for the first Starliner. I keep hoping some of them will be named after spaceships from my favorite juvenile SF as a kid, such as Star Spear (Tom Swift), Polaris (Tom Corbett), Starover (Dig Allen) and, of course, the SCN Scorpius (from Ride the Gray Planet, also known as Assignment in Space). Not to mention Space Battleship Yamato (bowdlerized to Argo in the Starblazers version)…

    1. More suggestions for Starship names:
      – Gaye Deceiver
      – Heart of Gold
      – Pillar of Autumn
      – Captain’s Fancy
      – Vorga
      – Helva

      I read too much science fiction.

      1. I’d like to see Starships named after astronauts and science fiction writers, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Yuri Gagarin, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury but, of course, to right an old wrong, the very first one, the flagship of the fleet, Enterprise, and all of them with the letters SS prefixing the name.

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