That last post on the Dragon launch wasn’t supposed to be published — it’s going up at AOL News a little later. It picked up sixteen comments before I realized that I’d hit the wrong button. I’ll look through them and maybe repost them here.

I got up this morning, and had no bandwidth, so I missed the SpaceX webcast, but I watched the launch on Fox News. Poking around some, now that I’m back on line, I see that they went into orbit. I’m assuming that it was a clean insertion (no unanticipated roll, as there was in June). Now comes the fun part. It’s supposed to do just a couple orbits, so it should be entering and coming down in the Pacific late morning, PST. Congratulations to SpaceX on mission success to date.

[Update at 9:17 PST]

Alan Boyle has a story. I’ll probably have one at AOL News later, but I want to wait to see how the entry/recovery goes (by the way, one of my pet peeves is the word “reenter,” which everyone uses, but implies that it has entered before — only the Shuttle has ever done that…).

[Update a few minutes later]

At the request of a commenter, here’s one of the first Youtubes out.

[Update shortly after deorbit burn]

Here’s more video.

OK, I’m hearing that drogue and all three main chutes have deployed. Still no word on first-stage recovery. Anyone else heard anything?