YESSSS!!!

Falcon 9 went off like clockwork! All shots courtesy of NASA TV! Interestingly, they were on a 30 second delay…

1423 CDT Liftoff!

1424 Going uphill

1426 First stage separation/2nd stage light off

1427 Capsule shot and 2nd stage burn

1433 First stage recovers on the ship

1436 Second stage separation

On orbit… two minutes less than Alan Shepard’s first flight 59 years ago… Depending on when you read this, they should be getting close to docking with the ISS… That is supposed to occur approximately 0930 CDT.

Honestly, I’m glad to see America taking back control of their flights into space, and congrats to Spacex, the first PRIVATE company to put men in space!!!

Comments

YESSSS!!! — 17 Comments

  1. I missed the launch since I was busy elsewhere at the time. I’m certainly glad to see us back in the business again.

  2. Eventually, enough private money will be available for space flight. At that time, the bureaucracy of NASA will take a back seat to progress.

  3. Started watching Space Force which, since it stars Steve Carrell, is decently funny. One scene where they show him ranting about $1000 cost for plastic button covers, immediately cut to next scene showing him putting his feet up on the desk and accidentally launching one of their rockets.

  4. As a kid, I watched the Apollo launches, and the Saturn V shook, rattled, and creaked as it hurled itself into orbit.

    This Falcon 9 launch was all – “I want to go there, so I will.”
    The internal shots in the cabin were smooth like silk, and stunningly impressive.

    • Surprisingly, the reason for that is the Saturn, though overbuilt for LEO, being designed to scale up to Mars missions, was not as overbuilt as the Falcon.

      That and there’s a tad bit of difference between 9 Merlin engines producing 192K pounds of thrust each and 5 F-1 engines producing 1.2 to 1.5 million pounds of thrust each…

      Now when Spaceship launches powered by the new Raptor engines, that will be a lot of vibratory power!

  5. Way cool. Tnx for the post, ONFO.

    “uphill” no doubt an aviation term.

    “30-second delay” gotta give the censors time to kill the signal if somebody starts cussing.

  6. This is a Big Deal, a new era if you will. Private enterprise once again doing WAY better than government can, or would if it could afford it. May the .gov continue getting out of the way.

  7. Dad used to live near the Space X test site in Waco. The tests shook the house. Glad we’re back into it.

  8. All- Thanks for the comments! Hard capture of Dragon was at 1030 CDT, a hair over 19 hours after liftoff. Another hour and a half or so of procedures before they actually open the hatch and step aboard the space station.

    Posted from my iPhone.

  9. The window to catch the ISS was about 1-3 seconds. Crazy planning and launching.

    As to a delayed feed, NASA learned their lesson after Challenger, when they finally cut the feed after 30 minutes or so after the accident. Very sobering watching the control room personnel freak and lose it very quietly while pieces parts splashed down for a very long time.

    Not tired of winning. And don’t think this would have happened under a different administration.

  10. Agreed. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the bit of the delay.

    The second was the likely behavior of the MSM in such an eventuality. (How could they get from a private launch failure to Orange Man Bad? Dunno, but they’d do it somehow.)

    I saw a bunch of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Shuttle launches on TV, but missed this one. Not sure I saw the live TV coverage for the Alan Shepherd’s suborbital flight, but caught it on the TV news at least. That little Redstone looks like a toy, now.

  11. Maybe next time they could round up some rioters and shove them underneath? They seem to like to set things on fire, after all.

  12. Who was it said they were crying?
    Me too. This is WONDERFUL.
    Odd how sad I felt not being able to watch the recovery of the first stage on “Of course I still love you!”
    Heckuva time to have a video burp.