SpaceX successfully launches ten Iridium satellites into orbit
Capitalism in space: SpaceX this morning successfully placed ten Iridium satellites into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket.
They did maneuver and landing tests with the first stage, which was making its second flight, but did not try to recover it. They did attempt to catch one half of the rocket’s fairing with their fast-moving ship and its giant net. No word yet on whether that attempt worked. Fairing recovery failed. See comments below.
The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:
9 China
6 SpaceX
4 Russia
3 Japan
3 ULA
2 Europe
2 India
The U.S. and China remain tied at nine for the lead in the national rankings.
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Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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Capitalism in space: SpaceX this morning successfully placed ten Iridium satellites into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket.
They did maneuver and landing tests with the first stage, which was making its second flight, but did not try to recover it. They did attempt to catch one half of the rocket’s fairing with their fast-moving ship and its giant net. No word yet on whether that attempt worked. Fairing recovery failed. See comments below.
The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:
9 China
6 SpaceX
4 Russia
3 Japan
3 ULA
2 Europe
2 India
The U.S. and China remain tied at nine for the lead in the national rankings.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Elon Musk: GPS guided parafoil twisted, so fairing impacted water at high speed. Air wake from fairing messing w parafoil steering. Doing helo drop tests in next few weeks to solve.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/979764513233715200
* 22 December 2015 — 1st recovery: SpaceX lands first Falcon 9 booster, RTLS LZ1 at Cape Canaveral. That booster, #1019, is now on display outside their Hawthorne headquarters.
* 8 April 2016 — 2nd recovery: Booster from CRS-8 flight lands on ASDS in Atlantic. That booster, #1021, was subsequently refurbished, and just under a year later, …
* 30 March 2017 — 1st reuse: Booster #1021 is reflown, lofting SES-10, and landing (again) on ASDS in Atlantic.
Over the 1 year period 30 March 2017 – 30 March 2018, SpaceX has had 21 launches involving 23 cores (the +2 from Falcon Heavy), with 13 of those cores making their first flight and 10 being reflown.
(SES-10 was an afternoon launch, so we get to count both it and today’s Iridium NEXT 5 by properly defining our year.)
Anyone know why NOAA forced SpaceX to cut off its reporting on the launch?
@Willi, NOAA, via its Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) office, licenses all US based private remote sensing space systems, and someone (details here are not clear) recently decided that a rocketcam transmitting imagery from orbit showing the Earth in the background counted as such a system. (There is speculation that this might be in reaction to the “Starman” video.) SpaceX has a license in works which will cover future flights, but for this flight they had to terminate public rebroadcasting of the video just prior to achieving orbit.
Quick answer: Stupid bureaucracy, but they are in the process of working around it.
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/979748665479876609
Kirk–
thanks for those tidbits!
How far the Russians have fallen.
It should sadden us all a little. However much I loathed the USSR and what it stood for, its space program managed some truly extraordinary achievements in space despite difficult circumstances (and considerable human sacrifice). Today, its Roscosmos successor is a shell of its former self.
Kirk wrote: “NOAA, via its Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) office, licenses all US based private remote sensing space systems, and someone (details here are not clear) recently decided that a rocketcam transmitting imagery from orbit showing the Earth in the background counted as such a system.”
Yet another freedom taken from us. Can’t take pictures of the Earth from space without permission? What are the space tourists supposed to do to show everyone back home about their trip to space?
I am pretty sure that the rocketcam imagery and tourist photographs were not intended by Congress to be the kind of commercial imagery needing regulation. They hardly fall under the base definition of remote sensing: the acquisition of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_sensing
Or am I being too cynical, today, about our increasingly tyrannical government?