Falcon Heavy launches successfully
Capitalism in space: The Falcon Heavy successfully launched tonight, and is presently deploying the 24 satellites on board.
They successfully landed the two first stage side boosters, but the core stage apparently just missed hitting the drone ship in the Atlantic. You could see it come down, but not on the pad. While SpaceX has now successfully recovered all six side boosters on all three Falcon Heavy launches, they have not yet succeeded in recovering the core stage.
The mission’s full success will not be known for several hours, as the satellite deployments unfold. So far the first two satellites have been deployed successfully.
The leaders in the 2019 launch race:
8 China
8 SpaceX
5 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)
3 India
The U.S. has now widened its lead over China in the national rankings, 13 to 8.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Capitalism in space: The Falcon Heavy successfully launched tonight, and is presently deploying the 24 satellites on board.
They successfully landed the two first stage side boosters, but the core stage apparently just missed hitting the drone ship in the Atlantic. You could see it come down, but not on the pad. While SpaceX has now successfully recovered all six side boosters on all three Falcon Heavy launches, they have not yet succeeded in recovering the core stage.
The mission’s full success will not be known for several hours, as the satellite deployments unfold. So far the first two satellites have been deployed successfully.
The leaders in the 2019 launch race:
8 China
8 SpaceX
5 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)
3 India
The U.S. has now widened its lead over China in the national rankings, 13 to 8.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
And I saw that GO Ms Tree (Renamed Mr Steven) may have caught a fairing.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-first-successful-falcon-fairing-catch-mr-steven-ms-tree/
Woo Hoo! More reuse than pretty much any other launch (Shuttle excluded due to reuse definitions. Has to cost LESS to reuse than otherwise to count).
This never gets old.
Always some new and interesting twist. Maybe not every flight, but they do not quite seem to stop innovating. How lovely.
Flight FH2 landed its center core (B1055) — one out of three (so far) ain’t bad considering that we used to loose 100% of the rockets!
V-Man: Just so there is no confusion, I was very careful what I wrote. While they did successfully land the core on the second Falcon Heavy launch, they did not really recover it.
geoffc: Thank you! I have posted this on the main page.
@V-Man I know. I thought about qualifying that. BUt I thought, no one would be petty enough to pick a nit that small. I was incorrect. :) On the internet there are NO nits too small to pick!
The difference between landing a stage and recovering a stage and all that.
Should count as 1 out of 3, and dang it was exciting. And I fully agree, totally awesome compared to every other launcher on the planet.
Not being able to secure it in high seas is just nitty gritty details that they already had a solution (Xoomba/Roomba) that was not modified in time in for the F-H launch to properly grab it. (Though rumour was it had been modified for this landing attempt). (Grab points on the booster, used by Xoomba on F9 are used to connect the side boosters to the core, so the Xoomba connector needed to be modified).
They didn’t recover the core, but the side boosters landed just fine. It was like watching a 1950’s sci fi movie. Gotta love living in the future.
Chris Lopes wrote: “Gotta love living in the future.”
For a while, we thought it would never get here. I’m so glad that it did.
The best part is that it looks like there is even more future to come.
I noticed that several of the satellites are technology demonstration or test satellites. It seems to me that the number of these new technologies has increased over the past decade. This bodes well for the future, where Chris Lopes reminds us we will live, some day.
It seems that the reduced cost of access to space makes technology innovation testing less expensive and, as expected by economics, more common.