Jared Isaacman’s private spacewalk manned mission launches on Falcon 9
Early this morning SpaceX successfully launched its Resilience Dragon capsule carrying four passengers on Jared Isaacman’s mission to do the first entirely private spacewalk. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Resilience is flying its third flight. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The spacewalk will take place on September 12, 2024. In between the crew will spend the next two days preparing for that, while flying in an orbit with a apogee of 870 miles, the highest any person has flown from Earth since Apollo. That orbit will be lowered slightly for the spacewalk itself.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
89 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 104 to 57, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 89 to 72.
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
Early this morning SpaceX successfully launched its Resilience Dragon capsule carrying four passengers on Jared Isaacman’s mission to do the first entirely private spacewalk. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Resilience is flying its third flight. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The spacewalk will take place on September 12, 2024. In between the crew will spend the next two days preparing for that, while flying in an orbit with a apogee of 870 miles, the highest any person has flown from Earth since Apollo. That orbit will be lowered slightly for the spacewalk itself.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
89 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 104 to 57, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 89 to 72.
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
Congratulations to all involved!!!
Tried to stay up for it. Weather delay finally forced me to bed. It seemed that the streaming of the broad cast was very rough and kept dropping out, almost always when they were going to show you or tell you something interesting. Going to watch the rebroadcast which I hope is complete.
Glad to see John Insprucker back as a commentator. The younger gals and guys are great, but I just like John and his focus on the comparative technical of historic space (Apollo, Shuttle, others) to SpaceX space.
Nice launch.
It is past the time to have a private space station.
I presume it was launched from Florida. Is Vandenberg rated for human launches as yet?
Michael McNeil: Yes, the launch was from Kennedy. I should have included that detail and have now added it.
I am sure SpaceX is well prepared to safely launch humans from Vandenberg. I am also fairly sure the FAA will object and demand new and very pointless paperwork before giving the okay.
Listened to the rebroadcast on X. It was still choppy
Michael McNeil:
To expand on Robert’s comment…
SpaceX currently has two “crew-capable” launch pads in active service: LC-39A at KSC, and a couple miles south, SLC-40 at CCSFS. SLC-40 just had its infrastructure for crew completed this summer, and NASA has just certified it this month for crew launch. The main improvement is the launch tower and crew access arm, though there are other things, like Draco and SuperDraco fueling… Anyhow, this gives SpaceX some redundancy now for crew launch which it did not have before, and that enables more schedule flexibility. Which SpaceX suddenly needs this month, because right now LC-39A is being reconfigured for the Europa Clipper launch on Oct. 10, and so that means that the Crew-9 launch is gonna need to make use of this brand new capability at SLC-40 for its Sept. 24 launch.
SpaceX has two pads at Vandenberg: SCL-4 and SLC-6. SLC 4 has been in operation for Falcon 9 launches for several years now; it does not have an access tower or Dragon processing facilities at present . . . SLC-6 was previously leased by ULA for Delta IV Heavy launches, and when it launched the last one in 2023, ULA chose not to renew the lease, and SpaceX picked it up. It is now being rebuilt for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, and is supposed to be ready sometime in the latter part of 2025. I’ve not heard anything about building in a crew launch capability. I suppose it would really depend on whether there was any market for it.
If there was a do-or-die-emergency, possibly they could improvise something at Vandy, but I don’t know how easy or quick that would be to do.
The view from sub-orbital flights isn’t that great…even ISS gives you more of a feeling that you are aboard some steampunk airship.
But the trunk separation video was high enough that the limb of the Earth matched the curve of the planets TOS Enterprise visited….it really looked like space.