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Successful SpaceX launch

Falcon 9 shortly after launch

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully launched 58 Starlink satellites as well as three Planet earth observation satellites. The image to the right looks up at the exhaust from the nine firing Merlin engines of Falcon 9 rocket, about two minutes after launch.

That first stage also successfully landed, the third time this stage has completed a launch. The fairing halves were also reused.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

11 China
9 SpaceX
7 Russia
3 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 15 to 11 in the national rankings.

Genesis cover

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 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

5 comments

  • wayne

    Video for this & the Rocket Lab launch, is absolutely amazing.

    –I don’t think we’ve seen this type of back lit lighting before. (?) And we didn’t lose the picture on the barge.

    My all time favorite scenes, for any rocket launch, is stage-separation. Can’t get enough of that stuff!

    Apollo 4, S-IC/S-II Staging, lower camera
    https://youtu.be/ieIqGedO-zg
    3:00
    Apollo 4, S-IC/S-II Staging, upper camera
    https://youtu.be/lxcJu0iX8nA
    2:59
    AS-202 – Separation of S-IVB from S-IB and ignition
    https://youtu.be/xMr_AGJprrg
    2:20

  • Kyle

    Were the fairings new or used?

  • Dick Eagleson

    Used. Each half was from a different previous mission. Somewhere, the ghost of Eli Whitney – inventor of the concept of interchangeable parts – is smiling. Haven’t seen any word yet on whether re-recovery of these fairing halves was successful or not.

  • Kyle: I say so in the post: These were reused.

  • A. Nonymous

    This is the second landing in a row where the barge camera never failed. Has SpaceX switched to using StarLink for the barge’s network connection? The phased-array dish should be able to handle vibrations far better than a traditional steered parabolic dish.

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