It made it. It's in space. The final frontier!!!
Mofo, that is awesome beyond words.
Will update when I know more.
Here's a sweeeeet photo from the rocket as it left the atmosphere.
Nothing much more to say...
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Hooollllyyyyy Shhiiiiiittttt!!!!
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19 comments:
Congratulations to you all!!
Please ask someone to fix the webcast!
The launch was amazing :)
Watching the first stage drop off was UN BE LIEVABLE.
One of the live bloggers I'm reading says telemetry was lost and there was a problem; the other says people are celebrating with champagne. Not sure who to believe...
I think there is a problem. It's not only the webcast: they lost telemetry from the second stage. :-(
But, hey, at least the first stage worked fine.
All I can say is send my congratulations and thanks for all of the effort to get to this point to not only Elon but all of the rest of the "SpaceXers" as well.
Here is hoping that the rest of the flight profile goes well, and that this can help put to rest some of the doubters that this could have been done.
And hoping that Bigelow Aerospace is going to offer you some more business as well (not that they havn't already shown up on the manifest).
I'm watching the spaceflight now blog, and that's what they said.
Congratualations..... Posting photos from the feed at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/
Congratulations! It was awesome. I hope everything else goes off beautifully.
Judging by the orientation of the engine (and thus the thrust vector), there's no chance that the stage made the orbit, no matter how fast it travelled at the cutoff time. Also, Clark Lindsay said that the planned burn time for Kestrel was about 10 minutes, and 5 minutes is way too short. So the mission has ultimately ended in failure, this much is certain.
However, SpaceX deserves congratulations for getting all the hard parts right: launch, staging. Who knows, they might even be able to recover and re-fly the 1st stage. Wouldn't that be great?
Guidance oscillations and the final roll should be fixable by the next flight. The Demo 2 mission should provide the necessary verification of most components of the rocket and operations.
Did anyone noticed on the video when the stages separated that the nozzle of the 2nd stage engine bumped (to me looked somewhat forcefuly) into the inner wall of the interstage when the 1st stage was falling out? And that the lip ring of the 2nd stage engine started comming of and finaly fell of just before the fairing was dropped? And I am not sure but the nozzle got red hot in some areas (with 5 more minutes left to burn) - I was afraid it's going to burn through. Was any of this normal?
The growing oscilation definitly looked abnormal.
The second stage engine is ablativly cooled: there is no coolant, the heat gets away by radiation (the glowing) and erosion of the engine. The glowing should be normal.
The bumb didn't look nice but I remember reading somewhere that the engine nozzle is made of Nobium for bumbs like that.
On most of the other blogs and fora the oscillations are seen as the most likely problem but since we aren't rocket engineers working for spacex so take it with a grain of salt :)
Congratulations! Despite not achieving orbit just yet, that already set a new altitude record for private spaceflight, didn't it?
Re. the rings coming away, see Elon's press Q&A. There's a transcript at Spaceflight Now. He said that these rings are made out of titanium and are there to prevent the nozzle from being squished by the bump at stage separation. They knew that it was going to bump. When the nozzle heats up, the adhesive gives way and the two half-rings separate.
I guess Kimball is going to go to sleep until the next launch campaign now. See you all next time!
I saw the transcript about the titanium half-rings, just a bit too late - after my post :)
Does anyone know if they have fished out the 1st stage yet?
Leonard! For shame, Caroline, said her brother, how can you talk so of persons you have never seen, and to whom you ought to feel grateful for the kindness of their invitation; even if it has interfered http://www.google.com with another party, that I must confess seems to offer unusual attractions...
Congratulations!! Awesome stuff..
Ps. visit my website: Rocket Spanish
Congratulations!!!
I just found you through StumbleUpon and was very happy to read your latest entry.
Love that video, great work. Love the red hot nozzle.
Loved that moment.
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