Category Archives: Space

Besides low Earth orbit (LEO)? Besides geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO)?

The “usual,” if you define “usual” as doing things routinely that a year ago no one had ever even dared to try.

1 – They’re retrieving their first stage boosters, landing them either on land near the launch site or on barges out in the middle of the ocean. (This is orders of magnitude beyond anything that anyone else is doing.)

2 – They’re re-using those boosters to launch new missions. (The Space Shuttle re-flew, and some of the Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters (SRB) were recovered and refurbished, but only with MUCH higher cost and MUCH longer turn around times.)

3 – They’re launching much more often than anyone else. For example, they launched on Friday from Florida (see pictures below) and they’ll try to launch tomorrow afternoon from California.

Yesterday’s launch was another tough one, with the booster coming back for landing from a very high altitude and energy condition, requiring it to have a large delta-V and to endure a lot of stress on re-entry. Elon Musk thought this might lead to a failure to recover the booster. It might be a “learning experience.” (And that’s another thing – that’s not just a euphemism. The folks at SpaceX are willing to take acceptable risks in order to push the envelope and learn how to do the hard things. That takes guts.)

All images from the SpaceX webcast:

It was a gorgeous day for a launch. Note that this booster launched out of Vandenberg in California on January 14, 2017, so the turnaround between launches was only 161 days.

As the rocket rises, the exhaust plume expands (much less air pressure to push against) and you can start to see the nine separate plumes from the nine engines.

Happiness is the Earth in your rear view mirror!

Looking up from the top of the first stage (left) we see the second stage (right) starting to fire.

The first stage (left) doesn’t have time to sightsee – it’s got a barge to catch. The grid fins pop out and act to steer in the atmosphere, much like you can “steer” with your hands out the car window as you’re driving along. The grid fins might look small, but they’re something like six feet square, similar in size to a king sized mattress. The second stage engine (right) starts to heat up…

…to the point where it’s glowing cherry red hot. The first stage does another burn with some of its nine engines to put it on a course to fall (with style!) down onto the recovery barge.

The first stage camera (sometimes) gets covered with soot and debris from the rockets, as well as condensation as it gets back into the lower atmosphere. But you can still see the grid fins glowing, getting red hot from the air friction. (Hopefully your hands out the car window don’t get this hot.)

The second stage is pressing on to orbit. While the launch and first stage recovery are spectacular, this is the part that pays the bills and lets them do it again and again and again.

The SpaceX barge in the Atlantic Ocean is “Of Course I Still Love You,” seen here just seconds before the first stage landing. (We lost video during the actual time of landing, in large part due to the interference of having a freaking rocket come down from space on a pillar of fire!)

That’s terrible, isn’t it? I mean, they missed the bullseye by at least eight or ten feet! On a more serious note, you can see that the rocket is leaning just a bit. This was one of the hardest landings and the booster came down fast, hitting the deck hard. That’s okay – the legs are designed to absorb a decent amount of energy in a hard landing. We’ll see how the booster checks out when it gets back to port, but preliminary reports are that it survived the landing without any major problems.

After a coast phase of about 19 minutes (see the timeline at the bottom) the second stage re-lit and boosted the satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.

Once travelling at 34,000 km/hour, the Bulgarian communication satellite was cut loose, pushed away by springs, as we watch it going…

…going…

…gone

That’s impressive!

More impressive, they’re going to try to do it again tomorrow. Launch is scheduled for 13:25:14 PDT. If you’re anywhere along the California coast from Ventura County to San Luis Obispo you should be able to see it. Here’s what a previous launch looked like from Camarillo – in fact, I just realized that’s the rocket that was re-launched yesterday from Florida! Of course, the closer you can get to the Lomoc and Vandenberg area, the better the view.

If you can’t get to the Central Coast to see it, you can watch the SpaceX webcast starting at about 13:10 PDT.

The impossible becomes the possible becomes the routine becomes the commonplace. We’re still somewhere between “possible” and “routine,” but we’re moving in the right direction!

Wasn’t that one of the reasons I started this website, way back in the early days of the universe when the photons were young and the ideals had moxie?

For those who might be relatively new around here and know me only from my “I’ve got a full-time-plus job and I might have a few seconds to throw some crap at the wall and see what sticks” days, there used to be a lot of spacey and astronomy-y things here. For example:

Transit of Venus astrophotography (along with other simple how-to bits for astrophotography)

Total lunar eclipse astrophotography (actually a couple more lunar eclipses as well)

History of manned space flight

Why NASA means so much to me

NASA Social at Edwards AFB

NASA Social at JPL for Orion launch

NASA Social at Palmdale for SOFIA

NASA Social in Washington DC for the Hubble Space Telescope 25th anniversary

NASA Social at Edwards AFB for LeapTech I would note for all of the NASA Social events, there were usually several days worth of posts and pictures, not just the one.

Why is this list important? It’s the one that I sent to the NASA Social team yesterday when I applied for the NASA Social on September 14 and 15th at JPL for the finale of the Cassini mission at Saturn. (If you’re interested, available, and meet the qualifications, you too can click on that link and apply before June 29th.)

On the one hand, I would  REALLY  like to get an invite to this NASA Social. Aside from the fact that it’s been over two years since I’ve been to one (that whole “job” thing mentioned above is really interfering with my fun!), this event promises to be spectacular, emotional, and a singular event in this generation of our exploration of the outer planets.

What are my odds of getting accepted? I suspect they’re…

…astronomical. (Nope, not sorry at all.)

I don’t know how many people will apply for those 25 spots. Not a clue actually. (Kate? Ballpark figures maybe?) I can say that as a WAG I would expect it to be 2,500+ and I wouldn’t be too awfully surprised to hear it was 25,000+.

One clue on the level of competition comes from the upgraded online form that they’re using. They want to make sure that you’re reaching a big crowd so they’re getting the best bang for their buck in inviting you. So now when you identify your Twitter or FaceBook or Instagram accounts, you’re asked to identify how many followers or friends you have:

Maybe it’s me, but if, say, Will Wheaton or John Scalzi wanted to go to this event and could be checking off those boxes deep into the lower half of this grid, they just might get preference over lil’ ol’ me. Just maybe.

Be that as it may, I’ve applied. So if nothing else, let’s start using this as a motivator over the next few weeks to spend much more time here talking about the things that I came here for in the first place. It can’t hurt!

…and I guarantee I won’t see a single one of them!

Magnitude -3.7? That’s like 747-on-final-approach bright!

72° peak above the horizon? Nice & high, trivially easy to spot!

Almost six minutes from horizon to horizon? SWEET!

Rising at 5:07 AM? My ass will be warm, comfy, and ASLEEP IN BED!

As Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his limitations!”