Well…just a shorty on the Falcon Heavy launch I just watched…another great launch and, for the first time, all three boosters landed successfully! I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing rocket launches…ever since I was a little kid at the start of the space program, I have always been mesmerized by how we humans can have built these machines…and now a private company is leading the way…okay, with help from the government but still…it was never in anyone’s plans to land and re-use boosters until Space X came along…nice job…one last thing…what’s the deal, space X? My ad blocker has blocked over 350 ads in the 20 minutes I have had the live stream running…that sucks…shame on you…
Tag Archives: Falcon Heavy
Falcon Heavy….
Well…just watched the test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket and it was one of the coolest things I’ve seen since the the Saturn 5 launches of the 70′s…I mean, lighting 27 engines at once and having that happen right is hard enough…but to then land all three boosters successfully…with two of them coming down in a synchronized landing at almost exactly the same time…not sure if the booster that was supposed to land on the ship made it since the cameras cut off as the landing started….but the really cool part was at the end of the telecast…I thought that Elon’s Tesla roaster was going to be contained in a fairing of some sort as it goes into orbit but the fairing separated and the car is exposed to space forever…and, it had a sign on the dashboard that said “don’t panic” along with the spaceman with his hands on the steering wheel…it’s nice when there can be a little whimsy in the world…congrats Space X….
Let’s talk about some cool stuff…
Well…even with the country falling apart and turning into a kleptocracy in front of our eyes, there is still some cool stuff happening that can and should make us smile a little, especially if you’re a science geek like I am. On Friday, maybe, there is going to be a live fire test of the 27 rocket motors on the Falcon Heavy, getting it ready for a launch in the next couple of weeks. I liked Elon Musk’s comments from a couple of weeks ago that there is probably a “50% chance” that the thing is going to explode on launch since it is 3 times more complex than the Falcon 9 it is derived from…after all, it is really three Falcon 9′s strapped together…and two of them have been flown before…but, the really cool part is that they are going to try to land all three of the first stage boosters after they separate from the second stage….oh, and the payload? Elon Musk’s personal Tesla roadster that they are going to put into orbit around the sun if everything goes right. Now, I like the whimsical idea of launching a car into orbit where it will stay forever…unless we gain the capability to go out and get it in the next hundred years or so….I will be watching Friday and later in the month for the launch…it takes my mind off the idiot in the WH……
Red Dragon on Mars….
Well…sitting here waiting for the Fedex guy to come and thought I’d do a little comment on an article I read this morning by Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy. There was a little noticed announcement last week by Elon Musk and Space X that they are going to try to land one of their Dragon V2 capsules on Mars by 2018…yep…when everyone else says they can’t get there until 2025 at the earliest, Space X is going to try it in two years…unmanned, of course, since the Falcon Heavy that they are going to use to launch it has not been tested yet and the Dragon V2 has not been flown either…but, I find it just so cool that private industry is going to do what NASA can’t…and beat them to Mars by 7 years. I know there have been many successful Mars probes sent by NASA and I applaud their work…work that continues to amaze me…but, to fly the hardware that is going to be used to send people to Mars in that short a time frame goes up the scale to really cool. Oh, and one more thing with the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9′s strapped together….when they test launch the Heavy later in the year, Space X is going to try to land all three boosters; two on land and one on the autonomous barge where they landed the last Falcon 9….that is going to be so cool and I had hoped they would try something like that…Space X is putting excitement back into space and even this old guy is pretty geeked….