65 thoughts on “SpaceX flight rescheduled”

  1. My train was delayed yet again so I’m not going to complain about this. If rail companies still can’t get a four carriages to move along pre-laid tracks after 200 years of practice I’m prepared to give the rocket guys some leeway.

      2. My experience is that trains are almost always on time. Seldomly I have experienced delays of more than 5 minutes.

        1. Maybe late trains are things we enjoy grumbling about. If we admit they don’t exist we’ll be left with just weather and politics. In the US few people ever take trains anymore, which could lead to a certain amount of late-train nostalgia.

  2. High altitude wind shear apparently causing delays. Now rescheduled to 3:45 EDT with a 15 minute launch window, but SpaceX has started loading fuel into the beast so that’s a good sign. If cancelled today then same launch window for tomorrow.

    1. The launch window ends at 4:00, so if they don’t launch at 3:45 then they won’t launch today.

      If and when it happens, and if the video feed includes sound, it’ll be interesting to time the sound delay and calculate the distance of the camera from the launch site.

  9. Successful launch and booster recovery. Spectacular dual landing of side boosters. Center core still has not been reported safe aboard the drone ship.

    1. Yes, they tend to lose camera on the reentry as they have several times before. At least they had a good camera at the site where the two side rockets came down. All and all, a pretty successful shot. 27 engines and they all worked.

      1. Insanely successful.

        Try to imagine how hard it was to coordinate all that and design it.

        Back in the “good old days” all you had to do was get one can clear of earth.

        We (in commercial airplane design) used to tease the space guys (mostly missiles): “ours has to come back!”

        1. Yes, this stuff is way over my head but it seems to be a marriage of mechanical technology and computer that allows this to happen. I worked on simple jet airplanes many years ago and I barely knew how they worked.

      2. Dude, you just got to watch an amazing piece of history! This was an enormous success. And, if I remember your age correctly, you’ve seen every important space launch humanity has ever done, which is also pretty awesome.

    2. Yes, I only now had a chance to see it but the two boosters landing in an almost synchronized fashion was quite amazing.

      1. AND: right next to each other on their assigned landing pads!

        All the way down, I’m thinking, “are they going to crash into each other?”

    1. Though I watched the SpaceX broadcast and I’m pretty amazed that even though they knew they may lose picture for the core camera, as has happened before, the two young hosts (whoever they were) seemed completely ill prepared for it and stammered their way ineptly in that down time. Seriously, that’s the best they could do for hosts?

      1. They were actual engineers who work at SpaceX not professional newscaster types, so I’d cut them some slack.

      1. Took me right back to the wonder I felt reading stuff like Heinlein’s juvenile novels or Hogan’s The Giants Novels.

  15. My screenshot capture of the view out the windscreen(?)of Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster:
    file:///Users/thomasczarny/Desktop/Screen%20Shot%202018-02-06%20at%205.12.14%20PM.png

  16. Wow, that was really fantastic to watch. I’m glad I got the hint to this event here because nothing were reported in German media in advance.

  18. Perhaps someday Falcon Heavy will be viewed with same fondness, indeed reverence, that we of a certain generation remember names such as Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Saturn V.

    1. Indeed, when I watched the start I thought for a moment,maybe that feeling I had could be similar to this kind of feeling people had experienced decades ago by watching the apollo missions.

      1. I was living in a dorm when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I watched the event in a TV room with perhaps 100 other people. It was a moment that I and billions of others will never forget, right up there with the John Kennedy assassination. These events along with several others, such as the Vietnam War and Watergate, make the 1960s (which I define as a “long” decade starting with JFK’s election and ending with Nixon’s resignation) the one that shaped everything that followed.

        2. I remember the moon landing (Apollo 11); but I was too young to stay up for the televised coverage (midwest of the USA).

          My older brother snuck downstairs and watched from the stairs — my parents never knew, I think.

        3. I was 6 when the moon landing happened and I remember it because my mother woke me up to watch it and had a cupcake with a candle, so we could sing “happy birthday” to the moon.

  19. When Life On Mars kicked in, my eyes teared up. I can’t remember seeing a single scientific moment as historic as this in my lifetime. It was so beautiful.

    2. I’ve seen several, but my eyes teared up too.

      Playing Bowie, man, that was pulling no emotional punches. But what really pushed me over the edge was the “Don’t Panic” on the dash.

        1. Emotions are weird and irrational. In some convoluted way part of what made me tear up at seeing “Don’t Panic” on the car was remembering how subversive and guilty I felt reading HHGTG as a fundamentalist teenager. It makes a crucifixion joke on the first page, for example, which is just the sort of thing my indoctrination had conditioned me to fear. I felt like I was committing a thought crime as I read that book but the humor overcame my fear. Fundamentalism is psychological abuse, and like any other abuse survivor the scars remain after you escape. In this case, the feeling I felt seeing “Don’t Panic” on the dash was something like vindication. Like my subversion was mainstream now, and going to Mars, while the religious still wallow in their squalor.

          It was a fleeting feeling, and the telling here sounds a bit over dramatic, but that’s what emotions do.

      2. How is engineering not scientific? And how is launching a rocket that will likely be the precursor to future space exploration possibilities far beyond previous capabilities not an incredible scientific moment?

        And I don’t care if the Roadster was product placement. It will still awesome.

        1. Engineering and science are not the same thing. Please don’t cheapen engineering by claiming that it is just a part of science. A good case can be made that there was engineering before there was science.

          I don’t care if the Roadster was product placement. It will still awesome.

          No it wasn’t awesome, it was a cheap expensive publicity stunt.

  21. Elon Musk has confirmed that the center core failed to land. Only 1 of the 3 engines used for landing restarted and the single engine was not enough to slow it to a landing.

    1. Too bad, but overall the complex test flight was a success. Congratulations to Musk and SpaceX.

  22. The live feed from the roadster with the Earth in the background is spectacular. It also reminds me of a certain scene from the movie Heavy Metal. Only this is much better. It’s real and it’s in HD.

  24. Given FlatEarh is a conspiracy theory, the answer will be obvious to any “evidence” like this: it’s a conspiracy. Faked. Super obvious, can’t you tell?

  25. The third stage burn to get from Earth orbit to escape orbit was widely observed from California and Arizona about 7:30 PM MST.

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