The window for tonight’s SpaceX Inspiration4 launch begins at 8:02 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, and the window will be open for five hours. Be sure to tune in to the live feed below, or one of the others listed, to see four “civilian” astronauts, who trained for six months, to go into orbit for three days.
We’re about an hour from the first open launch time, so click below and watch the takeoff. The probability of a launch this evening is given at about 90%, so things look copacetic.
Read more about the launch and the truly diverse set of astronauts (one with an artificial femur) here.
I often wonder what the flat Earth community would do if their most influential and respected ‘leader’ went on this trip. Imagine them returning and announcing it’s a sphere; I think the community would discredit and disown them rather than face facts.
It’s all fake. You go up and then the movie starts ;).
Why do you put civilian in scare quotes?
Because it’s not really the right term. A civilian is somebody who is not in the military and on that criterion, there have already been several all civilian flights. What is really meant in this case is “private individual”. Nobody on this flight is sponsored by a government agency.
So it’d be more accurate to say it’s the first flight with no professional astronauts, I guess.
In fact the announcers said that very thing during their narration of the flight.
Well now it is official: we have space tourism. Though i still worry about people who sit atop a rocket with enough explosive fuel to go into orbit, i also congratulate the spacex guys and gals on this accomplishment.
Congratulations to all concerned on a successful and safe launch.
I suppose that I should be grateful to hear what I could of flight director/controller announcements of launch milestone events, despite all the overblown Elizabeth Warrenesque whoopin’ and hollerin.’ What purpose did all that serve? Part of the PR spin? Not exactly reminiscent of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo “steely-eyed missilemen.” Ah, for the days of no-nonsense announcements of Apollo Launch Control’s Jack King.
The space tourism efforts of billionaires, while earth goes through a sixth extinction and towards a climate catastrophe, is rather disturbing to me.
My view is that the sooner Elon Musk fucks off to Mars, the better for everyone.
Whatever his faults, Musk seems genuinely concerned about the future of the planet and the human race and has done a lot of good things. Without Musk, electric cars would still be a small-niche thing. The main environmental problem is fossil fuels. (Even if the electricity comes from fossil fuels, electric cars are still better for the environment.)
He really isn’t.
Electric cars are not the answer. They’re still cars. They still take vast quantities of energy and resources to build and they are still voraciously consuming real estate in our cities that could be put to better use.
And his decision for Tesla to buy $1.5 billion in Bitcoin beggars belief if he is so concerned about the environment.
He revoked the decision to accept bitcoin as payment after a few days.
Yes he did, but not until after a lot of people had pointed out that it really didn’t look very good.
At least he learns from his mistakes.
His hyperloop and boring company exploits seem to have disastrous effects on US public transportation. His firms have convinced some officials already and even though the products so far have been spectacular — also hilarious — failures. See the utterly ridiculous Las Vegas public transport project. For this money, the US could have some decent public transports, but Musk seems to double down on the primacy of cars, which is bad for the public.
False dichotomy.