On instagram Elon has posted pictures of his original Tesla Roadster being loaded as payload for the Falcon Heavy test flight. The goal is to put it in an elliptic Mars orbit.
If he’s just throwing Teslas away like this he should feel free to send one my way.
Pretty nifty. You tend to forget how gigantic that fairing is. Not the largest of cars, but they could have launched a bus in there. Some higher res shots here.
LA folks were going kind of crazy after today’s Iridium launch. It was a spectacular view, though–just after dusk, the plume was illuminated against the night sky.
This was a pre-flown booster, but surprisingly, they didn’t recover it. They seem to be clearing out the old stock for their upcoming Block 5 variant, which should greatly cut refurbishment costs.
Another ho-hum mission tonight. The main payload was called ZUMA… and with almost nothing more known about it, not even the customer. NSA spy satellite? Probably something along those lines.
Pretty awesome picture of the launch, though. You can see the stage separation, boostback burn, reentry burn, landing burn, and second stage all in one (combined) long exposure. Neat.
Surely they aren’t that dumb. They should have known that this rumor would change public perception of Zuma from “meh, just another spy satellite” to “OMG what happened! Did it really fail!? Did SpaceX screw up?!”
With the Falcon Heavy launch looming so close, I’m just worried that the whole Zuma kerfuffle will wind up delaying FH.
Or worse, open SpaceX up to some sort of unpleasant lawsuit or government regulation. Someone’s likely not happy about a billion dollar satellite going boom.
Falcon 9 performs just fine. Payload gets to the requested orbit.
Northrup Grumman payload separator fails. Satellite stuck to second stage.
Northrup requests more time to get the adapter working. Maybe jiggling the stage around will free it; maybe cycle the latches a bunch of times.
SpaceX says no; not in the contract and besides, our stage is only rated for a few hours. If we don’t deorbit it now then it might never deorbit. We can’t be liable for problems arising from this (space junk, ground impact, whatever). SpaceX deorbits the stage with the satellite attached.
Northrup Grumman gets pissy, blaming SpaceX for ditching their satellite into the ocean.
The Falcon 9 stage clearly made orbit, and while I don’t think there’s any public confirmation that it made the right orbit (in principle, it maybe have underperformed and left the satellite in a decaying orbit), I think eventually someone will confirm that. Too many parties with eyes on it to hide that. Plus SpaceX said that the rocket performed nominally and they aren’t too likely to lie about that sort of thing.
Not a SpaceX question, but I don’t see a thread on the Delta 4 launch from Vandenberg today (1/12) - So just before launch there was a flare-up that charred the lower half of the rocket. Was this normal?
