This was too cool. I actually saw the bird climbing up to orbit a little after 1 pm local time today. It was launched from Omelek, but I could not only see the exhaust, but the rocket iself for about the first minute.
After a few seconds, the exhaust trail/contrail disappeared, but I could still see the rocket iself ascending. Finally, it was too small to see, but then a small, faint contrail appeared for a few more seconds, wayyyy up.
It was too far away for us to hear anything.
I’ve watched RVs reentering the atmosphere and coming in to impact in the lagoon, but this was the first launch I have seen with my own eyeballs. It was a real thrill for me.
I bet the champagne is flowing in various SpacEx offices today…well done, people!
Not quite. They didn’t actually deliver their payload to orbit, due to a “no anomoly” that impact and control problems during staging. I don’t know what business Elon Musk is in, but in the orbital launch insurance industry that’s generally considered a failure, and results in somebody having to pay someone else. It gets a little tiresome how blasé these start-up rocket companies are about the complexity of doing an orbital launch. Certainly the big players demonstrate a lot of bureaucratic bloat and attendent cost, but that doesn’t mean that the technology still isn’t very complex and failure prone.
For a company that has yet to demonstrate a to-orbit launch success they have a phenomenal number of orders, though. Funny, that.