It was launched on Good Friday, and now the Dragon has berthed with the ISS early in the morning on Easter Sunday, over the region of the world in which Christ was reportedly born, died, and resurrected. That wasn’t planned, though. They’d have preferred to have it up weeks earlier.
Meanwhile, no word from SpaceX about recovering the first stage. I’m going to interpret that as bad news, for now.
Looks like another perfect flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. Press conference is scheduled at 1700 EDT, when they’ll presumably tell us how the recovery attempt went. They did report a successful entry burn.
[Update about 5 PM PDT]
Elon has some news:
Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2014
[Another update about twenty minutes later]
Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2014
[Update an hour or so later]
I should add that while this is great news, it will still be disappointing if the rough seas prevent recovery, or break up the vehicle, because they’ll lose data they’d like to have to see how the stage handled the flight. That’s critical to understanding turnaround. The good news is that they’ll be able to do this every flight (that doesn’t need a lot of performance, like their earlier GEO missions) to get it right, and finally start to understand that.
This looks like it might be interesting. We may go up for it tomorrow, and hopefully check in with XCOR for a progress report. They got their cockpit a few days ago, and I think that was the long pole in starting to assemble the Lynx.
Judith Curry disagrees with Kerry Emanuel on now to evaluate climate risk.
Alan Boyle has a story on today’s hoped-for test of first-stage recovery by SpaceX.
[Update a few minutes later]
Amanda Wills interviewed Elon last night.
This looks like an interesting article, if I ever get around to reading it.
Is anticrastination doing something immediately?
We shouldn’t worry, we should just accept that this will happen and we should adapt to it and regard it as a business opportunity.
Its arrogant to assume that climate will remain static.
The whole language of climate change is designed to confuse the public and policy makers
Bob Carter says the IPCC has accomplished the inversion of the null hypothesis, where the onus is now on disproving dangerous anthropogenic climate change
We should focus on protecting people from natural hazards, and not worrying about what is causing them
It makes sense to encourage alternative energy and see what happens.
Bob Carter closed with this: no scientist can tell you whether it will be warmer or cooler in 2020, so we should prepare for both.
Yes. We don’t know much more than we do know.
And as she notes, the people speaking sensibly are independent or retired, not those receiving government funding.
This time, it’s not a public school, but college.
And as Glenn Reynolds notes, these morons now outnumber faculty on campus:
I’d sue all of these people personally, and make their lives a living hell until they left or were fired. And they should have to go through a forced psychiatric evaluation, too, to look at their tendency to abuse power and trust.
Yes.
This looks interesting. It seems to have both similarities and differences with Falcon/Dragon. Similarities: reusable first stage, vertical landing, pusher escape. Differences: Biconic capsule, hydrogen propulsion. Is the first stage hydrogen?
For those who have been waiting for an electronic version, it is now available at Google Play, currently priced at about eight bucks. For those who don’t do Google, I’ll be getting it up for Nook and Kindle (and possible iTunes) as well in the next few days.
[Cross posted at Safe Is Not An Option]