I would note that it would appropriate to think of the Senate design of NASA’s new (unneeded) rocket as being essentially a space transportation earmark for Utah (among other places). While it doesn’t explicitly steer the funds to that state, they will inevitably go there if NASA does exactly what Orrin Hatch demands — design a new heavy lifter that utilizes ATK solid boosters manufactured in that state. So it’s an excellent example of a disastrous transportation earmark.
In October in Las Cruces, Bob Bigelow, with the Lockmart rep sitting next to him on the podium, made it clear in no uncertain terms that he considered Orion unnecessary and the wrong solution for BEO exploration. Today, at the NASA/SpaceX presser, Elon essentially compared Dragon to Orion and found the latter wanting, with less capability (at least in terms of thermal protection) than the former, and more than an order of magnitude difference in cost. I wonder if anyone in Congress will be paying attention to this next year when it’s time to get out the knives for the rescission bills? Lockmart is clearly worried about it, which is why they came up with the 2013 Delta IV launch demo.
That last post on the Dragon launch wasn’t supposed to be published — it’s going up at AOL News a little later. It picked up sixteen comments before I realized that I’d hit the wrong button. I’ll look through them and maybe repost them here.
Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdity of it. Here’s a similar piece I wrote a couple years ago on the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, on why solving the energy problem is completely unlike going to the moon.
I got up this morning, and had no bandwidth, so I missed the SpaceX webcast, but I watched the launch on Fox News. Poking around some, now that I’m back on line, I see that they went into orbit. I’m assuming that it was a clean insertion (no unanticipated roll, as there was in June). Now comes the fun part. It’s supposed to do just a couple orbits, so it should be entering and coming down in the Pacific late morning, PST. Congratulations to SpaceX on mission success to date.
[Update at 9:17 PST]
Alan Boyle has a story. I’ll probably have one at AOL News later, but I want to wait to see how the entry/recovery goes (by the way, one of my pet peeves is the word “reenter,” which everyone uses, but implies that it has entered before — only the Shuttle has ever done that…).
[Update a few minutes later]
At the request of a commenter, here’s one of the first Youtubes out.
[Update shortly after deorbit burn]
Here’s more video.
OK, I’m hearing that drogue and all three main chutes have deployed. Still no word on first-stage recovery. Anyone else heard anything?