Falcon 1 goes up at 4 PM Pacific Time. That’s 7 PM for me, and we already have tickets purchased for Dark Knight, so I guess we’ll miss it, if it goes on schedule. I’ll have to watch the replay.
[Update at 10:30 PM EDT]
Back from the movie, which was very good. Ledger can certainly expect a posthumous Oscar nomination.
There have been launch delays, but they’re currently reloading fuel after having drained it (there was apparently concern that it was getting too cold during other delays) and are now expecting a launch at 11 PM EDT (8 PM Pacific), in almost exactly half an hour.
[Update a couple minutes later]
They must plan for an 8:05 liftoff, based on the count I just heard. T-32 and counting at 7:33. Weather is green, though there’s some cloud cover.
[Update about ten till the hour]
There must be a delay or something on the web feed, because they’re still saying it will be an 8 PM PDT launch, even though their count makes it come out three or four minutes after that. I wonder if there will be a transmission delay on the launch itself of a couple minutes? If so it won’t quite be live, but it will be close enough.
[Update shortly after scheduled launch time]
They had a (literally) last-minute abort. The window closes in an hour, and I doubt they can turn it around that fast, since they still have to look at the data to figure out what happened. Better luck tomorrow.
[Update a couple minutes later]
That was fast. Now they’re saying they think they may be able to recycle from T-10, so it still may be on tonight.
[10:30 EDT update]
Now they’re at T-7 and counting again.
[Update shortly after launch]
Uh oh. Sounds like strike three. The picture was lost at about 35 km altitude and a thousand meters/sec. They announced an “anomaly.” That doesn’t sound good. The last update on the site was that it was about to enter inertial guidance (not clear what they were doing prior to that). Did something go wrong with an IMU, or some other part of the GN&C?
Fortunately, you’re allowed more than three strikes in this game. It has to be a huge disappointment, though, unless the anomaly was merely a loss of signal, and the vehicle’s doing all right. The webcast is over, though. I think that I’d assume that the news is bad.