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The Falcon 9 lifts off at 2:45 pm EDT Friday from Cape Canaveral, as seen in this screen capture from the SpaceX webcast. If you had polled the attitudes of the people watching the launch of the first Falcon 9 on Friday, the most common feeling leading up to liftoff might be something like “hoping for [...] Falcon 9 on the pad at Cape Canaveral for a static test firing earlier this year. If all goes as planned, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will lift off Friday from Cape Canaveral on a mission to demonstrate the capabilities of the new launch vehicle. However, the problem with new launch vehicles is that things often [...] SpaceX’s Elon Musk didn’t say anything really new in his speech yesterday at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, at least compared to his address last week at a satellite conference in Washington. However, there is one new development that he did not mention in his speech. As reported by socalTECH.com yesterday, SpaceX [...] Elon Musk was the luncheon speaker Tuesday at the Satellite 2009 conference in Washington. His speech was a general overview of what SpaceX is doing on both the Falcon launch vehicles and Dragon spacecraft, but he did offer a few new and interesting items: Musk said that SpaceX has 19 Falcon 9 orders (12 of which [...] SpaceX conducted a nine-engine Falcon 9 test Saturday night, much to the surprise—and consternation—of people in communities surrounding the McGregor, Texas test site. SpaceX described the 177-second test at 11:30 pm EST Saturday as a nine-engine “mission duty cycle” test of the Falcon 9 first stage, and that it was a “complete success”. The [...] Saturday is, of course, the 51st anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the canonical beginning of the Space Age. It’s also the fourth anniversary of the winning of the $10-million Ansari X Prize by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the Paul Allen-funded effort by Scaled Composites that resulted in SpaceShipOne and White Knight. This has been a relatively [...] At the annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites in Logan, Utah, on Wednesday, Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX provided some additional details on the failure of the third Falcon 1 launch earlier this month in a previously-scheduled talk about the mission. She showed the rocket’s-eye view of the launch previously released on the SpaceX web site, but [...] A lot has already been said about the Falcon 1 launch earlier this week, so rather than recap and reanalyze the launch from a technical standpoint, I’ll make this observation. It was initially a little surprising to hear that SpaceX people were celebrating, having champagne toasts, and, in general, calling the flight mostly a success. [...] On Wednesday night PBS aired a pilot of a new science show, Wired Science. (If you missed the show you can watch it online; the show is competing against two others to win a slot in the network’s lineup). One segment of the show featured an interview of Elon Musk, where host Brian Unger [...] NASA announced this afternoon that, as many people suspected in the days leading up to this afternoon’s announcement, that SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) won Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) awards to develop cargo and crew transportation vehicles to serve the ISS. SpaceX proposed the Dragon capsule, launched atop a Falcon 9, as [...] |
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