SpaceX has had a lot going on this week between both coasts of Florida and Boca Chica, concluding for now in a static firing of all six engines of Starship 20. I don't want to call that the peak of the week; I'll leave that for you to call.
As you can read in the upper right corner, that was at 12:13:55 CST; about 45 to 50 minutes before that, there was what appeared to be a test of the pre-burners for all six engines. I saw that one but didn't grab a screen capture like this. After this one, Elon Musk tweeted a reply to a NASA Spaceflight tweet showing a video of the test.
Earlier in the week, the Crew-2 mission departed the ISS after launch delays kept affecting the Crew-3 launch. The Crew Dragon and four astronaut crew splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Pensacola Florida on Tuesday night around 10:30 PM EST. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, and JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide were all out of the spacecraft within an hour and off to medical facilities for checkups. Presumably after that they went home to their own beds. Perhaps by Wednesday morning.
On Wednesday night at 9:03 PM EST, the Crew-3 mission lifted off from pad 39A on the Kennedy Space Center, successfully putting the Crew Dragon capsule into the desired orbit and recovering booster B1067 for another use. The automated rendezvous and docking with the ISS occurred Thursday morning, about half an hour earlier than originally scheduled. For NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, the launch is just the beginning of a more than six-month stint in low Earth orbit.
Richard Angle photo for Teslarati, left, SpaceX photo from drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, right.
In the left hand frame you can see a solid cloud deck that the mission flew into and there's a more vivid picture here. It was cloudier here, about 35 miles south of the launch site, so we saw nothing. Not even a bright spot behind the clouds.
A scheduled Starlink satellite launch from the KSC, the first since May, was postponed this morning due to weather, when it had a 60% chance of good weather. It has been rescheduled for tomorrow, Saturday morning at 7:19 EST.
That's four big steps since Tuesday - four days if the launch goes off tomorrow morning as scheduled. Admittedly it has been quiet for a while, but that's quite a pace. I'm assured that the US has multiple corporations and a vibrant space industry. It only seems like just one of those companies is actually doing anything.
And SpaceX's rapid speed continues. Lots of achievements and progress at the launch and build sites, too, with the Wide Bay coming along, more and more work on the launch tower and components and the new crane coming together.
ReplyDeleteGo SpaceX!
ReplyDeleteMy son and I watched the Crew 3 launch, and I sat there chuckling the whole time.
I remember my Mom letting me stay home "sick" from school and watching the Mercury and Gemini flights.
There is more going on, but nothing at the level SpaceX reaches and maintains. If you want a quick summary of things not-SpaceX, peruse Doug Messier's blog "Parabolic Arc". He despises Musk, so he only covers anything SpaceX-related if they do something that cannot be ignored, and even then only with terse, adjective-scant prose.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.parabolicarc.com/
I have a handful of places I've gone to for news, but don't think I've been to Parabolic Arc. Duly bookmarked and thank you.
DeleteDuring the static fire they lost a few more TPS tiles. Hopefully they can solve the problem with them being shed as it is very important for the reusability of the spacecraft.
ReplyDelete