57 years ago today - "The Eagle Has Landed"

57 years ago this morning at 9:27 EDT, Buzz Aldrin crawled into the Lunar Module Eagle and began the lengthy process of powering things up for the short mission life of the module.  An hour later, Neil Armstrong joined Buzz in the LM.

A little over three hours after that, 1:47 PM, they released the latches and separated from the Command Module.  At 2:12, Michael Collins fired thrusters on the CM moving it two miles away from the LM.  Except for that small altitude difference, both vehicles remained in their initial orbit from yesterday's lunar orbit insertion until 3:08 PM when Armstrong fired the descent engine to lower the Eagle's orbit. 

What follows is a 20 minute video depicting the landing which is easily the best modern reconstruction of the landing that I've seen.  It combines video from the window as Armstrong would have seen it with the audio traffic from Mission Control.  The first three minutes gives a modern simulation and animation of how it all worked; after that, it goes to the view recorded on the LM with spacecraft communication on the left speaker and mission control intercom on the right.  Yes, I think it's worth the time.  

The LM touches down at 4:18PM EDT.

At 6:00 PM, Armstrong radios down to mission control that he recommends they start the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) sooner than planned; at 9 PM.  Although they don't make the 9PM goal, the 10:39 beginning of the EVA is still five hours earlier than the mission plans.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this was the last vacation I would ever take with my parents. July of 1969 was the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years of school, and I was 15 years old. Like millions of people around the world, I hung by the front of the black and white TV; this one in my uncle's house in New York City.  We watched intently but I don't recall exactly how much we saw or if we watched until 1:11 tomorrow morning when the EVA officially concluded. It's a sobering thought how many of the family members there on that historic day and night have passed away. Both of my parents, my uncle and aunt, and I'm simply not sure how many else. 

Over the years, this meme from Aesop at Raconteur Report has become my default way of thinking of the Apollo program itself. While he clearly means the landing of Apollo 11, I can see the entire Apollo program as a strong contender for the Peak of Western Civilization. 

Towers at Vandenberg intended for the Shuttles taken down for SpaceX

I'm gonna go out a limb to say a lot of you will be aware of this aspect of space history but the space shuttles were expected to fly out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and a launch complex (Space Launch Complex or SLC, pronounced "Slick") SLC-6 was built for California shuttle launches that never actually happened. Over the years, SLC-6 was used for various launch vehicles: the Titan IV in the early 1990s, Lockheed Martin’s LMLV-1 in 1995, followed by Athena I and Athena II rockets with payloads for NASA and Space Imaging (later GlobalEye) in 1997 and 1999, respectively. The final launch from SLC-6 was of a Delta IV Heavy on September 24, 2022. 

In 2023, SpaceX signed a lease to use SLC-6 for its Falcon launches but has never used it, instead launching its Falcons regularly form SLC-4, which it started doing ten years earlier, in 2013. Fast forward to today.

A series of demolition charges on Tuesday (June 16) brought down the access tower, mobile service tower, and what remained of the assembly building at SLC-6—pronounced “slick-six”—in Southern California. Once the location for the US Air Force’s first effort to put humans into space and later, the West Coast launch site for the space shuttle, SLC-6 will next be used by SpaceX in support of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. 

Flash back to February 1985. NASA’s prototype space shuttle orbiter Enterprise, stacked with an external tank and two solid rocket boosters, stands at Space Launch Complex-6 (SLC-6), flanked by the assembly building (left) and mobile service tower at back when it was called Vandenberg Air Force Base (today it's a Space Force Base). Credit: U.S. Air Force/Tech. Sgt. James Pearson

One year after this photo, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight killing the entire crew of seven. That led the DOD to rethink relying on the shuttle. The Air Force walked away from SLC-6 and never launched a shuttle.

Towers originally built to support early Air Force spaceflight efforts and later never-realized West Coast launches of the space shuttle were toppled at Vandenberg Space Force Base's Space Launch Complex-6 (SLC-6) in California on June 16, 2026. Credit: Space Launch Delta 30/Staff Sgt. Daekwon Stith

“Space Launch Complex-6 represents six decades of American innovation and our unwavering commitment to securing space superiority,” Col. James T. Horne III, commander of Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg, said in a statement. “By modernizing this historic footprint in partnership with our defense industrial base, we are building directly upon the foundation of our pioneers.”

The demolition was known to be planned but was only announced hours after it was completed at 11 am PDT (1800 GMT) on Tuesday. The detonations brought down the access tower first, followed by the mobile service tower and then the large American flag-adorned assembly building. Typical of Vandenberg weather, a marine layer of low clouds and fog added a somber look to the scene.

According to an environmental impact statement they filed, SpaceX seems to expect it will take another 18 months to complete modifications to SLC-6, including the construction of two landing pads for the reusable Falcon 9 first stage boosters. They talk about launching Falcon Heavy missions from SLC-6, which would require the two landing pads, but I see no mention of Starships launching from the left coast in the source article.  

One hundred year anniversary

Hundred year anniversaries of new technologies don't come up very often, especially in the subject area of space exploration but today is one. 

100 years ago, a liquid-fueled rocket flew into the sky for the very first time. The unlikely contraption was designed by Clark University physics professor Robbert Goddard, and launched from a cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts on March 16, 1926. 

Today, Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), who directed the flight, is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern rocketry, along with Hermann Oberth in Germany and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia. A tiny rocket by any standards, with a very short flight, his rocket named Nell was fueled by a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen. 

A picture you've probably seen before, Robert H. Goddard with his first rocket, Nell. Image from Wikipedia, with a long description including current NASA ownership and its history.

Nell flew for a blistering 2-1/2 seconds and achieved a height of 41 feet. Still, it showed the concepts would work and it even used one of Goddard's design concepts that is still widely used today allowing the super cold liquid oxygen to cool the rocket combustion chamber while the oxygen was leaving the fuel tank.

For his first liquid-fueled rocket flight, Goddard tried putting the engine on top of the fuel and oxidizer tanks in a belief it would create more stability, according to NASA. Following flight tests, Goddard moved the engines underneath the propellant tanks, which "simplified the overall design", and instead for stability added moveable vanes to the engine exhaust and gyroscopes. "He was one of the very first people to take the theoretical ideas around rocketry, and actually turn them into an experiment and really apply the scientific methods and experimentation,"

I'm sure I've read about Goddard and his contributions to developing modern rocketry, but putting this little post together demonstrated that it was mostly lost to memory decay. "If you don't use it, you lose it." The sources I used put together good, readable and short biographies. These were

• Space.com: "2 seconds that changed the world: Robert Goddard launched the 1st liquid-fueled rocket 100 years ago today" 
• NASA: "95 Years Ago: Goddard’s First Liquid-Fueled Rocket" - obviously a celebration article from five years ago, but very readable and good.  
• Ars Technica: "A century after the first rocket launch, Ars staffers pick their favorites" much less page space on R. H. Goddard   

It's worth noting, and the Space.com article has the details that I looked at, that Goddard died young in 1945, of throat cancer, and his wife Esther was instrumental in conveying his history and advocating for him. She was essential in filing his patents. Often, she was the only person who could read his notes to put the patent applications together. Esther got approval for 131 patents of his 214 overall.

EDIT 3/17 @ 0755 EST: In the last paragraph I inadvertently changed that first sentence from "died young in 1945" to  "died young, 45,"

A little addendum ...

The talk about the reentering Van Allen Probe A last night reminded me of things I've posted about several times over the years, the big one that the Chinese have dropped boosters onto populated areas for years. 

This example is from a post dated November 27, 2019 and the Tweet here is dated the 23rd. 

I hesitate to start with this example because while I believe they still drop boosters with minimal effort to protect the people on the ground, I know that China is working seriously on reusable boosters now. Several recent articles have focused on test flights of reusable boosters. We did stories about them testing reusable boosters just one month ago, a little over a month before that, and so on (second story in a roundup). Still, while there are still US launch companies that don't reuse boosters they don't knowingly drop them on populated areas. 

A big difference is that boosters weigh considerably more than more typical satellites and can cause much more damage. China launched four heavy-lift Long March 5B rockets between 2020 and 2022, and let their approximately 24 ton core stages fall back to Earth. The NASA requirements for public safety from re-entering spacecraft were published in early 1996, and require better than a 1 in 10,000 probability assessment, obviously a smaller chance than the "approximately 1 in 4,200" chance this Probe A was evaluated at. 

“Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased,” a NASA spokesperson told Ars. “After taking into account the mission’s scientific benefits and the low risk of harm to anyone on Earth, NASA granted a waiver to address the non-compliance with the US Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices. Consistent with national policy, NASA notified the US Department of State about the exception.”

Is there anything that screams "big gubmint" more than exempting your own projects (like this NASA satellite) from requirements everyone else is expected to meet? 

All the sources I've read yesterday and today repeat that no one has been injured by reentering satellites. That said, it seems the same can't be said about things falling from the sky. I ran across this photo around 2017, and vividly recalled seeing this picture in a magazine while in the waiting room at my dentist. That would have been somewhere around 1966 to maybe '68. Note that the picture itself is dated 1954. Also, where it says, "Ann Hodges, after she became the only person in history to have been struck by a meteorite,"  that sentence should end with "that we know of."

America's Worst Week in Spaceflight - An Annual Remembrance

NASA had their annual day of Remembrance yesterday:  Thursday, Jan 22. I usually run my annual remembrance post during the actual week, but I'll follow their example rather than my own tradition and bring the remembrance forward.

It's an oddity of US Space travel that every mission which ended in loss of crew and vehicle occurred in less than one calendar week - six days, although those accidents span 36 years. That week is January 27th through February 1st; while the years run from 1967 through 2003.

January 27, 1967 was the hellish demise of Apollo 1 and her crew, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, during a pad test, not a flight.  In that article, Ars Technica interviews key men associated with the mission.  In the intervening years, I've heard speculation that we never would have made it to the moon without something to shake out a bit of the NASA management idiocy, but that may just be people logically justifying their opinions.  Like this quote from Chris Kraft, one of the giants of NASA in the '60s. 

There was plenty of blame to go around—for North American [they built the Apollo capsule - SiG], for flight control in Houston, for technicians at Cape Canaveral, for Washington DC and its political pressure on the schedule and its increasingly bureaucratic approach to spaceflight. The reality is that the spacecraft was not flyable. It had too many faults. Had the Apollo 1 fire not occurred, it’s likely that additional problems would have delayed the launch.

“Unless the fire had happened, I think it’s very doubtful that we would have ever landed on the Moon,” Kraft said. “And I know damned well we wouldn’t have gotten there during the 1960s. There were just too many things wrong. Too many management problems, too many people problems, and too many hardware problems across the whole program.”

The next big disaster was January 28, - the next day on the calendar, but in 1986, 19 years later.  Space Shuttle Challenger was lost a mere 73 seconds into mission 51-L as a flaw in the starboard solid rocket booster allowed a secondary flame to burn through supports and cause the external tank to explode.  It was the kind of cold day that we haven't had here in some years.  It has been reported that it was between 20 and 26 around the area on the morning of the launch and ice had been reported on the launch tower as well as the external tank.  O-rings that were used to seal the segments of the stackable solid rocket boosters were too cold to seal.  Launch wasn't until nearly noon and it had warmed somewhat, but the shuttle had never been launched at temperatures below 40 before that mission.  Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that cold was likely the cause during the televised Rogers Commission meetings, dropping a section of O ring compressed by a C-clamp into his iced water to demonstrate that it had lost its resilience at that temperature.  The vehicle would have been colder than that iced water.  

As important and memorable as that moment was, engineers such as Roger Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the makers of the boosters, fought managers for at least the full day before the launch, with managers eventually overruling the engineers. Feynman had been told about the cold temperature issues with the O-rings by several people, and local rumors were that he would go to some of the bars just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center and talk with workers about what they saw. The simple example with the O-ring and glass of iced water was vivid and brought the issue home to millions.

There's plenty of evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion. The crew cabin was specifically designed to be used as an escape pod, but after most of the design work, NASA decided to drop the other requirements to save weight. The recovered cabin had clear evidence of activity: oxygen bottles being turned on, switches that require a few steps to activate being flipped. It's doubtful they survived the impact with the ocean and some believe they passed out due to hypoxia before that. We'll honestly never know.

Finally, at the end of the worst week, Shuttle Columbia, the oldest surviving shuttle flying as mission STS-107, broke up on re-entry 17 years later on February 1, 2003 scattering wreckage over the central southern tier of the country with most debris along the Texas/Louisiana line. As details emerged about the flight, it turns out that Columbia and everyone on board had been sentenced to death at launch - they just didn't know it. A chunk of foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and hit the left wing's carbon composite leading edge, punching a hole in it. There was no way a shuttle could reenter without exposing that wing to conditions that would destroy it. They were either going to die on reentry or sit up there and run out of food, water and air. During reentry, hot plasma worked its way into that hole, through the structure of the wing, burning through piece after piece, sensor after sensor, until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart. Local lore on this one is that the original foam recipe was changed due to environmental regulations, causing them to switch to a foam that didn't adhere to the tank or stand up to abuse as well as the original.

In 2014, Ars Technica did a deep dive article on possible ways that Columbia's crew could have been saved.  They republished that on February 1, 2023, the anniversary of the disaster.  It's interesting speculation, very detailed, compiled by a man who claims to have been a junior system administrator for Boeing in Houston, working in Mission Control that day.

Like many of you, I remember them all. I was a 13 year-old kid midway through 7th grade in Miami when Apollo 1 burned. By the time of Challenger, I was a 32 year old working on commercial satellite TV receivers here near the KSC and watched Challenger live via the satellite TV, instead of going outside to watch it as I always did. Mrs. Graybeard had just begun working on the unmanned side on the Cape, next door to the facility that refurbished the Shuttles SRBs between flights, and was outside watching the launch. Columbia happened when it was feeling routine again. Mom had fallen and was in the hospital; we were preparing to go down to South Florida to visit and I was watching the TV waiting to hear the double sonic booms shake the house as they always did. They never came.

The failure reports and investigations of all three of these disasters center on the same things: the problems with NASA's way of doing things. They tended to rely on "well, it worked last time" when dealing with dangerous situations, or leaned too much toward, "schedule is king" all as a way of gambling that someone else would be the one blamed for delaying a mission. Spaceflight is inherently very risky, so some risk taking is inevitable, but NASA had taken stupid risks too often. People playing Russian Roulette can say, "well, it worked last time," but having worked doesn't change the odds of losing.

Last year was the first time I linked to a post on Casey Handmer's blog on this topic, but not the exact incidents, but the management problems that get us to the point where such accidents happen. The post is about Dittemore's law and you might recognize the name. 

Ron Dittemore is the retired former Space Shuttle program manager who was ultimately responsible for the series of decisions that resulted in the Columbia disaster, which killed seven of the lost 25 astronauts.  Here's Handmer's money quote: 

Dittemore’s Law states that “A team composed of sufficiently competent, motivated, well-resourced individuals will tend to produce a collective outcome that is diametrically opposed to the intended, individually desired outcome.”

In physics terms, it’s something like diamagnetism.

Casey Handmer's Dittemore's Law post is definitely worth a read.

Christmas Eve 2025

This year is the 57th anniversary of Apollo 8's lunar orbit mission. The crew, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, spent almost one full day in lunar orbit, completing 10 orbits of the moon before heading back to Earth. At the moment, it looks like we'll get the Artemis II, "not quite enough like Apollo 8 to call it a re-do" mission no earlier than February of 2026. It won't even orbit the moon once, it will just loop around the moon and return to Earth without going into orbit around our neighbor.

The six-day long Apollo 8 mission full of firsts lifted off on Dec. 21, 1968, and it would feature the first time that humans had looked down on the moon from orbit; the first time that humans had seen the far side of the moon with their own eyes, not an orbiting camera.  And it would mark the first time anyone had ever seen the Earth rise over another world.  

I think any vote on the top 10 photos from the Apollo era would include this famous Earth rise shot from Apollo 8, arguably as the most famous or most important. 

Apollo 8 was originally not conceived as the mission it became; it was intended to be part of qualifying the Apollo spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).  There had been only one prior manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, and that had been only two months before in October.  While a Saturn V had been test launched, it had never carried astronauts into orbit.

"NASA officials realized that this was risky, since Apollo 7 had not yet qualified the spacecraft when their tentative decision was made," a NASA historical document reported. The decision was further complicated by Apollo 8's need for a more powerful rocket, called the Saturn V, which had never been tested on a crewed launch. But after months of discussion, NASA decided to move forward with an Apollo 8 moon mission on Nov. 10, about a month before the launch.

Space fans from those days will remember that critical rocket burns happened while the Apollo capsule was out of radio contact - over the far side of the moon.  The burn to stop Apollo 8 from looping around the moon and returning to Earth, enabling them to orbit the moon, had to take place while over the far side.  A day later, the burn to get them out of lunar orbit and returning to Earth took place over the far side as well.

All that remained was the return trip home. Mission controllers waited anxiously Christmas morning as the crew turned their engine on again, on the far side of the moon.

As they re-emerged, Lovell called out, "Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus," signaling that the ship was headed back to Earth. The crew landed successfully on Dec. 27.

Christmas Eve was the day they orbited the moon, the day that the crew spoke to us of the "stark and unappetizing" look of the lunar surface and read from the book of Genesis, the first book in the Christian bible.  Here on Earth, 1968 had been a tumultuous year. There had been riots in many places, assassinations (including Robert F Kennedy) and troubles all around the globe. On Christmas eve, in awe of what these men were accomplishing, it seemed like the world held its breath and watched. 

As I say every year, hold close the ones you love. Give thanks to the people who work the day so that others won't have to, including, police, fire, emergency workers of all kinds including military and hospital workers. If we're very lucky, this will be the worst Christmas of our lives and everything in life gets better year by year for the rest of our lives. And if things get worse, we'll remember this as the "good old days". Either way, hold tight.

Labor Day 2025

Welcome to Labor day, or as we refer to it this year: August 32nd, the earliest Labor Day there can be. The chances of rain tomorrow are being put at 70% so rather than smoking something, we'll be having a pretty typical meal like we do every day, on our regular keto way of eating.  Since it seems the vast majority of stores are open, I could use to make a run to the nearest Office Supplies store for a printer ink cartridge.  Yeah, I know that's exciting.  

One of the reasons I shifted away from writing about the political/social side of life that so many fellow bloggers talk about all the time is that it's such an odd combination of important, and yet insanely boring to talk about all the time.  I get tired of the same handful of stories all the time, even if "all the time" simply means today or this week.  "Someone somewhere" decides what the story of the week is going to be and we get bombarded with versions and derivatives of that group of stories until the next story of the week gets chosen.  I get bored with seeing them on TV, I get bored with hearing them, and I get bored writing the same things.  

One of the things that's in the pile of stuff that cycles by endlessly are trade unions.  While Florida has been a "right to work" state for my entire working life, both Mrs. Graybeard and I worked in places where union membership might have not been legally required, rather it was more like a necessary evil we had to put up with.  

I know I've written this concept down before and won't bother linking to myself, but I've been involved with specifying components the company I was working for was going to buy long enough to realize that companies don't buy anything without negotiating a price.  You may get an offer for $X dollars and be insulted or you may be grateful, but in things I was involved with, we might buy components that were custom designed for us that both the component sellers and we the buyers would negotiate a price for.  Unions started in negotiating working conditions, classically hours of work versus pay per hour.  It may not seem fully logical at first glance but while I personally don't want to work in a unionized workplace, I can see the argument for having a professional negotiating your pay.  The argument against that is you have to pay the negotiator, too.  

The advent of unions was complicated immediately by violence.  The first blood spilled by union activists apparently goes back to the Haymarket Square massacre in 1886, in which:

... striking union workers threw a bomb at Chicago police, killing eight police officers and countless civilians, after being incited to their lethal rampage by socialist Samuel Fielden (not unlike how Marty Lamb was beaten after the crowd of unionists was inflamed to violence by “progressive” Rep. Capuano) [Note: explanation of the Rep. Capuano reference in that linked article just above - SiG]

Because of their enormous influence in the Democratic Party, unions have specifically gotten themselves exempted from laws the rest of society must follow.  You probably know about the exemptions from the anti-trust laws, and extortion laws, and that they tried to exempt themselves from Obamacare.  This is an exceptionally brief introduction to the history of union violence against anyone they regard as "in their way."  

Unions are progressively more desperate because membership in non-government employee unions has been dropping since the late 1950s.  Only government workers' unions are growing, where no true negotiation takes place because there are no parties at the table risking anything.  Unions like the NEA, AFT and the SEIU are the beneficiaries of fat government contracts.  They get more union dues which they siphon off to contribute to getting Evil Party politicians elected who will negotiate new, fat contracts with them.  Of course an alternate way of saying that is unions only survive where there isn't a free market but the expenses they cause are paid for by the taxpayers or society at large and don't come out of the pockets of the negotiators on the other side of the table.  

Despite the rhetoric, the unions aren't trying to make anyone's lives better except for their own.  If members get some crumbs that make their life better, that's nice.  For the non-unionized workers, who have to pay them their higher wages, too bad.  As the saying goes, FUJIGM.  

Well, this is wandering far off the topic of celebrating Labor Day, so I hope you have an enjoyable day no matter how you celebrate or mark the day.   

Jim Lovell, Gemini and Apollo Astronaut Passes at 97

Jim Lovell, veteran of four space flights including the famous Apollo 13 passed away yesterday, August 7 in Lake Forest, Illinois.  That short summary only hints at his contributions to the Gemini and Apollo programs, and space history.  The following biography is primarily lifted from a 2020 post on Space.com. 

Jim Lovell is an ex-NASA astronaut who flew with the Gemini and Apollo missions. He's most famous for his role as commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission that so nearly ended in tragedy. At the time of the mission, Lovell had spent more time in space than anyone in the world, and in total, logged over 700 hours in space. 

In 1994, Lovell worked with journalist Jeffrey Kluger to write a book about Lovell's career and the Apollo 13 mission. The book, "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), spurred the 1995 movie "Apollo 13," starring actor Tom Hanks. 

Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1928. He developed an interest in rocket science as a high school student, and went on to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin, according to The National Aviation Hall of Fame (which he was inducted into in 1998). Lovell then attended the U.S. Naval Academy where he graduated with a bachelor of science degree in 1952. 

In 1958, Lovell graduated from the Navy's test pilot school and spent the next several years testing fighter aircraft and other jets before they were authorized for use by less experienced pilots.  Also in 1958, he married Marilyn Gerlach; they would have four children together. (Marilyn passed away in September 2023.)  The Navy's test pilots were among the best aviators in the country, and as such, were prime candidates for NASA's astronaut program in the early 1960s. 

Lovell was selected as a potential astronaut candidate for Project Mercury but was turned down because of a temporary excess of a protein called bilirubin in his blood, which could have been indicative of a liver problem. When he protested NASA the response he received was, "I have five men out there who don't have a bilirubin problem, and 26 more on the way who probably don't," Lovell recounted in "Lost Moon." 

But he got a second chance when NASA began recruiting astronauts for the Gemini and Apollo programs, and Lovell was selected for the program in 1962. 

Lovell served as a backup for Gemini 4, before being assigned as one of two crew members on Gemini 7, which launched on Dec. 4, 1965. 

The Gemini 7 flight was an endurance mission in every sense of the word. Lovell and Frank Borman spent more than 330 hours (nearly two weeks) in a spacecraft about the size of a coat closet. The men carried out nearly 20 experiments and operated without their spacesuits on for the first time, according to NASA. They also successfully rendezvoused with Gemini 6A on Dec. 15, 1965 and the two spacecraft moved around in close proximity for a little over 5 hours. After 209 orbits around Earth, Gemini 7 returned home on Dec. 18, 1965. 

Lovell's next trip to space was as commander of Gemini 12, the last flight of Project Gemini. Lovell was accompanied by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who completed three extravehicular activity operations during the mission. The two-man crew also successfully docked with the Agena target vehicle and performed several experiments, according to NASA.

The next step for Lovell was the moon. Apollo 8 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Dec. 21, 1968, with Borman as the commander, William Anders as the lunar module pilot and Lovell as the command module pilot. The mission completed its goal of going around the moon and back, according to NASA. It was the first time any human had journeyed so far, and the men were the first to see the far side of the moon.

"On Apollo 8, we were on the dark side of the moon, which was 60 miles [97 kilometers] below us," Lovell told Chicago Magazine in a 2019 interview. "As we kept on going around, we suddenly saw the Earth coming into view 240,000 miles [386,000 km] away. I could put my thumb up to the window and everything I ever knew was behind it. Billions of people. Oceans. Mountains. Deserts." 

Lovell's crewmates each wrote farewell letters to their wives before the mission, just in case something happened and they didn't make it back home. But Lovell didn't write a letter, he told Chicago Magazine. "Instead, I went to Neiman Marcus and bought my wife a mink jacket. I had it delivered on Christmas Day with a note that said, 'To Marilyn: Merry Christmas from the man on the moon.'"

The crew made six telecast appearances during their trip around the moon. Millions of people watched the astronauts deliver a Christmas address from space, in which they read passages from the Bible and described the view of space and Earth, unfurling beneath them. Apollo 8 returned to Earth on Dec. 27, 1968. 

NASA's portrait of Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell. (Image credit: NASA)

Lovell's last mission was as commander of Apollo 13 in April 1970. He was joined by lunar module pilot Fred Haise, and command module pilot John "Jack" Swigert. Swigert was initially Apollo 13's backup command module pilot, but was asked to join the crew 48 hours before launch time after the original command module pilot, Ken Mattingly, was exposed to German measles. 

Apollo 13 was the third targeted moon landing. All appeared normal until the evening of April 13, when the astronauts were just a day away from landing on the moon. A stray spark ignited an oxygen tank within the command module, heavily damaging the spacecraft. 

The three men huddled in the undamaged lunar module — a spacecraft designed for two men to land on the moon — for most of the next four days. To save energy, only the most essential systems were kept powered up. The men were cold, uncomfortable and dealing with a constant barrage of minor issues. But with the help of Mission Control, they arrived safely back on Earth on April 17, 1970. 

Lovell retired from NASA and the Navy in 1973. He went to work for Bay-Houston Towing Company and became the President and CEO in 1975. He later held executive and board member positions for various other companies before retiring in 1991. 

Lovell has received many awards and honors including the Collier, Harmon (three times) and Goddard trophies, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, NASA Distinguished Service Medal and most recently, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, according to The National Aviation Hall of Fame.

In 1999, the Lovell family opened a restaurant in Lake Forest, Illinois called "Lovells of Lake Forest," which featured memorabilia from Lovell's time as an astronaut and the Apollo 13 movie. The restaurant saw success for many years but closed permanently in 2015. 

Lovell had been the oldest surviving Apollo astronaut. That distinction now goes to Aldrin, who is 95. Only five of the 24 astronauts who flew to the moon during the Apollo era are still alive: Aldrin, Charles Duke, Harrison Schmitt, David Scott and Lovell's Apollo 13 crewmate Fred Haise.

A Last Look at Apollo 11 and the Apollo Program Itself

Not exactly Apollo 11 itself, but rather the Apollo program itself in a couple of "big picture" ways.  

One of the things I don't understand at all is the lunar landing deniers; it's such a stupid thing to wrap one's belief system up in.  I understand that with big conspiracy theories like this, there's simply no way to disprove them.  There's no piece of evidence we could show a true believer that would have them say, "Gosh! You're right!  We did go!" For the last 30 years, I believe it has polled consistently that 6% of the population believes we never went.  There's another group, I believe of a similar size,who just claims they're not sure.  

When I worked for Major Southeast Defense Contractor, there was a graybeard Mechanical Engineer whom I became friends with. His first job out of college was with Grumman Aerospace doing support for the Lunar Modules. He talked about being called into a Tiger Team to solve an issue on Apollo 14 because one of the astronauts had tripped over a cable, pulling the cable out of one of the science packages. For some of you, if I say Mil-38999 connectors, you'll get a visceral nausea at the thought of rewiring and crimping the pins on one of them. In 1/6 G wearing gloves with fingers as wide as small Caribbean islands. They told the 14 crew to abandon it. If you look up how many people worked on the program, sources will say over 400,000 people in 20,000 companies worked on the Apollo program. This friend was just one. 

There's so much evidence that a landing denier has to make it a life goal to not see it and truly examine it.  "My mind is made up.  Don't talk to me about it!"  Fast Company magazine (of all places) ran a story back in July of 2019 with just a few of the reasons why it's such a silly idea.  He starts out philosophically, a really good place to my way of thinking, by asking how do we know anything?  To borrow a few sentences: 

It’s a little like asking how we know there was a Revolutionary War. Where’s the evidence? Maybe it’s just made up by the current government to force us to think about America in a particular way.

How do we know there was a Titanic that sank?

And by the way, when I go to the battlefields at Gettysburg—or at Normandy, for that matter—they don’t look much like battlefields to me. Can you prove we fought a Civil War? World War II?

In my first iteration of college, I had to take a "mandatory elective" in the Philosophy of Science and questions like this were the entire class. Let's say you went to bed one night, and by the morning, everything in the universe had doubled in size. How would you know? People in class would inevitably talk about measuring things, but if the rulers and every length standard had doubled in size, too, the measurements would say the same things. How could you know?  Similarly, it's not possible to derive a way to prove the entire universe didn't spring into existence, just the way it is mere moments ago, with our memories and experiences fully formed the way they are and all the evidence we use to conclude it's billions of years old came into existence moments ago, as well.

This applies to everything. How do we know that things we observe in other galaxies are the way we say they are? We assume that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, but that's just an assumption because we can't get there to check. Without those assumptions there's precious little we can say about the things we observe, and we like to be able to think we really understand everything we see. 

The thing to remember about the space race was that it was a race.  Remember there was a Soviet Union, who entered the 60s well in front of the US space efforts, and who had the capability to monitor things on the moon as well as we could. Don't forget they wanted to win that race. If they had any indications that the missions to the moon were faked, don't they think the Soviets would have made it known? They would have pounced on and revealed any fraud in the blink of an eye, and not just without hesitation, but with great joy and satisfaction. 

In fact, the Russians did just the opposite. The Soviet Union was one of the few places on Earth (along with China, and North Korea) where ordinary people couldn’t watch the landing of Apollo 11 and the Moon walk in real time. It was real enough for the Russians that they didn’t let their own people see it.

Books could be written on why the Soviets didn't make it to the moon; the story I think has the most weight (and I haven't been able to find it lately) is that some of the brightest minds in their space program were killed in a pad disaster that took out the launch structures and those scientists/engineers.  They never recovered from that loss, but they continued the race.  Not everyone recalls that at the time 11's LM landed on the moon, there was a Soviet probe on the surface (Luna 15) - a mission that was supposed to show the world "we can return moon rocks to earth for study without sending humans".  The mission failed. 

With the latest generation of satellites prospecting the moon, we can see the landers and marks on the surface.  These are from later missions, but can we assume that if they faked Apollo 11 they would have faked them all?  

Apollo 14's landing site. The dark lines between the Antares (lunar lander) descent stage and the ALSEP are footprints. (ALSEP = Apollo Lunar Science Exploration Package)

Apollo 17's site.

Of all the arguments that we regularly read from lunar landing deniers, one has an element of truth to it.  They say the Van Allen radiation belts would have fried the astronauts. Saying "fried" is wrong by orders of magnitude, but there is a measurable effect.  It turns out the astronauts who went through the belts to the moon had a significantly higher rate of cardiovascular disease than astronauts who never went to orbit or those who only went to low earth orbit. 

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether mortality rates due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, accidents and all other causes of death differ in (1) astronauts who never flew orbital missions in space, (2) astronauts who flew only in low Earth orbit (LEO), and (3) Apollo lunar astronauts, the only humans to have traveled beyond Earth’s magnetosphere. Results show there were no differences in CVD mortality rate between non-flight (9%) and LEO (11%) astronauts. However, the CVD mortality rate among Apollo lunar astronauts (43%) was 4–5 times higher than in non-flight and LEO astronauts.

The looming issue here is that they can't conclusively say it was the Van Allen belts, just that it was something to do with leaving Earth's protective magnetosphere, but they only left the magnetosphere briefly; Apollo 11 was four to five days (I'm guessing here) but other missions were longer.   That brings more concern to a Mars mission, as well as doing work on the moon.   

You'll note I haven't said a word about one of the most frequent complaints I've seen from landing deniers, about the photography. Not seeing stars; seeing land that isn't as perfectly smooth and straight as they seem to expect it to be.  Anybody who learned photography in the film days knows how empty those arguments are the minute they hear them. If you think that the stars should be visible with the foreground as brightly lit as peak afternoon sun on a beach, you don't understand the first thing about the brightness ranges films - or our own eyes, for that matter - can handle. I've honestly never seen a single argument about a photograph that has stood up to casual knowledge of film photography. 

With current technology mission plans, called "boost and coast", a Martian trip is a long undertaking.  Mars and Earth reach opposition (closest point) roughly every two years (it varies).  Launched around opposition, a trip to Mars takes about seven months.  After that, as Earth continues to advance ahead of Mars, the return trip takes longer.  A quick stay on Mars turns into seven months to get there and ten months to a year coming back.  If one is going to travel for 18 months, a year and a half, it makes a reasonable argument to stay longer.  Seven months to Mars, then explore 16 months until Earth is approaching for a shorter return?

A potential solution is nuclear powered spacecraft.  I've been talking about this for years, but a nuclear powered engine can accelerate the first half of the way there and decelerate the second half the way.  There are designs for engines that "burn" low yield atomic explosions - impulse power - for thrust.  Some designs that have been investigated would allow 60 day trips to Mars instead of seven months.  By now everyone has heard of the bone loss, edema and other problems astronauts on the ISS face.  Those can be solved by artificial gravity on the spacecraft, like the science fiction books used to say.  Yes, it will make the spacecraft heavier and the mission more expensive.   Nobody ever suggested there was anything remotely easy about it.  Judging by reading what Elon Musk seems to think an exploratory trip to Mars requires and the many Starship cargo loads he's talking about, I think Elon gets it. We're in good hands.  

56 Years Ago Today - "The Eagle Has Landed"

This morning at 9:27 EDT, Buzz Aldrin crawled into the Lunar Module Eagle and began the lengthy process of powering things up for the short mission life of the module.  An hour later, Neil Armstrong joined Buzz in the LM.  

A little over three hours after that, 1:47 PM, they released the latches and separated from the Command Module. At 2:12, Michael Collins fired thrusters on the CM moving it two miles away from the LM. Except for that small altitude difference, both vehicles remained in their initial orbit from yesterday's lunar orbit insertion until 3:08 PM when Armstrong fired the descent engine to lower the Eagle's orbit.

What follows is a 20 minute video depicting the landing which is easily the best modern reconstruction of the landing that I've seen. It combines video from the window as Armstrong would have seen it with the audio traffic from Mission Control. The first three minutes gives a modern simulation and animation of how it all worked; after that, it goes to the view recorded on the LM with spacecraft communication on the left speaker and mission control intercom on the right. Yes, I think it's worth the time.

The LM touches down at 4:18PM EDT.

At 6:00 PM, Armstrong radios down to mission control that he recommends they start the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) sooner than planned; at 9 PM.  Although they don't make the 9PM goal, the 10:39 beginning of the EVA is still five hours earlier than the mission plans.

As I've mentioned before, this was the last vacation I would ever take with my parents. July of 1969 was the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years of school, and I was 15 years old.  My older brother, 18, had graduated high school in June and couldn't vacation with us.  Like millions of people around the world, I hung by the front of the black and white TV; this one in my uncle's house in New York City (The Bronx, for those who know).  We watched intently but I don't recall exactly how much we saw or if we watched until 1:11 tomorrow morning when the EVA officially concluded. It's a sobering thought how many of the family members there on that historic day and night have passed away. Both of my parents, my uncle and aunt, and I'm simply not sure how many else.  Of the people I've mentioned, only my older brother survives to this anniversary. 

Only Small Stories

To be honest, it's getting hard to find interesting stories these days.  

The AX 4 mission is still on the ISS but I think it's in its last couple of days.  Things I can trace say they'll stay on the station 14 days, but they docked to the station on June 26, and 14 days is June 40th, uh, July 10th.  I don't know if those missions ever get extended and I don't see any word about "our mission ends on July x-didy x-th."  

On This Day in 2011, the last Space Shuttle mission launched.   I remember writing about it in my early days of blogging.  It was really a day of mixed emotions; sorry to see the program ending but knowing it simply had to end - and probably should have ended years earlier.  It was a spacecraft designed in the 1970s and flying for 31 years by then.  I knew the program was over-hyped and never achieved the costs to orbit, the launch frequency, or the operational safety it was sold with.

I ended the piece with this:

It's no secret - chances are everyone who visits here knows the Endarkenment approaches.  I know as well as anyone that the economy is on the verge of collapse, and the social order on the verge of disintegration.  Knowing it's coming doesn't make seeing it any easier, and like some of the other folks I read, it pains me.  The end of American manned space flight just seems like another sign of the approaching darkness.   

 Image credit

I imagine that this anniversary isn't getting spoken about much is partly these mixed emotions along with the fact that this is a 14 years anniversary not a 15, 20 or 25 year anniversary.  It's a "tweeny" milestone. 

And remember, in 2011, the Falcon 1 had only done a couple of test flights.  The Block 5 Falcon 9 was years in the future, along with the first manned flight (Bob and Doug) from the USA in May of 2020, and dozens of other everyday things we're completely used to. 

Christmas Eve 2024

I constantly have to remind myself that while I might put up a post about some event that happens (or happened) on any given day, most people won't read it until the following day.  While I'm writing this on Christmas Eve, Tuesday Dec. 24, most readers will read this on Christmas Day .  

On this night 56 years ago, Christmas eve of 1968, Apollo 8 was on the world's first mission to the moon. Like sailors sailing out of sight of land for the first time, man was leaving the safety of shore for the first time. We were becoming a space-faring population.  The crew,  Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, spent almost one full day in lunar orbit, completing 10 orbits of the moon before heading back to Earth.

The six-day long mission full of firsts lifted off on Dec. 21, 1968, and it would feature the first time that humans had looked down on the moon from orbit; the first time that humans had seen the far side of the moon with their own eyes, not an orbiting camera.  And it would mark the first time anyone had ever seen the Earth rise over another world.

I think any vote on the top 10 photos from the Apollo era would include this famous Earth rise shot from Apollo 8, arguably as the most famous or most important.  

Christmas Eve was the day they orbited the moon, the day that the crew spoke to us of the "stark and unappetizing" look of the lunar surface and read from the book of Genesis, the first book in the Christian bible.  Here on Earth, 1968 had been a tumultuous year. There had been riots in many places, assassinations and troubles all around the globe. On Christmas eve, in awe of what these men were accomplishing, it seemed like the world held its breath and watched.  

As a space-fanatic 14 year old, I was captivated by the mission.  Of course, the easiest video to find about the mission is the message they sent down on that Christmas eve, 56 years ago.  

As I led off with, I'm writing this on Christmas Eve, but you will most likely be reading this on Christmas day.  As I say every year, hold close the ones you love.  Thanks to those who work today so many others don't have to. If we're very lucky, this will be the worst Christmas of our lives and everything in life gets better year by year for the rest of our lives.  And if things get worse, we'll remember this as the "good old days".  Either way, hold tight. 

 

 

The 10 Coolest Things in Space so far in this Century

Eric Berger at Ars Technica took on a pretty mundane topic over at Ars Technica, but managed to blow my mind in the setup.  The topic, the kind that's always a matter of opinion, is to rank the 25 coolest things in space so far in this century.  The subtitle, though, is the thing that kicked me in the head: “Taking stock of spaceflight one-quarter of the way through the 2000s.”  That's right, in three weeks, New Year's Day 2025, we're 1/4 of the way through the 21st century.  Sure, it's obvious when you think about it, I just never gave a moment of thought to it.  

It's an interesting read, far more interesting than the typical end-of-the-year retrospectives we get every year for New Year's, and I wouldn't dream of picking 25 things just to match the number of years but it might be fun to think about the top 10 coolest things.

10: The Voyagers continue in interstellar space

I write about the two voyagers regularly, whenever a story comes up.  Pretty much every time, the problems are things never seen before.  Components are working at temperatures they never were certified for; and that's true for every system on the pair of satellites. The team that got Voyagers started on the mission have all retired or passed away, replaced by younger engineers and techs that have to work on things that they must have confidence won't do something awful because of the two day delay between sending a command and getting results back.  This coming August and September will mark their 48th year in their four year mission. 

9: New Horizons Pluto Mission

On January 19, 2006, at 1900 UTC, Mrs. Graybeard and I were riding our bikes home from a moderately long bike ride and interrupted our ride to watch a rocket arc downrange (saying the ride was moderately long is based purely on where we pulled off the side of the road to watch it). It was the Atlas V carrying New Horizons as it started its mission to fly by Pluto.  The flyby was on July 14, 2015 - close to 9-1/2 years travel. It was the first time since the Voyagers in the 1980s that a probe reached a planet never-before seen in such resolution. No one knew what to expect and the images were jaw dropping.  

8: Philae touches down on a comet

Built by the European Space Agency, Philae was a small robotic lander that traveled to a distant comet, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, aboard the Rosetta spacecraft. After a journey of about a decade, Rosetta reached orbit around the comet and released Philae. In November 2014, Philae touched down on the comet, but harpoons designed to anchor the spacecraft failed to deploy. Accordingly, Philae bounced a few times before coming to a soft landing on the nucleus.

This marked the first time a spacecraft had ever landed on a comet. Although lying on its side in the shadow of a steep cliff, Philae still returned rich data about the comet’s nucleus over the next half year or so.  It returned images and video from a comet that were at once familiar but also entirely alien.

7: 20 Years of Continuous Exploration on Mars

Since 2004, there have been rovers continuously exploring on Mars, starting with Spirit and Opportunity and continuing through Curiosity in 2012 and 2020’s Perseverance.  The continuous ability to observe and monitor conditions on Mars goes beyond the headline, “search for evidence of life” on Mars to a continuous ability to observe Mars, which could benefit plans to settle on the world.  

Part of the “coolness factor” of 20 years on Mars includes the Ingenuity helicopter and its 72 flights out of a planned 5.  Ingenuity is almost worthy of a spot of its own in the Top 10 coolest.

6: Kepler Space Telescope finding planets

The existence of planets outside our solar system was confirmed in the 1990s, but the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009 changed that picture.  The first planets were detected by monitoring the brightness of stars for periodic dips in brightness that would indicate a planet blocking (occulting in astronomer-talk) the star by passing between the telescope here and the star.  

Kepler did the same, monitoring the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in our neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy, looking for the periodic brightness dips to identify transiting planets. To date, Kepler has detected more than 2,700 exoplanets and found that far from being rare, there are probably at least as many planets in our galaxy as stars, if not many more.  In case it’s not immediately clear, 2,700 has to be a lower limit to the number of exoplanets for two reasons: first, if the plane of the orbit doesn’t line up right, we’ll never see the occultation, and second, if the orbital period is more years than Kepler was able to observe, we’ll never see it. 

5: The James Webb Space Telescope

Another example of late and over budget, but that’s far more understandable for something never done before, like the JWST, than something that’s almost completely reuse of existing hardware like SLS. JWST is a self-deploying multi-mirror infrared (IR) telescope that was bound for an orbit that nothing can reach if the telescope needed to be fixed. A high risk mission.

After lifting off on an Ariane 5 rocket on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope spent half a year unfolding and deploying in space before finally beginning operations. But the astronomical results have been worth it. The saga of Webb has been a story of persistence and perseverance by NASA, Northrop Grumman, and other partners who strived to bring this magnificent instrument online. A happy ending was far from certain, but we got one anyway.

4: The first successful landing of an orbital class rocket

I remember this one vividly.  It was the night of December 21, 2015, from Cape Canaveral and we were watching from the backyard while listening to the Kennedy Space Center Amateur Radio Club live relay on their 2 meter repeater. The landing was below our horizon but we could see the engine burns in the night sky and hear the radio coverage.  It seemed like Sci-Fi for a rocket that had just launched a few minutes earlier to return and land near the launch site. Like many people, we had paid attention to the attempts to land on a barge at sea, and while we were hopeful, those weren’t all that encouraging. That landing changed everything, and the first recovery at sea was in April 8, 2016.

I could go on about how important reuse is, but I’ve done that too much already.

The rest of what follows is all SpaceX.

3: Demo 2 and America's return to manned spaceflight

By the spring of 2020, we had gotten used to SpaceX landing Falcon 9 boosters and their seemingly incredible rate of progress.  On the other hand, since the last Shuttle flight in 2011, NASA had seemingly been sliding backwards, forced into buying rides to the International Space Station from the Russians.  Sliding backwards, that is, until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon came along.
 
The vehicle’s first mission, carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, came during a summer of unrest when America needed a win. The country was still largely shut down by COVID-19, and its politics were fractured by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. America’s return to human spaceflight marked a significant technical achievement by SpaceX, which became the first private company to launch humans into orbit, and it allowed NASA to fly more astronauts to the space station and take full advantage of that facility's research capabilities. Dragon has flown more than a dozen times since.  

2: Falcon Heavy with a choreographed landing of two boosters

Choreographed for the two Falcon 9 boosters to land about one second and a few hundred feet apart on the Cape.  This Falcon Heavy launch, in February of 2018 took the #1 spot in Eric Berger’s polls of readers that he did to write his piece.  It was a visual candy treat – irresistible.  It starts with the 27 Merlin engines of the three strapped-together Falcon 9s, then that choreographed landing, and is topped off with the arresting view of a cherry red Tesla (and Starman) flying away from Earth and out toward Mars.

It was a spectacle that understandably captured the public’s attention. But the new rocket was more than a spectacle. By designing, building, and launching the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX demonstrated that a private company could independently fund and fly the largest and most powerful rocket in the world. This showed that commercial, heavy-lift rockets were possible. By providing competition to the Delta IV Heavy, the Falcon Heavy saved the US government billions. It's likely that the US government will never design and develop a rocket ever again.  

1: Catching the massive superheavy booster with the launch tower at Starbase

I’m rating this as the coolest thing in the first quarter of the 21st Century while Eric Berger at Ars Technica rated it #11.  Everyone knows the visual impact from having watched replays over and over again, I guess I’m just more impressed by that little demonstration.

On October 13 of this year, SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket for the fifth time, but this flight profile was different in that the company sought to recover the Super Heavy first stage. Remarkably, the rocket returned to the launch site, hovered alongside the launch tower, sidled into the space between the pair of massive “chopsticks” then was plucked from the air by them and subsequently set down back on the launch mount.

There are a few reasons why this is such an important event. It demonstrates a number of important things.  First, it verifies the radical approach to catching a rocket (obviating the need for landing legs and reducing launch turnaround times). It allows SpaceX to accelerate the development and testing of Starship.  Finally, the visually stunning tower grab captured the public’s attention and brought wider recognition of Starship’s potential to change spaceflight forever.  In the first few weeks after the mission I heard more people who aren’t particularly interested in day to day space activities talking about how incredible this was, saying things like “Elon Musk makes towers that grab flying rockets out of the air” or talking about how it’s the most fantastic thing they’ve heard about since the moon landings. 

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And there you have it. Lists like the Top 10 of anything are always one person's opinions and I'm sure few, if any, of you will agree with mine. I'm still not tired of watching Falcon 9s land after a successful flight, and I still stop to watch highlights of the flight test with the booster being grabbed by the chopsticks. There were some cool things in Eric's list I couldn't replicate, but he had the top 25 (for 25 years) and I stopped at 10.  

Feel free to voice any opinions, as always.

Wow... Just Wow... Again!

Starship Flight Test 5. This went beyond Wow, all the way to "Holy Crap!"  It's beyond testing a couple of things, and as far as I can tell, it met every objective. I was here to watch this and watched the whole coverage that SpaceX linked to on X. Full screen, 1080p video for just about all of it.

The quote SpaceX uses all the time is, "the payload for this flight is data;" the whole purpose is to examine changes made since the last test with a handful of milestones in mind. They're fond of saying that no matter what they try, only excitement is guaranteed. That was easily exceeded in IFT-5.

After a flawless liftoff and the couple of minutes until stage separation, followed by the return to the pad at Starbase Boca Chica, we saw this:

We've known about the plans to return to the Orbital Launch Mount and desire to catch the Super Heavy booster for years.  We've seen videos created by various folks depicting what it would look like. It didn't prepare me. I caught myself watching the seconds before that screen capture shown above quietly saying, "Holy Crap!" Many of us watch them land the boosters after a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch and say it never gets old.  I think this is going to be the same way.

Bear in mind SpaceX made a video of all the failures on the way to their first successful Falcon 9 landing called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" - a tribute both to their work and their sense of humor.  That video was made seven years ago. There are no scenes out of today's mission for a similar video on how to catch the world's most powerful rocket booster.  Around 500 tons worth of booster. 

As impressive as catching SuperHeavy in the air was, it was only half the mission. Starship was still flying a suborbital flight to the Indian Ocean, off the NW coast of Australia. Catching SuperHeavy was 6:55 into the mission, the splashdown into the ocean was almost exactly an hour later. The plasma and heating we'd seen on earlier missions was just as mind-boggling as before but the video didn't show the flap melting away as it did on IFT-4.  Don't forget that this is SpaceX.  They went to the spot in the ocean that they were aiming for and put some buoys with cameras on them to capture the splashdown.  This is just after the still extremely hot engine nozzles dumped into the ocean.

(Screen grab from Space.com VideoFromSpace)  Yes, it exploded. As one of the SpaceX announcers said, they didn't plan to recover any part of that Starship.  The video leading up to that moment is from a camera pointed down at the bottom of the Starship from the top.  The ocean surface becomes visible, then it apparently plunges into the ocean because the entire scene changes color. 

If you haven't seen the video of the whole mission, it's worth the time. A minute or three after Mechazilla catches the booster, they go about a half hour with no chatting or narration, starting up again at about T+40 minutes. Go pick a video presenter you like or go to SpaceX's video on their own servers. It's a historic mission.

A comment I read somewhere said that with this, mankind has become a space-faring civilization. That seems a bit of an overreach to me, but it certainly made the talk about flying unmanned Starships to Mars in 2026 and sending people by 2028 sound more likely.