Same stuff, different day at SpaceX today with yet another launch from Pad 39A, this time of Bulgaria’s 1st satellite, BulgariaSat 1, to geosynchronous orbit. Yep, another communications satellite, but as mentioned, this is the 1st satellite made by Bulgaria, so that’s special: I hope it works out well for them and their needs! The […]
Tag: LC-39A
SpaceX CRS-11 Successfully Launches And Docks With The International Space Station
On June 3rd, 2017, yet another Falcon 9 booster launched from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, this time carrying the 11th SpaceX Commercial Resupply mission to the International Space Station. This mission is noteworthy for 2 reasons: This is the 100th launch from LC-39A, which was first used for the Apollo 4 Saturn V launch […]
SpaceX Launches Its Heaviest Payload Yet – Inmarsat-5
Yesterday evening SpaceX launched Inmarsat-5 F4, the heaviest payload yet flown on a Falcon 9. Inmarsat-5 is yet another communications satellite, this one intended to provide increased network connectivity over Europe (to put it extremely simply). The vehicle was a Falcon 9 full thrust, and due to the record weight of the payload (for Falcon […]
What I Failed To Notice About Yesterday’s SpaceX Launch
I’ve made a pretty big mistake in my article yesterday about the Falcon 9 launch of NROL-76. This is the fact that they used high-end cameras and telescope systems to track the booster for it’s entire flight and return to land. https://www.xadara.com/nrol-76-successfully-flies-on-a-falcon-9-rocket/ Seriously, re-watch the footage: aside from a few sections to show the on-booster […]
NROL-76 Successfully Flies On A Falcon 9 Rocket
After a day long delay, the classified U.S. Military payload known as NROL-76 was launched this morning, not on a Delta IV or an Atlas V booster, but on a SpaceX Falcon 9! It’s an incredibly standard launch from LC-39A, but being a military payload, the livestream of the event focused on liftoff and the […]
45 Years Ago: The Launch Of Apollo 16
45 years ago today, on April 16th, 1972, Apollo 16, the penultimate mission of the Apollo Lunar Program, launched, carrying John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charles Duke on a mission to land at Descartes Highlands and learn more about the geology of the lunar highlands, a part of the Moons lithograph that had not been […]
36 Years Ago – The Launch Of Columbia On STS-1
Last year I covered the launch of STS-1, the first flight of the Space Shuttle Program, with a more in-depth article which you can find in the link below. Today, I thought it would be better to share just a fragment of that historic, albeit somewhat forgotten mission, by focusing on the launch of the […]
SpaceX Successfully Re-flies A Falcon 9 First Stage!
Looks like the engineering teams at SpaceX did things right – the 1st stage of the Falcon 9 rocket for the SES-10 launch, which was used last April for the CRS-8 Mission, not only flew successfully, apparently they re-landed the stage on a drone ship in the ocean. Again. Yeah, the stage successfully launched and […]
EchoStar 23 Successfully Launched On A Falcon 9 Booster
This morning was the successful launch of of the EchoStar 23 communications satellite from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A on a Falcon 9 booster. This is the second launch of a Falcon 9 from LC-39, and the 3rd successful launch since the September 2016 explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket on LC-40. It looks […]
SpaceX CRS-10 Launch Webcasts
As always for any SpaceX launch, here are both the technical and hosted webcasts. For this launch I mainly watched the actual NASA feed, as it felt more fitting for the launch from pad 39. I should have stuck with the SpaceX feed though as it had better video and the added telemetry data that […]
CRS-10 Launch Scrubbed Due To Thrust Vector Control Issues – What That Means
Todays launch of the Falcon 9 carrying the Dragon spacecraft for the CRS-10 mission was scrubbed until tomorrow, February 19th. The reason? An issue with Thrust Vector Control (VTC for short) on the 2nd stage. Reports are early, so I don’t have details, but this seems to have been the key issue for the scrub, […]
SpaceX CRS-10 – The First Launch From LC-39 In 5 Years
Saturday, February 18th, 2017, will mark the first launch in 5 years from Kennedy Space Center LC-39. Pad 39A last saw usage for the final launch of the Space Shuttle Program, STS-135, in 2011, and since then has been only slightly modified from its shuttle configuration to accommodate the future SpaceX Commercial Crew Missions to […]
The Time of Apollo – 1975 NASA Film
In 1975, the Apollo program ended. Spanning nearly 15 years, from the programs inception in 1961, the final moon landings in 1972, all the way to Apollo Soyuz in 1975, the Apollo program was, at current, the ultimate in exploration, setting distance records, mission duration records (for that time) on Skylab, and of course, it’s […]