02-06-2018, 07:44 PM
|
 |
Master Modeler
|
|
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
|
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
Yeah that was friggin' AMAZING... just literally amazing... almost like what I imagine the first moon landing would have been like (had I been born to see it).
Still awaiting word on the core booster... the feed from the ship cut off about time of landing. The second stage successfully inserted the Tesla roadster and "Starman", a dummy wearing the new SpaceX flight pressure suits the astronauts will wear when launching on manned Dragon capsules, into LEO. Also aboard was a Tesla "pocket car" model of the roadster with a tiny Starman passenger as an "Easter egg" and also a "space ark" specially designed long term data storage unit designed to preserve human knowledge and culture permanently in deep space.
|
I’m older than you?! Wow. I was not quite three when Apollo 11 was launched, and I remember seeing it live on television (we also saw it on Pad 39A in person a few days before [my father always regretted not pulling rank at the Miami fire department so that we could have seen the launch in person—but today I admire his sense of duty]; other than the VAB itself, I’d never seen something so huge!) On that day in 1994, my mother and I watched a PBS Apollo 11 “reprise” that used actual major TV network coverage—I saw again the timeline-synchronized LEM model with the gas burner descent engine, which landed before the actual LEM did (because of the crew’s unplanned maneuver to avoid the boulder field), and I also saw something that had confused me in 1969, when the stars turned reddish-purple on the translunar coast TV view. (It was on a star chart that the crew televised briefly; the small, spinning-disc, sequential-field [color wheel] color TV camera used aboard the Command Module, perhaps due to a glitch in the image conversion electronics on Earth [all analog, back then] made the white stars on the black star chart turn reddish purple.) I only went to this length to reminisce about Apollo 11 because...today’s Falcon Heavy launch made me feel young again, and filled with wonder, from the volcanic launch to the twin booster landings to seeing Starman and the Tesla Roadster against the luminous blue Earth and the Sun!
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
Yep... Elon's calling for a new space race...  OL J R |
When New Glenn starts flying, it really could become a race! Blue Origin has a different philosophy and a different timeframe (Elon Musk wants to settle Mars, but Jeff Bezos speaks of laying a firm foundation for establishing space colonies and interstellar space flight). It is far too early to predict which one will achieve more. (On October 4, 1957, a prediction that Americans would land their countrymen on the Moon first, in less than 12 years, and with no real Soviet competition [their N1 was too little, too late, not even begun until 1964] wouldn’t have been taken very seriously.) Half a century or more from now, either company—or maybe even a third contender, as-yet undreamt of—could be the dominant force in space exploitation and exploration. |