falcon heavy info
An influx of over 100,000 visitors were expected to come to view the launch. A crowd from the campground brought chairs and patiently awaited the launch.
The lift off was delayed over 2 hours, taking off only 15 minutes before the launch window closed. But she did take off! Here is the initial cloud of exhaust as the ignition started.
And liftoff! We could see the ship for a long time.
The two rocket boosters separated as planned and returned to earth to safely land on pads about 8 minutes later. They looked like 2 balls of fine falling from the sky. And gave us a most wonderful double sonic boom!
Unfortunately, the middle core of the rocket failed to land on the drone ship when 2 of the 3 engines necessary to guide the core failed to fire.
failure to land on drone ship
But still, a success! The upper stage of the ship is now in orbit and so is Musk's private Tesla car, with a space dummy "Starman" at the wheel. Musk mounted cameras on the car..real pictures..
starman in the tesla
Luke had a bit of less success with his RC plane today. It took a sudden nosedive and ended up in the sawgrass of FL. They don't call it sawgrass for nothing. Both Luke and his 2 friends ended up with cuts. It took all 3 men 2 hours of pushing through saw palmetto and brush, sometimes cutting through vines searching to find the little plane, but as they were about to give up, one of them found it.
She ended up with a broken prop and motor, plus some scrapes, scratches, gouges and cracks in the foam fuselage. Luke and John are going to an RC store tomorrow to have it looked at and to buy replacement/repair parts.
Other than the above, it's been sorta quiet and fun. We did take part in a campground pot luck hot dog/hamburger party yesterday. Don't ever let anyone tell you that old folks don't like to eat!
No comments:
Post a Comment