Falcon flying free – SpaceX finally make it to orbit
For my fellow dreamers in the audience, here’s a little something to momentarily take your mind off financial instruments, presidential debates and environmental doom:
From the press release:
SpaceX announces that Flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle has successfully launched and achieved Earth orbit. With this key milestone, Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.
“This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull’s-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake.”
Watching that makes me feel that – as a species – we’re pretty awesome. It’s just a shame we can’t stop arguing over which subgroups of the species are more awesome than the others… what might we achieve then?
[Story via pretty much everywhere; video first seen at Warren Ellis's gaff]
September 29th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Positive!
September 30th, 2008 at 12:33 am
What can I say? I guess at least one sf blog has to support the capitalist running-dogs of the genre…
September 30th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Thanks for that. Serendipitously I had Fiona Apple’s version of Across the Universe playing and the two combined were very special. I thought to myself it would make a great film intro, lots of space to get the credits over with but also build up the excitement of getting into space.