Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Evening launch today

SpaceX will be the delivery service for a NASA satellite to search for exoplanets today. The Falcon 9 rocket has a launch window only 30 seconds long, starting at 6:32 pm Cape Canaveral time. SpaceX will attempt to land the booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. Weather looks good, and there is a backup launch opportunity Tuesday if they can't go today.

As this is a NASA-paid launch, you can watch the liftoff via SPACEX or NASA TV or on Youtube.


The next scheduled launch is by the US-owned Rocket Lab company, launching their first commercial payloads aboard their innovative Electron rocket from New Zealand. That one is set for April 19/20 with a window of 8:30 pm - 12:30 am. More details later.

Wow, I never realized that launch windows could be anywhere near that tight! Always wanted to be a mission specialist on the shuttle but ended up a microscopist/radiation safety expert. Never got into space but I've been to Chernobyl!

Rocky, thanks for the heads up.

Wow, I never realized that launch windows could be anywhere near that tight! Always wanted to be a mission specialist on the shuttle but ended up a microscopist/radiation safety expert. Never got into space but I've been to Chernobyl! [/quote]

Do you glow in the dark? ;-)

Sweetness and I watched that Atlas V from the backyard on Saturday and it sure isn't as impressive as the Saturn V that we can actually hear 80 miles away. The NASA channel didn't carry that launch live, but the local news channels did. The one that I hope that I'm down here for is the SLS launch. That rocket is 322 feet high and will weigh 8.8 million pounds and be able to carry 70 tons of payload. The space shuttle could carry only 22 tons. We took a day and toured the Space Center and I had no idea that it was as big as it is. Everything is big there though. The current crawler-transporter that moves the rockets from the assembly area to the launch pad goes one mile per hour and gets 32 feet per gallon (165 gallons per mile) of diesel fuel. They have 16 locomotive traction motors at 375 hp each. They are modifying it now so that it will carry 18 million pounds. It was a great day out and recommended if you get to Florida.

Mike, launches to the Space Station sometimes have an instantaneous launch window - less than one second. Getting to the right orbit gives you some flexibility, but "hitting" a 15,000 mph target requires a very precise "lead". Launch windows are an extremely complicated thing to calculate. They have to figure in the final destination orbit position, sunlight for the solar panels, and even other orbiting objects to avoid collisions.

Windfall, the crawlers have been there since the Apollo days. When I gave those tours to VIPs (especially foreign ones) I used to quote its fuel consumption as "a meter to the liter" which is pretty close. One other neato facto: each link in the tread weighs one ton. Only two were made, and they'll have to last as long as the space program because they are irreplaceable.

The launch just slipped to Wednesday. Don't know why just yet, other than "a rocket problem."

I get that a lot. Funny irony of the trip (2 weeks touring various types of nuclear facilities in Russia and the Ukraine in "92" just after the collapse of the "old" Soviet Union) was that I came down with near lethal pneumonia immediately upon my return. Hospitalized for 9 days with a total of 22 chest x-rays during diagnosis, treatment and followup. The dosage from the x-rays easily exceeded what I got in 4 hrs at Chernobyl (we didn't enter any of the really serious locations, got about 5 times normal background while there, really nothing). They never were able to identify what type of pneumonia I had, dubbed it "Legionella like". Always wondered if the KGB was trying to knock me off for causing a big brawl in a Kiev restaurant. I bought a bottle of champagne for each of the tables in the place (about 10 tables at $4 american at the time) and did a toast to "Ukranian Freedom and Independence". A local with us translated the toast, everybody seemed to break into cheers and such. Next thing I know some dudes start pounding the crap out of the guy who translated it. The whole place turns into a schit storm. I jump into the fray to try and protect the local with us. Other friendly locals quickly rushed us into a car and drove us the hell out of there back to our hotel. They didn't speak english well though and could not explain what had happened, just kept saying "big problem, big problem, not you, you good comrade". Figured certain "hard line" folks there didn't like my toast!

Yeah, I have a history of "stirring up the pot" causing trouble.