T-minus 30 Minutes!
After a small delay, the team is off the island, and we are now outside the window where we would hit the International Space Station with the rocket.
Probably worth waiting a little bit as I don’t think NASA has much of a sense of humor. It would be funny though, just not funny to them.
Cryogenic chilldown and liquid oxygen load has begun and all systems are green.
Winds and weather looks good. RP1 loading.
K
T-Minus 10 minutes
The strongback has been lowered and Auto-Sequence has begun.
The previous times that auto-sequence has occurred, the computer has aborted for a variety of reasons:
- Glitch in the Video Camera
- Power Surge/drop on the launch pad
- Ground helium supply disconnected itself prematurely
All of those were enough to abort the launch. Wednesday’s static fire had zero issues and no aborts.
There is every reason to expect that we will go all the way to launch.
Very exciting.
Of course, once the rocket takes off, then we see a whole bunch of things that we cannot test.
We want the stages to disconnect; we want the stage 2 engine to fire up correctly; we want the fairing to separate nicely; and we want the satellite to deploy perfectly.
Don’t go away when the launch happens. It ain’t over until the satellite is up and on.
K
Holy Shit!!!!
It launched. It really launched.
Holy shit.
Someone’s looking out for that satellite...
The team is on Omelek collecting debris.
The rocket impacted on a dead reef about 250 ft away from the launch pad, so most of it is recoverable for analysis.
Amazingly, the satellite was thrown high into the air when the rocket impacted and came crashing down through the roof of our machine shop, landing mostly intact on the floor! One helluva’ return trip.
The hole in the machine shop roof is the only significant damage to the island.