SpaceX Launch
I like to think of our generation (we are in our early seventies) as the space generation. As a kid, I avidly read science fiction and watched all the sci-fi I could find at the movies and on TV. I regretted that I would be too old to participate in, perhaps even too old to see, manned travel into space and on to the moon. Then there was Sputnik, and Kennedy took up the challenge and, wonder of wonders, I was too young to be among those first astronauts. When men in their late thirties were walking on the moon, I was only in my mid twenties. Some of these men were closer to my father’s age than mine. Though I spent my working life in science and technology, I never got involved in the space program, but I watched it and cheered it. Then, after the last Apollo landing, another amazing thing happened. Everyone lost interest and the funding dried up. NASA made a valiant effort to maintain its momentum by going to a semi-reusable near earth orbit spacecraft, the shuttle, but aside from that, there has been little to feel good about since the early 70’s. I am sorry I never traveled to Cape Canaveral to watch a lunar mission launch. I didn’t even watch a shuttle launch. Maybe, I’m not really the space buff I like to think I am.
Last week we went to Palm Harbor, Florida to visit with family. While there, we spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center touring the facility and viewing the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket. This rocket was transporting the seventh resupply shipment to the International Space Station under a NASA contract with the private company, SpaceX. SpaceX has a strategy to reduce the cost of launching payloads into orbit by recovering the large first stage booster and reusing it. Their intent, which seems rather implausible to me, is to actively land this first stage, after it separates from the upper stage, tail-first (as in old sci-fi movies) on a barge floating off shore in the Atlantic. The previous six SpaceX resupply missions to the ISS have all been successful, but the most recent two missions are the only ones during which they have actually tried to recover the first stage. The recovery phase of both missions failed, although the second came heartbreakingly close to success. There is an entertaining SpaceX video documenting this earlier attempt and failure which can be seen here. My hope was that we would see the launch of the first operational rocket to have its first stage recovered, even though the recovery would occur far down range out of our sight.
A bus carried us out to a causeway where we stood with a few hundred people about four miles from the launch pad and watched the Falcon 9 lift off toward orbit. I hand held a Canon EOS 7D camera with an EF 70-300 mm 4-5.6 L IS lens. I ran the camera in program mode at 4 frames per second with the lens fully zoomed using one-dimensional image stabilization. (The rocket tracked so slowly that full image stabilization would probably have been a better choice.) I had taken about 500 photos before the rocket was lost from sight. While we were a little confused by clouds, intermittent vapor trails, and puffs of smoke associated with staging, there was some scattered applause and we all returned to the bus believing we had witnessed a successful launch. Unfortunately, as anyone familiar with that CRS-7 launch knows, such was not the case. While not visible through the view finder, my camera had captured quite accurately what was really happening:
There is a classic lift off.
The Falcon 9 passes through or behind a first puffy cloud.
It begins to pitch away from us as it tracks to the east toward orbit.
A halo appears around the nose of the rocket as it goes supersonic.
The rocket enters atmospheric conditions which produce a vapor trail.
The Falcon 9 leaves vapor trail producing conditions and is now a small red/yellow flame appearing to move downward as it continues to pitch over and track toward the eastern horizon.
It is about to pass behind a puffy cloud as it approaches staging.
Half a second later a puff of smoke and diffuse flame appears.
After another second it appears as a well developed cloud of smoke and flame.
Three seconds later, the fully developed cloud of smoke and flame begins to pass behind the cloud. Nothing visible to the naked eye emerges from behind the cloud. We had in fact witnessed, in person, a very special SpaceX launch. Unfortunately, rather than the launch associated with the first successful recovery of the booster stage, it was the launch associated with the first failure of a SpaceX ISS resupply mission. Nevertheless, one cannot help but root for SpaceX as the only serious entity in the space business today which is trying to be really innovative, as demonstrated by their ambitious effort to recover the booster stage.
As part of our tour of the Kennedy Space Center we saw the now retired space shuttle, Atlantis. Built as a general purpose reusable spacecraft, it is a creation of great esthetic beauty, especially compared to the various capsules some of which we saw. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, Shenzhou, Orion all require astronauts (past, present, and foreseeable future) to be stuffed like “spam in a can” if they are to travel into and return from space. It now seems likely that a half century will have passed between our last visit to the moon and our next. One cannot help but worry that the generally retrogressive nature of our space program is symbolic of a society without a sense of imagination or adventure; one unwilling to invest in anything without immediate personal payback, be it basic science and technology, education or national infrastructure, let alone the arts and projects such as space exploration which, while not feeding our physical appetite, nourish the spirit.