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The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Up, Up, and Away – and Down, Down, Down!

Up, Up, and Away – and Down, Down, Down!

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Folks,

At 6:35 pm Eastern today, Space X will launch their first commercial Falcon Heavy Flight. Should be exciting!

Perhaps most exciting is their attempt to land three boosters simultaneously. I’m hoping for an exceptional show.

 

 

URL is https://www.spacex.com/webcast

 

This video should go live approx 20 minutes before launch. Enjoy the marvel, everybody!

 

ETA: Looks like flight is postponed until 8 pm. Let’s hope it’s still a go and we can see the landing!

Reader Interactions

36Comments

  1. 1.

    Alain the site fixer

    Sorry for brief, incorrect video. Amazing to see a black hole/event horizon. Just amazing. But this triple landing should be unreal, if anything like the dual-landing. Enjoy folks, must go to big screen to see it.

  3. 3.

    Martin

    Launch was pushed back earlier today to 8PM EDT, with a window that closes at 8:32PM. They were a few hours late rolling out to the pad, so this is likely just an extension of that delay. Backup launch time is tomorrow from 6:35PM to 8:31PM EDT.

  4. 4.

    Brachiator

    While we are waiting…. Interesting read….

    What We Learned From the First Black Hole Image

    Most importantly, this image once again proves that the main theory that physicists use to explain the force of gravity, the theory of general relativity, is correct. Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan told Gizmodo in an email that the picture also offers the strongest evidence yet that what we’ve long thought about galaxies is true—that they contain supermassive black holes at their centers that contain points-of-no-return for light, called event horizons. In short, they’re not just big dense balls, but something scarier.

    This alone is a huge deal. Despite their chaos, general relativity says that a black hole’s behavior can be predicted based on just three properties: its mass, spin, and electric charge. Much smaller black holes seem follow these rules, as per observations from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors, which measure disturbances in spacetime from black holes colliding. But perhaps there’s something we weren’t seeing, some effect that only comes about in larger black holes, and maybe these potential differences could help describe some mysteries of the Universe, like dark matter.

    But these first results from the Event Horizon Telescope suggest that both big and small black holes obey the same rules….

  5. 5.

    jl

    @Brachiator: So, more evidence that Roger Penrose is correct and that general relativity rules, and quantum mechanics needs to adjust to conform where they produce different predictions?

    I got no clue, IANAP. Any of the BJ physicist squad want to give advice?

  6. 6.

    Alain the site fixer

    It’s kind of mind-boggling to see the picture, tbh. I mean I’ve known about them as theory for all my life, but to see it for real is just unbelievable, almost. It’s just awe-inspiring. Something so huge, so powerful, so far away, and yet we can image it. Just amazing.

  7. 7.

    trollhattan

    Does Trump know Musk is putting an Ay-Rabb satellite into orbit? Oops, don’t mind me, it’s Sawdi and thus, a-ok.

    Have watched launches since the Mercury Program and never, ever tire of it. The delays, yes, the launches, no way.

  8. 8.

    Alain the site fixer

    @trollhattan: I agree, I never tire of launches, but the extra flair of the twin-landing last time was just amazing, and so now a triple – I mean that’s a bit of poetry and magic wrapped up and given us to excite and encourage about the future. It works!

  9. 9.

    miroker

    At 18:46EST, when you click on video it says will be live in 4 hours. But 20:00 is in 2 hours, hope that does not portend something for the launch success

  11. 11.

    Alain the site fixer

    @miroker: their website still says 8 pm; launch window closes at 8:32, so if not before then, it will be postponed so not sure where the time stuff comes from.

  12. 12.

    dmsilev

    @jl: Opinions differ. The thing is, quantum mechanics _also_ tests out as correct to some ungodly level of precision. Most people I’ve heard talk about the question believe that GR and QM are different limits of some underlying model which we haven’t yet figured out. There have certainly been many many attempts to come up with such a theory (string theory being the most well known), but getting testable predictions out of those theories is really really hard.

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    The mister is trying to talk me into going out in the canoe in the middle of the river (away from the trees) to watch the launch. I may be persuaded.

  16. 16.

    cope

    @Betty Cracker: Pics, please.

    I will attempt from my back yard and since it will be getting pretty dark by then, I want to try a time exposure. The problem is that I do not know exactly where to point the camera. I want to use max zoom and that will really decrease my field of view. If I were smarter, I would always shoot from the same spot and place or note some kind of marker directly toward the launch site. The angular difference between the two different launch sites SpaceX uses significantly influences which way to point my camera. I know this one is going off from 39A, the more northern of the two. Anything spectacular, I will share. If it’s a bust, I’ll blame the weather.

    Edit: I’ll be using a tripod so I really need everything set up in advance. Shooting something like this from the hip using a long zoom is not something I have mastered.

  17. 17.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Musk just tweeted that there is a heavy high-altitude wind shear, and if it doesn’t go away, there will be no launch. If it’s got anything to do with the winds we’re getting, fuggetaboutit.

  22. 22.

    David Evans

    @jl: It’s more evidence that GR rules at very large scales. The crunch between GR and QM comes at small scales and I don’t think these observations are relevant to that. Unless further analysis shows something odd about the spectra that might mean QM is going wrong.

  24. 24.

    jl

    @dmsilev: @David Evans:
    OK, thanks, but i sense waffling. Any implications for how black hole evaporation works, entropy and loss of information?
    My cards on the table, I kind of like the Penrose cyclic cosmology idea.
    Or, am I still going to get ‘Who knows?’

    Edit: I read an article someplace today that said the new research shows that black holes of all sizes seem to obey exact same GR rules of behavior.

  27. 27.

    Betty Cracker

    @Martin: My dad took my sister and me to a few Apollo launches. They still rank among the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen.

  29. 29.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Betty Cracker: We had the rocket engine testing going on for those rockets about 10 miles from where I grew up. Even though it was half a century ago, I still remember the noise and vibration. They’d happen about once a week around 1965 to 1967.

  30. 30.

    Spanky

    When I still worked at GSFC I wrangled a shuttle launch pass and gave it to my dad. That must have been in the late 80s or around 1990. He really enjoyed it, and that was about the time he was 80. He stopped traveling soon after, so I was happy to have given him one of the thrills of his lifetime.

    Never saw one myself. When the missus retires maybe we’ll come down to Cracker Country and watch a Falcon Heavy.

  32. 32.

    Aleta

    Seems like big rockets for just a satellite. Unless a big geostationary sat?

    Oh.

    “Arabsat-6A is a high-capacity telecommunications satellite that will deliver television, radio, Internet and mobile communications to customers in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe,” SpaceX representatives wrote in a mission description. “Built on Lockheed Martin’s enhanced LM 2100 platform, Arabsat-6A includes several innovations that provide advanced Ka spot beam communications services and Ku and Ka-band coverages in addition to other frequency bands.”

    So, is this something that could only be done with the Falcon Heavy?
    Or is it a trial for the upgraded boosters and to showcase them?

    While this mission is the second flight of a Falcon Heavy, it is the first to use SpaceX’s upgraded Block 5 Falcon 9 rocket boosters, which give it a 10% boost in maximum thrust over its predecessor, Musk has said.

  33. 33.

    Brachiator

    I’ve seen a shuttle landing. Never seen a launch live. That would be amazing. Maybe one day.

  34. 34.

    Ken

    @miroker:

    COMPUTER: Quiet, I have to run through millions of precision calculations to safely activate the experimental space drive. OK, I think we’re ready. Launch in ten… nine… eight… six… five…

    HUMAN: We are in such trouble.

    (From an old episode of Red Dwarf, probably on Youtube somewhere but I haven’t checked.)

  35. 35.

    David Evans

    @jl: You’ll certainly get “who knows?” from me. I’m just an onlooker. I would be surprised if these observations told us anything about evaporation etc, They don’t seem to be detailed enough for that. But maybe there is more that hasn’t been processed.

  36. 36.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Aleta: No, it’s not something that could only be launched by a Falcon Heavy.

    Modern comsats are built to fit into a standard “straitjacket” of size-on-stack and mass and can be launched by a few different vehicles — Ariane 5, larger Atlas variants and the like and the Arabsat is within that size and weight limit. The Falcon Heavy is overkill for something that size but I suspect SpaceX offered the owners a cheap launch with the added risk this was only the second launch of this particular vehicle setup so its track record is not as good as, say, Ariane 5 which has not had a complete launch failure since 2002 (one launch went wrong a couple of years ago but the payloads reached their operational locations by burning fuel that they needed for extended lifetime operation hence they will need replacing sooner than expected).

    SpaceX has its eye on the NRO launch “market” to put big spysats into orbit. At the moment only the Delta 5 Heavy can carry out those launches using a rocket configuration very similar to Falcon Heavy (three similar vehicles strapped together). However the launch tempo for those satellites is about one a year which is not as lucrative as commercial geosync and other launches. SpaceX will probably configure Falcon Heavy to launch multiple geostationary satellites in a single launch once it gets enough launches under its belt for the insurance premiums to come down.

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