by fillskills on 1/14/17, 8:32 PM
"A few minutes later, the first stage of the rocket landed successfully on a platform in the Pacific Ocean." - They have made this so normal. Its not even news title worthy now. Exciting times we live in!!
by generj on 1/14/17, 7:33 PM
I don't know what they did on the camera and transmission side, but having the sub-orbital view on the 1st stage all the way down to the barge was super impressive.
by jonah on 1/14/17, 11:04 PM
Here's a photo I took of the ascent from about 50 miles east.
http://imgur.com/a/RlJUR
(Nikon D7000, 300mm, handheld. Cropped and adjusted for contrast.)
by tankenmate on 1/14/17, 7:37 PM
For those wondering, they successfully deployed all 10 satellites, after the second SECO, into their correct orbit.
by grkvlt on 1/15/17, 6:25 AM
Sadly, with these new Iridium satellites, the 'Iridium Flare' phenomenon of a bright flash visible in the sky when the old satellites passed through sunlight and reflected it downwards when overhead, will no longer occur. I liked the quote from the Iridium CEO explaining why it won't happen: "[...] we weren't going to spend money just to make angular shiny things on our satellites [...]"
by harshaw on 1/14/17, 9:49 PM
The video says a one engine burn on the return of the first stage. The descent seemed a bit slower than the last landing and thus less of a dramatic suicide burn.
This time the descent video seemed more "real". On the last barge landing it was so quick that it seemed magical.
by sctb on 1/14/17, 7:34 PM
by ufmace on 1/15/17, 12:20 AM
Good for them! I'm impressed with how quickly they were able to conclude their accident investigation and get approved for return to flight. Brings to mind all of the multi-year Shuttle accident investigations.
by thenewwazoo on 1/14/17, 10:56 PM
Watching the broadcast, it appeared that they launched _westward_ off the coast of California. That seems very weird to me, since my understanding is that you can use the not-insignificant rotation of the earth as "free energy" to achieve orbital speed.
Did they launch westward? Why?
by smoyer on 1/14/17, 9:31 PM
It would have been cool to see an animation of how these seven satellites move in their orbits (as well as the final completed constellation).
by general_ai on 1/15/17, 3:59 AM
And the beauty of this is, launching these Iridium satellites is just a beta test for what they're going to do next: launch _four thousand_ of their own satellites which will blanket the planet with gigabit broadband.
by joeblau on 1/14/17, 7:47 PM
This was freaking amazing. These are the types of technology launches that truly get me excited.
by Shivetya on 1/14/17, 8:48 PM
Why does Space X land on barges while blue origin land, well on land. Also does anyone have a pictures of iterations of Space X's landing methods and strut setup?
by nixarn on 1/14/17, 7:30 PM
And what a beutiful launch & landing it was! I gotta admin, I was a bit nervous after their last explosion. Great everything went smoothly!
by srigi on 1/15/17, 8:36 AM
by monk_e_boy on 1/14/17, 7:59 PM
Any videos of the landing?
by sidcool on 1/15/17, 5:39 AM
Their turn around time is super fast. I can't imagine this happening even with NASA. Here's a lot of good luck to SpaceX in 2017.
by hsavit1 on 1/14/17, 8:26 PM
We're all going to Mars, yay!
Wait. actually...
by nrjdhsbsid on 1/14/17, 8:45 PM
Does anyone else feel like the COPV problem was not truly solved? This is the second mission loss caused by the same exploding COPV's.
They need to be redesigned and SpaceX is twiddling around the issue to avoid the r&d cost. If I was NASA I would be very hesitant to use their rockets for people at this point