Space X No-Go a Go-Go!

Exper­i­ence the thrill! — 7Mb WMV file of the lift off

Went through a won­der­ful spate of feel­ings watch­ing the live cov­er­age of Space Explor­a­tions’ attempt to launch their Fal­con 1 Space Vehicle –demoflight2. As you may or may not know, Space X was one of the win­ning con­tract­ors to provide private space deliv­ery sys­tems. Unlike gov­ern­ment sponsored agen­cies, such as NASA or the ESA, SpaceX was foun­ded by the chap that made a bit of money selling PayPal to eBay. They have failed on a pre­vi­ous launch attempt after a fuel leak and this sub­sequent launch went as far as 1:02 when they went into a ter­minal shut­down pro­ced­ure.
I got word earlier in the day that they would be mak­ing this launch from Kwa­jalein. After an hour and 3 minutes they have just aler­ted us that they will make another attempt tomor­row. I can only ima­gine the dis­ap­point­ment of those closely involved in the pro­gramme.
Its quite fas­cin­at­ing listen­ing to the mis­sion cov­er­age. Its dif­fer­ent than a NASA launch. There is much more vis­ible (aud­ible) detail in the checks and com­ment­ary. One gains a greater appre­ci­ation for the com­plex­ity of as simple (its designed to be that way) sys­tem as Fal­con 1. There are a lot more female voices in the launch crew and when the shut down happened, it was as clock­work, with the only frus­tra­tion evid­ent being some lapses in proper address and com­plete­ness of instruc­tions. You star­ted to hear the frus­tra­tion after a while.
The idea behind the Fal­con 1 and Fal­con 9 (heav­ier lift sys­tem) are to provide a private altern­at­ive to NASA’s deliv­ery. The Fal­con 1 is a com­pact vehicle designed to deliver small satel­lites into LEO. Fal­con 9 is much lar­ger and is designed to replace the space shuttle with the abil­ity to ferry people back and forth to the ISS.
Last year the first launch attempt failed when a fuel leak led to an abort in the first minute of flight. They have since been try­ing to con­duct a suc­cess­ful launch nd have emphas­ized that they are extremely detail focused and are tak­ing as con­ser­vat­ive approach as pos­sible to the launch pro­ced­ures. We await to hear what happened today and see if they can get off the ground tomor­row. The web­cast should be available.

Update: 20 March 2007 — 8:14EDT:
Well, 54:02 minutes watch­ing another launch attempt. This one got much more excit­ing and they were hos­ing the engine area and it seemed like all was good to go. We went back through a ter­minal abort with the clock stopped at T+10s. They are back into scramble mode and we await some indic­a­tion as to whether we are scrubbed for the day. LC has just come back to con­trol to ask for a recycle to T-11m and go for another try today.…looking pos­sible. They are polling for opin­ions. Looks like they are aim­ing for an open win­dow at
One of the more amus­ing hap­pen­stances is that all mikes remain open (whether they are sup­posed to be or not I am unaware), but some­body was express­ing some thoughts in a rather frank way for a little while when it abor­ted.
The cam­eras were also a little more unstable today and were los­ing pic­ture every 15 seconds. They did switch between cam­eras more today which was appre­ci­ated and after the abort they have been zoom­ing and pan­ning over the lower part of the launch pad. Cool.
Looks like we are going to go for another attempt real fast. They hve emp­tied and are now in the pro­cess of refilling the tanks. Sounds like LC is a little anxious and push­ing VC a little much. VC is pretty cool though and doesn’t push back. Sounds quite solid. LC is run­ning through all the steps and seems to stumble a little (cer­tainly I would expect as LC has all the steps to mas­ter and every­one else is much more focused this is cer­tainly excus­able). I think that we are about 11 minutes from rein­i­ti­ti­ation of the count­down, but that only by reck­on­ing. They men­tioned that there was rain mov­ing in, but hasn’t been men­tion of that since about T-13 or –14 first time through. It is cer­tainly look­ing a little greyer in the sky there. It was so pretty nice and blue.
Count has star­ted again at 20:54:00 my time…we are go again. Clock is run­ning. would love to actu­ally have a list of these steps…we are step 110. They all sound good to go to ter­minal count.

Update: 21:41: WOW! That was sure worth the wait. Launch went swim­ingly and there was a great cam­era poin­ted straight down so you watch the liftoff from a won­der­ful vant­age point. Mois­ture forms on the lens for a while, but as you clearly change atmo­spheres it dries out and the shape of the flame grows much wider. Then we reach first stage sep­ar­a­tion which hap­pens as it should. Huge cheer­ing when that hap­pens. The cam­era is then poin­ted right near the second stage engine which glows and glows hot­ter and hot­ter, but everything seems to have been run­ning watched for a few minutes and then lost the feed. Don’t think any­thing bad happened. Will await fur­ther news. What a great ride!