Launched at Last

Keeping track of the impending launch of a crewed space capsule from Florida, I made sure to follow the official NASA streaming video on Wednesday. When some pictures of the Falcon 9 rocket set up at the launch pad showed it turned such that the “old new” NASA logo on its first stage wasn’t facing the camera I had wondered about “small gestures,” but the video coverage did wind up showing several other wiggly-letting logos scattered around the effort. It was rather more important than that, though, that the weather stayed ominous throughout the afternoon and the launch was scrubbed. Then, in just the few days until the next instantaneous launch window news got more ominous in general, with reports of one more test bed for a bigger SpaceX rocket exploding in flames very far from the worst item. (Still, that SpaceX has worked its way through past explosions the “obviously competent where a government agency isn’t” rhetoric in science fiction and online comments of a certain ideological tilt before its establishment just might have ruled out altogether, may have helped me come to accept the company even with all the grotesque turns in Elon Musk’s public life.)

The weather still seemed a tossup to start with today; I did wonder as I watched the streamed events repeat what the commentary might start feeling like on a third go-around. Things did seem to improve there, though, and as the countdown closed in on launch remembering how I’d been indulgent to the point of watching the final space shuttle launch on TV instead of just my computer I went and turned on the cable I almost never switch inputs to, although I did stick with CBC news. Just to compare that against the official stream I had my iPad convenient, but I managed to notice the streaming images didn’t match what was on TV, and then that the stream lagged by more than a few seconds for all that CBC’s banners blocked the official countdown clock. I concentrated on TV for the actual launch, which just might have somehow felt “surprisingly fast” getting off the pad and through the seemingly crucial first-stage burn. (That booster stage made a barge landing, too.) That the capsule got into orbit seems a good thing anyway, although I have to accept it’ll be “a small weight on the scales” for some. One question is how much I’ll notice about just what the commuter flight is like as compared to in a tight-packed Soyuz before the scheduled docking.