The Latest Liftoff

I keep admitting how I take note of a dramatic rocket liftoff or space probe arrival but then don’t pay as much attention to what follows. In the past few days I have been trying to keep up with news from the new Mars rover, waiting for pictures that’ll elaborate on the first glimpse of its surroundings. A better picture, still from underneath the rover, has arrived that develops a faint shadow in the first glimpse into hills on the horizon, along with a sort of “teaser” recorded earlier during the landing itself.

In looking for that, though, I did manage to learn another cargo rocket was being launched to the space station, and tuned into the streaming coverage of that. There might have been the thought “we should remain aware there are rockets other than SpaceX’s.” The launch itself wasn’t as elaborately tracked as some, but there was a reminder it just happened to happen on the fifty-ninth anniversary of John Glenn blasting off into orbit (with the cargo capsule’s name SS Katherine Johnson, significant in its own right, a subtler reminder of that). I also noticed the simple computer animations used during the second stage burn showing orbital speed building up by having the perigee climb from “negative thousands” to “positive hundreds,” the important changeover happening during the last seconds.