SpaceX will try again to launch 1st astronaut mission for NASA today. Here's when to watch live.

[Michie]

I’ll check it out

 

[Michie]

CSPAN has the same feed as NASA so we are watching the same feed now.

 

[Michie]

Ugh! Rain go away!!

 

[Michie]

Well they are expecting a clear in the weather. *fingers crossed*

 

[mnorian]

Ugh! Rain go away!!

You would think; if a jet airplane can fly thru a torrential rain storm; ingesting TONS of water; that a rocket would be able to go thru a storm that is only 10 miles or so thick; till it gets to space.

Maybe it's the winds that cause the delays; pushing the ship off course.

 

[Michie]

You would think; if a jet airplane can fly thru a torrential rain storm; ingesting TONS of water; that a rocket would be able to go thru a storm that is only 10 miles or so thick; till it gets to space.

Maybe it's the winds that cause the delays; pushing the ship off course.

It could be. Plus the technology to pull this stuff off is so touchy as compared to a jet. Plus, nobody wants another Challenger disaster.

 

[Michie]

Would anyone here go to space if they had the chance?

I think as much as I love to keep up on this subject, I do not think I’d be ready to go yet.

 

[mnorian]

Would anyone here go to space if they had the chance?

I think as much as I love to keep up on this subject, I do not think I’d be ready to go yet.

In the last 86 launches; SpaceX has had four failures; that's one every 22 launches; and when they fail; there is nothing left. I think I will wait till the odds are a little better.

 

[mnorian]

The trouble with a rocket; when it fails; and blows into a million pieces; there is no way to look thru the rubble to see what went wrong; like they can with an airplane.
So they have to start from scratch; every time; and hope they corrected the problem.

 

[Michie]

In the last 86 launches; SpaceX has had four failures; that's one every 22 launches; and when they fail; there is nothing left. I think I will wait till the odds are a little better.

That’s my line of thinking as well. Not to mention the dangers of space itself.

 

[mnorian]

T-4 minutes!

 

[Michie]

Woohoo! This is just amazing. Nervous for them though.

 

[mnorian]

They made it to orbit!

 

[rockytopva]

LA Times put together a good video of the launch...

 

[prodromos]

Congratulations USA!

 

[Bob Crowley]

Would anyone here go to space if they had the chance?

I think as much as I love to keep up on this subject, I do not think I’d be ready to go yet.

Probably not the place to put my weird views, but I think God intends to drive us out into space. To do that, He (quite possibly with our help through nuclear war or some other stupidity or both) would have to make this planet so inhospitable we would not want to stay here, much as many forebears of the US and Australia could no longer tolerate their original home nations for example.

I also believe we'll learn to teleport, using quantum entanglement, which scientists are already fooling around with. Supposedly impossible, but I always use liquid fuelled rockets to boost my argument, if you'll pardon the pun.

Dr. Robert Goddard was possibly the best known pioneer of liquid fuelled rockets, and he reached about 41 feet in 1926 with a top speed of 60 mph.

In one of those ironies of history, the Nazis launched the space age in 1944, just 18 years later when the first V2 liquid fuelled rocket hit London after flying 200 miles and reaching speeds of 2800 mph.

Thirteen years later the Soviets launched Sputnik (same name as my dog incidentally - apparently it means "fellow traveler" in Russian), and a mere twelve years after that the US landed men on the moon, using a liquid fuelled rocket.

43 years from 41 feet to the moon - 1926 to 1969.

I think there'll be a similar hyperbolic leap in quantum entanglement experiments, just as there has been in IT and electronics for example. It's also instantaneous.

So we may have to go into space whether we want to or not. One thing is for sure - the emphasis would be on sheer survival. Most of us probably would not be tough enough to survive.

For me, private enterprise rocketry a la Tesla or Virgin will prove to be a stop gap measure. I think entanglement will be where the action is going to be.

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-complex-quantum-teleportation.html

 

[Michie]

Astronauts often describe a powerful 'overview effect' when gazing at Earth. Here's what it is and why it may be essential to space missions.

 

[Michie]

Lovell said that if you really think about your existence in the universe — as seeing the Earth from afar forces one to do — the context of everything changes.

"People often say, 'I hope to go to heaven when I die.' In reality, if you think about it, you go to heaven when you're born," he said. "You arrive on a planet that has the proper mass, has the gravity to contain water and an atmosphere, which are the very essentials for life. And you arrive on this planet that's orbiting a star just at the right distance — not too far to be too cold, or too close to be too hot — and just at the right distance to absorb that star's energy and then, with that energy, cause life to evolve here in the first place."

He added: "God has really given us a stage, just looking at where we were around the moon, a stage on which we perform. And how that play turns out is up to us."