Launch of the RazakSAT satellite via a Falcon 1 rocket


  1. MarcusZ says:
    July 14, 2009 at 7:06 am

    “That was easy!”

    Hehehehe, nice comment at the end of the video ;)

    Thanks again for putting this up! Due to the delay of the launch by 3 hours I could not see it live (4am local time…)

    Reply
    • MarcusZ says:
      July 14, 2009 at 7:17 am

      Just checked again: in the end the launch was at 05:35am local time. Hmm if they had told be me that yesterday I would have been able to just get up very early to see this live.

      Screw all those annoying weather delays! ;)

      Reply
  2. steve g says:
    July 14, 2009 at 8:30 am

    excellent launch, great image quality thnks for putting this up and i wonder if there will be other camera angles of this launch from the ground following it up also?

    Reply
  3. Hala says:
    July 14, 2009 at 9:48 am

    This was awesome to watch! Thank you! The camera made the whole journey seem very immersive to the point where I think I experienced slight vertigo for a short while. Makes me wish I’d followed my childhood dream to go into space now :D

    xx

    Reply
  4. Rick Boozer says:
    July 14, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    I hope this is an indication of how well the upcoming Falcon 9 launch will go. Hopefully the Augustine panel will recommend implementation of the COTS-D option to use Falcon 9 and Dragon to get crew to the ISS. We’re going to have to use the Russians some for this purpose, but hopefully not for long!

    Reply
  5. screwy-louie says:
    July 14, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Thanks,couldn’t make the live shot. Haven’t been into space since 70′s… might be back. Thanx

    Reply
  6. 117L7 says:
    July 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm

    A lot of roll seeking in the booster stage, but who cares, it all averages out. I kind of think that stiffiner ring that flys off the second stage engine was not supposed to happen, but the nozzle didn’t split so it ends up being a performance improvement. The second stage nozzle looks like it was very near the end of it’s life at SECO. Something going on about half way up the nozzle in what appears to be a fabrication seam maybe. The difference between the way it looks at 2:47 and 9:44 is striking. I’m glad it worked though, it’s a fairly solid design as far as I’m concerned. Sorry, but I’ve never been a fan of ablator nozzles though.

    Reply
    • Rick Boozer says:
      July 14, 2009 at 3:20 pm

      “I kind of think that stiffiner ring that flys off the second stage engine was not supposed to happen,”

      The SpaceX announcer said at about 5 min 36 sec after launch that the stiffening ring was supposed to come off soon, and it came off shortly after he said that. So how can you say it wasn’t supposed to happen?

      Reply
    • Rick Boozer says:
      July 14, 2009 at 4:18 pm

      Made a Typo. Sorry it was 3 min 36 seconds after launch.

      Reply
    • MarcusZ says:
      July 15, 2009 at 7:42 am

      Actually the stiffener came off on Falcon 1 Flight 4 as well. Unfortunately you can’t directly see it in neither the “High Roller” nor the “Highlights” videos on SpaceX site, but in den High Roller video the stiffener is there before fairing sepp and gone after.

      But thanks to our good friends here at SVC you can see it as well in the full Webcast of F1F4: http://www.spacevidcast.com/2008/09/29/spacex-reaches-orbit-with-falcon-1-flight-4/
      at 03:31 (as part of the Falcon 1 promo video, probably taken from Flight 2)

      at 21:34 you can see it coming off during flight 4 much sooner after Kestrel ignition compared to flight 5.

      My guess is, that this stiffeners only job is to protect the nozzle of the Kestrel engine from vibrations during launch as well as during first stage separation. Then, as the nozzle heats up it goes off sooner or later once it reaches a certain temperature.

      Reply
  7. Robert Horning says:
    July 14, 2009 at 11:09 pm

    I want to thank you guys (Ben, Cariann, & company at CRCC) for putting on an excellent show. My kids were here to watch most of it as they were doing their chores, and it proved to be an interesting draw.

    I did notice an interesting distinction between the shuttle flight vs. this flight on a number of factors. Yes, I get Ben’s argument here that this is comparing two completely different things (manned reusable vehicle spaceflight vs. unmanned expendable vehicle spaceflight) but the contrasts were huge. There are 10′s of thousands of workers on process the shuttle and close to 100,000 or more on the actual construction of the components that flew. For the Falcon 1 there were just a few hundred that built it and only a dozen or so people at “ground control” both doing preparation as well as running the launch.

    (See this page for the whole ground control team for this launch:)

    http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/spacex-successfully-delivers-first-payload-space?page=

    If commercial space is to happen, this is the necessary feature that will keep costs down. Other comparisons can be made that unfairly put NASA into a negative light, but having a small and nimble team will help save labor costs and can ultimately make going into space routine and affordable. Perhaps the Falcon 9 launch team will be slightly larger than this group, but I can’t imagine it being 10x this size, much less the 100x this size that currently does launches on the cape for NASA.

    I can’t wait for the Falcon 9 launch. It should be an interesting journey.

    BTW, for any of the space geeks reading this, is there any plan by anybody to use the Falcon 1 for another flight, or might this have been the last flight of the Falcon 1? There are no additional F1 flights on the manifest, as the next closest related flight is the Falcon 1e vehicle, with an “extended” tank for extra performance (20 meters longer), and all future F1 flights are using this “extended” model.

    Also, the last date for when the Falcon 9 might fly was in the April – June 2009 range. As that window has definitely come and gone, is there even a hint when the F9 might go up?

    Reply
    • MarcusZ says:
      July 15, 2009 at 7:16 am

      Regarding the Falcon 9 inaugural flight I think I’ve read something about November somewhere, but I’m not sure about this.

      Reply
    • Rick Boozer says:
      July 15, 2009 at 3:08 pm

      “Yes, I get Ben’s argument here that this is comparing two completely different things (manned reusable vehicle spaceflight vs. unmanned expendable vehicle spaceflight) but the contrasts were huge.”

      Though neither of the Falcons is reusable right now, remember that Musk continuously says that both were built with reusability in mind. In the case of F 1, only the first stage will ultimately be reusable, but current plans are to recover and reuse both stages of the F9 eventually! This goal will not be easily accomplished and SpaceX right now is focusing solely on reliability to orbit. As soon as they have confidence in the vehicle, we should see an all out effort at recoverability.

      P.S. I won’t see any responses to this post until the beginning of the coming week, because I shall be in my remote mountain getaway home where there is no internet service. I guess I could get a satellite IP service but they are soooooo slow.

      Reply
      • Benjamin Higginbotham says:
        July 15, 2009 at 6:14 pm

        That’s where TerreStar-1 comes in handy (just launched). Hopefully service will be online soon.

        I agree with most of the above points, but I think the argument stemmed from NASA not launching and SpaceX launching. Had SpaceX put crew on a vehicle they were launching from the Cape, I’m pretty sure they would have scrubbed too.

        That being said, small and nimble is the way to go. So long as SpaceX does not get absorbed in to the NASA collective I think they can do some amazing things much faster than the Government. Lets see how F9 goes and then hope for an F9 heavy :)

        Reply