Wow, that was incredible. Nervous moments and it climbed out, and went thru Max-Q. The booster sep was REALLY nice!
Turned out the staggered boostback of the boosters was an “option” that they didn’t do. Good, the near-simultaneous landings were awesome. As some of you noted, the same onboard video for the two boosters, seems to have been one video repeated, for whatever reason. I THINK that from that one booster’s video view, you could see the other booster’s re-entry burn begin, and also the landing burn, before the booster’s own engine(s) fired up.
Think they dropped the ball a bit with the fairing sep. They started the music for “Life on Mars”, but showed the computer graphics of the changing flight paths of the three boosters and second stage. Which was nice but they must have meant to change to the live camera view inside the fairing, and not that flight path graphic at that time. The crowd certainly yelled loudly about something they saw (probably the fairing sep on one of multiple monitors), before finally the view of the Roadster in the webcast. In any case, that was a very neat set-up for the camera arms to get those views, now seen “live from orbit”.
Core stage….. not sounding good. I that the hosts found out i their earpieces that it had been lost but were also probably told NOT to let the viewers know that. Certainly the boisterous SapceX employees got pretty quiet shortly after the core was supposed to land, so they probably knew what happened via an unseen monitor or knew that when a controller said “we lost the core”, apparently that meant literally lost it and not loss of widow feed. I haven’t seen any good info yet on the nature of hat happened. Other than filling in the big logical blank that if it HAD landed safely, SpaceX or Musk would have said so by now.
Second stage has done a 2nd burn to raise the apogee to 7000 KM.
Final burn to leave Earth and go into Heliocentric orbit around the sun (Apogee as far away ad Mars’ orbit is, NOT to Mars), is due sometime around 8:30 to 8:45 PM EST.
Second stage batteries will not last a long time, so do not expect the live Tesla Video to be available live for much longer. By tomorrow it’ll literally be a blip on a radar screen (NORAD’s that is), or a point of light in a telescope, no electrical power, no transmissions.
A few images from the Orlando Sentinel website. Will be looking for more to post later.
