Falcon 9 Heavy
 

Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon 9 Heavy for the second time, this time carrying a real payload. They also, for the first time, successfully landed all 3 booster cores, 2 side boosters back at the Cape and the centre core on the drone ship, "Of course I still love you" (named in a tribute to Iain M Banks - a brilliant Scottish SciFi author RIP).

As someone who would stay up late with my Dad to watch the Apollo missions, I still get a kick out of this stuff.

Here's the video of the launch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=TXMGu2d8c8g

The launch sequence starts at 19min 54 sec.
The side boosters simultaneously landing at 27:30
The video feed for the centre core landing is lost but shows the core afterwards at 30:30

Re: Falcon 9 Heavy
 

How the hell do they land the side boosters back down like that!?



+ Watching that speed go up and up and up in the bottom left of the screen is just crazy.

Re: Falcon 9 Heavy
 

Brilliant fiction writer too. The Wasp Factory is my favourite book and the only book I've read multiple times.

Re: Falcon 9 Heavy
 

Isn't technology wonderful? :)

Elon Musk (SpaceX founder) always said that getting into space was too expensive and it's ridiculous that so much is thrown away each time. His business model required the main engines to be used multiple times and he has successfully re-used the standard Falcon 9 core in previous launches.

SpaceX are currently trying to recapture the shroud that surrounds the payload but haven't succeeded yet - they are getting closer though.

Iain Banks wrote SciFi as Iain M Banks and regular fiction without the "M". He said he liked to write SciFi because there were no constraints - so his ships (which were always AI) were often huge (as in miles long), the ships would select their own names, and were usually weird.
His view of the future was basically optimistic with most books set within "The Culture", an AI guided civilisation with people free to choose lifestyles (and length of their lives).

I've re-read "Use of Weapons" a couple of times. An unusual book inasmuch as it tells two stories about the same person running in alternate chapters. In the first chapter the chronology advances normally, in the second it is recounted in reverse with both leading towards a terrible outcome.

(not one of the more optimistic Culture novels ;) )

Iain M Banks was only 59 when he sadly passed.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy launch
 

Another mostly successful launch last night/this morning:
https://www.spacex.com/webcast

The two side boosters successfully recovered but the central core missed the drone ship in the Atlantic. I still get an enormous kick out of seeing the two side boosters land simultaneously back at the Cape.