![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Artemis has launched
Nov. 15th, 2022 11:28 pmI happened to find the live feed from nasaspaceflight.com a few minutes before the official "go for launch" poll to take the spacecraft off of the T-10 minute hold, so Suzanne and I watched it from there to about 25 minutes after launch.
It was a glorious and absolutely nominal launch, at least up to the current point. The first stage has separated and is continuing up by momentum to about 1800 kilometers in altitude before coming back down, hitting the atmosphere at orbital speeds, and splashing whatever doesn't burn up into the Pacific somewhere between here and Hawaii. The second stage has spread its solar arrays and is about ten minutes away from a small orbit-adjustment burn, and some longer time (an hourish, I think?) away from the long burn to get it heading to the moon.
Suzanne also told me about the story of how it got named. Usually the naming of these things takes many meetings and much discussion. This one apparently took a few minutes -- there was a bit of opening discussion, someone said "we're sending women to the moon, of course we're naming it Artemis, right?" and that was pretty much the end of the discussion.
Oh, and we're about to the orbit-adjustment burn. ... Sounds like that was as expected as well; they had live video from the solar array that didn't have an angle to show the engine or exhaust, but did show that the camera mount (and presumably the array) was waving back and forth a bit from being shoved by the thrust. We're a half-hour or so from the lunar injection burn.
Anyway. Just a few weeks short of 50 years since we launched the previous human-rated rocket to the moon, and a whole Space Shuttle program and a lot more in the interim, and we are back to this point again.
There is something reassuring about the fact that, when we are building rockets this way where the goal is not "iterate on a lot of launches cheaply and collect data from the failures" but is to use well-tested technology and NASA-grade "waterfall" development processes and plan the everliving heck out of things, we can make a thing that works like this.
And, yeah, it's spaceflight; it's not going to always work like this even with the best of reliability design and planning, I know. It's going to be subject to the same sorts of failings that brought us the non-sealing o-rings and the assumptions that ice falling on the heat-shield tiles wasn't a problem, and beyond those to the things that can't be prevented, because this is pretty close to the largest amount of power that any human-made system ever tries to control, and space is an unforgiving environment, and there are still unknowns.
But right now, we have a rocket that has gone through an hour and eight minutes of flight on its way to the moon, and its successors will be capable of taking humans on that ride with them and bringing them home, and I am feeling really happy about that. Thousands of people chose to spend a significant fraction of their lives on making this thing happen, and millions of us have had at least some little part in it, and it flew. It is flying.
It was a glorious and absolutely nominal launch, at least up to the current point. The first stage has separated and is continuing up by momentum to about 1800 kilometers in altitude before coming back down, hitting the atmosphere at orbital speeds, and splashing whatever doesn't burn up into the Pacific somewhere between here and Hawaii. The second stage has spread its solar arrays and is about ten minutes away from a small orbit-adjustment burn, and some longer time (an hourish, I think?) away from the long burn to get it heading to the moon.
Suzanne also told me about the story of how it got named. Usually the naming of these things takes many meetings and much discussion. This one apparently took a few minutes -- there was a bit of opening discussion, someone said "we're sending women to the moon, of course we're naming it Artemis, right?" and that was pretty much the end of the discussion.
Oh, and we're about to the orbit-adjustment burn. ... Sounds like that was as expected as well; they had live video from the solar array that didn't have an angle to show the engine or exhaust, but did show that the camera mount (and presumably the array) was waving back and forth a bit from being shoved by the thrust. We're a half-hour or so from the lunar injection burn.
Anyway. Just a few weeks short of 50 years since we launched the previous human-rated rocket to the moon, and a whole Space Shuttle program and a lot more in the interim, and we are back to this point again.
There is something reassuring about the fact that, when we are building rockets this way where the goal is not "iterate on a lot of launches cheaply and collect data from the failures" but is to use well-tested technology and NASA-grade "waterfall" development processes and plan the everliving heck out of things, we can make a thing that works like this.
And, yeah, it's spaceflight; it's not going to always work like this even with the best of reliability design and planning, I know. It's going to be subject to the same sorts of failings that brought us the non-sealing o-rings and the assumptions that ice falling on the heat-shield tiles wasn't a problem, and beyond those to the things that can't be prevented, because this is pretty close to the largest amount of power that any human-made system ever tries to control, and space is an unforgiving environment, and there are still unknowns.
But right now, we have a rocket that has gone through an hour and eight minutes of flight on its way to the moon, and its successors will be capable of taking humans on that ride with them and bringing them home, and I am feeling really happy about that. Thousands of people chose to spend a significant fraction of their lives on making this thing happen, and millions of us have had at least some little part in it, and it flew. It is flying.
