The Falcon 1 launch last night was mostly successful. A perfect liftoff, first stage burn, staging and second stage ignition. About a minute into the second stage burn the vehicle started “coning” — tumbling around its long axis — and the engine was shut down. So the second stage didn’t quite make it to orbit, but it did get to 300km on a ballistic trajectory.<\/p>\n
So while not a completely successful test, it was a pretty good validation for SpaceX.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Falcon 1 launch last night was mostly successful. A perfect liftoff, first stage burn, staging and second stage ignition. About a minute into the second stage burn the vehicle started “coning” — tumbling around its long axis — and the engine was shut down. So the second stage didn’t quite make it to orbit, … Continue reading “Congratulations SpaceX”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}