Tag: SpaceX

  • Falcon Heavy Launch

    If you haven’t seen the Falcon Heavy launch video already on YouTube, you must. If you’ve seen it, it’s worth watching again and again if you like this sorta stuff again and again.

    I did not watch the launch live but a live feed was going on as I watched the launch by scrolling back as the vehicle flew to orbit.

    It was lovely to see the updates on Twitter (by Elon Musk as well as other space tweeps). It was a lovely accompaniment to the live video feed on YouTube. It almost made it look like that these were tools specifically made for this purpose. Reddit went too crazy for me to meaningfully follow it on mobile.

    The launch was spectacular in the following as well. It almost felt as exhilarating as watching the early Apollo missions.

    Towards the afternoon Sandhya Ramesh wrote for The Wire magazine answering some of the questions that many people seemed to have had about the mission. Stephen Clark at Spaceflight Now has the most descriptive write up of today’s events itself. I haven’t seen any write up yet about the implications of the launch worth sharing that I’m not already sharing on my Tumblr.

  • SpaceX’s Historic Launch Success

    SpaceX successfully delivered SES-8 communication satellite into a geostationary orbit today. I did not pay too much attention in the build up to this launch. It was Michael Belfiore’s blog post that woke me up to the significance of this launch.

    In Indian terms, there is nothing much to compare with since India does not commercially launch communication satellites into orbit. GSLV cost for the last launch was pegged at ₹180 crores. SpaceX’s current launch cost to the customer is said to be $60 million compared to $260 million which is said to be the current industry standard. This seems to me to be similar to Reliance’s introduction of the ₹1/minute call charges in the nineties that has revolutionised the Indian telecom industry.

    With more proven flights of SpaceX, India should perhaps consider switching to SpaceX as a standby launch partner instead of Arianespace.

    Congratulations to SpaceX and wish it more success in the future as well!