Category Archives: Space

The D.C. area’s no-flying-needed way to see a space launch

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Tuesday night treated me to the first space launch I’d seen in person–meaning close enough to hear it–since 2018. And unlike the previous three launches that I have been privileged to experience from that close, this one did not require a flight to Florida.

Instead, only a three-hour drive lay between my house and Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, hosted at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s eastern shore. (Shout out to Ars Technica’s science writer John Timmer for offering a lift.) The occasion was Rocket Lab’s U.S. debut of its Electron rocket, something I had made two earlier trips to Wallops in December to see before those launch attempts got called off.

Electron heads to space, with its second stage leaving a plume that evokes a celestial jellyfish.

Rocket Lab, a startup that first launched Electron from its New Zealand facility in 2017 and had conducted 31 missions from there since, is the newest tenant at Wallops. But this site across an inlet from Chincoteague saw its first liftoff much earlier–in 1945, five years before Cape Canaveral’s first launch. It’s had a quieter existence since, with recent Wallops headlines featuring a flight or two a year of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rockets to send Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. They remain the only space launches that I’ve seen, faintly, from my house.

A press pass issued by Rocket Lab granted a much closer view of its “Virginia is for Launch Lovers” mission, just two miles away from a spare concrete pad next to the Atlantic. At ignition about 40 minutes after sunset, Electron lit up the shore, a brilliant beacon shooting into the sky. The sound rolled out to us about two seconds later–a steady low-frequency roar that might have been an especially loud jet engine, except jets can’t shoot anything into Earth orbit. A clear sky let me track the rocket through first-stage separation, then follow the second stage as its exhaust left a plume dozens of miles up.

If you’re reading this around the D.C. area, you should have multiple chances to experience that, as Rocket Lab plans four to six launches from Wallops this year. Things to know in advance:

• The no-stopping offseason drive should be barely three hours from downtown D.C. to the Wallops visitor center, but woe betide anybody who hopes to make the trip that quickly on weekends from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

• The range at Wallops doesn’t shout “space flights here,” lacking the giant gantries of the Kennedy Space Center; the tallest structure is a water tower emblazoned with NASA’s “meatball” circular blue logo.

• Wireless coverage can get really bad, so you should not bank on being able to Instagram launch photos.

• Don’t expect the same show you’d get at a KSC launch. At liftoff, Electron’s thrust is 43,000 pounds, while at launch Antares (with one launch left this year) is good for 864,000 pounds. In comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have 1.7 and 5.1 million pounds of sea-level thrust sending them skyward. But while you won’t have the experience of feeling a giant rocket’s sound rush over you like an acoustic avalanche, it is still a kind of magic to see something people made leave the ground and soar into the black, all the way to space.

• You can, however, see a launch from closer than the Cape allows. A launch-viewing guide from photographer Kyle Henry lists one location, not always open, 1.7 miles from the pad, with an always-open spot 2.2 miles away. The NASA Wallops Visitor Center is another option, about 7 miles away.

• If you can’t make the trip, you should still be able to see a Wallops launch from around D.C. That’s more easily done at night, when you don’t have to distinguish one contrail from everything else in the sky; you just have to spot a rocket’s red glare.

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A reluctant rocket launch

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Photo shows a sign headlined "CONTROLLED ACCESS AREA" on a fence closing off Rocket Lab's LC-2 pad at Wallops Island, with an Electron rocket on its side pointing toward the viewer in the background.

Friday evening was supposed to treat me to the sight of an Electron rocket lighting up the sky above Wallops Island, Va. Instead, it served up a sea of brake lights at the end of a long drive home from Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

But that’s a known risk of trying to schedule a trip to see a rocket launch. The fiendishly complex machinery needed to get a launch vehicle to defy gravity’s pull and then accelerate its cargo to 17,500 miles can fail pre-launch tests, weather conditions can violate launch commit criteria, and a single boat or plane in the wrong spot will cause a range-safety violation. And those are just day-of-launch dealbreakers!

Rocket Lab’s attempt to launch Electron from the U.S. for the first time succumbed to a more mundane obstacle: NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration were still “working to close out final documentation required for launch,” per a Thursday-night tweet from Rocket Lab, which forced a delay to Dec. 18.

Originally, Rocket Lab’s work to open a U.S. launch facility at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (yes, MARS) on NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility was set to advance with a launch of Electron Dec. 7, as announced Nov. 9.

But on Nov. 30, this “Virginia is For Launch Lovers” mission to deploy three Earth-observation satellites then got pushed back to Dec. 9 to “allow time for final pre-launch preparations.”

On Dec. 7, however, a forecast calling for “an incoming weather front bringing strong upper-level winds and unsettled conditions” led Rocket Lab to move the date back to Dec. 13.

Alas, on Dec. 11 an unspecified issue securing clearance of nearby airspace forced a two-day slip to Dec. 15–when itself got got ruled out on the 12th because of bad forecast weather and replaced with the Dec. 16 date than then suffered the aforementioned documentation veto.

That last bit of news arrived as I was already on the road to the Eastern Shore, too late to cancel the hotel booking I had waited to make until that evening after canceling four earlier reservations at the same Hampton Inn in Chincoteague. Fortunately, Rocket Lab went ahead with a tour of their Wallops facilities, including a visit to the pad to see Electron snuggled under a thermal protective blanket.

And because Wallops is only a three-plus hour drive away, my cost to not see a launch remains trivial compared to the airfare, hotel and car-rental expenses I racked up before I finally saw Endeavour fly–an experience that was worth every one of those tens of thousands of pennies.

So what about that Dec. 18 date? It remains theoretically doable, in part because a journalist friend of mine is already planning on driving to Wallops and back Sunday and offered a lift. But I’m going to wait to see if the rest of Saturday brings any new “Rocket Lab update” e-mails.

KSC FOMO is real

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This weekend is treating me to the first-world problem of having travel booked to a place I haven’t visited in three years–at the cost of not being able to visit another place I haven’t visited in four years.

The Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building, Shuttle Landing Facility Runway, and launch complexes 39A and 39B as seen from an American Airlines jet on the way to Miami.

While I will be packing Sunday to fly to Berlin for the IFA electronics show for the first time since 2019 (disclosure: the organizers are covering most of the travel costs for an invited group of U.S. journalists and analysts, myself included), NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket will be enjoying what I trust is its last night of slumber on Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center before starting a journey to the Moon Monday morning.

Before everybody gets on my case for the subpar judgment I’ve just confessed, I booked the IFA travel in early July, weeks before NASA set tentative launch dates for this uncrewed Artemis I mission. At least I’ve got Monday morning mostly free to glue myself to a screen and see if SLS lifts off in the two-hour window that opens at 8:33 a.m.

Meanwhile, journalists I know are arriving at Cape Canaveral and tweeting photos from KSC’s press site, something I last got to do in 2018. The Artemis 1 countdown began Saturday morning. And if no technical glitches surface and all the other launch-commit criteria line up green Monday, everybody close enough will get to see NASA’s largest rocket since the Saturn V take to the skies–then hear and feel the crackling thunder of its engines, which apparently will be a lot louder than the shuttle’s.

I’ll only get to watch the proceedings from my living room. The closest I’ve gotten to the Cape since that February 2018 trip to cover Falcon Heavy’s debut is seeing KSC from a plane–which, don’t get me wrong, is a real window-seat treat.

But while I may have to wait two more years for a chance to see the next SLS launch, the launch calendar is now so busy at the Space Coast that even a randomly scheduled trip to central Florida allows decent odds of seeing a liftoff. So, yes, I will return to KSC even if it’s just for fun–and in that case, I’m bringing my family so they can see firsthand why I’m so crazy about this.

Return to flight

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For the first time in almost nine years, Americans began a journey to space from Florida instead of Kazakhstan. SpaceX’s successful launch Saturday afternoon of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket closed the longest gap ever in human spaceflight from U.S. soil and broke a government monopoly on travel to orbit.

The long wait after the last shuttle mission in July 2011 for this day and this liftoff took me back all the way to 1981. That’s when my 10-year-old self woke up unnaturally early on a Sunday morning to watch the space shuttle Columbia roar to life, taking John Young and Bob Crippen to orbit after a more than five-year drought that followed the splashdown of the U.S. half of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July of 1975.

I didn’t get to watch that launch on YouTube on a flat-panel TV–instead, it was an over-the-air CBS signal on a cathode-ray-tube set. There was also no social media; the only people I could rejoice with afterwards were my brother and my mom and dad.

But then as now, the United States had been through hard times. Not only did NASA have to sit and watch as the Soviet Union sent cosmonauts to orbit and the shuttle program’s delays dragged on, the end of the 1970s saw our country reeling from an oil crisis, an economic crisis, and the hostage crisis. The USSR felt free to invade Afghanistan and throw its weight around the rest of the world.

It was a lot for a nine-year-old boy who had only recently gotten into the habit of reading the New York Times and watching the evening news. It felt like my country kept getting kicked around.

The past year has not been like the year running up to STS-1. It’s worse. So much worse. A global pandemic has killed more than 102,000 Americans and wrecked the U.S. economy (with the inconsequential collateral damage of my being unable to cover the SpaceX launch in person as I did 2018’s Falcon Heavy launch). The president is a ignorant bigot, a pathological liar, and a magnet for the corrupt and the incompetent–NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine being a blessed exception. The streets of some American cities were on fire Friday night.

The state of American spaceflight was nowhere as bad before today as it was at the end of 1980–astronauts have kept flying to space on Russian rockets without the shuttle’s fatal vulnerabilities, and the ISS is a spacecraft big enough to see from the ground. But all the other things make today’s misery index exponentially higher.

And this time, the kid trying to make sense of the world is my daughter. I try to help her with that, but I don’t know that I’m doing that much. Could anybody?

Saturday’s launch doesn’t cure the novel coronavirus, put tens of millions of Americans back to work, vote Trump out of office or banish his brand of cruelty from American politics, bring George Floyd back to life, or excise systemic racism. But as my friend Maura Corbett put it in a tweet, this accomplishment gave “a grieving and broken country some wonder and hope today.” And it should remind everybody that hard work and a willingness to learn may ultimately take you through adversity. And to the stars.

Launch logistics: Booking a trip to see Falcon Heavy fly on three days’ notice

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I’ve had the idea of covering the first launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket in the back of my mind for the last few years, but I didn’t book my travel for Tuesday’s launch until Saturday afternoon.

I was waiting for a confirmation of the schedule from the company that would be more solid than a notional “No Earlier Than” date, and which would then let me know if I could still attend a Yahoo Finance cryptocurrency conference in New York on Wednesday. Besides, I knew that D.C. and Orlando often represent a cheap city pair.

The schedule details I needed from SpaceX arrived shortly after noon Saturday, so I got to work–one travel component at a time.

Having to reach the Kennedy Space Center by 1:15 p.m. to visit Launch Complex 39A ruled out some decent mid-day fares. But Southwest’s site showed a 6 a.m. nonstop out of National for only $50. Sold!

Then I canceled the D.C.-NYC Amtrak reservation I’d had for Tuesday night (I appreciate that the railroad still lets you do that for free until 24 hours before departure) and booked a Tuesday-night flight from Orlando to New York to replace it.

I went with United for that leg, spending a little extra (a still-reasonable $155) to fly on an airline where my frequent-flyer status would allow a free same-day-change to a Wednesday flight to Newark if a launch scrub required that. A few more clicks to book a rental car and one night’s lodging, and I had launch travel solved… or so I thought until an hour after a liftoff that got pushed back to 3:45 p.m. by upper-atmosphere winds.

At that point, the “OMG! OMG!” shaking had stopped, I’d filed my copy, and Google Maps indicated that the usual 45-minute drive from KSC to Orlando would run an hour and 15 minutes. Nope! As horrendous post-launch traffic dragged Google’s arrival estimates past my flight’s boarding time, I called United to see if they had space on the morning’s first MCO-EWR nonstop, a 5:36 a.m. departure. They did.

After dropping off my rental car and getting through a mercifully quick security checkpoint (is there a better exhibit for TSA Pre or Clear than MCO?), I ran to my original flight’s gate and saw for myself that the plane was gone. I called United back, the rep bailed me out of the consequences of my overly-optimistic travel tactics by putting me on that 5:36 a.m. flight for free, and then I opened my laptop–tethering off my phone because the airport WiFi didn’t let me connect–to book a hotel barely two miles away for $90.

By then, it had been some 10 hours since I’d last eaten, so I treated myself to a nice dinner at the airport. (If you, too, get stuck at MCO and want something more original than the terminal’s fast-casual brands, head upstairs to McCoy’s in the Hyatt Regency). After a prolonged wait for the hotel van, thanks to no visible signage indicating that these shuttles could pick up at either of two spaces on the B side that sit maybe 800 feet apart, I was in bed by around midnight.

I somehow woke up one minute before the 4:15 alarm I’d set on my phone and was through security 40 minutes later. You can image my relief at seeing my upgrade clear, then having a quick NJ Transit ride from EWR to Manhattan help wrap up this prolonged commute by 9:10 a.m.

A long and informative day ensued with Yahoo colleagues, most of whom I hadn’t seen in months, and various cryptocurrency experts. But then my travel luck ran out again when my train to D.C. left more than an hour and a half late. Twitter, not Amtrak, informed me that this was the result of a tragedy–a northbound Acela striking and killing a person walking along the tracks in the Bronx, which led police to close the railroad for two hours.

That meant I didn’t get home until nearly 1 a.m, almost 21 hours after my day had begun. But I did get to sleep in my own bed, and I came home with two posts filed from KSC that more than covered my travel costs as well as dozens of photos (since edited into a Flickr album) and one unusual recording that you can hear after the jump.

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Interplanetary download times, then and now

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Like many of you, I’ve spent much of this week refreshing various NASA social-media feeds to see the latest pictures from Pluto.

Voyager Neptune image

Neptune as seen by Voyager 2 on August 14, 1989.

New Horizons Pluto image

Pluto as seen by New Horizons on July 13, 2015.

Beyond the ongoing amazement that with less than half a penny of every federal dollar, NASA has taken our senses further into the solar system than anybody else in history, this has gotten me thinking of the last times we explored a planet for the first time.

When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and then Neptune in 1986 and 1989, my download time to see color photos of either planet for longer than a brief spot on the evening news could span months. The New York Times was a black-and-white production, so I would have to wait for the inevitable National Geographic cover story that I would then read and re-read obsessively.

When the Web came around years later, it did not take me long to realize that magazine production cycles and the U.S. Postal Service would never again limit my ability to geek out over pictures taken by robot spacecraft billions of miles away.

And now we’re outright spoiled–I cannot keep track of the image catalogs maintained by various NASA centers. But to see full-resolution copies of the images captured by New Horizons this week, we will have to wait even longer than we did in 1986 and 1989: At 1,000 bits per second, the maximum bit rate available from 2.97 billion miles away, it will take 16 months to get a complete set of the spacecraft’s observations.

Ad astra per aspera

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Ten years ago today, my friend Doug interrupted a lazy Saturday morning to call with an urgent question: Do you have the TV on?

STS-107 memorialThat’s when I learned that the space shuttle Columbia should have landed in Florida but never would. I spent the rest of the day obsessively watching the news and thinking “I hate to see the good guys lose one.”

(I’m embarrassed that I’d forgotten about Columbia’s scheduled return before that call, but more so that I didn’t head into the newsroom to help in some way that Saturday.)

When Challenger disintegrated, I was all of 15 years old, and it shook me to see the people I had thought capable of engineering miracles stumble so badly. But it was comforting to think that NASA–that we–had learned and would never again think that “this worked every other time” outweighs “here’s why it might not.”

We didn’t learn enough, because we should have seen the tragedy of STS-107 coming. Only two launches after Challenger, Atlantis came home with hundreds of tiles scarred by insulation flying off after liftoff. Fourteen years later, that risk caught up with Columbia.

Columbia was the shuttle my 10-year-old self, entranced and exhilarated, woke up early to watch launch in 1981, and the one I looked forward to seeing in the Air and Space Museum someday. Instead, the shuttle and astronauts Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Rick Husband, William McCool, and Ilan Ramon were gone.

When I made my long-awaited pilgrimage to the Kennedy Space Center two years ago, I was struck by the enormous STS-107 insignia hanging inside the Vehicle Assembly Building–a silent reminder to stay skeptical in the face of apparent success.

We honor the crew of Columbia as well as Challenger’s Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee and Michael Smith–and before them, Apollo 1’s Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom and Ed White, Soyuz 1 cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov and Soyuz 11’s Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov–if we remember that lesson as we continue their worthy endeavor.

T+366 days

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One year ago today, I was standing on a scruffy lawn in Florida, bleary-eyed from having slept an hour in the last 20–and feeling none of the fatigue accumulated from that sleep debt and compounded over an afternoon, evening and night of travel.

I don’t think there has been a day since May 16, 2011 when I haven’t thought about the mind-expanding experience of seeing a space shuttle launch for the first time.

First the waiting–welling up in the predawn hours from a kid’s Christmas Eve anticipation to the electricity in the stands at a baseball game before a walk-off home run for your team. The “oh my God, we’re really going to do this” moment at about T-15 seconds. Then the visceral jolt of seeing Endeavour’s rockets split the sky open with a sustained, brilliant flash of light, throwing that improbable machine into the clouds–and hearing and feeling the crackling avalanche of sound rush right up and over us.

The birth of our daughter was about as exciting–also experienced on near-zero sleep!–but I can’t think of much else that compares. Except for seeing the final shuttle launch with a press pass in July. (If you can get away with doing a once-in-a-lifetime thing twice without taking somebody else’s spot, do it; after taking the canonical launch photo on my first try, I could soak everything in the second time.)

Witnessing this controlled explosion didn’t last long, but I think if you ask any of the NASA Tweetup attendees who returned to the Kennedy Space Center for the launch after the scrub two weeks earlier, they’d all say it was one of the greatest moments of their lives. And that it taught something about endeavoring through adversity–or, at least, about the importance of avoiding short circuits in a Load Controller Assembly box.

I’ve retold this story dozens of times to friends and strangers, and I’m still trying to get the language right. Maybe I’m overthinking it. When I saw the Daily Show’s John Oliver do his comedy routine in March, he needed far fewer words than this post to convey his reaction to seeing the launch of Atlantis from the same KSC lawn: “Holy fucking shit!”

A sort of homecoming for Discovery

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The space shuttle Discovery completed her last journey a week ago. An airport tug towed the shuttle, with tiles and insulating fabic looking toasted or outright torched from 39 re-entries, into a display hall at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.

It was not an altogether joyous occasion. The proper home for a spacecraft is space, not a museum. Discovery might have kept flying for years longer–had the Bush administration not acted on the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to retire the shuttle, after which the Obama administration reaffirmed that decision while adding two last flights to the schedule.

During the handover ceremony itself, former senator and two-time astronaut John Glenn said the shuttle was “prematurely grounded.”

But there are reasons why we only have three space-flown shuttles to retire to museums after building five. Challenger’s remains sleep in a missile silo at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station; Columbia’s occupy part of the 16th floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. Neither spot is open for tourist visits, although anybody designing a manned spacecraft should find a way to pay their respects there.

What makes me mad, not just sad, is seeing people use this occasion to break out a “The End” stamp for the space program.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, pronounced Discovery’s final trip “a funeral march”–apparently unaware that the shuttle’s would-be successor, the behind-schedule and over-budget Constellation program, had been fired for cause. CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a “Hard Landing” episode that suggested the battered Space Coast economy will never recover. (For all of of that episode’s neglected angles, I hated seeing that the bar I stopped in for lunch after STS-134’s launch had closed.) Editorial cartoons have proclaimed that manned space flight has reached the end of its road and now amounts to a museum piece.

But like many people of a certain age, I know the difference between today and the last extended interregnum in American spaceflight. One of my first memories of television was watching a rocket launch that must have been the U.S. half of 1975’s sole Apollo-Soyuz Test Program mission. I had to wait almost six years to see another liftoff live on TV. No American got close to orbit until the Sunday morning in 1981 when I woke up early and excitedly to watch Columbia take us back.

We are not witnessing a re-run of that era. If you want to see an American spacecraft, you don’t need to go to a museum. Step outside on a clear night, when the timing lines up, and you can’t miss a light brighter than any star gliding in front of all of them–the International Space Station, occupied nonstop by U.S. astronauts since November of 2000.

Back on the ground, NASA is designing the biggest rocket the U.S. has flown since the ’70s–although the Space Launch System’s projected expense and limited utility alarms me.

But unlike the ’70s, we don’t have to hope that the government does everything right. In Florida and Virginia, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are getting ready to run cargo to the ISS in privately-developed spacecraft. SpaceX and three other firms are also competing to bring up crew next and free us from having to pay Russia for transportation to the station. (Note to Congress: Reducing the funding for this project is one of the most foolish and shortsighted things you’ve done lately.) In a year or two, the rich should be taking their own suborbital flights, no NASA contract needed. (Note to Virgin Galactic PR: call me.) And in Seattle, some well-heeled tech entrepreneurs think they can make a business out of mining asteroids.

The dream is alive.

Damnit, I hope I’m right about that.

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Post-Labor Day reflections

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The calendar says summer runs through Sept. 23, but in the working world it ends on the Tuesday after Labor Day, when kids go back to school and most adults either return to their work or return their full attention to their work.

Things have been a little different for me this year. I started this summer by exiting the working world, and I have not quite rushed to return to it. I needed time off, more than I realized in April.

It took a good month after my departure from the Post for me to realize the absence of the accumulated stress I’d been working under. It wasn’t just the volume of work, it wasn’t just the pressure to write up tech rumors of dubious long-term relevance, it wasn’t just the increasing anxiety of hearing each new crack in the ice under my position–it was the combination of all that.

Having that weight lifted from my back was a blessing. So was the chance to catch up on many of the things I’d been missing. Among them: growing enough lettuce and cucumbers to be able to stop buying either for two months (please don’t ask about the tomatoes and green beans); trying a round of new recipes to use up those crops; brewing beer at home; turning a few unproductive patches of lawn into beds of perennials more compatible with my erratic groundskeeping; witnessing the space shuttle launch in May and again in July; swimming in the Atlantic and the Pacific; exploring my expanded freedom to speak more directly on Twitter; arriving somewhat on time for weeknight events instead of showing up 90 minutes late.

Best of all, I’ve watched my daughter taking her first steps.

(I should also note things I’ve left undone: reading Ulysses, or even finishing the books I got two Christmases ago; resuming my fitful attempts to learn Spanish; getting rid of most of the junk in the basement.)

But now it’s back-to-work time for me as well. Blogging twice a week for Discovery News has left room in my schedule, but I’m about to start a second weekly gig and am looking at one or two other possible regular arrangements. I’ve also been picking up one-time assignments–within the next few weeks, I owe various third parties two magazine articles and at least one blog post. Under these circumstances, I don’t mind being busy again.