Brotoro

The external shots of the double boostback burn was great! Such dirty camera lenses on the boosters. Hopefully that will cook off before landing.

Flaming stick go up. Fun tracking camera view of boostback. Nice clear skies over Floridar. Coming back home… Landed On board and external views of landing.

Only the second flight of this booster. No wonder it looks rather clean.

I didn't say anything against using days or months or years. I spoke about dividing days arbitrarily into 24 hours, and hours into 60 minutes, and blocking days into arbitrary 7-day weeks... which people manage to deal with even though those aren't powers of ten.

Falcon 9 first stage landing successful!

Still no booster landing confirmation. Ah! Booster landing confirmed!

Liftoff... Max-Q MECO Entry burn complete No landing burn telemetry...

As I recall, the carrier maneuvered alongside the capsule and then hauled it aboard with a crane. But I never actually saw that step happen on TV... I think it took quite a while to do, hence the desire to get the astronauts to the ship in a more timely manner.

No, the Apollo astronauts exited their capsule (once divers had put a flotation collar around the capsule) onto a life raft. They were were then hoisted up to a helicopter which ferried then to the recovery carrier.

It doesn't strike me as mysterious why the X-37B is on long missions. It was originally a reusable spaceplane tested at NASA. Then the design was given to the Air Force as a research tool. Once the Air Force has a toy with interesting capabilities, they aren't going want to give it up. What, it only has a small payload capacity compared to other options (such as Dragon) that were developed later? Ah, but look what the X-37B can do: Very long duration missions! I bet your Dragon was built for that. So, they send an X-37B up on longer and longer missions to justify keeping them, at the cost of a launch vehicle every couple years. Whatever research they are doing can't be vital, or they would have several of them running in parallel (you don't want to wait two years to get your vital data only to have it lost in a reentry accident...you'd have more doing the research as backup).

Yes, the external (and onboard) video of the boostback and after was great. Clear, twilight-dark sky makes for good tracking camera shots.

Quickly changing? I don't think the numbers support this idea. A kilogram of Pu 239 has hundreds of billions of radioactive decays occurring within in every second. Cosmic ray flux of GeV particles is only 10^4 per square METER per second (the flux of TeV cosmic rays is only 1 per m^2 per second, and the flux rate for even higher energy particles falls off precipitously). And a kilogram of Pu has a cross-section of much less than a square meter. The number of Pu atoms being converted by cosmic rays (even assuming a 100% efficiency of conversion) is going to be insignificant compared to the number of conversions going on naturally inside the Plutonium all the time...and the chunks of Plutonium metal take that vastly greater number of disruptions to its crystal structure in stride without affecting its ability to go boom when you squeeze it. At least not on the time scales of our civilizations. The structures that make up a nuclear weapon are not nearly as susceptible to radiation damage as fragile biological and electronic components of spacecraft (and we already study those effects). Also, the outer layer of the physics package that makes up the radiation channel reflector outer layer will act to shield the internal components from external radiation. Your concern makes no sense to me.

The Artemis 1 trajectory makes sense to me now that I understand the Oberth effect and the limited amount of delta-V available in that weenie service module.

No. 0.9999... is equal to 1

If NASA's graphic is correct, the craft is now in sunlight. The time to look for it is now after separation so you can tell you are seeing the right thing because it's two objects.

Meh… Even at its altitude, Artemis has got to be in Earth's shadow when it passes south of us.

If that old ground track map is even close, it seems we have a good chance of seeing it.

"TransLunar Injection burn"... Now there's an exciting blast from the past.

Judging from the map on the wall in Mission Control, it doesn't look like I'm going to see anything... but it is an 18 minute burn...

Thanks... slowly loading...

I watched the night launch of the Apollo 17 Moon rocket on TV... the last lunar mission of the Apollo program. Almost 50 years later, I got to see another Moon rocket night launch. My TV screen is considerably larger this time. Yeah, a ground track would be nice.

Perigee-raising burn. It's like they are playing KSP. ...and NOW it's in orbit. Interesting view from the camera on the solar array wobbling during burn.

MECO. Let's see if they can stick the booster stage landing.

Burned out SEBs are spewing sparks like it's 4th of July.

And we have flammin', freakin' liftoff! Not at all like a Saturn V... that puppy moves.