Three launch pads: on the left in the background, SpaceX is raising a launch tower for Starship. Center, Artemis-1 on its launch pad. Right, in the background, is where SpaceX launches its Falcon-class rockets, including astronauts into Earth orbit.
Three days, three launches: with a distant thunderstorm as the backdrop tonight, SpaceX boosted a voice and data relay satellite into orbit for Globalstar. This was the view from Bennett Causeway in Port Canaveral.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 booster B1060 for a record-breaking 13th time Friday from Pad LC-39A from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT). It placed hauling 53 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit.
I took part with Dr. Subrata Ghoshroy, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a discussion about the current state of international space cooperation on TRT World, a Turkish news outlet. Moderated by Ms. Ayse Surbecker, it was a pleasant experience all around.
I’ve been on television before, but not in a long time and never remotely via computer. It was an interesting and fascinating experience.
SpaceX launched an Egyptian communications satellite toward a geostationary orbit June 8th from Cape Canaveral. It was the first commercial launch of a geostationary payload in 2022 as the market shifts towards lower-orbit satellites.
Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 5:04 p.m. EDT (2104 GMT) from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
As seen from Bennett Causeway:
Back in the days of landline POTS telephony (plain old telephone service, without data) six people died annually in the US while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. That’s right — half a dozen folks met their end getting zapped by their telephone in a storm. The Old Wive’s Tale from the time was true. Of course, now that most everyone’s phone is wireless that’s a thing of the past, but there are still a lot of wired networks all over the world that use “outside plant” by necessity. The power grid, for one, but there are others. And they are all at risk for lightning strikes that can carry into your home or office and have rather…unpleasant…consequences.
In my younger days, I spent my time in research and development laboratories, first doing fiber optics applications with medium powered lasers, then later, in regular telephony materials research. One of the areas of focus my team worked on were low cost novel materials for lightning protection down phone lines, including on the side of homes where the telco networks interfaced with the customer’s premises wiring. There was a device called a NID, short for network interface device, where the lines joined. And there, we were working on a resettable lightning fuse that would short if a certainly energy level was reached and then reset itself automatically.
Through the years, I have photographed a lot of landscape, fashion, decaying architecture and sports professionally, and have enjoyed some decent success in each realm. No, I don’t view myself as any kind of Richard Avedon or Ansel Adams, but I do think a handful of my photos could be fairly termed “good.” I’ve enjoyed that journey and the experiences that went with it, and perhaps that is the most important thing.
Rocket launch photography is a whole other animal. To make a great launch shot, you need access (the closer the better), and the ability to deal with some very mixed conditions: the fire and flame is incredibly bright while the rest of the photo is either in normal light or at night. In the early days of digital cameras the available dynamic range was lacking, and film has its own personality — chrome (slide) film has maybe a +/- 2 stop latitude, and negative film perhaps as many as +/- 5 stops. That’s helpful, but color darkroom is a bear in its own right. That said, dodging and burning in is really hard for color.
Anyway, for the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-123 launch in 2008, I set up with negative film and essentially ran a whole roll of film through in the first few seconds of launch. The initial shots were kind of…okay…but the third to last one was a real keeper.
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
To celebrate our twentieth anniversary, my wife and I took a trip to Yosemite National Park in California. This is where we got married all those years ago, just her and I in the Yosemite Chapel. We’d both had the big church hoo-ha in the past, and neither of us were interested in having another day of pomp and circumstance again…the point was to celebrate our relationship, to forge a new union and to enjoy the whole experience.
It worked out. Rather well, in fact. For two decades, we’ve managed to ride the highs and the lows, and have stayed committed to each other. Yay us. It’s a lifelong commitment and I think it will last until we’re gone.
Here are some photos that I took while we were out west:
Photo ©2022 Charles Boyer
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SpaceX launched fifty-nine small satellites along with experiments on Wednesday, May 25, 2002 at 2:35 p.m. EDT (1835 GMT) from Cape Canaveral using a Falcon 9 rocket. After staging, the Falcon booster returned to Cape Canaveral Space Station and landing about eight-and-a-half minutes later.
The Space Coast Air Show was held May 21-22, 2022 at Space Coast Regional Airport, the airport formerly known as Tico Airport. Turnout was good, with a healthy crowd of several thousand people on hand to see some of the best military and stunt aircraft in American history on display. Here are some photos from Saturday, May 21st.
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