With Saharan Desert dust in the sky, SpaceX launched Falcon 9 to orbit shortly after dawn on May 18, 2022 from Pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch was originally scheduled for 6:20AM local time, or shortly before dawn here, but it was delayed for nearly forty minutes for a 06:59AM ET liftoff.
Quite a number of my family members have worked in the space program at various points in their careers, and for some of them, it was their career. I’ve known for a long time that my late Mom had a relatively brief stint out at Kennedy Space Center / Cape Canaveral Air Force Station working as a nurse for TWA, who was contracted to provide medical services for the facility, but it’s rare to find any pictures of her working there.
I found one today in a pile of my Dad’s papers. I was looking for a report he had written about the state of Pad LC-39B after Apollo 10 launched, and came across this photo. My mother is the one on the right.
“STAND BY RESCUE UNITS AWAITING STATIC FIRING OF S/C #3 AT CRYO. BLDG.
L-R:: Mr. A. Mair, Mr. Harold Moore, Mr. Thain, Miss Penelon, Mrs. Dismukes, MILA”
Photo: NASA: 104-KSC-65C-880 / 1-15-65
At the time, she was still married (and soon to be divorced) from my biological father, hence the name Dismukes.
From May until sometime in October, the chance of an afternoon or an evening thunderstorm is omnipresent on the Space Coast. Sometimes you get both — summer is the wet season here, and you have to factor that into any plan you make for the evening. Such was the case last night, with scattered thunderstorms firing up in the late afternoon and continuing until after midnight.
For some folks — like me — that was disappointing, the longest total lunar eclipse in many a year was happening in the skies above us, and depending on where one was located, you either got to see the whole celestial show, or very little of it. I had planned a series of photographs marking the beginning to end of the eclipse cycle, but storms and their clouds kyboshed that completely. So go the plans of mice and men, it is said.
Then, just as the last slivers of direct sunlight were being chased off Luna’s surface by the encroaching shadow of the Earth, the clouds parted, but the air remained humid and thick. Alas, serendipity!
Using extreme settings that were disadvantageous to good photography, in mediocre atmospheric conditions, this is what I saw.
On Saturday, May 14 at 4:40 p.m. ET, SpaceX launched Starlink satellites to orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Click for three more photos…
SpaceX launched another batch of fifty-three Starlink internet satellites at 5:42 a.m. EDT (0942Z) May 6, 2022 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was its path to orbit as seen from Space View Park in Titusville.
At the end of World War II, Cape Canaveral was a quiet, sleepy place. The fishing village wasn’t much of a tourist destination, Banana River Naval Air Station was in disuse, and would close in September 1947 where it would be placed in a caretaker status.
That would change, however, on September 1, 1948, when the former naval air station was transferred to the newly formed US Air Force. In 1949, it was renamed the Joint Long Range Proving Ground, and was designated as the launch point for the military’s efforts to develop long range missile weapons.
It took until July 1950 for a rocket launch to happen at the new JLRPG. According to the NASA/US Army publication NIX 66P-0631, GPN-2000-000613:
“Bumper 8 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 kilometers, higher than even modern Space Shuttles flown many years later. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, the Bumper Project was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts.”
I set up my GoPro on the beach to record the scene on Playalinda Beach when SpaceX launched Starlink 4-16.
I set up for a wide angle view to capture the entire first stage portion of the flight — it made everything look further away than it actually was, but all in all, yeah, this is what its like to see a launch from here.
Playalinda is far better for launches from Pad LC-39A, as it is much closer than SLC-40 or SLC-41, but overall, it’s still a really good place to come. After all, you’re on one of the most beautiful beaches in Florida, and it’s really not crowded, even when the parking lots are full.
As seen from Playalinda Beach late in the afternoon. The same booster carried four astronauts towards the International Space Station about three weeks earlier this month.
And then there were two. After SpaceX launched Starlink 4-14 on April 21, 2022, there were “only” two rockets standing on top of their launch pads on the Space Coast.
Artemis-1 won’t launch this time around, instead, it will return to the VAB sometime around April 26, 2022 for repairs to a faulty valve as well as other processing. While it is gone, repairs and upgrades will be made to the ground support equipment on Launch Complex 39-B, and hopefully when the rocket is rolled back out, its Wet Dress Rehearsal will run more smoothly.
Crew-4 is scheduled to launch in the pre-dawn hours on April 27th, 2022. It will head to the International Space Station and deliver four NASA astronauts there to being a six-month stint onboard.
I’ve been seeing some discussion about the potential for a new launch pad to be built at Kennedy Space Center — LC-49. This has been on the site’s master plan in one form or the other dating all the way back to the 1960’s, and the potential of it actually being built has risen lately due to SpaceX’s Starship due to come online in the next 6-12 months.
“One potential new vertical launch area, Launch Pad 49, could be sited to the north of Pad 39B. This location avoids overflight issues with Pad 39B and minimizes conflict with the Canaveral National Seashore, giving potential non-NASA entities a flexible set of operational options. In addition, Pad 49 could use Beach Road as an access road, allowing for more autonomous operations and the option to operate outside of KSC’s secured area.”
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