T-00:02:00 
Sure disappeared into the clouds quickly.
T+00:03:00 boosters separated, fairing off, looking good
T+00:10:00 main engine shutdown, upper stage firing
T+00:15:00 Thinking about back to sleep after they get solar power switched on.
T+00:30:00 Upper stage cutoff and separated. At least the Ariane people can relax now.
Telescope power is on.
Now not sleepy, damnit.
SpaceX has really spoiled me with their continuous live footage from the rocket, there’s clearly a camera on this mission but so far all they’ve shown is the fairing deployment.
There was a lot of this going on I bet.
https://twitter.com/drbecky_/status/1474722109863649289?t=zWK59fUp6JtbfmqxqQSTKw&s=19
Had to turn off the Nasa stream when the religious mumbo-jumbo started - going back to it shortly.
Right after the boosters separated, they pivoted the camera, but it looked for a second like the rocket was wobbling. It was very “Oh shit!”
Oof, so much science is riding on this mission. IIRC it’ll take months to fully deploy the telescope, I’ll be sweating it the entire time.
6 months is what I am reading.
i considered myself well informed, but was wondering why they can’t service it in the future, and it turns out it will be at a lagrange point beyond the moon! i should pay more attention.
They’re putting this telescope way above LEO for noise reduction purposes so I think sending apes out there to fix it is much harder. Also (Im guessing here) it’s insanely hard to design components that can be serviced while wearing giant spaceman gloves and anyway modern electronics are way more reliable these days.
That video interview posted a bit up thread touched on this. It’s going to be insanely far away. Way, way, way further than the Hubble.
It actually has a docking ring in case we are much more advanced in AI bots doing space travel 10 years from now when it runs out of fuel but we definitely have no way to fix it if something goes wrong during deployment.
What I really want to know is what the first picture will be. I am sure this has already been decided but not shared with the public.
It’s supposed to be a surprise, they’ve already picked what it’s going to be but haven’t said yet.
I think there’s two parts to this. On the actual launch side, SpaceX is already dominating NASA launches. Of the 12 upcoming missions that have been assigned, SpaceX has 8 of them. What’s more, there aren’t really even any competitors for future awards of high-profile launches now that Delta IV and Atlas V aren’t taking new customers. Vulcan will be there eventually, but it needs to fly and then get certified by NASA, which requires some operational history. Plus SpaceX owns manned spaceflight. So with NASA as a customer, I think they have the organization on lockdown.
The other side is NASA as a sugar daddy, doling out development dollars. Here I definitely agree that the big contractors have a huge advantage, but I think that some of those development contracts are actually pretty toxic long-term. A central element of Elon Musk’s genius as a businessman is taking iterative, startup-style development and making it work for ultra-high-complexity real-world engineering. That approach requires both lots of customer feedback and lots of flexibility to make radical changes during development. As a concrete example, Starship was originally intended to be carbon-fiber, and they even started buying giant piece of CF machinery to make prototypes, but then they pivoted to stainless steel for cost/performance reasons. If SpaceX was just a prime contractor for a big government program like Boeing is for SLS, there’s absolutely no way they could have made that change. They’d be stuck building a carbon-fiber white elephant with no plausible customers until the program either got cancelled or limped to an ignominious conclusion. Potentially lucrative, but not pretty.
Re: Peter Beck, the dude founded his own rocket company and successfully built a working orbital rocket! How many dues does the man need to pay??
This is pretty cool:
I’m betting on it being an update of a very well known Hubble image, like the Hubble Deep Field or Pillars of Creation.
ESA launched it so perfectly NASA now expects a minimum 10 years of service from JWST, compared to the minimum baseline of 5 years for the mission.
That’s good news but there’s still a lot to sweat before operational day 1.
