SpaceX's Falcon Launches... Sort Of

JHarrison writes "Spaceflight Now is running a story on the SpaceX Falcon 1 launch yesterday. Those of you watching the stream will have no doubt noticed the telemetry failure at 04:50, and turns out that was more than them turning the webcast off.. "A year after its maiden flight met a disastrous end, the SpaceX booster lifted off at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 GMT Wednesday) from a remote launch pad on Omelek Island, part of a U.S. Army base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Controllers lost contact with the Falcon during the burn of the second stage that would have placed the rocket into orbit around Earth. "We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly," Elon Musk, founder and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said in a post-launch call with reporters. Live video from cameras mounted aboard the rocket's second stage showed increasing oscillations about five minutes after liftoff, just before the public webcast was cut off. The rolling prevented the necessary speed to achieve a safe orbit, instead sending the stage on a suborbital trajectory back into the atmosphere.""

Comments

So what?

[OriginalArlen]

I started writing a reasoned explication of the pointlessness and irrelevance of this whole story, but I made myself too angry with the uncritical "private space colonisation" fanboy mentality that says we'll all be living on Starship Enterprise in a century's time. To those people (probably everyone on this thread) I say this: turn off the damn Star Trek DVDs and get a life. Colonising space is an infantile fantasy. Grow up and get over it already, ffs.

Fuck, even this has now turned into flamebait. Dear Taco, could we possibly split the "science" section into "techno-utopia bullshit" and "actual science" categories please?