Falcon 1: Third Time Was ALMOST the Charm
Herb Schaltegger wrote in
.com:
Watching the webcast right before telemetry was lost, it looked like
the vehicle was going into a spiral - the guidance was chasing the
trajectory and the oscillations were getting larger and larger.
Too bad - first stage, staging and fairing sep looked clean. The
webcast was pretty good too.
The pretty pictures will tell almost as much as the telemetry.
I'd say it was unique that an orbital launch vehicle had an
ignition abort and was launched in spite of that only an hour
later. A full success would have been great, but SpaceX otherwise
had a pretty good day. Hopefully their next launch will come
in reasonably short order.
--Damon
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