Dragon Is In Orbit!

On Dec 10, 6:17*pm, (Ian Stirling) wrote:
In sci.space.policy wrote:



On Dec 8, 11:06?am, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article
tatelephone,
says...
Whole ascent went just great, and they got some really good video of the
stage burns and Dragon separation.

I watched the video live and was amazed at how stable Falcon 9 was
during the 1st and 2nd stage burns. ?The earth (in the camera
background) was rock solid, which shows that the attitude and roll of
snip
Liquid fueled rockets are very smooth compared to solids. *Vibration
resistant gyroscopicaly stabilized cameras were first developed by the
movie industry for use on helicopters. *If you look at the rocket body
as well as the Earth I think some of the solidity had to do with the
excellent engineering that went into the camera as well as the rocket
itself.

I was looking at the point the edge of the main nozzle made with the earth.
It was remarkably stable. The camera can't have anything to do with this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ci9...eature=related

If you look at 1:05 through 1:12 (mission timer) - you'll see when
they go supersonic there's definite vibration. The first stage plume
also changes with altitude as it over-expands. At 3:10 you have first
stage separation - and there's a slight change of pitch - and then you
can see a 3 second oscillation - and a half second oscillation not a
vibration per say - but its hard to tell since the field of view is
being obscured by the second stage plume. At 3:47 the engine gimbals
actuate for a fraction of a second and you see the stage pitch a
little and then hunt around its ideal flight angle. Again at 5:38 -
6:31 - etc.