Tuesday 23 December 2014

Orion EFT-1 Launch

In our second week in the US, we moved North from Miami to Orlando with the express purpose of getting down to the Kennedy Space Centre for the historic launch of the Orion Experimental Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) atop a Delta IV heavy rocket. We were there from 3am, right the way through to 9:44 am when the launch was wonderfully scrubbed..... Shattered but not defeated, we were back the very next day and got to watch the successful launch during the very first try! Hurrah!

Sadly, the stage commentator only noticed that the TV screens were well over a minute out, not the 10 seconds out they had believed, and so we missed out on doing a countdown. In fact, I was one of the few people where we were standing that actually managed to get a video of the launch - everyone else missed it! So my video of the launch is posted below.

The viewing site was built for the space shuttle launching 3 miles away, so the launch of the Orion was over 8 miles away! This means that the footage is not great. Also, at that distance, the rocket was out of sight into the clouds by the time you could hear it, over a minute after lift-off! Note that I included a panorama of the morning, just before the launch; lift-off is at ~25 seconds in.

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