So how many other people found themselves up super late last night/this morning to watch SpaceX’s historic launch?!
To be honestly, it was completely accidental that I just happened to still be up around 3:30am finishing up some writing, and when I saw the reminders of the 3:44am launch coming through on Twitter and Facebook, it seemed kinda silly to not stay up another half hour to watch. And talk about cool – admittedly in the past I’ve been a bit of a skeptic as the shuttles were being decommissioned, but it really felt good to watch SpaceX officially picking up the reigns where NASA had left off and having something to show for it … not just a prototype ship in a hangar in the desert, but taking another leap towards being the first private company in history to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station is kinda huge!
Anyways, so it looks like Dragon will be in orbit for a couple of days now before it’s actually able to dock with the ISS – looking forward to watching that, too! – but in the meantime, here’s a collection of screenshots that I took from the webcast that I thought turned out kind of cool. You can actually also go watch the original videos of each stage of the launch over on Vimeo as well.
Granted, I never looked to see if NASA did the same thing with some of its launches, but how cool is it that not only we live in a time when we’re watching a new industry erupt into space, but also communications technology is to the point where we can watch videos of the launch both from the ground and also from the rocket itself streamed live over the Internet in real-time?! 8)
