Covering All Things Florida
NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson has returned to Earth from the International Space Station. During her 184 days in space, she orbited Earth 2,944 times and traveled approximately 78 million miles.
SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Northrup Grumman’s Cygnus CRS-2 NG-21 (S.S. Francis R. “Dick” Scobee) to orbit this morning from Cape Canaveral. Liftoff was at 11:02 AM EDT under variable skies that showed a strong chance of storms coming in shortly afterwards.
SpaceX conducted a static-firing of the nine Merlin engines of a Falcon 9 booster first stage at SLC-40 last night as the company prepares to return to flight after a very rare in-flight failure on July 11.
Kennedy Space Center, FL – Today media gathered at KSC to greet the arrival of the NASA Pegasus barge ship carrying the iconic orange center core of the SLS Artemis ll rocket. It arrived about 10:30 this morning at the KSC Turning Basin where tugboats Termite and American position it at the dock so the rocket core can be unloaded and prepared for its truck journey to the nearby VAB son July 24th.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is set to launch its latest geostationary weather satellite, GOES-U, on June 25, 2024, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission, the final installment in the GOES-R series, will dramatically advance weather observation and environmental monitoring technology.
In what has become a rite of summer, it’s nearly Sargussum season on Florida beaches. In many recent years, thick brown mats of a macroalgae named Sargussum start washing up on the shorelines, sometimes reaching several inches in depth in early summer, and those mats linger until well into the season.
Sargassum often comes with a pungent stench attached to it — something between sewage and rotten eggs — due to the mats off-gassing Hydrogen Sulfide and Ammonia, among others. Hydrogen Sulfide smells like rotten eggs, and ammonia is most commonly linked to a stale urine smell. This makes a sargassum-covered beach a wholly unpleasant experience, and that’s before the brown water is created in the surf by Sargassum decaying in the water.
Sunday night saw an on-time launch for SpaceX’s latest Falcon 9 mission known as Bandwagon-1. The rideshare mission, SpaceX’s 35th of 2024, carried 11 satellites to a mid-inclination orbit (45 degrees) for six different companies. A mid-inclination orbit places satellites over populated areas rather than providing global coverage seen with standard polar orbits.
On March 7, 2023, the US Space Force, along with the Department of the Air Force, held the third of three in-person meetings in the Cape Canaveral / Titusville area, The purpose of the meetings was to provide information about a proposed Environmental Impact Study that would ultimately see SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy rocket launch and land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
When I was a kid, Wolfie’s in Cocoa Beach was one of my Dad’s favorites to take me out to eat. It was kid-friendly, unlike a place like The Mousetrap or other infamous and legendary Cocoa Beach haunts. They’re all long gone now, as is the nature of restaurants in a resort town. One that is especially missed by many is Wolfie’s, a place that not only had a great lunch but also a side note in space history that is funny today but was not at all amusing in the mid-1960s.
“Even the local newspapers had nothing to say about the launch and that sonic boom from the booster return. What happened to the media coverage of rocket launches? I left Florida wanting to see more launches, and learn all I could about space.”
Chris Leymarie
This story first appeared in Talk Of Titusville . Reproduced with permission.
A rarity is becoming commonplace lately here on the Space Coast, as SpaceX successfully launched two Falcon 9 rockets within eight hours of each other from the Eastern Range, returning both safely to the ground at the company’s Cape Canaveral landing zones.
Washington, D.C. – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reaffirmed its decision to deny SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband service nearly $900 million in subsidies for rural broadband deployment under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).
