Off work today for Presidents Day, and the house is quiet enough that I can actually finish a post before noon for once. Kids are at my sister's, coffee's still hot, so let's talk about the rocket launch from last Wednesday that I've been meaning to write up since it happened.
SpaceX put a satellite called DSCOVR into space on February 11th, riding a Falcon 9 up from Cape Canaveral at 6:03pm Eastern. Deep Space Climate Observatory. It sits about a million miles out, at a spot called L1 where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun balance out just enough that a satellite can sort of hover there instead of orbiting normally. From that spot it watches solar wind headed toward us and gives about 15 to 60 minutes of warning before a solar storm hits, which sounds small until you remember that's basically the only warning we get for something that can fry power grids and satellites. It'll also keep an eye on ozone and radiation levels and beam back full-disk images of the sunlit Earth, the kind of "blue marble" photo everyone loves.
Here's the part that actually got me interested though, and it's not the launch itself. This satellite is old. Really old, as these things go. Al Gore proposed it back in 1998 as a way to put a live picture of Earth online, sort of an educational thing, and people called it GoreSat as a joke, not always kindly. It got built, then it got shelved for over a decade because of politics and funding fights and general Washington nonsense, and it sat in a climate-controlled storage room at Goddard for something like 13 years before NOAA and the Air Force finally dusted it off and gave it a real science mission. So the thing that finally flew last Wednesday started as a punchline in a Congressional budget fight almost seventeen years ago. I think that's kind of wonderful, honestly. Not every good idea dies just because it gets mocked for a decade.
The launch itself had already been scrubbed twice, first because of a radar tracking issue on the Air Force's side, then because of high winds the next night. Third time worked. What didn't work was the part everybody actually wanted to see, which was SpaceX trying to land the first stage. Because DSCOVR needed to go so far out, the booster came back in way too fast and hot for a real landing attempt, so SpaceX had already lowered expectations there. But they'd also planned a softer experiment, guiding the stage down toward their drone ship in the Atlantic just to gather data, and even that got called off because the seas were running three or four stories high and the ship couldn't hold position. Elon Musk tweeted that the swells were basically a hurricane-level mess out there. No landing, no real attempt at one this time.
And I'll admit, that's the bit I actually care least about, which maybe puts me out of step with most of the coverage I saw. Everybody wants to talk about the landing, because it's flashy and new and there's something almost cartoonish about watching a rocket fly itself back down onto a boat. I get the appeal. But I keep coming back to the fact that we just launched a solar storm early warning system that spent thirteen years collecting dust because nobody could agree on paying for it, and now it's a million miles from here doing actual useful work. That's the story. The booster splashing into a rough ocean is a footnote.
I don't know why this stuff still gets me the way it did when I was eleven watching shuttle launches on a TV wheeled into the classroom, but it does. Anyway, if you want to see what DSCOVR's up to, NOAA's supposed to start posting the Earth images once it settles into position later this year. I'll probably post one here when that happens, assuming I remember.
Back to normal posting later this week. Enjoy the extra day off if you've got it.