First Space Launch From UK Soil Today

[elbows]

And then they just ended the livestream without having anything to offer other than the word anomaly, and thanking their customers and partners.

 

[elbows]

And Grant Shapps ffs

Being interviewed by a corporate slug and featuring shit about Shapps being a pilot himself. Shame they didnt strap him to the rocket.

 

[elbows]

Can we arrange to launch the B Ark from hitchhikers guide from the UK next time?

 

[steveseagull]

Well that was a load of cock. I am off to bed.

 

[Spymaster]

Me too.

There's a Falcon 9 going out of Cape Canavarel at 0450 (GMT), if anyone wants to watch a proper launch.

 

[elbows]

I would have been more forgiving of the weak presentation and lack of interesting visuals if they had at least managed to give us a consistent experience in terms of which mission control communications we got to hear. By failing to do that they also managed to botch up their coverage of the moment when the rocket launched from the plane, they basically missed it. And the useless commentator didnt even knowing what he was looking at shortly after that moment, until the penny eventually dropped.

 

[cupid_stunt]

#BrokenBritain

 

[Spymaster]

By failing to do that they also managed to botch up their coverage of the moment when the rocket launched from the plane, they basically missed it. And the useless commentator didnt even knowing what he was looking at shortly after that moment, until the penny eventually dropped.

That would’ve been funny if it weren’t so irritating. It took me a few seconds to figure out what we were looking at, then I realised we’d missed the main moment. Then I was waiting for the shot to change but it just stayed on the backwards view from the rocket into the darkness!

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Gloriously crap, and a perfect metaphor for this country at the moment.

 

[Voley]

I think the Science Minister might've given it another hour or so before he said this:

Science Minister George Freeman said: “This genuinely is a historic moment for Britain.

“We’ve won the space race in Europe.”

UK space launch: Historic rocket mission set to blast off from Cornwall

The first mission to launch a rocket into space from British soil has run into difficulties after Virgin Orbit said it appeared to have an "anomaly" which has prevented its rocket from reaching orbit.

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[Spymaster]

I think the Science Minister might've given it another hour or so before he said this:

Science Minister George Freeman said: “This genuinely is a historic moment for Britain.

“We’ve won the space race in Europe.”

UK space launch: Historic rocket mission set to blast off from Cornwall

The first mission to launch a rocket into space from British soil has run into difficulties after Virgin Orbit said it appeared to have an "anomaly" which has prevented its rocket from reaching orbit.

www.telegraph.co.uk

That would’ve been wanky even if the mission was a success, given that Virgin Orbit is an American firm staffed heavily by ex-NASA types.

 

[Spymaster]

£300 million I have seen bandied around. Though that seems a bit high to me.

On top of that it looks like VO shares are set to tank, wiping another $200 mil off the company value.

 

[JimW]

There's some comfort to be taken in the massive disappointment it will be for Branson.

 

[Spymaster]

It’s certainly been an expensive couple of days for Dickie.

 

[platinumsage]

See I told everyone it would be shit.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

So that went well.
Should have got a muskmobile.

 

[Supine]

the mission trajectory energy demands are well within the launch vehicle performance envelope.

Or not as it turns out

 

[Gromit]

The moment Grant Snaps turned up to claim glory I knew it was fucked.

 

[Spymaster]

The bloke from Cornwall Spaceport being interviewed on the BBC, trying to put a positive spin on losing 250 million quids worth of kit, was interesting.

 

[A380]

So the the UK remains the only country in the world that once had the capability to put a satellite into orbit but no longer dose...

 

[teuchter]

Well, this settles once and for all the question of whether Cornwall is competent enough to function as an independent country.

 

[Spymaster]

Well, this settles once and for all the question of whether Cornwall is competent enough to function as an independent country.

Spaceport bloke disagrees with you. His pitch was that the mission had shown that Spaceport Cornwall is viable, that the airspace and maritime space was well managed, etc. etc.

He barely stopped short of saying that the bit that fucked-up was American!

 

[Gromit]

Spaceport bloke disagrees with you. His pitch was that the mission had shown that Spaceport Cornwall is viable, that the airspace and maritime space was well managed, etc. etc.

He barely stopped short of saying that the bit that fucked-up was American!

The whole LauncherOne concept isn't that Cornwall is now a spaceport but that any runway in the world that can take a 747 is a spaceport.... Providing you don't mind a 60% success rate.

 

[WouldBe]

Should have used a milk bottle.

 

[elbows]

That would’ve been funny if it weren’t so irritating. It took me a few seconds to figure out what we were looking at, then I realised we’d missed the main moment. Then I was waiting for the shot to change but it just stayed on the backwards view from the rocket into the darkness!

I went back and watched that phase on the stream again last night. It was yet another moment where, for those who didnt mind the lack of interesting imagery and just wanted to know what was happening at each moment, the graphics were actually telling the story quite well. All that was required was for the commentary to be in harmony with the graphics and data, instead of in conflict with it. Because the timer graphic did manage to indicate that the rocket had launched from the plane, but the commentator at first didnt notice and then offered a completely false explanation for what that timer was doing.

If I had watched the whole thing without sound then I'd have had a near-realtime sense of each success and then the ultimate failure, rather than having my mind pulled in very different directions at key moments. At least the commentator had already failed to instil confidence earlier, and I am somewhat used to trusting my eyes and data far more than commentators narratives. So I wasnt led too far astray, the pull of the data and graphics was always stronger for me. Which ultimately led to me sitting around for a good half an hour waiting to see if a failure was eventually acknowledged, waiting to learn whether thats what the data we saw had actually been a sign of. On a vaguely related note, do people ever watch adverts with the sound off? That tends to reveal a layer of how they attempot to manipulate that is less noticable if our brains are having to process speech and music at the same time.

Also when I went back and watched the doom period again, the graphic where the rockets path was imposed over am image of part of the globe did actually show it plummeting. If nerds from one of those storm watching youtube channels had been doing commentary, I dont think they would have failed to notice.

 

[Spandex]

This has gone under the radar.

That was a prescient comment

 

[elbows]

Having rewatched the doom period data dashboard and taken some notes, I hope we eventually get a proper post-mortem with events labelled with precise mission time. Just so the nerdy side of me can see which data spikes were bad data and which were real or at least real signs of trouble.

At T +1hr 11min 47sec all was still showing up as being well and some mission control comms confirmed this.

T +1hr 12min 23sec was the first potential sign of trouble on the dashboard - there was a huge reading for G's on the GNC acceleration map graph.

Then followed periods of dashboard unavailability and various large spikes in speed and altitude data, and speed reading falling to 0. But some this did coincide with a switch of tracking station (Madrid).

T +1hr 13min 24sec they got the dashboard back, but various readings were all over the place including some scary gimbal readings at times over the subsequent 24 seconds.

T +1hr 14min 02sec no more main data dashboard, no more speed readings other than 0, altitude now starting to drop.

T +1hr 16min 31sec altitude had fallen all the way down to 244,030 feet, at which point we got no further altitude data updates.

That period ran from about 11.14pm to 11.18pm and then we had to wait nearly half an hour for some first acknowledgement of failure. On the few occasions that we heard from the commentator during this subsequent wait for news, he distracted us with graphics of how things should be going, and absolute bullshit excuses about how this was the most boring phase of the mission. This further raised my suspicions of failure at the time.

 

[Idris2002]

Who was running this one then? Eddie the Eagle?

 

[elbows]

Shortly after some of those 'interesting' data moments the microphone was picking up occasional sounds that I am tempted to think was someone banging their fists on a desk in frustration at failure, or the commentator being passed notes of doom. But the production values were so low that it could have been any number of coincidental bumblings.

 

[elbows]

#BrokenBritain