Monday, June 14, 2010

Ohio Aerospace Hub Road Project

Here's a map of the recently announced pork road development project to support our innovation hub:
View Ohio Aerospace Hub Roadwork Development Grant in a larger map

I'm sure this will be welcome by the retailers on Brown St (now that they've successfully shuffled off their vagrant problem).

Friday, June 4, 2010

Falcon 9: Lift Off!

Falcon 9 launch successful on first test flight.  Wow!
First Stage In Flight

Successful Stage Separation
Second Stage Burn
Yeah, yeah, it's just a test.  But the cost of the entire development program (~$335M) for Falcon 9 is the same as a single test flight for Ares I-X (~$445M)...

From my perspective (as someone who's sat in the hot seat conducting flight tests), the really impressive thing with the SpaceX operation was their ability  to light the engines, auto-abort, and turn a new countdown/launch at the end of their range time.  There was clearly a whole lot of work in the design phase leading up to the impressive execution today that made saving the mission possible.  Nice.