Chinese Space Station Lands in Hawaiʻi

We received an emergency alert text message on our phones early AM that said space station debris over the island of Oʻahu were possible. This is the first Chinese space station Tiangong-1 falling out of orbit. This was followed 20 minutes later by another message saying this was not a test and this time the possibility was real (as opposed to the message in January about an incoming ballistic missile that turned out to be false). There were some streaks of light in the sky although this is not unusual for Honolulu, which regularly has a fireworks show for tourists. Then some images from around the island started coming in.

Prince Kūhiō Day

Today is a state holiday in Hawaiʻi. Of course I forgot about it and went to work and wondered where everyone was.

It is named after Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole. He is the only royalty that has also been a delegate to the US Congress.

Here is a link to his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_K%C5%ABhi%C5%8D_Kalaniana%CA%BBole

SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch

Congratulations to SpaceX with the Falcon Heavy launch!

I've been waiting to see this for a long time and V and I watched the live feed this morning (I let everyone at work know ahead of time and the launch kept getting delayed by wind but there was no way I was missing this).  Seeing the 27 engine core and two boosters rise up to the sky, after all the worry about vibrations and forces pulling the ship apart on launch, the simultaneous double landing of the two boosters, and "starman" casually (one arm on the wheel) flying in the Tesla above Earth was simply amazing.

It sounds like the gliches were that two of the engines failed to ignite on the central core during landing so it smashed into the ocean at 300 mph and damaged two of the drone ship engines. And, they overshot the Hohmann transfer to Mars orbit.  The latest I saw, a few minutes ago, is that it is headed to the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Juniper!

I call this a huge win! A company, not a country, put something into a heliocentric orbit that will make it out to the Asteroid Belt and back. With all the negative things happening in the news both in the US and around the world it is wonderful to have something positive, exciting (a risk and an achievement), and simply fun for a change.

That is all for now.  I am going to try to add some screen captures I took while watching the live stream (it is unreal to see the car with Earth in the background) and a graph of the predicted orbit. One last comment however, in the followup news conference when Elon Musk was answering questions he said something to the effect that this was just a start, he could easily imagine scaling up the frequency of launches, with simultaneous recoveries and returns, and that they needed to be thinking even bigger.