Maybe, after 1st stage separation. During the 1st stage burn, however, the automatic light adjustment was too heavily influenced by the darker rocket body. The ground just appeared as pure white. After stage separation, clouds and islands could be seen, but, not being familiar with the local geography, I didn't know what was what. Perhaps if you viewed the video mentioned by Patrick, you'd be able to see it. Joe Bauman wrote:
Thanks for the message! Did you get to see anything of Kwaj? -- Joe
As other emails mentioned, yesterday's launch was scrubbed. However after some difficulty, today's launch finally happened. It could have been much better than it was. The connection was pretty inconsistent, usually showing a new frame every 5 seconds or so. About the longest continuous stream I was able to get was 15 or twenty seconds. Several times I lost the connection entirely.
Anyway, today's launch got down to 0, the ignition started, then automatically aborted. I never picked up on why it aborted from the control room chatter. Humorously, one of the controllers, apparently not aware his mike was still hot, seemed to be whispering to a colleague, "Look at all that water! Mother @#$%!" He was referring to the deluge of water they pour onto the launch pad to avoid heat damage to the equipment. He went on to express his amazement in similar terms for quite some time.
By and by, they decided to reset the count to T - 16:00 minutes and try again. This time the rocket launched, about an hour after it was originally scheduled to launch.. Immediately upon launching, the camera view switched to an on board camera looking straight back along the rocket's path. It was frustrating because of the inconsistent connection problem. I watched until a little while after the first stage separation, then completely lost connection again. If I could have gotten a continuous stream, it would have been very impressive.
Joe Bauman wrote:
Darnit, I was not able to make this iMac connect to the site. Did anyone watch the launch? Did you get some nice views of my dear old atoll? Best wishes, Joe
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