As always, AWESOME!!!

I think it's time for them to put a little mute on the people cheering tho.. Perhaps put the talker-people farther away.

That landing camera is always a tease.

Bump for the Iridium launch Tuesday afternoon. Sounds like there won't likely be a booster landing (it's starting to look like they won't bother with anything but Block V boosters moving forward), but they're still working on recovering the fairing with these west coast launches.

Won't be the most exciting launch of the year, but meh...rockets.

T-15 minutes (ish)

I think I'm gonna let the constantly-updating countdown in the OP thing go for now. It's kind of a pain to keep that updated, especially when launch dates tend to float around a lot. Now that we've basically just hit the "steamroller" stage when SpaceX is launching relatively mundane missions every couple weeks, it's hard for even me to get all that excited about every single mission.

I'll still bump the thread if I'm watching a launch, and I encourage others to do so as well. I'll still post interesting news as it comes up, and I'll be sure to give everyone a heads-up for any particularly notable launches moving forward. It's really just the OP counter and next mission info that's changing. Just use the links in the OP if you want to see what's coming up for yourself.


But on the subject of news, it looks like crew Dragon to ISS is currently NET January 2019.

http://www.sworld.com.au/steven/space/uscom-man.txt

Launch attempt coming up in 30 minutes if anyone's interested. Pretty mundane launch - block 4 booster that won't be recovered. They're still experimenting with fairing recovery, but they don't have a ship out there to try and catch it. It's pretty much same 'ol same 'ol.

It is pretty awesome that they have already gotten to the point where launches are boring.

If anyone's up late, a launch is coming up in an hour (1:50 am EST). This is the second launch of a Block 5 booster, and all of them will be moving forward. Landing on the drone ship.

In theory, this booster won't have to be torn apart at all (the first B5 was just to verify that everything was as they expected), so we might see this one fly again soon-ish.

Crazy cool shot from last night's launch.

https://i.imgur.com/cEXLQho.jpg

Credit to /u/TMahlman on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comm...ld_happen_and/

THAT is a really cool shot! Thanks for sharing (and bumping this thread from time to time).

Last minute bump. Launch in 2.5 minutes.

Entering a 40-minute coast. This is unimportant but kind of fun - Iridium (customer for the launch) put together a playlist for the launch and synced it to the various events. So you hit play at T-10:30 and then had a nice soundtrack for the launch including Thunderstruck at launch, Return to Sender at boostback, and Welcome Back when the booster landed. ROFL

Gotta love how "boring" these have become.

Late launch tonight if any night owls will be up. GTO mission, barge landing. Only thing notable is that it's the first reuse of a Block 5 (the first one flown). Hopefully we'll see this one fly again shortly for the first multi-use vehicle.

Looks like the crew access arm is being installed at LC-39a.

https://i.redd.it/ezsmiapvbah11.jpg

Kind of bizarre seeing that futuristic arm attached to a giant hunk of metal from 50 years ago, but whatever works!

FWIW, they're now targeting November for the first demo launch of Dragon 2 and April 2019 for the first crewed demo.