The recent Falcon Heavy launch

by philg

I made it up to Titusville, Florida to watch the 6th Falcon Heavy launch. It was scheduled for a one-hour window starting at 7:29 pm so the Kennedy Space Center folks couldn’t be bothered to stay open and sell $250/person tickets for an up-close view. The wind was gusting to 30 knots all day, but forecast to quiet down around 8 pm and, therefore, SpaceX decided to launch at the very end of the window. A temporary flight restriction went live at 6:54 pm and cuts off a portion of the KTIX airspace, but the airport stays open and all runways are available to VFR pilots (I did not have to demonstrate my ability to land in a 30-knot crosswind, in other words).

Launches can be seen nicely from anywhere along the Intracoastal Waterway (regarding the channel markers: “red right returning doesn’t exactly work until you remember that the waterway goes from New Jersey to Texas and nobody wants to return to New Jersey”–local boat captain). My favorite spots are Shiloh’s, a local steakhouse with a lawn and some balconies, and the Space Bar, on a Marriott rooftop. Shiloh’s will have sports playing on its TVs and sometimes live music while the Space Bar plays the SpaceX YouTube feed (turns out that it is delayed by roughly 30 seconds).

The FBOs at KTIX close by 6 pm and most of the launches seem to be later in the evening. After hours, I prefer to park on the east side of the airport because it is a little closer for Uber so call U.S. Aviation for the gate code to get back in. The terminal will be closed, but there is a bathroom inside the fence for people who arrive after hours. The control tower closes at 9 pm, but there is pilot-controlled lighting, of course.

Shiloh’s from September 24, 2022:

Here’s the Space Bar setup:

The lobby and some other areas are fun too:

How did the launch look? I did not attempt to make an official record, since there were so many closer cameras pointed at the event. Here’s an interesting long exposure by Robert Wyman:

What about the sound? We were so far away that it did not hit us until about one minute after launch and was only a low rumble. A rocket launch in a movie theater is a lot more exciting, especially in the sound department. Still, it was fun to be in a crowd of people who appreciate space technology. After the launch, I caught a ride back to the airport with an interesting guy with whom I’d shared a table. He is involved with the training of firefighters to do water rescue. When I got back to Stuart, I found that a guy at APP Jet Center had been able to see the launch without taking more than a few steps outside:

Friends all the way down in Jupiter had also seen it.

Separately, I wonder why this ViaSat 3 system that was the payload makes economic sense. Each satellite supposedly has 1 terabit/second capacity. But how does that compare to the capacity of the entire Starlink system?

Going to Titusville and watching a rocket launch is the Florida $100 hamburger (closer to 1,000 Bidies, of course, when adjusted for inflation).

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7 thoughts on “The recent Falcon Heavy launch”

  1. Photographing a rocket launch from an airplane is a popular thing to do, but too practical for general aviation.

  2. These launches are awesome! My family and I saw one from that area a few years ago – we were taking a cruise out of Port Canaveral and realized that one was scheduled the (very early) morning of our cruise. We saw it from a parking lot off of the channel to the cruise port.

    One thing that surprised me is just how much the ground shook when the rocket took off. I believe we were still pretty far from the launch site, but we could definitely feel it. But it was great, both our girls (one of which is majoring in aeronautical engineering) still remember it. Going to have to remember Shiloh’s if we ever make it down there again!

  3. That was a fun story to read and thanks for the photos and the restaurant links. I was glad to see a good, clean Falcon Heavy launch and despite whatever misgivings I might have with his other ventures, I support SpaceX and their talented team wholeheartedly. Congratulations to everyone, SpaceX needed a win and it made one.

    • BTW the latest version of CorelTrace does a very nice job (with a little adjustment) vector tracing that neon astronaut. Adobe Illustrator’s tracing utility also does a good job but frankly, despite being a little faster (I believe it does some of the processing in the Cloud) it’s not as intuitive and the results aren’t quite as good, even if you use the docker options to tweak the trace. It also helps a lot to have a good, high-resolution source image with as little motion blur or lens correction as possible and your iPhone delivers on that.

      So after all these years, CorelDraw is still a useful tool to have in the box. They’ve kept the bloat to a minimum with PowerTrace and keep improving it. I’m buying a laser engraving system, hopefully pretty soon, maybe partially as a birthday gift, and PowerTrace does an excellent job turning bitmap images like that one into editable vector graphics. Then you can export the file and 3-D loft it, etc. The file sizes it produces are also more manageable. I don’t have the $$ right now for a cutting-edge PC, so generating a vector quickly and with a reasonable number of nodes and good curve smoothing, etc., is still important to me.

  4. Falcon Heavy is the most underrated rocket. Puts the ULA offerings to shame. Put them out of business actually.
    I may have more to contribute about SpaceX soon. Two brand new engineer grandchildren going to work at Hawthorne and Seattle (Starlink).

  5. Thanks for taking the time to share this experience. Perhaps you would consider to apply for SpaceX astronaut training?

  6. Surprised you are wearing a Disney T!?!? Your cult leader Desantis won’t approve!

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