Firefly Alpha looks to be on for tonight — technically Saturday morning. Launch window is same as this am. 0001h to 0201h, to adopt the military idiom. Got the optics aligned.
Vicarious Launch Operations lead reports dessert is internal, and beverage chilldown is proceeding nominally. Meteorology reports clear and visibility unlimited, with a nipple-crinkling breeze from the southwest.
Live stream starts in about an hour.
2342h: go for terminal count. They say that yesterday’s “light’m up and shut’m down” event at T-0:01 was from a sensor in one of the four stage 1 engines reporting conditions not quite right.
10/01/0010h: A fine launch! Count and ignition were without a hitch.
At T+0:55 (approximately; the webcast was near-live with maybe a 20 second delay) it broke local horizon — about as bright as Jupiter from my location 150 miles eastish. It was very nice in the 20x100s on a ball mount “tight enough to point, loose enough to track”. Orange-yellow flame, and with the binocular field providing a fixed angular (field of view) reference, the acceleration was evident.
At that point I abandoned my count (I count seconds within a coupla percent) and watched. The plume grew longer, wider, less dense, and a bright leading point (likely hot engine bells) kept climbing.
The flame went faint, long and blue — went out — five seconds of dark, and the second stage lit, whiter than the stage 1 exhaust.
For the next three minutes, the dot of the burning engine made just enough light to illuminate the exhaust plume that got wider and wider as the air thinned out. That big vacuum bell is radiatively cooled and orange-hot. Then it was a faint (magnitude 7 or 8?) dot arcing down to the horizon.
I lost it at about T+06:20, less than a degree above local horizon. Less than a minute later, the exuberant presenter called out engine cutoff. The stage and payload successfully arrived in a retrograde orbit.
Time to hug the pup and go to bed, savoring the cool desert night breeze.
I hope they’ll launch a Falcon or something an hour or two before sunup. It would be wicked cool to see the upper stage emerge into sunlight.