Video Credit & Copyright:
Video 1: NASA
Video 2: SpaceX
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 was a great day for SpaceX as earlier in the day, Dragon returned from the ISS to officially complete a successful CRS5 mission. Later at 23:03 UTC (18:03 EST) a Falcon 9 rocket listed off from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) Florida carrying the Deep Space Climate ObserVatoRy (DSCOVR) for NASA, NOAA and the United States Air Force.
This is SpaceX’s first deep space (non-Earth orbit) mission as it will take DSCOVR 115 days to traverse the 1 million miles to its comfortable L1 Lagrange point where it will monitor the Sun and Earth (but mostly the Sun) and act as early warning to any solar mass thrown at us from the Sun. Here’s my write up on the mission: https://danspace77.com/2015/02/05/spacex-to-launch-dscovr-for-the-air-force-noaa-nasa/
Unfortunately, due to weather conditions, “Just Read the Instructions” drone barge couldn’t be on location to facilitate the 1st stage landing but the 1st stage did make a successful, vertical soft water landing only about 10 meters from its projected landing point. That’s good news because this flight, being a deep space flight meant that the 1st stage was dealing with higher heights, faster speeds and hotter temperatures than Earth orbit flights and still made its mark.
NOAA DSCOVR Press Kit: http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/DSCOVR/press.html
NOAA DSCOVR website: http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/DSCOVR/
Elon Musk Twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk