My Sunday Afternoon Web 2.0 Moment

Every now and then, you get blown away by the tech infrastructure we take for granted most days. My latest Web 2.0 moment happened over lunch at Joe's Garage when my Twitter feed updated with a tweet from @drtiki, of TikiBar TV fame (the podcast that I showed in the lecture the other week). The brother of the producer for TikiBar TV, @tuscamosk, is Elon Musk, who founded Paypal which was then sold to eBay for lots of $$$. He used some of the proceeds to start up a space aeronautics company, SpaceX that was looking to become the first privately funded company to launch a vehicle into earth orbit.

Following along via both Twitter and SpaceX's live webcast, I watched in real time as the launch went through a couple of aborts, and then finally liftoff. About 2 minutes in, as the first separation stage was occuring, the engine exploded (live webstream from the rocket going blank). Official word still hasn't come out yet what's happened, but updates from people in the command centre via twitter suggest the engine exploded. Within minutes, video of the aborted launch was posted to various sites, such as here, and Wikipedia had been updated with the details of the failed launch.

So here I am, sitting in Fitzroy eating lunch, and before the engineers have had a chance to say 'who tripped over the plug?' I have watched an attempt at achieving spaceflight history in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, its ups and downs to launch, liftoff and then 'an anomally', with post disaster analysis all in real time; and now I'm blogging about it all before the first media statement to news agencies. All thanks to simple technologies like RSS, twitter and blogs.

Watch the launch here:



Update: news reports starting to filter in. The payload for the flight included 3 sattelites (one of which was a solar sail experiment), and the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek's Scotty, James Doohan.

I hope Elon Musk's other project is a bit more reliable than the Falcon 1 - I really, really want one.