Moon Shot; 1969

[mhajicek]

A high altitude vomit comet. They only got a few seconds of zero G.

 

[Bobw]

Congratulations Sir Richard Branson,

The first "space tourist". Job well done.

Its about fricken time they used the space port for something.

Kind of anti climactic. I didn't get a shot of the capsule actually
going up, just didn't think of it, but it was kind of cool. I thought
we would get a sonic boom on the way up, but we didn't. We got a good
one when it came back though.

This is the one shot I got. White Knight 2 directly above the shop
climbing through 40,000 ft at about T -11:00.

If it wasn't so humid, there wouldn't have been a contrail, and it
would have been almost impossible to spot. I've tried looking for it
before when it was tooling around, and wasn't able to see it.
A 737 without a contrail at 36,000 is almost impossible to spot, I don't
even try anymore. Wide bodies show up pretty good though.

The cell phone camera only zooms in so much.

Here is the link if you really want to zoom in on it. Its still far away,
but you can see it better.

All sizes | 2021-07-11_11-23-58 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

 

[otrlt]

Sir Richard could have perhaps launched this historic mission from his homeland, but instead, he chose to come to the southwest of the USA.

Why is that? The deserts of California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico are where aerospace subcontractors reside. Although today's events were not nearly as significant of what happened nearly 60 years ago, California aerospace contractors are going to get allot busier.