<story><title>SpaceX&apos;s First Official Cargo Resupply Mission to the ISS - Launch Webcast</title><url>https://new.livestream.com/spacex/CRS1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nkoren</author><text>One of the best things to happen during this launch is that an engine exploded. You can see engine 1 eat itself at 1:31 in this video:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRTYh71D9P0&amp;#38;feature=youtu.be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRTYh71D9P0&amp;#38;feature=youtu...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Edit: First the video was public, then it was made private, now it seems to be &quot;unlisted&quot; but viewable. So no guarantee that it&apos;ll still be there in another minute...]&lt;p&gt;Why is this a good thing? Because it proves a point: the rocket automatically adjusted its trajectory, and continued on its course as if nothing had happened.&lt;p&gt;The Falcon 9 is the first American rocket since the Saturn 5 with an engine-out capability. Its multiple symmetrically-arrayed engines allow for it to compensate for a sudden loss of thrust from one side: the other side reduces thrust as well to stay balanced, and everything else just burns a little bit longer. That was the theory, anyways. Today they put it into practice.&lt;p&gt;For any other rocket that you&apos;ve seen launched in the last 35 years, that would have ended the mission catastrophically -- but the Falcon shrugged it off like nothing had happened. They always said they could do that, and now they&apos;ve done it. Congratulations, SpaceX! Creating a fault-tolerant rocket is &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; better than creating a faultless one (since that&apos;s impossible).&lt;p&gt;[Edit]: In the absence of the video, the engine anomaly is being widely reported on Twitter: &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/spaceteam/status/255128401927610368&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://twitter.com/spaceteam/status/255128401927610368&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/visionik/status/255128010653593600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://twitter.com/visionik/status/255128010653593600&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>SpaceX&apos;s First Official Cargo Resupply Mission to the ISS - Launch Webcast</title><url>https://new.livestream.com/spacex/CRS1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mixmax</author><text>I have a favour to ask of HN.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m responsible for webcasting Copenhagen Suborbitals launches, and we&apos;re having a lot of great discussions about what works and what doesn&apos;t in a live webcast of a launch. We obviously want our webcasts to be as interesting as possible, and so I&apos;d like to ask you a question:&lt;p&gt;What do you think could be done better in this Space X webcast? Is there something you&apos;re missing? Something you think would be cool? Something that&apos;s bothering you? Are the speakers good? Why?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sure we can learn a lot by asking potential viewers what they think, and implement it for next summers launches.&lt;p&gt;And good luck to SpaceX!</text></comment>