June 9, 2020 The Ultimate in Social Distancing

The Liberty Gazette

June 9, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Everybody’s talking about the SpaceX launch. After scrubbing the Demo-2 launch May 27, success came three days later. As we say, when there’s a problem, it’s better to be on the ground, wishing you were up there, than being in the air wishing you were on the ground.

But May 30 was the date when Falcon 9 sent Crew Dragon’s second demonstration mission from Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station (ISS). This test flight with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley put the United States back in the business of human spaceflight. It was the final major test for SpaceX’s system to be certified by NASA to send humans up there again.

Mike: I had the honor of the NASA astronauts attending my International Procedures course. They periodically took it to keep current for flying within the earth’s atmosphere for travels to Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan to ride aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS.

SpaceX builds the rockets and NASA builds the astronauts. Their commercial crew program is expected to turn America’s future toward the moon, Mars, and beyond. Whoever said the sky’s the limit obviously wasn’t an astronaut.

It took about 19 hours to blast to their destination 262 miles up. How long Bob and Doug will be at the ISS is undetermined, but anywhere from 30-90 days, maybe longer. They have work to do, joining the ISS Expedition 63, maintaining the station and carrying out scientific experiments and tests.

Whenever they’re finished and it’s time to come home, they’ll depart in their spacecraft, jettison the trunk, conduct the de-orbit burn, which only lasts about 12 minutes, and will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere.

At 18,000 feet altitude, two drogue parachutes will deploy, and then at 6,500 feet the four main parachutes will deploy. They’ll splash down just off Florida’s Atlantic Coast at a velocity of 25 feet per second, and then be scooped up by SpaceX’s Go Navigator recovery vessel.

All of this, from launch to splashdown, happens autonomously. Bob and Doug even got a good seven hours of sleep on the way up.

Linda: SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, was so emotional that he could barely talk with reporters after the launch. He’s spent many long years building a great team and great products, working toward this day. Engineers of all ages, from all walks of life, jumped and cheered as they watched their personal contributions roar into space. These were the kids who chose STEM courses and studied, who stayed off the streets because the rewards are greater than thug life. Not all of them came from privileged homes, but all of them had dignity, made goals, and worked hard.

On May 30, in the midst of chaos, violence, virus, and fear, a tweet by a kid named Andy Milonakis went far and wide, with four million ‘Likes’ and a million retweets: “Congratulations to the Astronauts that left Earth today. Good choice.”

One thing’s for sure, space travel offers the ultimate in social distancing.

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