Inspiration4 Launch Livestream [video]

Here is a countdown to the targeted launch time at 8:02 p.m. EDT (00:02 UTC) to save you from having to do timezone math and possibly mess-ups (I let the page create the countdown and triple checked it;). Check it out - it has a rocket:

https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/launch?iso=20210915T20...

Ars Technica's excellent space reporter Eric Berger has an article on private orbital spaceflight by the way.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/four-private-citizen...

Now let's keep our fingers crossed and wish the crew of Inspiration4 to "Fly safe" as Scott Manley would say.

Edit: if you want to see what's happening on Twitter, here is a search for the hashtag "Inspiration4": https://twitter.com/hashtag/Inspiration4?f=live

This is an amazing mission, and I'm really looking forward to following their progress.

I am disappointed however, at casual factual errors being stated by the presenters. They produced a graphic showing that this mission will be targeting an orbit higher than the Hubble. This is correct, for Hubble's current altitude. However, the accompanying commentary then stated Inspiration4 will fly higher than any mission since Apollo. This is not correct. STS-103 [0] a servicing mission by Discovery to the Hubble in 1999, had an apogee of 609km - higher than the planned orbit for this mission.

The same casual error / re-definition of an already accepted term applies to the "all-civilian crew" line. The Ars Technica article [1] covers this point well; plenty of all non-military space flights have occurred.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-103 [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/four-private-citizen...

Weather is 90% "go" by the way, that is there is only 10% probability of violating weather constraints. You can find the report summary at the page of the Space Force 45th Weather Squadron doing the launch support for that:

https://www.patrick.spaceforce.mil/Portals/14/Weather/Falcon...

(If you want to look up the same for other launches, go to https://www.patrick.spaceforce.mil/About-Us/Weather/ Look for a box saying "Launch support" in which an upcoming launch will have a link to its weather report)

can't wait!