- It is the day after the historic Falcon Heavy launch.
I'm here with Darrell at the
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
These are not the rockets that went off.
These are historic rockets from the past,
real rockets, but not active.
I've never even been to this area before.
- No, me neither.
I mean, I've been covering space at TechCrunch
for about two years now,
but haven't had the chance to come down
and see it in person.
It's awesome to see it in person.
- It's really cool, the town is really normal though.
It's just like a normal, sort of like,
suburban Floridian town.
- It's great, but you just randomly run into people
who are rocket engineers.
- Yeah, they're just like, "Oh, you're going to the launch?
"Yeah, I used to be an engineer
"on the Challenger or whatever."
And then the actual launch area,
I didn't know it's an actual Air Force base.
I wasn't sure if it was just like a NASA facility,
but you know, it's all access-controlled and stuff.
- Yeah, very much access-controlled.
(Devin laughs)
So much so that I'm not allowed on there
because of my Canadian heritage.
- You weren't allowed
on the actual launch day, - Yeah.
- But we got to go the day before.
- [Darrell] And set up shots and take a look
and get in really close to the rocket too,
the Falcon Heavy, pretty close, pretty close.
We were right there in the part with the exclusions
or whatever they call it, right?
Where you're not allowed to be.
And some people set up remote cameras.
- [Devin] Yeah, I didn't know how that works.
- So basically, they were setting up
sound triggers and when the rocket goes off,
it's close enough in.
There's no sound delay, right?
So it's setting off the camera
and they're taking shots like rapid-fire.
- [Devin] I loved how they had
those weird little enclosures.
Some of em looked like they were 20, 30 years old.
- Yeah, one was just a mailbox.
(Devin laughs)
- I've never been that close
to a launch site obviously,
and this was a historic pad too.
This was 39A where they launched Apollo missions,
what else?
- [Darrell] Space Shuttle missions
- [Devin] Space Shuttle missions they launched from there.
And now we have this amazing three booster,
just super-unprecedented launch from SpaceX,
and everything went great.
- They could have landed the third--
the core booster, which missed the drone ship
and then--
- [Devin] By not that far, but actually,
it's probably better that it didn't hit it directly.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Cause it was going 300 miles an hour.
- Definitely could have been worse.
- So day of, we had a lot of delays though,
I was really worried.
We thought it was not gonna go for a while
cause we were just sitting there,
we got on this bus and, you know,
they said, "Oh, it's delayed by half an hour
"because of the high winds."
Like what we've got right now.
And we're like, "Okay, sure, yeah, that's normal."
And then they're like,
"Oh, we're gonna delay another half hour."
And then another, and then another--
- [Darrell] And once they start stacking like that,
and it's always about these high wind advisories,
at least the people where I was,
probably where you were too,
started saying, you know,
there's a lot of just talk of just what's gonna happen.
And a lot of them were saying,
"Oh, it's probably not gonna go off."
Like we're getting too close too the end of the window,
it's probably not gonna happen,
just based on, I guess, past experience.
But that's something you don't get
when you're remote, too, right.
You don't get all the that,
you don't get the people
just sorta kinda sharing information,
trying to see what's going on.
You can listen in to the official count, right,
and the updates as SpaceX gets them,
but people are just kinda making theories too
and figuring stuff out on their own.
- [Devin] Yeah, there's people who'd been to
you know, 10, 20, 30 launches,
like just veterans who live in this area
and they were using like all their local knowledge.
There was a guy who just had a pin for everything,
his entire hat was covered in pins.
He's gonna have to get a new hat soon.
(laughs)
- [Devin] But eventually the launch did actually go off.
But we were in different places,
we had a couple different people here.
I was with VM, we were on the causeway,
this sort of bridge area, beautiful little beach,
and we had this great view of you know
directly out of the rocket and sort of went
right sort of up over us kinda.
It was really hard to get a shot of him
I managed to get the last couple seconds.
But they came in so fast. - Yeah.
- They were just like woosh!
And then you would see--
Like, I had no idea this is what it was gonna be like.
I had no idea what to expect.
- [Darrell] Yeah.
- But they came down all of a sudden.
It was like a UFO landing or something.
And then they popped.
They were just like (imitates rockets),
they started burning,
and then there were four sonic booms.
I didn't know to expect any sonic booms at all
and it startled the hell out of me.
I was holding the camera and it's like whoa! (laughs)
- We were in the exploration tower
which is out here in the cape, like not on base.
It was a really unimpeded view of both
and I could capture with one camera
the wide shot of both the takeoff and the landing zones.
We had a guy there who was just basically
talking us through what was gonna happen,
and he was amazingly spot on.
Like he was just like, "Okay, you're gonna look here
"and this where your reentry burn is gonna be
"for the returning boosters."
And you know, we'd look and there it was.
His timing was like, right on.
- That's amazing that they have that depth of knowledge.
That's what I'm learning as someone who's
just starting to cover the space industry.
That there's so much custom and so much tradition
and all this stuff,
this huge body of knowledge that you build up.
The one thing we didn't get to do
was get on top of the vehicle assembly building.
- [Darrell] Yeah.
Famous NASA building.
And I really wanted to go up.
They said I was gonna go up on it
and then they took that away from me.
- Yeah well (laughs)
- And Buzz was there.
Buzz Aldrin was just a couple of feet away
from the press center,
but we didn't get to talk to him, unfortunately.
(laughs)
But we got to see a awesome rocket launch.
Yeah, I think it was an amazing experience.
I learned a lot about how this all works
and I don't know, I'm just so happy
that everything went off successfully.
Yeah, it was like, just fabulous.
- Yeah, I mean for both of us,
couldn't have asked for a better first experience
of a rocket launch.
It's historic, it went off smoothly, it was great.
- Yeah.
- Super-impressive.
Can't wait to see what they do next.
They got lots of stuff coming out.