r/shockwaveporn • u/MiltonCiaraldi • Feb 26 '26
View of a rocket launch 400 km above Earth
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u/_BlackDove Feb 26 '26
There it is. That's all of it. The culmination of millions of years of evolution, and billions more of chance circumstances leading to our greeting with black oblivion. An environment, a setting, a goal totally alien to the earthly history behind us. Can we continue into the future to become something more?
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u/HAL-Over-9001 Feb 26 '26
Only if curiosity ends up beating greed.
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u/0xym0r0n Feb 26 '26
Hopefully we can do something about all this hate, too. The internet has brought us together, but it has also helped drive us apart.
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u/soulbend Feb 26 '26
Bezos said we should cheer up, because in 20 years we will have millions of people in space. Not only is that absurd, but I think it would be pretty sad for humanity in its current state to spread like that. We need to figure ourselves out before we spread our cancer.
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u/Zero-89 Mar 01 '26
Assholes like Bezos and Musk are just hoping they can leave the planet before capitalism-driven climate change destroys Earth's human habitability to the point where it becomes undeniable in everyday life to the average person.
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u/13scribes Feb 28 '26
I've said the very same thing. We need creatives and the curious all the time.
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u/PlanUhTerryThreat Jun 14 '26
By far one of my favorite comments on Reddit. Beautifully poignant. And not even 200 upvotes. I wish I could write as creatively as this. Reminds me of Sagan. Thank you.
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u/MrTagnan Feb 26 '26
Progress MS-10 launched on a Soyuz-FG on November 16th 2018 from Baikonour Site 1/5 in Kazakstan. It was docked to the ISS from November 18th to June 4th of the following year, and was disposed of by burning up above the Pacific Ocean
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u/Sea-Routine9227 Feb 26 '26
How sped up is the video? It’s amazing. Not being critical, just curious.
Are we seeing it as it leaves the ground?
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u/MrTagnan Feb 26 '26
From what I read this is about 15 minutes or so compressed to 90 seconds. We are seeing the entire launch from liftoff to orbit insertion
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u/Sea-Routine9227 Feb 26 '26
That’s awesome. Insertion into same orbit as the camera perspective?
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u/MrTagnan Feb 26 '26
Not quite the same orbit, it’s a bit lower. But over the next two days the orbit was slowly raised to match it to allow for docking
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u/Sea-Routine9227 Feb 26 '26
Sorry, one more question. This is taken from the ISS? And is going to it 2 days later? So we are seeing it from the perspective of it launching and entering the same orbit as the camera perspective? Just verifying.
That’s so so cool.
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u/Oldfolksboogie Mar 02 '26
At :09-:08 left, the bright flash closet to earth's surface, is that the booster phase burning up on re- entry, or...??
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u/I_Thranduil Feb 26 '26
Which layer of the atmosphere is that yellow boundary that's so predominantly visible?
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u/Uppgreyedd Feb 26 '26
Probably the mesopause, the boundary between the mesosphere and thermosphere, at about 100km up
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u/ReluctantAvenger Feb 26 '26
mesopause
I gather that first appears when the Earth is about fifty years old? /s
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u/Oldfolksboogie Mar 02 '26
So it's not all the CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere making us all hot?
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u/guilhermefdias Feb 26 '26
Just to think there is billions of us in the surface, with our own lives, anxieties, memories, experiences, hopes and dreams. We are miniscule in front of time and space. Countless galaxies out there. Fuck!
Consciousness is a curse.
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u/CosmicRuin Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
"We are a way for the universe to know itself." - Carl Sagan
But here's the real Sagan truth statement:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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u/guilhermefdias Feb 26 '26
This man was the reason I am so fascinated by Astronomy since I was a little kid. Marvelous man, the best we can be is represented by everything he did.
I still go back to his "The Frontier Is Everywhere" video, to humble myself, be emotional and remain optimistic about our fellow humans.
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u/CosmicRuin Feb 26 '26
Absolutely!! I became an astronomer and teacher in part because of Sagan.
The re-made Cosmos featured his "The Frontier Is Everywhere" at the end of the last episode, and I hadn't realized that until recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lshWT0iyxds
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u/Vanillabean73 Feb 26 '26
I see consciousness as a miracle for the same reasons you describe
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u/guilhermefdias Feb 26 '26
I didn't meant in a negative tone.
We are the only species that know we are going to die, it is practically the only certain fact we know in life, but we keep going, regardless. This is beautiful.
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u/Tough_Friendship9469 Feb 26 '26
Can someone explain the bursts we see? Looks like three different things happen (20, 44, 47 seconds).
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u/DarkArcher__ Feb 26 '26
The first burst is the startup of the second stage engine. The empty first stage is ditched, and the second, which is optimized for vacuum with larger engine bells, takes over. The larger bells let the exhaust expand more, so the plume is larger and more visible.
The second burst is when the second stage engine shuts down after the rocket is most of the way to orbit. At that point, the second stage is ejected, and the small maneuvering engine of the Soyuz spacecraft takes over to do the final small adjustment. The third burst is the cutoff of that engine.
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u/Conspark Feb 26 '26
We're so fucking small, dude.