On Monday, April 2 the 14th Commercial Resupply Mission to the International Space Station blasted off Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was carrying a Dragon spacecraft filled with cargo for the astronauts on board the station.
The rocket was a re-used Falcon 9 rocket, as was the Dragon capsule; both had sent payloads to ISS before.
To really appreciate that well worn, flight-tested rocket you should take a really really close look at it.
And now you can, thanks to the work of NASA Spaceflight photographer Brady Kenniston. Brady took 25 separate images using a 600 mm lens with a Nikon D500 and then stitched them together in Lightroom. According to Kenniston, If you could print off this picture at a print resolution 300 DPI, it would create a 1/22nd scale rocket that was over 3 meters.
In fact, that’s exactly what he did:
This is great! Thank you! Not sure if you saw this but I did in fact do a 300dpi print that’s 10 feet long and it’s incredible. pic.twitter.com/PnNKPwU6Ej
— Brady Kenniston (@TheFavoritist) April 11, 2018
If you want to explore every nook and cranny of this rocket, head over to an Easyzoom version that Brady uploaded, which allows you to zoom into extreme detail and see every ding, scratch, and scorched paint on the side of the rocket.
And if you want to see more of Brady’s work, check out his photos on NASA Spaceflight and from his personal site. Or follow him on Twitter.
Source: Brady Kenniston/NASA Spaceflight
How wonderful to see a spaceship looking grubby and battered like a ship, train or plane because it has been used in the same everyday way. The future has finally arrived.