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NASA Launch Commentator George Diller: This
is Falcon launch control, one hour, 31 minutes,

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43 seconds into the flight of Jason-3.

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Joining us here at the Public Affairs console
is Tim Dunn,

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who is our NASA launch manager during the
countdown this morning

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for the launch services program and

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Tim, we've been following this flight and
it appears by all accounts

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that the launch went well and the flight went
well but maybe

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you can give us some background of how things
went.

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Tim Dunn: Glad to do that, George. So let
me first off say today is a thrilling day

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for NASA,

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in particular for the NASA Launch Services
Program.

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Getting to today has been a long journey as
you can imagine.

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First time we've had a NASA Launch Services
Program mission on a Falcon.

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The Falcon 1.1, we spent a tremendous amount
of time getting it to the level of certification

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so that we could do what we just did this
morning on the central California coast.

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So with that I can tell you that it was a
very active countdown.

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We got in early this morning and tried to
get things going a little bit sooner

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in the timeline because we felt we might have
some issues to work and

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we kind of worked a helium issue with getting
the helium pressure

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from the ground supply into the bottles on
the vehicle.

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So that caused us to do a little bit, some
workaround actions

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that we resolved through our anomaly resolution
process

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and that drove some other cases that our engineering
team working alongside

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SpaceX's engineering team just did a tremendous
job.

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I just can't say enough about how well the
two teams, the NASA team

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and the SpaceX engineering team, worked
together to resolve several anomalies throughout

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the countdown.

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Diller: How did the flight look?

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Dunn: So we only had a 30-second window today
and we only had two days

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on the range before we needed to stand down
for another range

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customer here and then try again later should
we not have launched.

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AS you can imagine, we are very excited to
have launched today.

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The flight itself, we've just done a very
little bit of data review,

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what we call a quick look data review and
the first stage and second stage

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performance looks very nominal. Could not
have asked for a better day.

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The first stage burn looked beautiful.

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The first burn of the second stage put us
into the perfect parking orbit

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and then about 42 minutes later after that
we came out over Africa

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where we did our insertion burn to put us
in our operational orbit for Jason-3 spacecraft.

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That was a very short burn, about a 5 and
half or 6 second burn that went very well

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likewise and then we had a nominal spacecraft
separation.

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Diller: So by all accounts, Falcon 9 has come
across for delivering Jason-3 on-time, on-orbit.

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Dun: On-time, on-orbit, yes.

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The final orbit numbers looked right on the
money,

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so for the spacecraft it looked very good,

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we could confirm that the solar array deployment
did go well.

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We're still waiting for another pass where
we come across Africa

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and the spacecraft will downlink its full
state-of-health data to that ground station

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in Fairbanks.

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So we should know more about the full state
of health of this spacecraft when that occurs.

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Diller: Well Tim, thank you very much and
congratulations on a very happy,

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full successful launch and I know we had a
lot of additional issues to work to get to

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this point and it all worked.

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Dunn: Thank you so much George. It's a tremendous
amount of work

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to get to a day like today but it's nice when
you can celebrate your successes.