So I set an alarm for 4:15 in the morning on Saturday. On purpose. For a rocket.
If you weren't up at that hour with me, here's the short version: SpaceX was supposed to launch its Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon capsule on top early Saturday, May 19th, on a mission to actually dock with the International Space Station. Not just fly near it and wave, dock with it, using its own capsule, which no private company has ever done. NASA's been buying rides from the Russians since the shuttles retired last year, so this was a genuinely big deal if it worked.
I made coffee, pulled up the webcast on my laptop in bed with the sound low so I wouldn't wake anyone up, and watched the countdown clock crawl down through the holds. T-minus ten, nine, eight. Engines ignite. And then, at T-minus zero point five seconds, half a second before liftoff, the whole thing just stopped. Engines cut. No explosion, nothing dramatic looking, just a very anticlimactic silence and a commentator saying something about an abort.
Turns out it was a pressure reading on one of the nine engines, engine five specifically, that tripped an automatic abort. The rocket's own flight computer made the call in that half second, which is honestly the part I keep thinking about. Nobody in a room somewhere hit a button. The vehicle looked at its own numbers and decided not to go. There's something kind of wild about a machine being built to talk itself out of its own launch.
They scrubbed it, rolled the launch to Tuesday the 22nd, and everybody who'd set alarms went back to bed mildly disappointed. I definitely did not go back to bed gracefully. I was useless at work Monday, this Monday, running on the kind of sleep debt where you keep rereading the same line of an email three times.
Anyway. If it goes up Tuesday and everything works, this is a private company docking a capsule at the space station for the first time ever, carrying cargo NASA is actually paying for. That's the part that gets undersold in a lot of the coverage I've read, everyone's fixated on "ooh rocket," but the actual news is the contract. NASA outsourcing station resupply to a company that was basically a startup a decade ago. I don't know why that doesn't get people as excited as the flames do, but here we are.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: this was also the weekend I finally got Diablo III installed and running, four days after launch, and I still hit the always-online error screen twice trying to log in Friday night. Error 37, "the servers are busy," for a single player game I paid sixty dollars for and cannot play if Blizzard's authentication servers hiccup. I get why they did it, piracy and the real money auction house and all that, but sitting there watching a spinning icon because I want to click on skeletons alone in my own living room is not a great feeling. Not related to the rocket thing at all except that it's the same week and both involve me staring at a screen waiting for a company's infrastructure to cooperate.
Back to the launch. What I keep coming back to is how normal a scrub actually looks from the outside. You expect either liftoff or a fireball, and instead you get a countdown that just stops and a very calm voice explaining turbopump inlet pressure. It's less dramatic than the movies and somehow more interesting for it, because you're watching a real decision get made by hardware in real time, with a payload and a crew of engineers who've been up since 1 a.m. watching numbers scroll by.
I'll probably set the alarm again Tuesday. Might actually get to see something leave the ground this time. If not, at least I'll have had two mornings this week where I made coffee before 5 a.m. and stared at a live feed of a rocket on a pad in Florida, which is a stranger way to spend a weekend than I usually manage.
Setting a second alarm now so I don't sleep through it if they push the window earlier. We'll see.