So I set an alarm for 6:45 this morning, which if you know me at all is basically an act of self harm, just to watch a livestream of a robot arm grabbing a spaceship. And it was worth it.
Dragon, the SpaceX capsule that launched Tuesday from Cape Canaveral, got captured by the space station's Canadarm2 at 9:56 am Eastern this morning. Astronaut Don Pettit was at the controls up there, with Andre Kuipers backing him up, and I was on my couch in sweatpants watching a slightly choppy NASA TV feed on my laptop because apparently my cable internet decides launch mornings are the day to remember it's actually DSL from 2004. The capture itself took maybe a couple minutes once Dragon got into range, and then a few hours later they berthed it to the Harmony module. Simple to describe, absurdly hard to actually do.
Here's the thing that I don't think gets said enough: this is a private company's spacecraft that just delivered cargo to the International Space Station. Not NASA's. Not Russia's, not Japan's, not the European Space Agency's. SpaceX built this thing, launched it on their own Falcon 9 rocket, and flew it up to a football-field-sized laboratory orbiting the earth at something like 17,000 miles an hour, and it worked. First try that counted, more or less (there was a scrubbed launch attempt back on the 19th over an engine valve issue, which everybody forgets about now because it worked three days later).
I know Elon Musk gets talked about like he's either a messiah or a con man depending who you ask on a given week, and I try to stay out of that particular argument because it's exhausting and nobody changes their mind. But strip away the personality stuff and just look at what happened on a technical level this morning: commercial company, commercial rocket, commercial capsule, docking with a station that's usually the exclusive domain of nation-states. That's genuinely new. I've been doing this blog since November of last year and I don't think I've written about anything space related yet, which now that I think about it is a little embarrassing given how much of my childhood was spent reading library books about the shuttle program.
Can we talk for a second about how much better this was than the Facebook IPO circus from last week. I'm not trying to dunk on Facebook (well, maybe a little, the stock's been sliding pretty much every day since it opened at 38 bucks and nobody I know who bought in on day one is thrilled about it right now), but there's something kind of refreshing about a tech story this month that isn't about a stock ticker or a Nasdaq glitch. It's about an actual physical object doing an actual physical thing in actual physical space, six hundred and something miles up, and either it works or it very publicly does not. No spin, no "pivot," no S-1 filing to parse. The arm grabs the capsule or it doesn't.
I spent way too much time this morning refreshing Twitter watching people lose their minds over this in real time, which honestly might be my favorite way to experience a big event now, better than the feed itself half the time. Somebody posted a gif of the capture moment within about ninety seconds of it happening. I have no idea how people do that. I still fumble with uploading a screenshot half the time.
Anyway. Dragon's berthed now, the crew's going to start unloading cargo in the next day or two I believe, and eventually it'll come back down and splash into the Pacific, which is its own whole separate feat that I'll probably also stay up too early for. Worth the alarm clock. Worth the bad coffee I made because I was too impatient to wait for the kettle to actually boil. Not every Friday morning gives you something like that.