So this week everybody and their uncle is writing about Facebook hitting a billion users, and yeah, that's a big number, but honestly a number going up isn't a story, it's a milestone. The thing I actually stayed up for this week was a Dragon capsule grabbing onto the space station with a robot arm. I think that's more interesting and nobody's really talking about it outside the space nerd corners of the internet, so here we go.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket out of Cape Canaveral on the evening of October 7th, carrying an unmanned Dragon capsule loaded with supplies for the ISS. This wasn't the demo flight from back in May where everyone held their breath to see if a private company could even reach the station. This was the real thing, the first of twelve contracted cargo runs NASA is paying SpaceX to fly. Boring in theory. Except it wasn't boring at all, because about a minute and nineteen seconds into the flight, one of the nine Merlin engines lost pressure and just... shut off.
I found this out the next morning scrolling through NASASpaceflight forums with my coffee, and my first thought was "well, that's the mission." I remember the Shuttle program, I remember how an engine problem meant an abort, and abort usually meant a very bad day. But that's not what happened here. The flight computer noticed the dead engine, recalculated on the fly, and burned the other eight a little longer to make up the difference. Dragon still made it to orbit. It's genuinely one of the more impressive pieces of aerospace engineering I've read about this year and it happened almost by accident getting buried under a billion-Facebook-users news cycle.
Not everything came out clean, to be fair. There was a secondary payload riding along, a small Orbcomm test satellite, and because of the engine hiccup it got dropped into a lower orbit than planned. It's apparently going to reenter and burn up way sooner than intended. So somebody's having an annoying week over at Orbcomm. I don't want to pretend this was a flawless mission, because it wasn't, but "the primary payload survived a full engine failure and the secondary payload just had its lifespan shortened" is a wildly different outcome than what an engine-out failure has meant on basically every crewed launch vehicle before this one.
Then Wednesday morning I set an alarm for stupid-early, something like 5:45, flipped on the NASA TV stream (which buffered constantly, of course it did, it's NASA TV, some things never change) and watched Dragon get captured by the station's Canadarm2. Sunita Williams was on the controls, with Aki Hoshide backing her up, and there's this weird slow tension to watching a robotic arm reach out and grab a fifteen-thousand-pound spacecraft that's just drifting a few meters away. It's not dramatic the way a launch is dramatic. It's quiet and careful and it took forever and I loved every minute of it, even half asleep with cold coffee.
I'll be honest, I've gotten pretty tired of the breathless Elon Musk hype machine over the past couple years, the guy tweets something vague and half the tech blogs treat it like scripture. But this is the part of SpaceX that actually earns attention: not the personality, the hardware surviving a real failure in real time and still doing its job. That's the story that should have led this week, not another headline about a user count.
Dragon's going to hang out docked to the station for a few weeks doing cargo exchange before it heads back down, which is its own neat trick since it's currently the only cargo capsule that can actually return stuff to Earth intact instead of just burning up on reentry like the Russian and Japanese resupply vehicles do. I'll probably write about the splashdown whenever that happens, assuming it goes as well as this leg did.
Anyway. Number of Facebook users this week: one billion. Number of engines that quit mid-flight and didn't end the mission: also one. I know which fact I find more interesting.