I set an alarm for 6:45 on a Friday morning this week, which is not a thing I do. My alarm on Fridays is usually "whenever the dog decides." But NASA was launching something at 7:05 AM Eastern and I did not want to miss it, so there I was, in a hoodie, laptop balanced on a stack of books because the coffee table is currently doing double duty as a filing cabinet, watching NASA TV's stream buffer.
The thing launching was Orion, NASA's new capsule, on a test flight they're calling EFT-1 (Exploration Flight Test 1, if you want the whole name). No crew on this one. It went up on a Delta IV Heavy out of Cape Canaveral, which is genuinely the biggest rocket currently flying in the US, three cores strapped together, and even on a laptop screen at 6 in the morning it's an absurd amount of fire. They'd actually tried the day before too and scrubbed it, something about a fuel valve and then some boats that wandered into the range and wouldn't clear out in time. I remember reading that and thinking, boats. The future of human spaceflight, delayed by boats. There's something very fitting about that.
Anyway Thursday's scrub meant Friday was it, and Friday it went. Two orbits, no crew, and then a run at reentry that's really the whole point of the mission: they wanted Orion to come back into the atmosphere at close to 20,000 miles an hour so the heat shield would get tested at something close to what you'd actually see coming back from the moon or further. It got up to about 3,600 miles from Earth on its second orbit, way past where the space station sits, before turning around and coming home. Splashdown was off Baja California a few hours later, parachutes and all, and the recovery ship out there was the USS Anchorage, which sounds like something out of a submarine movie.
I've been doing this blog since November 2011 and if I'm honest, spaceflight posts are not the ones that get read. My post about setting up a Raspberry Pi as a media server got ten times the traffic of anything I've ever written about a rocket. I don't care. I like rockets. I like that a capsule with basically no one paying attention to it except space nerds and NASA employees went up, did a couple of loops, and fell back through the sky on purpose, and that we can watch the whole thing streamed to a laptop balanced on library books. Twelve years ago this would have been a scheduled TV special with Walter Cronkite's spiritual descendant narrating. Now it's a Ustream link somebody posts on a forum.
My one complaint, and it's a small one: NASA's stream still cuts to those weird slow-motion replay loops right at the moments you actually want live audio, and it did that twice during ascent. I get why, from a broadcast standpoint. Doesn't make it less annoying when you're trying to hear the call for max-q.
There's a version of this post where I get into what Orion is actually for, the whole Mars-someday pitch, the fact that this exact capsule design has been kicking around in different forms since Constellation got canceled back in 2010. I don't really want to write that post today. I just wanted to write down that I watched it, that it worked, that the heat shield apparently held up fine on reentry (they'll know more once they've actually pulled the thing apart), and that for about four hours on a Friday morning I didn't check email once, which might be the rarer achievement honestly.
My partner walked past around 7:30, saw the recovery footage on screen, and asked "is that the thing from the news," in the exact tone of voice you'd use for "did you take the trash out." Not everyone needs to care about this. That's fine. I cared enough for both of us and drank cold coffee doing it.