I got up at 6:15 on Friday morning specifically to watch a rocket launch on my laptop, propped against the toaster, coffee going cold next to the keyboard. That's the kind of thing I do now apparently. The rocket was NASA's Orion capsule, and it actually happened this time — Thursday's attempt got scrubbed after some fuel valve issue and a boat that wandered into the exclusion zone, which, of all the reasons to delay a spacecraft, "a boat showed up" has to be one of the more embarrassing ones.
Friday morning it went up clean. Delta IV Heavy off the pad at Cape Canaveral a little after 7am Eastern, three brown cores burning together, and Orion rode it out past the Van Allen belts before coming back down under parachutes into the Pacific a few hours later. Nobody was inside. This was the uncrewed test flight, EFT-1 if you want the acronym, and its whole job was to go higher and faster than anything built for humans has gone since Apollo and then survive coming back in fast enough that the heat shield actually gets tested properly. Something like 20,000 mph on reentry, temperatures around 4,000 degrees on the shield. NASA TV had a countdown clock running in the corner the entire stream and I watched more of that clock than I care to admit.
Here's my actual complaint though, and its a real one: the NASA TV stream buffered constantly right at the parts that mattered. Not during the boring holds, not during the pre-launch commentary where two hosts fill twenty minutes talking about heat tiles. No, it buffered exactly at main engine cutoff and again right before splashdown, both times for a solid 15 or 20 seconds of spinning wheel while I sat there refreshing like an idiot. I don't know if that's a NASA infrastructure problem or just my apartment's wifi being what it is, but it happened on two different tabs, one on Chrome and one where I'd pulled up the USTREAM embed on my phone as backup, so I'm inclined to blame them and not me.
What struck me watching it live is how different this felt from a normal news event. There wasn't a hot take to have. Nobody was going to write a scorching opinion piece about whether a heat shield performed adequately, it either worked or it didn't, and by midday it was clear it worked. Splashdown was around 11:29am Eastern, the Navy recovery ship USS Anchorage picked the capsule up, and that was basically it. Clean test, first step toward whatever crewed Mars ambitions get talked about at these press conferences every few years without much follow-through that I've ever seen personally.
I'll say this though, because I think its true and slightly unfashionable to say: I don't actually think most people my age care about spaceflight the way the tech press wants us to. My officemate asked me on Friday afternoon why I looked tired and when I told him I'd watched a rocket launch before work he just kind of nodded slowly and went back to his monitor. That's fine. I'm not trying to convert anyone. But there's something about watching a countdown hit zero and a several-hundred-foot column of hardware actually leave the ground on schedule (ish, one day late) that a software launch will never give you. Nobody's app update has ever made me get up at 6:15am voluntarily, and I say that as someone who has stayed up until 2am for iOS betas more than once, which I'm not proud of.
Orion won't fly with people on it for years still, and this particular capsule isn't even the one that'll eventually do it, this one goes to a museum probably. But the whole test was about proving the numbers on paper actually hold up against real reentry physics, and apparently they did. I'll take a win where the biggest problem of the day was a boat and a buffering video player. Most Fridays in this industry don't go that smoothly.