So I was going to write about the Sony mess this week like everyone else on the internet, but honestly there are about four hundred posts out there already telling you what got leaked and who's mad about it, and I don't have much to add except one small thing, which I'll get to. What I actually want to talk about first is Orion.
If you missed it (I almost did, this is the kind of thing that gets buried under whatever else is loud that week), NASA launched the Orion capsule on its first test flight last Friday, December 5th, off the top of a Delta IV Heavy out of Cape Canaveral. No crew, just a dummy load of sensors and a mannequin-ish setup for radiation and vibration data. It went up at 7:05am eastern, did two loops around the planet, got out to something like 3,600 miles from Earth, farther than anything built to carry humans has gone since Apollo 17 in '72, and then came back in hot. Like, 20,000-mph, 4,000-degree heat shield test hot. Splashed down in the Pacific off Baja about four and a half hours after liftoff.
I watched the whole thing on the NASA TV stream, which buffered constantly on our office wifi because of course it did, and I had a client call at 8am that I kept half-muted so I could keep an eye on the countdown ticker in the other tab. Not my finest professional moment. The launch had actually scrubbed the day before too. A boat wandered into the exclusion zone and there was a fuel valve issue on top of that, so Thursday was just a lot of nervous waiting and nothing happening, which if you've ever followed a launch you know is most of the experience. Friday actually went off clean though, and I'll admit I got a little choked up watching the capsule separate and coast out past where the ISS orbits. I don't know why space stuff gets me like that. I write JavaScript for a living and none of what I do will ever leave the atmosphere, but there's something about an actual American-built human-rated spacecraft going somewhere new for the first time in decades that just hits different than another product launch.
It's not a moon mission, it's not even carrying anyone, and it'll be years before Orion does anything with actual astronauts on it. I know that. But watching the heat shield survive reentry at those numbers, on the first real try, felt like a genuinely good day for people who build things, in a month that's mostly been full of people breaking things.
Which brings me to the other thing. After the Sony emails and password dumps started circulating, I did the thing I've been putting off for probably two years: I went through LastPass and actually changed every password I'd been reusing across more than one site. Turns out that was more than I wanted to admit: some login I made for a random forum in 2009 was still attached to an email account I still use. Not great! I'm not going to pretend I have some hot take on Sony's security practices (spoiler: they were bad, everyone's are bad, mine were bad too until this week), but seeing actual plaintext passwords floating around in leaked spreadsheets is a way more effective motivator than any "please enable two-factor" nag screen has ever been for me. I still haven't turned on 2FA for half the accounts that offer it, which I recognize is inconsistent, but one thing at a time.
Anyway. Two very different kinds of engineering had a moment this week — one flew a quarter-million-dollar-per-second rocket to the edge of where humans have ever been, and the other one is a bunch of us finally admitting we've been using "password1" with a capital P for the discount. Only one of those made me cry a little at my desk on a Friday morning, and it wasn't the passwords.
Orion's next flight with an actual crew isn't happening for years yet, something like 2021 if the current schedule holds, which honestly seems like forever from here. I'll believe it when I see it. But for one Friday morning it was nice to watch something in this field go right on the first attempt.