So it's been five days now and I'm still pulling up that grainy droneship footage of the Falcon 9 coming in sideways and I think that says something about where my head's at this week.
Quick recap for anyone who was too busy digging out from the holidays to notice: last Saturday SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying cargo up to the ISS, which by itself is Tuesday-level news at this point, they've done it before. The actual story was what happened after the first stage did its job and separated. Instead of just dumping the booster in the ocean like every rocket company has done since forever, SpaceX tried to fly it back down onto an autonomous ship out in the Atlantic. A drone ship. With a landing pad painted on it and everything, out there bobbing around with nobody on board.
It almost worked. That's the part that's stuck with me. Elon Musk's first tweet after it happened said the rocket landed on the ship but "too hard for survival," which is such a specific and slightly funny way to describe a multi-ton rocket exploding on a barge. A few days later he posted more detail: the grid fins (the little steering fins near the top of the booster) worked great all the way down through hypersonic and transonic speeds, and then ran out of hydraulic fluid right before the actual touchdown. So the thing came in with too much lateral velocity, hit at an angle instead of straight down, and did not stick the landing, to put it mildly.
I keep coming back to how weird it is that "the rocket exploded" is somehow the good outcome here compared to where this technology was a decade ago. Nobody's landing an orbital-class booster on purpose in January 2015. That's not a thing that happens. And yet here's a private company that got close enough that the failure mode was "ran out of hydraulic fluid for the fins," which is a wildly specific and solvable problem, not some fundamental impossibility. You run out of hydraulic fluid, you bring more hydraulic fluid next time. That's an engineering to-do list item, not a reason to give up.
I'll admit I have a soft spot for this stuff that's probably disproportionate to how much it actually affects my life. I don't work in aerospace, I've never been to a launch in person (something I keep meaning to fix, Florida is not that far), and realistically none of this changes anything about my Tuesday. But there's something about watching a company just publicly try a genuinely hard thing, fail at it in an interesting and specific way, and then explain exactly why in a tweet instead of hiding behind a press release, that I find more compelling than basically anything else in tech right now.
Which, speaking of tech right now, can we talk about how exhausted I already am with CES recaps. It was only last week and I already feel like I've read forty variations of "here's every smart fridge that was at the show" posts. I don't need my refrigerator to have a screen on it. I do not want to check Twitter on my fridge. I have a phone for that, and a laptop, and honestly a fridge that just keeps things cold is doing its one job fine. Every year it's the same parade of concept gadgets that nobody buys and then CES is over and we never hear about 90% of them again. The droneship landing thing is a nice contrast because at least it's a real attempt at something, with a real failure you can point to and a real reason why, instead of a press release about a fridge nobody's shipping.
Anyway. They're apparently already talking about trying the landing again on the next resupply mission, whenever that ends up being scheduled. I'll be watching for it. If they land it clean at some point this year I will absolutely be one of those people refreshing a livestream at some ungodly hour of the morning, coffee in hand, rooting for a rocket like it's a sports team. Worse hobbies out there.