I cleared my evening for this three separate times last week, which in retrospect is a lot of evenings to give up for a rocket that, in the end, didn't even try to do the thing I was watching for.
Quick recap if you weren't following along back in January (I ranted about the first attempt here, if you want the whole thing): SpaceX has been trying to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform out in the ocean instead of letting it fall into the sea like every booster before it. Refuel it, fly it again, skip building a brand new one from scratch every single launch. Back on January 10th the booster actually made it all the way down to the drone ship, which they'd named "Just Read the Instructions" (an Iain M. Banks reference, and honestly still the best part of this whole program), and then it came in too hard, ran out of hydraulic fluid for the steering fins on the way, and more or less took the deck apart on landing. Musk's tweet afterward was something like "close, but no cigar," which is a very calm way to describe your rocket exploding on a boat.
So last Wednesday's launch, carrying a satellite called DSCOVR, felt like it was setting up for round two. DSCOVR itself is this odd little climate and space-weather probe that's been sitting in storage since the late 90s under a different name (it used to be called Triana, and it got mothballed for over a decade for reasons that have basically nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with who was in the White House at the time). It finally got off the ground after two scrubbed attempts earlier in the week, one for a radar issue and one for weather, both times after I'd already sat down in front of the laptop with a coffee for nothing.
Here's the part that got me though. This time SpaceX didn't even attempt the barge landing. Seas out there were apparently running over three stories high, so instead of aiming for the drone ship they just let the booster do a soft touchdown test on open water and, presumably, sink after. No boat, no explosion, no drama. Which is obviously the sensible call and I don't blame anyone for making it. But I'd built myself up for another one of those white-knuckle final-thirty-seconds moments and instead got nothing, which is a weirdly specific kind of anticlimax.
My actual complaint, and it's a small one: the livestream buffered constantly, right through the parts that mattered, on what I have to assume is not a shoestring operation. I get that half the internet was watching the same ninety seconds of footage at once, but you'd think NASA and SpaceX between them could throw enough bandwidth at this that I don't get a spinning wheel exactly as second-stage separation happens. I gave up and watched the replay on YouTube afterward, coffee long cold, dog thoroughly unimpressed that I was still on the couch at that hour.
None of this changes my read on whether the landing thing eventually works, for what it's worth. I still think it will, mostly because the economics make too much sense once you actually sit down and run the numbers on building a first stage from scratch versus refueling one, and because Musk does not seem like a guy who quits on something once he's decided it's the right approach. But the scoreboard is sitting at zero for two right now, one crash and one non-attempt, and I'm already wondering how many more of these evenings I'm going to burn before one of them actually sticks the landing.
The satellite's fine, incidentally, which is easy to forget in all this. It's on its way out to a spot about a million miles from here where it'll sit and watch the sun for the next several years, which was the entire point of sending it up in the first place. Almost nobody was talking about that part on Wednesday night, because a rocket trying to land itself on a boat is just a better story than a weather satellite, even when the weather satellite is the actual reason the rocket left the ground.