So I've had the SpaceX livestream replay open in a tab for five days now, watching that Falcon 9 first stage come down onto the drone ship over and over, and I still flinch at the same spot every single time. If you missed it: last Tuesday (the 14th), SpaceX launched their CRS-6 resupply mission to the ISS, a routine cargo run, Dragon capsule full of supplies and experiments, nothing especially newsworthy about that part. The interesting bit, like it usually is these days, was what happened after the second stage separated and the first stage tried to fly itself back down onto that autonomous drone ship out in the Atlantic, the one with the great name, "Just Read the Instructions."
And it almost worked. That's the maddening part. It wasn't a fireball at ignition or a stage that missed the ship by a mile, it actually found the deck, came down more or less where it was supposed to, and then a throttle valve that was responding too slowly gave it too much sideways velocity right at the last second. It landed hard and at an angle instead of dead center and upright, tipped over, and went up in a very expensive fireball a few seconds later. Second time in three months this exact thing has happened, more or less. The January attempt ran out of hydraulic fluid for the grid fins and came in tilted; this time it was a sticky valve. Different failure, same result: a very fast, very precise near-miss that ends in a pile of scrap metal and a compilation of debris raining down that the internet has already turned into slow-motion GIFs.
I keep coming back to this because I think it's a much better story than most of the stuff clogging my feed reader this month. Everyone's writing about a smartwatch you can preorder but can't actually buy in a store for another five days, and look, I get it, I'll probably end up covering that here too eventually because it's genuinely the biggest consumer tech thing happening right now. But there's something about a private company landing (almost landing, twice now) an orbital-class rocket booster on a floating barge that I find way more interesting than watch faces and taptic engines. Nobody's done this before. Not the Soviets, not NASA, not anyone. The fact that they're getting close enough that the failures are down to "a valve was slightly slow" rather than "it exploded on the pad" tells you the hard part is basically solved and now it's just engineering iteration.
I also just like that they're being loud about the failures instead of quietly burying them. A lot of companies would frame a booster tipping over and exploding as some kind of unqualified success in a press release, all spin, no substance. SpaceX just puts the footage out there, lets Musk tweet the blunt version of what went wrong, and moves on to fixing the actual mechanical issue. That's a refreshing way to handle a public failure and I don't think enough companies do it. My last job had a whole approvals process for even mildly bad news going external, three people had to sign off before anyone could say "the deploy caused an outage," so watching a rocket company just show you the crash in HD is kind of bracing by comparison.
Anyway. There's another cargo launch and presumably another landing attempt coming this summer, and I'll be watching that one live if the timing works out, because last week's was on a workday and I had to catch the recording during lunch, hunched over my laptop with a sandwich, which is not exactly the dignified way to watch history almost happen. If they stick the landing next time I fully expect to see it looping on every tech site within the hour, and honestly, I hope I'm annoyed by the repetition, because that'll mean they finally pulled it off.
One more thing while I'm here: if you run a website and haven't looked into how it renders on a phone lately, this is the week to do that. Google's telling anyone who'll listen that mobile-friendliness starts mattering for search rankings in a couple of days. I finally got around to checking this blog's theme on my phone last night for the first time in, honestly, longer than I want to admit, and some of the older post layouts from a couple years back look rough. Fixing that is next weekend's project.