Everybody's Sharing That Rocket Landing Video and Nobody's Reading The Fine Print

So yesterday Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's rocket company, the quiet one that doesn't do a livestream with a countdown clock and a hype reel, flew a rocket called New Shepard up past the edge of space and then landed the booster back on its tail, upright, at their site out in West Texas. No splash landing, no barge, no fireball. It just came down like something out of a 1950s pulp magazine cover and stood there.

I watched the clip about four times in a row before I did anything else with my morning coffee. It's genuinely one of the best pieces of aerospace footage I've seen in years, and I say that as someone who has watched a truly unreasonable number of rocket launches on grainy NASA TV feeds since I was a kid building model rockets in the backyard and losing at least one a summer to a tree.

Here's my actual complaint, though, and its a small one: the framing going around today is sloppy. A bunch of headlines and roughly all of Facebook are treating this as basically the same milestone as what SpaceX has been attempting all year with their Falcon 9 landings on the drone ship, the ones that have mostly ended in very expensive explosions so far. It is not the same thing, and the difference matters if you care about any of this beyond the pretty video.

New Shepard went up, crossed the boundary generally used to mark "space" (about 100 kilometers, 62 miles, the Karman line if you want the actual term), the capsule separated and came down under parachutes the old-fashioned way, and the empty booster came back down solo and stuck the landing. That's suborbital. It went up and basically came straight back down along more or less the same line, the way a very tall bottle rocket does. What SpaceX is chasing is landing a booster that just put a payload into actual orbit, which means going sideways at around 17,000 miles an hour before you even think about coming home. Getting that stage turned around, slowed down, and back to a landing pad is a wildly harder problem, and they haven't managed to stick one yet as of this week.

None of that makes what Blue Origin did unimpressive. Reusability is the whole ballgame for making spaceflight cheap, and doing a controlled, engine-assisted vertical landing on your first real attempt is legitimately hard regardless of what altitude you started from. I just get twitchy when a company that's been famously secretive for over a decade suddenly gets to have its PR framed, by accident or not, as "we solved the same problem the other guys are still failing at," when it's a different problem that happens to look similar in a highlight reel.

Anyway. I've already decided I'm going to be That Guy at Thanksgiving on Thursday when somebody's uncle brings this up between the stuffing and the pie and asks if this means we're all going to Mars next year. I have a whole little speech prepared about suborbital hops versus orbital velocity and I am aware that nobody asked for it and I'm going to give it anyway. My wife has already told me to keep it under two minutes. I will not keep it under two minutes.

One more thing while I'm complaining about things nobody asked me to complain about: can we stop calling every rocket landing "historic" in the headline? This is like the third or fourth "historic" rocket thing this year alone. Words lose meaning if you use the big one every single time. Save "historic" for when something happens that hasn't happened before in a way that actually changes what's possible, not for every incremental step along the way, even the genuinely cool ones like this.

Going to go watch the landing clip a fifth time now. I regret nothing.