I was standing in the returns line at Target on Monday, three people back, holding a sweater my aunt bought me in a size that fits approximately nobody, when my phone buzzed with a push notification that just said "SpaceX did it." That's it. That's the whole notification, from some app I apparently installed months ago and forgot about. I almost didn't look. Post-Christmas return lines make you a little feral and I didn't want to lose my spot.
But I looked, and it turned out to be true, and it's been rattling around in my head since Monday night so here we are.
On December 21st, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying eleven Orbcomm satellites, and about nine minutes after liftoff the first stage, the big expensive part that usually just falls into the ocean and gets written off, came back down under its own power and landed standing up on a pad at Cape Canaveral. Landing Zone 1, they're calling it. Upright. Not tipped over, not in pieces, not a fireball on a barge like some of the earlier ocean attempts. Standing there like nothing happened.
I want to be honest about something: I have been mildly annoyed by Elon Musk hype for a couple years now. Every time a new Tesla thing gets announced my feed turns into a fan convention, and I generally roll my eyes and scroll past. So my first reaction to the push notification was suspicion, actually, like okay, what's the exaggerated version of this story going to turn out to be.
There wasn't one. I went home that night, reheated some pizza that had gone slightly cardboard-ish in the fridge, and watched the launch replay on my laptop instead of whatever was on TV. And it's genuinely one of the stranger things I've watched a video of. You've got this enormous white column of a rocket, taller than most buildings I've stood next to, and it does the thing rockets do, climbs up on fire, disappears into a dot, and then a while later the bottom third of it comes back down out of the sky, slows itself with its own engines, and just parks. There's a shot from the ground where the exhaust plume kicks up dust and the thing settles into it like a lawn dart landing tip-first in soft grass, except the lawn dart weighs 25 tons and doesn't tip over afterward.
People in the SpaceX control room lost it, understandably. I don't think I've ever heard that much unfiltered cheering from a room full of engineers. Usually engineers I know express joy by saying "huh, neat" in a flat voice and going back to their monitor.
A quick side note because people keep conflating the two: this isn't the same thing Blue Origin did in November, when their New Shepard capsule went straight up past the edge of space and came straight back down to the same spot, no orbital payload involved. This Falcon 9 stage went up fast enough and far enough to actually put eleven satellites into orbit, then somehow arranged to come home anyway. Different problem, harder problem, and worth not smushing them together in conversation even though I've already seen three people online do exactly that.
I'll admit the actual point of all this, the reusability angle, the idea that a rocket stage doesn't have to be a $60 million one-way ticket to the bottom of the ocean, is the part that matters more than the video looks cool part. But I'm not an aerospace economist, I'm a guy who was returning a sweater, so I'm mostly just stuck on how it looked. It looked like science fiction props footage. It looked fake in the way things look fake right before you remember that no, this is just what real footage of a genuinely new thing looks like, because we don't have a visual vocabulary for it yet.
Also, unrelated, but the Target line took forty minutes and the kid at the register couldn't find my receipt in their system so I basically donated that sweater to the store. Nobody tell my aunt.
Anyway. It's been a weird, good week for watching things happen that hadn't happened before. The theaters are still packed for the new Star Wars movie, which I still haven't seen because every showtime near me sells out an hour after tickets go live, and now there's rocket footage on top of it. I don't know what 2016 rockets are supposed to look like after this, but I assume "fall into the ocean" stops being the default answer.