So Friday night I did the thing I keep telling myself I'm not going to do anymore, which is stay up way too late watching a rocket on my laptop with a bag of pretzels I definitely didn't need to finish. SpaceX had the SES-9 launch scheduled out of Cape Canaveral, and after something like three or four scrubs over the past couple weeks (weather, a helium issue, more weather) it actually went up around 6:35pm Eastern. The satellite deployment went fine, from what I can tell — SES-9 is a big communications bird headed for geostationary orbit, the kind of payload that's going to sling internet and TV signals around Asia-Pacific for the next decade or so.
What I actually stayed up for, though, was the landing attempt, and that one didn't work. The first stage came down on the droneship (the one with the great name, "Of Course I Still Love You," sitting out in the Atlantic) and it hit hard. Elon had basically told everyone beforehand not to get their hopes up, something like "good chance it doesn't work" because this was a GTO mission, meaning the booster comes in way faster and way hotter than it does on the lower-orbit cargo runs to the ISS. Less fuel margin for the landing burn. So it wasn't exactly a shock. But watching the feed cut out right as the booster hit, and then that weird silence on the call before someone finally says "the vehicle was lost," still got me a little more than I expected.
I think what's funny is how fast this stuff went from unbelievable to just expected. A year and a half ago a rocket landing itself upright on a boat would've been the entire story, front page everywhere, gifs for a week. Now the successful ones (there's been two, I think, since December) almost read as routine, and it's the failures that feel like actual news. Thats a strange kind of progress. I dont know if theres a lesson there or its just how we work as people, we adjust the baseline almost instantly and then get bored of miracles.
Anyway. I was annoyed at myself the next morning, is the real point of this paragraph, because I had a 9am call and I was running on maybe five hours of sleep and too much pretzel salt. Worth it, probably. I dont really have a good defense for staying up for something I knew had maybe a coinflip's chance of working. I just like watching them try.
One other thing I want to flag before I forget, since it's happening basically as I'm typing this: the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol kicks off in the next day or so over in Seoul. Five games, Google DeepMind's Go-playing system against a guy who's been one of the best players in the world for close a decade. I'm not going to pretend I understand Go beyond the very basics: I know its supposed to have more possible board positions than atoms in the universe, which is the stat everyone quotes, including me apparently, but the fact that this is even a real match with real stakes and a million dollar prize on the table feels like a bigger deal than most people are treating it as right now. Chess got "solved" by computers twenty years ago with Deep Blue and everyone kind of shrugged eventually. Go was supposed to be different, supposedly a decade or more off still, because you cant just brute-force your way through it the way you could with chess. I have no idea how it's going to go. I'm mildly rooting for Lee Sedol, honestly, for no better reason than I like an underdog and I'm a little unsettled by how much smarter these systems keep getting without me really noticing month to month.
Two things in one week that are sort of about the same question, now that I write it out: how much of the stuff that used to require a person doing it really well is quietly getting handed over to machines that are pretty good at it too. A rocket flying itself back down to a boat. A program that might beat one of the best Go players alive. Neither one is really about the rocket or the game, when you think about it for more than a minute.
Going to try to actually watch some of the Go match this week if the streams are decent. Might report back. Might also just fall asleep at my desk again, we'll see.