So Friday afternoon I had a meeting I could not get out of, and of course that was exactly when SpaceX was trying to land a rocket on a boat again. I ended up propping my phone against a water bottle on the conference table, muted, just glancing down every few minutes at the livestream while someone talked about Q2 targets. Not my proudest multitasking moment but also not my first.
If you've been half-following this the way I have, you know the backstory. SpaceX has been trying to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket upright on an autonomous drone ship out in the Atlantic for a while now, and it kept almost working and then very much not working. There was the one in January 2015 that came in too hard and basically exploded into confetti. Another attempt a few months after that ended about the same way, a little more sideways. They did stick a landing back in December, but that was on solid ground at Cape Canaveral, not on a boat that's bobbing around in open water. The boat landing is the harder trick, and everyone who follows this stuff knew it.
Yesterday (April 8th) they finally got it. CRS-8 launched around 4:43pm Eastern carrying supplies and an inflatable habitat module up to the ISS, and about eight minutes later the first stage came back down, engines relighting, legs out, and planted itself on the drone ship without tipping over or turning into a fireball. I watched the replay clip probably six times last night. There's something almost unreasonable about watching a fourteen-story-tall column of metal fall out of the sky, right itself, and land like it's setting down gently on a table. It doesn't look like it should be possible even when you're watching it happen.
The detail I keep telling people about, more than the landing itself, is the boat's name. It's called "Of Course I Still Love You." That's not a joke I'm making up, that's the actual, official name of the ship. Elon Musk apparently borrowed it (and the name of the other drone ship, "Just Read the Instructions") from the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, where the sentient starships get these long, dry, oddly conversational names. I read a couple of those books years ago and forgot most of the plot honestly, but the ship-naming convention stuck with me, and it's a genuinely funny thing to see show up on the side of a real barge in the middle of the ocean. Somewhere there's a marine engineer who had to stencil that onto a support vessel and just went along with it.
What I find more interesting than the "wow rockets are cool" reaction, which, sure, they are, is what this actually means if they can do it again reliably. Rocket stages have always been the most expensive part of the equation and historically you just throw them away after one use, like flying a 747 across the ocean once and then scrapping it. If SpaceX can catch these things and reuse them without basically rebuilding the engines from scratch, the economics of getting stuff into orbit start looking pretty different. That's the actual story here, not the hang-time footage, even though the footage is what everyone's going to share.
Also, unrelated complaint: whoever scheduled our team meeting for 4:30pm on a Friday when there was a rocket launch happening should reconsider their choices in general. I don't think it's too much to ask that major aerospace milestones get factored into calendar invites. Nobody in that room but me cared, and I only found out it landed successfully because my phone buzzed with a notification and I had to pretend I was checking something work related.
Anyway. One successful drone ship landing doesn't mean this is solved forever, they've said themselves that reusing a stage that's landed is a whole separate set of tests before it flies again. But after watching two of these attempts crash and burn (one of them literally), it's hard not to get a little invested in this one going right. It went right. I'll take it.