I was at my desk on Friday morning, coffee going cold, watching a livestream instead of doing the thing I was actually supposed to be doing that morning. Sound familiar? SpaceX launched the Thaicom 8 satellite up to geostationary transfer orbit that morning, and about nine minutes later they landed the first stage back on the drone ship out in the Atlantic. Again. This is the fourth time they've pulled this off now, and somehow it still gets me every single time.
Here's the thing that doesn't get talked about enough when people wave this off as "SpaceX did the thing again." Landing a booster after a low orbit cargo run, like the CRS-8 landing back in April, and landing one after a GTO launch like this Thaicom mission, are not the same trick. A geostationary transfer orbit needs way more fuel on the way up, which means the booster comes back down faster and hotter, with a lot less gas in the tank to slow itself down. SpaceX themselves had said going into this one that the odds were rougher than the earlier landings. Elon Musk was pretty blunt about it on Twitter beforehand, basically saying don't get your hopes up. And then they landed it anyway. Second GTO landing in three weeks, after JCSAT-14 pulled off the same trick on May 6th.
I don't really have a hot take here beyond this: it's genuinely one of the more remarkable things happening in tech right now, and I think a lot of us went numb to it faster than we should have. Three weeks ago this exact same feat was a first-in-human-history moment covered on every news channel. This time it barely dented my Twitter feed until I went looking for it. That's a strange thing about progress, it stops being news the second time you see it.
Small complaint while I'm here: the official SpaceX stream chat is unwatchable. I had it open in a second tab for maybe four minutes before muting it. It's just a wall of rocket emoji and people arguing about Tesla stock, which has nothing to do with anything happening on screen. I don't know why I keep opening it every single time. Morbid curiosity, I guess.
What I'm actually curious about, and what nobody seems to be writing about yet, is whether this particular booster is even going to fly again. The GTO landings come in so much hotter that there's a real question about how much wear the first stage takes compared to the gentler cargo-run landings. We don't know the answer to that as of this writing, but that's the part of the story I actually want more reporting on. Anybody can watch a rocket land on a livestream, that's the flashy part. Whether they can turn around and reuse the thing cheaply enough to actually change the economics of getting stuff into space is the whole point of doing any of this, and that's a much slower and less telegenic story to tell than nine minutes of fire and a barge camera.
My dad called me over the weekend to ask about "the rocket thing" because he'd seen a clip on Facebook, and I spent about ten minutes trying to explain why landing after a GTO launch is harder than landing after a cargo resupply run. I don't think I did a great job of it, judging by the silence on the other end of the line. Some of this stuff is genuinely hard to explain casually even when you've been following along for years. I might try writing a proper explainer post on the different orbit types at some point, since I keep running into this same wall with people who ask.
For now I'm just going to sit with the fact that a company is regularly, almost routinely at this point, landing rockets on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and that a sentence like that would have sounded like straight up science fiction to me a decade ago. Four for four isn't a fluke anymore. It's starting to look like a method.