So last Monday, at some ungodly hour like 12:45am, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral and stuck the landing again. Second time they've landed one back on solid ground instead of that barge in the ocean. I stayed up for it, which, given that I have a day job and a body that increasingly resents 1am anything, was a decision I regretted by about 9:30 the next morning.
Here's the thing that got me though. This happened during the exact same week that literally every single person I know, including my dentist, was wandering around parking lots at midnight staring at their phone trying to catch a Zubat. Pokemon Go has been out for something like two weeks now and it has genuinely eaten the entire internet's brain. My own neighborhood turned into this weird nightly gathering of teenagers and grown adults congregating around the church two blocks over because apparently it's a gym or a Pokestop or something, I don't fully understand the taxonomy and at this point I'm too embarrassed to ask. And meanwhile SpaceX quietly landed a reusable rocket booster, on land, at night, with basically no fanfare compared to what a small orange rat-thing on your phone screen was getting.
I'm not even mad about it. I get it. Pokemon Go is fun, it's social in this strange new way where strangers are talking to each other in public again, and a rocket landing is, let's be honest, mostly a vertical column of fire and smoke that either tips over or doesn't. But it did strike me as sort of funny that the actual hard problem, the one where you take a 15-story controlled explosion and bring it back down onto a concrete pad without it falling over, got a two-minute segment on the evening news wedged between two Pokemon Go segments.
The payload matters more than the landing anyway, if I'm being honest with myself. That capsule was carrying a docking adapter up to the space station, the kind of hardware that future crew capsules are actually going to plug into once astronauts start launching from American soil again instead of hitching rides on Russian Soyuz rockets. That's the boring, unglamorous, actually-important part of the story and it got maybe a tenth of the coverage of the landing itself, which itself got maybe a tenth of the coverage of a video game about catching cartoon animals. I don't have a grand point to make about that. It's just how it goes. Landing a rocket looks cool in a ten-second video clip. A docking adapter does not.
Anyway, watched the launch on the NASA feed on my laptop, propped up on the kitchen counter, half asleep, and when the first stage came down and stuck it I actually made an audible noise loud enough that it woke up my cat, who was extremely unimpressed and went back to sleep within about four seconds. Worth it though. I've watched a bunch of these landings now going back to December, and I still don't think I've gotten used to how wrong it looks. Rockets are supposed to go up and either come apart or crash. Watching one come back down under control, slow itself, and just kind of stand there on its own legs like nothing happened still messes with something in my brain that grew up on Apollo footage and shuttle disasters. It looks fake. Every time.
Meanwhile I did also go out and play Pokemon Go for about forty minutes on Tuesday because peer pressure is real and my roommate wouldn't stop talking about a Lure Module some cafe down the street had set up. Caught a Pidgey and a couple of Ratata and then my phone battery was at 11 percent and I had to go home, which is apparently the entire experience for most people right now. The battery drain on that app is genuinely rough. I ended up buying one of those cheap portable chargers off Amazon that everyone's suddenly recommending, the little brick ones, mostly because I got tired of watching my phone die by 3pm every day.
Two very different stories, same week, wildly different amounts of attention, and I don't think that's a coincidence or a tragedy, it's just what happens when the thing that's fun to hold in your hand beats the thing that's impressive from four hundred miles away. Rockets can wait. Theyve been doing this a while and they'll keep doing it whether or not anyone's watching at 1am.