I set an alarm for 9:15 this morning specifically to watch a rocket. Not even a new kind of rocket, a Falcon 9, which by now Ive watched go up more times than I can count. But this one mattered for a dumb reason that I cant fully justify: it launched from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, and 39A hasnt sent anything into space since Atlantis lifted off in July 2011 on the very last Space Shuttle mission. That's the same month this blog started, which is a coincidence I'm probably making too much of, but there it is.
SpaceX was actually supposed to fly this one yesterday. They scrubbed it with under a minute on the clock because of what NASA described as an out-of-limits reading tied to the upper stage engine steering hydraulics, which is exactly the kind of vague-but-terrifying phrase that makes you glad they stopped the countdown instead of pushing through it. Today they tried again and it went up clean at 9:38:58 AM Eastern, no drama, Dragon capsule riding on top loaded with something like 5,500 pounds of cargo and science experiments headed to the ISS.
Watching the stream, the thing that got me wasnt the launch itself so much as the pad. 39A is where Apollo 11 left from. Where most of the Shuttle missions left from. SpaceX has been leasing it since 2014 and doing renovations, and there was a real possibility this slipped further and further until it felt like vaporware, the way big infrastructure promises often do. It didnt. They actually flew from it, on a NASA resupply contract no less, which is a weird sentence to type out loud. A private company launching a government cargo run from the same concrete Neil Armstrong walked across on his way to the launch tower.
Im not going to pretend Im some die-hard space nerd who tracks every mission. I mostly ignore the ones that go up from the other pad down the road. But something about a company that was basically a punchline eight or nine years ago (remember the early Falcon 1 failures, the third launch where the stages recontacted and the whole thing tumbled) now routinely using the most historically loaded piece of concrete in American spaceflight is the kind of thing that actually makes me feel optimistic about something, which doesnt happen a lot before 10 AM on a Sunday.
The livestream itself buffered right at T-minus 12 seconds, because of course it did, and I missed the actual ignition watching a spinning circle instead. Comcast, if youre reading this, which you are not, get it together. I ended up watching the replay clip about four minutes later instead, which is its own weird modern experience: watching something live-ish, missing the live part, then watching the recorded version of the thing you were just trying to watch live, all within the same ten minutes.
One thing I keep thinking about is that they didnt even attempt a booster landing on this one, or if they did I lost track amid the buffering (checked after: no droneship or pad landing was planned for this flight, first stage was expended). Not every mission needs the landing to be the story. Its become almost a background expectation now, this idea that of course theyll try to land it, and when they dont its almost more notable than when they do. Two years ago the idea of routinely landing an orbital booster was science fiction. Now its the part I almost forgot to check on.
Dragon's supposed to reach the station and get grappled by the Canadarm in a few days, arms full of supplies, at which point this becomes a completely unremarkable resupply run, filed away with the dozen before it. But this morning, for about nine minutes, a rocket left from the same pad as Apollo 11 and didnt need three government agencies and a Saturn V to do it. Worth the early alarm. Worth the bad coffee I made too fast because I was rushing to get the stream up. Not worth Comcast buffering at the one moment that mattered, but I guess you cant have everything.