I had a whole Sunday morning planned out. Coffee, some laundry, finally answering the three emails I'd been ignoring since Thursday. None of that happened, because SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from Pad 39A and I sat on the couch with my laptop watching a grainy NASA-adjacent livestream like it was 2011 again.
Quick context if you missed it: 39A is the pad NASA used for Apollo 11, most of the shuttle missions, and basically every big American human spaceflight moment since the late 60s. Nobody had launched anything from it since Atlantis closed out the shuttle program back in July 2011. SpaceX has been leasing it and retrofitting it for a while now, and Sunday morning was the first time anything actually left the ground from there under their control. A Dragon capsule full of cargo, headed to the space station, riding a Falcon 9.
I watched it lift off a little before 9:40 in the morning, Eastern time. The stream buffered right at the worst possible moment, obviously, because that is what livestreams do, and I missed a solid four seconds of the actual liftoff staring at a spinning wheel. Got it back in time to see the thing clear the tower though, and honestly that first few seconds off the pad still gets me every time, no matter how many of these I've watched at this point. There's something about the sound design of a rocket launch that no app notification or product keynote is ever going to replicate. It's just physically loud in a way that comes through even a laptop speaker.
The part that actually matters
Here's the thing that made me stay on the couch instead of getting up to start the laundry: not long after the first and second stages separated, the booster turned itself around and flew back down to Landing Zone 1, a few miles from the pad it just launched off of, and landed itself upright. I've seen this now more than a handful of times and it has not gotten old. If anything it's gotten weirder to watch, because now I half expect it and it still looks completely wrong, like footage running backwards. A fifteen-story piece of machinery that just launched a spacecraft toward the space station casually strolling back down and sticking the landing on a concrete pad.
I keep coming back to this idea, maybe too often on this blog, but I think landing and reusing boosters is a bigger deal for actual technology than pretty much anything coming out of a phone launch this year. Not a knock on phones, I own one, I like mine fine. But most of what gets called innovation lately is a camera bump or a slightly faster chip or a notification center rearranged for the fourth time. This is a company routinely doing something that, ten years ago, most aerospace engineers would've told you wasn't worth attempting because the fuel savings wouldn't offset the added complexity. They're proving that wrong in real time, on a pad where Neil Armstrong once sat waiting to go to the moon.
There's a specific kind of nostalgia at work here too that I want to be honest about. I was a kid during the shuttle era, not really old enough to appreciate most of it while it was happening, but old enough that watching Atlantis land for the last time in 2011 felt like the end of something. Watching 39A get used again, even for an uncrewed cargo run, even by a private company instead of NASA directly, scratched an itch I didn't realize was still there. It's not the same thing. I know it's not the same thing. But it's not nothing either.
The capsule made it to orbit fine, on its way to dock with the station in a couple of days. The booster is sitting at Landing Zone 1 right now, presumably getting inspected by a bunch of very tired engineers. My laundry is still not done. I did eventually answer one of the three emails, so it wasn't a total loss of a Sunday.
If you didn't catch it live, it's worth finding the replay just for the pad flyover shots before liftoff. Seeing 39A prepped and ready again, gantry pulled back, after sitting mostly quiet for five and a half years, is a genuinely strange thing to look at if you remember what it used to be for.