So it's Sunday night, I've got laundry going, and I'm still thinking about a rocket.
Thursday evening SpaceX relaunched a Falcon 9 first stage that had already flown once before, which is a sentence that would've sounded like science fiction a couple years ago. The booster (B1021 if you're keeping track, which apparently I am now) first flew back in April 2016 carrying cargo to the ISS, landed itself on that drone ship out in the Atlantic, and then just... sat around getting refurbished for almost a year. Thursday they strapped a fresh satellite to the top of it (SES-10, for a Luxembourg satellite company most people have never heard of) and lit it up again from the same pad at Kennedy Space Center that used to launch the Space Shuttle.
I had it pulled up on a second monitor at work, which I am not going to pretend was fully professional of me, but come on. The stream started around 6pm, there was the usual hold-your-breath countdown stuff, and then it went up fine and — this is the part that actually got me — the booster came back down and landed itself again. Second flight, second landing, same piece of hardware. My coworker walked by, saw the little booster silhouette sticking the landing on screen, and just said "wait, that's the SAME rocket?" and yeah. That's the whole point. That's why everyone who follows this stuff has been losing their minds about it for two years.
I don't think I can fully explain to a non-space-nerd why this matters so much, but I'll try anyway: rockets have basically always been single-use. You build this absurdly expensive, absurdly precise machine, you burn 90% of it up getting a payload into orbit, and then you either let it crash into the ocean or you just throw the whole first stage away. It's like building a 747, flying it once, and scrapping it. SpaceX has been landing these boosters back on droneships and on land for a while now (I remember watching a bunch of them blow up before they finally stuck one, which honestly made the eventual successes feel more earned). But landing one is a party trick if you never actually reuse the thing. Thursday was the first time an orbital-class rocket flew, landed, and then flew paying cargo again. That's the actual milestone.
Elon Musk did the post-launch call and used the word "revolutionary" about four times, which, sure, it's his company, let him have it. But I don't think he's wrong here. If they can get the turnaround cost down and the refurbishment time shorter, the economics of putting stuff in orbit change pretty dramatically. Not overnight, and there's a real argument that SpaceX's own math on the savings has been optimistic in the past. I'm not going to pretend I have insider numbers on what SES actually paid for this launch versus a new booster. But directionally, reusing a rocket like a reusable rocket (I know, I know) instead of a Roman candle you light once is obviously the right direction if you can make the engineering work.
Unrelated but also from this same week: Samsung showed off the Galaxy S8 on Tuesday and it's got that curved edge-to-edge screen with basically no bezel and no physical home button anymore, which is going to be one of those design choices every other phone maker copies within about eighteen months. Also apparently no headphone jack controversy here since it kept one, which after the iPhone 7 drama last fall feels almost quaint. It's not out until later this month so there's not much to say yet beyond "it looks nice in photos," but I'll probably end up with one, my current phone's battery is on its last legs anyway.
Anyway. Laundry's done. Rocket's still cool. More soon.