So I stayed up way too late last night watching a rocket launch, which is not exactly out of character for me but is not great when I've got a 9am call today.
SpaceX finally got the Intelsat 35e satellite off the ground out of Kennedy Space Center, after scrubbing the attempt twice earlier this week thanks to weather (Wednesday and Thursday both got called off, if I'm remembering right, which happens more with these Florida summer storms than people realize). The window opened late, something like 11:38pm Eastern, and I had the livestream up in one tab while pretending to do something productive in another. Didn't work. I just watched the countdown.
The launch itself went fine. Falcon 9 did its thing, first stage separated, second stage carried Intelsat 35e on toward its transfer orbit. No drama there. What I actually want to complain about is that there was no landing attempt at all this time. Zero. The booster just got expended into the ocean like it's 2015 again.
And look, I get why. Intelsat 35e is a heavy bird, built for high-throughput broadband coverage over Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa and Europe, part of that whole EpicNG constellation Intelsat's been building out. A satellite that size headed to a geostationary transfer orbit eats up way more fuel margin than a standard commercial comsat, and there just isn't enough gas left in the first stage to flip around, boostback, and stick a landing on the droneship. SpaceX has been upfront about this tradeoff for a while now — heavy payload, no recovery, sometimes that's just the deal.
But I've gotten spoiled. That's the honest truth of it. A year and a half ago a booster landing was a legitimately stunning thing to watch happen live, and now I catch myself feeling almost cheated when it's not on the menu, which is a pretty absurd way to feel about a company routinely landing 14-story rockets on a barge in the ocean. I complained about this to a friend over text at like midnight and even typing it out I knew how ridiculous it sounded. Still annoyed though.
The webcast itself was fine but SpaceX really needs to fix that dead air in the last few minutes before a hold gets confirmed. There's always this stretch where the hosts go quiet and you're just staring at a static shot of the pad wondering if something's wrong, and nine times out of ten nothing is wrong, it's just how these countdowns work. A ticking clock overlay or literally anything would help. Small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that makes we wonder if anyone on their comms team has watched their own stream start to finish.
Anyway. The satellite's on its way to do satellite things, which mostly means beaming broadband and TV signal to places that don't have great terrestrial options, and that's a genuinely useful outcome even if it's not the flashiest headline. Not every launch needs to be the one where the booster comes home. I just wish I hadn't refreshed spacexstats every twenty minutes for two straight scrub days waiting for a launch that, when it finally happened, gave me nothing to watch land.
I've got a stack of half-written posts sitting in drafts right now, one about switching my RSS reader again (third time this year, I have a problem) and one about a Raspberry Pi thing I broke and haven't fixed, so more soon. For now I'm just going to go find some coffee and accept that I chose this lifestyle voluntarily.