Okay so by now literally everyone with a keyboard has written something about Falcon Heavy. I wasn't going to bother, because what's left to say that six hundred other blogs haven't already said this week. But there's one part of Tuesday that I keep thinking about that most of the recaps skimmed past, so here we go.
The launch itself was Tuesday afternoon, 3:45 ET, from Pad 39A at Kennedy — the same pad Apollo 11 went up from, which is the kind of detail that sounds like marketing copy until you actually watch it happen and get a little emotional about it. Cherry red Tesla Roadster on top, a mannequin in a SpaceX suit strapped into the driver's seat that everyone's now calling Starman, Bowie on a loop on the stereo. "Don't Panic" on the dashboard screen. There's apparently a Hot Wheels version of the same car sitting on the dash too, with a tiny Starman inside it, which is the sort of joke that only makes sense once you've already committed to putting an actual car into space. I watched most of it on my phone at my desk because our office blocks YouTube for "bandwidth reasons," except half the building was clearly doing the exact same workaround I was, because the wifi crawled to a stop right around T-minus five minutes. Nobody in that office is fooling anybody.
The bit that actually got me wasn't the car, though. It was about eight minutes after launch, when the two side boosters came back down and landed at the same time, a few hundred feet apart, back at Cape Canaveral. Watching two rocket boosters land themselves upright, simultaneously, like a synchronized diving routine except each one weighs as much as an empty 737 — that's the moment my stomach did something weird. I've watched a lot of SpaceX landings by now and they still don't feel like a thing that should be possible. This one being doubled just about broke my brain a little.
Here's the part nobody's really writing about though. Those two boosters coming back through the atmosphere threw off twin sonic booms over the Space Coast, and apparently it rattled windows and shook houses badly enough that people down around Cocoa Beach and Melbourne started calling 911 thinking it was an earthquake or an explosion. I saw a few local news clips of dispatchers fielding panicked calls in real time while the rest of us were up on Twitter watching the boosters stick the landing and cheering. Somewhere out there Tuesday afternoon, one group of people was having the best five minutes of their year, and a few blocks over another group thought their house was coming apart. Nobody tells you that half of the story when they're doing the highlight reel.
The center core, for what it's worth, did not land. It was supposed to come down on the drone ship out in the Atlantic, "Of Course I Still Love You," and instead it missed by a wide margin and came in too fast, apparently taking out a couple of the ship's engines with shrapnel from a few hundred feet up. Elon basically confirmed as much afterward. Somehow that part barely made the news cycle because everybody was too busy losing it over a car playing Bowie in orbit.
I'll be honest, I find a lot of the Elon-worship stuff exhausting, the guy tweets like he's auditioning for something and I don't need the daily updates on his personal life. But credit where it's due: getting a rocket with 27 engines lit at once off the pad, on the first try, with two boosters landing in sync eight minutes later, is an actual engineering achievement and not hype. My personal ranking of the day's events: the double landing first, the sonic boom chaos a close second because it's just such a perfectly 2018 image, and the car in space a distant third, mostly because I think the car stunt will read as more of a punchline in twenty years than the landing will.
Also, somewhat unrelated, but the Winter Olympics opened in Pyeongchang on Friday and there were already reports of some kind of technical mess with the wifi and broadcast systems during the ceremony that people are quietly muttering "cyberattack" about without anyone confirming much yet. If that turns out to be what it looks like, that's a whole other post. For now it's just a rumor with smoke around it.
Anyway. Back to whatever I was supposed to be writing about this week.