So this was the week everyone's timeline was full of Google I/O clips, that Duplex demo where the assistant calls a hair salon and says "mm-hmm" like a real person, which is impressive and also kind of unsettling if you think about it for more than four seconds. I'm not going to write about that. Half the internet already has, and it'll keep getting written about for another week at least. I want to talk about the thing that happened two days ago that I think is actually the bigger deal long-term, even though it got a fraction of the attention: SpaceX flew the first Falcon 9 Block 5.
It went up Friday afternoon, 4:14pm Eastern, off pad 39A at Kennedy, carrying Bangabandhu-1, which is Bangladesh's first geostationary comms satellite. It was supposed to fly Thursday but the computer aborted at T-minus 58 seconds and they scrubbed for the day. I had the stream open in a browser tab at work during the Thursday attempt and when it scrubbed I just left the tab sitting there, unmuted, refreshing between spreadsheet cells like an idiot, waiting for a hold that wasn't coming. Very productive afternoon.
Anyway Friday it went, and it worked, and the booster landed on the droneship (still can't get over that they named it "Of Course I Still Love You," genuinely one of the best decisions in the history of aerospace naming conventions).
Block 5 matters more than any individual launch because it's the version of the rocket that's supposed to actually be reusable in the way Musk has been promising since roughly forever, fly it, inspect it, maybe swap a couple things, fly it again within 24 hours eventually, ten-plus times per booster with only minor refurbishment, a hundred-ish flights before retirement. Every earlier Falcon 9 was really a stepping stone toward this specific hardware revision. Titanium grid fins instead of the aluminum ones that used to catch fire on reentry. Uncovered, unpainted interstage because paint is just extra weight and extra cost with zero benefit. More powerful Merlin engines, better insulation around the engine section so it can take reentry heat without a full teardown afterward. None of that is flashy. Nobody's going to make a viral clip out of a titanium grid fin.
But this is the part of the SpaceX story that I actually care about, more than the Mars talk, more than the Starship renders. A rocket that doesn't get thrown away every single flight is the whole ballgame for making spaceflight something other than a once-a-decade civilizational flex. Airlines don't build a new 737 for every flight. Cargo ships don't get scuttled after one crossing. The fact that we've treated orbital rockets as disposable for sixty years is the actual weird part, not the fact that someone's finally trying to stop.
I'll admit the demo-friendly version of this week's news cycle makes sense, a computer that can order a haircut for you is something you can show your mom and she'll get why it's interesting in about eight seconds. A landed booster requires you to already care about rockets, or at least sit through someone explaining why the fins matter. I get why one trends and the other doesn't. Doesn't mean I have to write about the one that's already trending.
(Also, separate and much smaller complaint: my inbox has started filling up with "we've updated our privacy policy" emails from basically every company that has ever had my email address, which I'm assuming is everyone gearing up for the GDPR deadline later this month. I've gotten four today. I don't think I'm going to read a single one, and I don't think you are either, and I don't think anyone drafting them thinks so either, which makes the whole exercise feel like a very expensive legal ritual rather than actual communication. More on that when the deadline's actually closer and it's a full-on avalanche, probably.)
Point is, go watch the Block 5 landing footage if you haven't. It's less charming than a robot voice saying "um" convincingly, but it's the one that's going to matter in five years.