So Thursday afternoon I did the thing where I tell myself I'll just glance at a livestream for a minute and then forty minutes disappear. SpaceX finally launched the Block 5 version of the Falcon 9, out of Kennedy Space Center, and I had a browser tab open the entire time pretending to work in the other window.
For anyone who hasn't been following along (and honestly, why would you, unless you're the specific flavor of nerd I am), Block 5 is the version of the Falcon 9 that Musk has been talking up for months as the one that's actually built for reuse, not "reuse" in the sense of "we recovered it and then spent three months taking it apart to see if it survived," but reuse in the sense of turning a booster around and flying it again in a matter of weeks, maybe eventually days. The launch had slipped a day, from Wednesday to Thursday, which is basically par for the course with SpaceX and barely worth mentioning except that I'd cleared my afternoon for Wednesday and then had to quietly un-clear it.
The payload was Bangabandhu-1, which is Bangladesh's first geostationary communications satellite. There's something I really like about that detail and it's not really about the rocket at all, it's a country getting its own satellite for the first time, riding on top of somebody else's hardware milestone. That's the part of space stuff that gets me, more than the "biggest rocket" or "most powerful engine" headlines. A whole national first, kind of riding shotgun on a test flight.
The launch itself went up around 4:14 in the afternoon Eastern, which is a weirdly civilized time for a SpaceX launch. I'm used to either falling asleep before a 1am static fire or waking up bleary for a dawn window. Getting to watch a landing burn on a landing that happens in broad daylight, with the barge visible and everything crisp instead of a grainy night-vision blob, is honestly just nicer television. The booster came down on the drone ship and stuck it, and I did the thing where I pump my fist alone in my apartment like I personally had something to do with it.
The other thing eating my week
Meanwhile, completely unrelated, my email has turned into a swamp of "We've updated our Privacy Policy" notices. Every single service I have ever signed up for, going back to some forum I joined in 2013 and forgot existed, has apparently decided this is the week to tell me about it. GDPR enforcement kicks in on the 25th, and you can feel every company's legal department working overtime right now. I counted eleven of these emails in my inbox yesterday morning before I'd even had coffee. Eleven. Some of them are actually useful and explain real changes. Most of them read like they were generated by a template and nobody at the company read past paragraph one.
I'll admit some hypocrisy here, because I still haven't updated the privacy policy on this very blog, and I probably should before the 25th rolls around, given that Techpad technically has readers in the EU (hi, the two of you in Germany who comment sometimes). It's on the list. Right under "fix the RSS feed footer that's been broken since March," which, yes, I know, I know.
What I keep coming back to with both of these stories, the rocket and the privacy emails, is that they're sort of opposite modes of the same industry. One is a company moving fast enough that they're literally trying to fly the same piece of hardware more than once to save money and get to Mars faster. The other is companies moving as slowly and carefully as legally possible because a regulator in Brussels is about to start handing out fines. Both are just tech doing tech things, I guess, but one of them is a lot more fun to watch with a bag of chips at 4pm on a Thursday.
Anyway. Landing videos never get old to me. I don't care how many times I've seen a booster stick a landing at this point, it still doesn't feel like a normal thing that's allowed to happen.