So the whole internet spent last week losing its mind over Elon Musk's "funding secured" tweet and the SEC drama that's still unspooling out of it, and also over Fortnite finally landing on Android and Epic deciding to skip the Play Store entirely (which, sure, we can talk about sideloading security later, everyone else already has). I'm not writing about either of those today. Every tech blog on earth is already covering that stuff, and honestly by the time you read this there'll probably be six more updates I haven't even seen yet.
What I actually want to talk about is the fact that I set an alarm for 2:45 in the morning on a Sunday to watch a rocket launch, and I'd do it again.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe went up on August 12th, 3:31am Eastern, off the pad at Cape Canaveral on a Delta IV Heavy. I'm on the west coast so that meant watching the livestream at basically midnight, sitting on the couch with a mug of coffee I definitely didn't need to be drinking at that hour, half a bag of pretzels, and my dog giving me the most confused look a dog has ever given a human. She does not understand why the TV is on at midnight and honestly neither did my neighbors, based on the light through my window.
They'd actually tried to launch it the day before, Saturday, and scrubbed it with less than a minute on the clock because of a helium pressure alarm. If you've ever watched a launch attempt get scrubbed in the final seconds you know that specific flavor of deflation — you build up the whole countdown in your head and then it just stops. So going back the next night for round two felt a little different, less like an event and more like unfinished business.
Anyway it worked. And the mission itself is the kind of thing that's hard to overstate without sounding like a NASA press release, so let me just give you the numbers that actually stuck with me. The probe is going to fly through the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, closer than anything humans have ever built has gone, eventually within about 3.83 million miles of the surface. That still sounds like a big number until you remember Mercury orbits at around 36 million miles out. It's going to get there using seven gravity-assist flybys of Venus over about seven years, slowly bleeding off orbital energy each pass.
The heat shield is the part that actually made me say "wait, what" out loud at midnight. It's a carbon-composite panel about 4.5 inches thick, and it's rated to handle something like 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit on the sun-facing side while the instruments tucked behind it stay close to room temperature. That's not a small engineering problem, that's a "we invented a new category of thermal protection system" problem. I looked it up afterward and apparently it took years just to get the manufacturing process for that shield to work at scale.
One detail I like more than I probably should: this is the first NASA spacecraft ever named after a living person. Eugene Parker is the astrophysicist who predicted the existence of solar wind back in 1958, when most of the field thought he was wrong, and he was there at Cape Canaveral at 91 years old watching them launch a probe with his name on it. There's something about that I find genuinely moving in a way I don't usually get from tech news. Most of what I write about on here is some company shipping a slightly better version of something that already existed. This is a guy who was right about physics sixty years before anyone could build the thing to prove it, watching it go.
I'll admit the actual livestream experience was rougher than it should've been — NASA TV's feed kept dropping to a lower bitrate right at the interesting parts, and I ended up flipping over to a mirror on YouTube for the last few minutes before liftoff. Small complaint in the scheme of things, but if you're going to ask people to stay up until 3am you could at least keep the stream from turning into a smear of compression artifacts during the most exciting ninety seconds of the whole night.
Worth setting an alarm for, is my point. I don't do that for phone announcements anymore.