So last Monday I set an alarm for 10am on a day I had exactly zero reason to be up that early on purpose, because SpaceX was launching a Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg with 64 satellites strapped to it. Sixty-four. On one rocket. That's the part that got me — not the landing, not the reusability angle I've beaten to death on here before, just the sheer number of tiny spacecraft riding along on a mission called SSO-A: SmallSat Express, which sounds like something you'd order off a menu.
The whole thing was basically a rideshare van for satellites, put together by a company called Spaceflight Industries, and it broke the record for most satellites launched on a single rocket. I watched the stream on my laptop with the sound down low because my daughter was still asleep, and I kept refreshing the chat to see if anyone else was as weirdly emotional about this as I was. A handful of people were. Most were arguing about the drone ship name, which is "Just Read the Instructions," and yes, that's a real Culture novel reference, and yes, I will die on the hill that naming your autonomous ocean barge after a Iain M. Banks ship AI is one of the genuinely great bits of corporate whimsy of this decade.
The first stage came down on that drone ship without much drama, which by December 2018 is somehow already the boring part of a SpaceX launch. Remember when that used to be the whole show? Now it's just the appetizer before the deployment sequence, which for this mission took hours because they had to space out 64 separate satellite releases so nothing bumped into anything else on the way out. I did not watch all of that live. I have a job.
Separately, and I promise this connects, I spent part of that same week digging through old email trying to figure out if I still had a Starwood Preferred Guest account, because of the Marriott breach news that broke at the end of November. Half a billion guest records. My own hunt turned up an account I hadn't touched since a work trip to Austin in maybe 2014, still sitting there with some embarrassingly small number of points and, presumably, whatever personal info I'd handed over at check-in that year. Nothing came of it for me as far as I can tell, but going through old hotel confirmation emails from a trip I barely remember was its own small weird experience. You forget how much of your life sits in some database you never think about until a headline makes you go check.
Anyway. Back to the satellites, because that's the more fun story. What strikes me about a mission like SSO-A is how unglamorous most of the payload actually is once you look past the launch spectacle. A lot of what went up is small imaging and communications hardware for companies and universities that could never have afforded a dedicated launch on their own. That's the actual shift happening here, quietly, underneath the record-breaking headline number. Launch used to be the bottleneck for anyone who wasn't a government or a telecom giant. Now you can be a university lab with a shoebox-sized satellite and get a seat on a rocket that's also carrying somebody else's weather sensor and somebody else's radio relay, and you all split the bill.
I don't think that's a small thing, even if it doesn't generate the same headlines as a booster landing itself on a boat named after a sci-fi joke. It's the kind of change that only looks obvious in hindsight, the way cheap shipping containers only look obvious in hindsight. Somebody figures out how to split a fixed cost sixty-four ways and suddenly a bunch of projects that were never going to happen, happen.
My coffee had gone cold by the time deployment finished. Worth it. I'll take an early alarm for this over almost anything else that could've dragged me out of bed on a Monday.