So yesterday everybody on my timeline was passing around that first-ever picture of a black hole (M87, 55 million light years away, looks like a fuzzy orange donut, you've seen it by now). I'm not going to write another "here's why this photo matters" post because every tech blog on earth did that exact post yesterday and mine would just be noise. But today gave us something almost as wild and a lot more personal to watch live, so that's what I actually want to talk about.
Last night SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy for the second time ever, carrying the Arabsat-6A communications satellite, and I stayed up way too late watching the stream instead of doing literally anything productive. Liftoff was 6:35pm Eastern from Pad 39A at Kennedy, and about eight minutes later they landed all three boosters. All three. The two side boosters came down together back at Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral, basically at the same moment, which still looks fake every single time I watch it happen. The double sonic boom hit a few seconds later and you could hear the crowd at the Kennedy viewing site just lose it. Then the center core, coming in way faster and way further downrange, stuck the landing on the drone ship out in the Atlantic, "Of Course I Still Love You." First time they'd ever recovered all three Falcon Heavy boosters in one flight. The first Falcon Heavy demo last year lost its center core when it missed the drone ship and hit the water at like 300 mph, so this was the actual redemption arc.
I'll admit I have a soft spot for the drone ship names specifically. Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions are both Iain M. Banks references, and there's something very funny about a trillion-dollar aerospace company naming its ocean landing pads after sarcastic sentient spaceships from a series of novels about post-scarcity anarchist utopias. Anyway.
Here's the part that made today weirder than a normal good-news space day though. A few hours before the Falcon Heavy launch, Israel's Beresheet lander lost its main engine during descent and crashed into the lunar surface instead of landing on it. This was SpaceIL's spacecraft, a nonprofit that started out as an entry in the Google Lunar X Prize (which never actually got won, the prize expired in 2018, but a few teams kept going anyway). Beresheet launched back in February riding along with an Indonesian satellite, took this long, looping, fuel-efficient path to the moon instead of a direct shot, and was maybe 489 feet up on final approach when the engine cut out and they lost contact. Mission control in Yehud went quiet, then you could see everyone's faces just fall. If it had worked, Israel would've been the fourth country ever to soft-land on the moon, after the US, Russia, and China. It didn't work, and now it's a crater, or at least debris in one.
So that's the day. One country's spacecraft ends up as new lunar wreckage in the afternoon, and a private company sticks a landing that looked physically impossible by evening. I don't think there's a neat lesson in that, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tries to hand you one within twelve hours of either event. Spaceflight is just like this sometimes, brutal and glorious back to back, and you don't get to pick the order.
One more thing worth mentioning: Beresheet was never trying to be a moonshot in the metaphorical startup-blog sense, it was an actual moonshot, built on something like a $100 million budget, which is absurdly cheap for a lunar mission (NASA's Surveyor program in the 60s cost way more per landing even adjusted for inflation, though obviously not an apples to apples comparison given how much has changed). SpaceIL has already said they want to try again. I hope they do. I'd rather watch five failed scrappy attempts than zero attempts, and I say that as someone who has personally never landed anything more ambitious than a paper airplane in a hallway at work.
Falcon Heavy's next flight isn't scheduled for a while, something for the Air Force I think, but if you missed last night's landing, go find the replay of the side boosters coming down together. It's worth the four minutes.