We're a little over a month into whatever this is now. I've stopped calling it "quarantine" because that word implies an end date, and I don't have one of those, so I've just started calling it Tuesday, or Thursday, or whichever day it happens to be. My calendar has been depressingly empty since mid-March. Yesterday I actually wrote something on it for the first time in weeks: May 27. Underlined twice.
That's the date NASA announced for the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch, the one that's supposed to send astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley up from Kennedy Space Center, pad 39A, on a Falcon 9. If it goes off as planned, it'll be the first time a crewed spacecraft has launched from American soil since the shuttle program shut down in July 2011. Which, funny enough, is basically when this blog started. I don't think I've ever mentioned that on here before, but I remember exactly where I was for Atlantis's last launch (a work break room, a bad video stream, somebody's aunt crying on CNN), and I remember feeling a little sick about it, like the country had quietly decided space wasn't a priority anymore. Nine years of buying rides on Russian Soyuz rockets at something like $80 million a seat will do that to you.
So yeah, a date on a calendar shouldn't feel like this much of a relief, but here we are. I want to be careful not to get carried away with the "commercial spaceflight saves the day" narrative, because I think there's something a little uncomfortable about how much of this is now run through a company owned by one guy with a Twitter habit, instead of, you know, a government agency answerable to actual oversight. That's not a knock on the engineering, which from everything I've read is genuinely solid. It's just a thing I keep chewing on. NASA handing the keys to the ignition to SpaceX isn't the same as NASA doing the thing itself, and I don't think we should pretend those are equivalent even when the outcome looks similar from the outside.
What I can't get over is the timing of the announcement itself. Every other headline this week has been contact tracing APIs and ventilator shortages and case counts, and then NASA drops "hey, humans are going to space again in six weeks" into the middle of it like it's nothing. I had it open in one tab and a Zoom call in another, and I kept alt-tabbing back to reread the same paragraph about the Falcon 9's abort system because I genuinely could not focus on whatever spreadsheet was being screen-shared. Small, dumb complaint here but I will die on this hill: nothing kills a Zoom meeting faster than someone reading bullet points off a slide they could've just emailed. Anyway.
There's something almost stubbornly optimistic about setting a launch date for two people to leave the planet while the rest of us can't leave our zip codes. I don't mean that as a knock, I mean it as the thing that got me. Most of the news cycle right now is about containment, staying put, flattening curves, all of it necessarily inward-facing and it should be. And then there's this one story that points straight up and says a specific day, six weeks out, when something is going to happen that hasn't happened in almost a decade. It's not going to fix anything. It's not a vaccine, it's not a stimulus check, it's not going to get anyone's job back. But I noticed how much better I felt after reading it than after reading literally anything else in my feed that day, and I think that says something about what a person's brain actually needs during a month like this one. Not distraction exactly. Just proof that long, slow, difficult projects still occasionally end with someone strapped into a rocket.
Obviously the date could slip. These things slip constantly, and a global pandemic is not exactly a frictionless environment for coordinating a launch with hundreds of contractors. I'm not going to be shocked if May 27 quietly becomes June something. But I circled it anyway, because right now having any date on the calendar that isn't "next Zoom call" feels like a small win, and I'm taking it.