I watched a rocket leave the ground yesterday afternoon and it wrecked me a little, in a good way.
Quick recap for anyone who was off the internet: at 3:22pm Eastern on Saturday, SpaceX put two NASA astronauts into orbit on top of a Falcon 9, in a capsule they named Endeavour, off pad 39A at Kennedy. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are on their way to the space station right now as I type this, docking's supposed to happen tomorrow. First time a crew has launched to orbit from US soil since 2011, first time ever on a commercially built and owned spacecraft. They scrubbed the first attempt on Wednesday because of weather, some cloud-electrification rule about lightning risk, and honestly that made Saturday feel better, like it earned the clear sky it got.
Here's the detail that got me though, and I haven't seen many places dwell on it: Doug Hurley was the pilot on STS-135. That's the last Space Shuttle mission ever flown, Atlantis, July 2011. I started this blog in November of that same year, four months after Atlantis touched down and NASA mothballed the whole shuttle fleet. I remember writing some half-formed post back then about how weird it felt that the country that put a man on the moon didn't have a way to launch its own astronauts anymore, and NASA would be buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets for the foreseeable future at something like $80 million a pop. Nine years of that. And the guy who flew the actual last shuttle mission is the same guy who just flew the first flight to end that stretch. I don't know why that hit me the way it did but it did.
The interior of that capsule is a whole other conversation. Three big touchscreens, no toggle switches, no analog dials, nothing that looks like it belongs in a museum next to Apollo hardware. Some people online are calling it a Tesla in space and I get why, Elon Musk owns both companies and it shows. I'll be honest, my first reaction watching the b-roll of Behnken and Hurley in the simulator was that it looked less trustworthy than a wall of physical switches, not more. Turns out there are manual controls hidden behind the touchscreens for exactly that reason, so fine, I'll let it go. But my gut reaction is still that I want a big red mechanical switch somewhere on a thing that's carrying a human being to space, screens can freeze, my laptop froze twice this morning trying to load the same livestream.
Speaking of the livestream, NASA TV's coverage started something like four hours before launch and I had it on in the background while I made lunch, folded laundry, answered two work emails I definitely should've ignored on a Saturday. That's just where we are three months into working from home, I guess, everything blurs into everything else and a historic launch competes for attention with dishes. My partner walked through around 3pm, saw the countdown clock, and said "oh is that happening today" like it was a mildly interesting weather event. I don't think I conveyed the scale of it very well over the preceding week if that's the reaction it got in my own kitchen.
The first stage came down on the drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You, stationed out in the Atlantic. That name still makes me laugh every single time, a barge named after a joke from a Iain M. Banks novel, worth like tens of millions of dollars, catching rocket boosters on their way back from space. There's something very of-this-decade about that, the most serious hardware humanity builds getting named by a guy who reads a lot of sci-fi and thinks it's funny.
Anyway. Endeavour's on its way, docking tomorrow, and assuming that goes fine this becomes the first operational leg of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, meaning American astronauts stop needing a ride from Roscosmos. Nine years is a long time to not be able to launch your own people. I'm glad it's over, I'm glad I happened to be paying attention on a random Saturday instead of scrolling past it, and I'm mildly annoyed my laundry still isn't folded.