I was up at 5:30 in the morning on Friday for this, coffee in one hand, phone propped against the coffee maker, watching the NASA livestream instead of getting a normal amount of sleep. Worth it. Crew Dragon Endeavour lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 5:49am Eastern carrying four astronauts to the International Station: Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur from NASA, Akihiko Hoshide from JAXA, Thomas Pesquet from ESA. Clean launch, clean ascent, booster landed itself on the drone ship out in the Atlantic like it was nothing.
Here's the part that actually got me out of bed for it though, and its not the part most of the coverage led with. This wasnt just another Falcon 9 with a crew capsule bolted to the top. The capsule itself, Endeavour, is the same one that flew Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley up in May 2020 on Demo-2 — the flight that ended almost a decade of the US not having its own way to launch humans. And the booster underneath it had already flown once before too, on the Crew-1 mission back in November. So you had a reused capsule sitting on a reused booster, both of them previously used to launch actual human beings, launching four more human beings. That's not a small thing. Cargo reuse is basically routine at this point, nobody blinks at a booster landing anymore. Reusing hardware that's already carried people, on a mission that's also carrying people, is a different kind of vote of confidence. Somebody at SpaceX and somebody at NASA looked at the numbers on that exact capsule and that exact booster and said yes, put four more people on it.
I keep thinking about how weirdly boring this is starting to look from the outside, which is sort of the whole point. A crewed orbital launch used to be the biggest event on the calendar, wall to wall coverage, kids gathered around TVs at school. This one got a livestream and a few headlines and then everyone moved on to arguing about Apple's colorful new iMacs. Which, fine, I have opinions about those too (the pastel-on-the-front-bold-on-the-back thing is doing a lot of work to make you forget it starts at $1299 for the base config with only 256GB of storage, and I say that as someone who will probably still end up buying one). But a reused human-rated spacecraft launching on a reused human-rated booster and it barely cracking the front page feels like the actual milestone here, more than any single Tuesday keynote. This is what "routine" is supposed to look like when a genuinely hard engineering problem gets solved properly — not fanfare, just it working, again, with less fuss than last time.
Docking happened a little over 5 hours after launch, which is its own kind of wild if you remember when getting to the ISS meant a two-day chase. They're using the faster rendezvous profile now that they've got the orbital mechanics dialed in tighter. Once Endeavour docked there were briefly ten people on the station at once, which apparently makes for some interesting sleeping arrangements since the crew quarters weren't built for that many bodies. A few of the newly arrived crew were bunking in the Dragon capsule itself for the first night or two.
Anyway. I don't have a tidy point to make about any of this beyond: I got up stupidly early for a livestream of a rocket I've now watched fly twice, with a capsule I've now watched fly twice, and it still gave me a knot in my stomach right at ignition the same way the first one did. Maybe that never goes away and maybe it shouldn't. There's something almost sentimental about watching the same specific hunk of metal go back up again, like running into an old coworker at the airport. Crew-1's astronauts are still up there too for a few more days actually, so there's a handover period where both crews are on station together before Kimbrough and McArthur's predecessors head back down in their own reused Dragon. It's turning into a genuine rotation, ordinary spacecraft doing an ordinary job, which ten years ago would've sounded like science fiction on its own without anyone needing to add a single extra adjective to it.
Going back to bed now. Well, not really, it's almost 7am and the dog wants breakfast. But you know what I mean.