I set an alarm for 6:45am on a Friday to watch a rocket get stacked. Not launched. Stacked. If you'd told teenage me, who used to record shuttle launches on VHS and rewind the good parts, that grown-up me would voluntarily wake up early for a crane operation in south Texas, I think he'd have believed it immediately and then asked why I wasn't doing that every week.
This was Booster 4 and Ship 20 out at Starbase, and on Friday SpaceX used the launch tower's arms (the ones people have taken to calling chopsticks, because that's exactly what they look like) to lift the Starship upper stage on top of the Super Heavy booster for the first time. I'd been watching the NASASpaceflight live feed on and off for a couple days already because the whole stacking operation kept getting delayed and rescheduled, which if you've followed any of Elon Musk's timelines before is not exactly a shock. "Tomorrow" from that company has always meant "sometime this month, maybe."
But it actually happened, and for a few hours there was a fully stacked Starship sitting on the pad, and it is enormous in a way that doesn't really come across in photos until you see a person standing anywhere near the base. Put together, booster and ship come in somewhere around 390 feet, which edges out the Saturn V as the tallest rocket ever assembled, even though the Saturn V is still the one that's actually flown anyone anywhere. That distinction matters to me more than it probably should. Standing there (well, watching a chat window full of people typing "STACKED" in all caps, since I obviously wasn't there) doesn't mean it works. It means it's tall.
They took it back apart a few hours later, presumably to keep testing the booster and ship separately before whatever comes next, and that's honestly the part that got me thinking. We're so used to spectacle being the whole story now. Big reveal, big applause, cut to credits. This was the opposite: an enormous, genuinely historic-looking machine got put together for basically an afternoon so a few hundred engineers could stare at it, take some measurements, and then take it apart again like it was a extremely large, extremely expensive Lego set. No launch. No countdown. Just logistics.
I've got a complaint buried in here somewhere and it's this: the live chat on these streams has gotten borderline unwatchable. I love that tens of thousands of people care enough to tune in for a crane lifting a cylinder, genuinely, that's a good thing about the internet. But it's mostly just people spamming rocket emoji and arguing about whether this proves Elon is a genius or a fraud, and I always end up muting chat within about ten minutes and just watching the raw camera feed with a podcast going in the other ear. Give me the quiet, boring footage of a machine getting bolted together over a comment section any day.
Anyway. What actually got me out of bed for this wasn't really the height record, it was that this whole vehicle, if any of the plan works out, is meant to be fully reusable, booster and ship both landing back home instead of burning up or dropping into the ocean. That's the part that's hard to wrap my head around still, even though I've read the explainer threads a dozen times. We've had reusable boosters landing themselves for years now with the Falcon 9, so it's not like the concept is new to me. It's the scale of it that keeps not quite computing. A 23-story stainless steel rocket landing itself, on purpose, more than once. I don't think that idea's finished being weird to me yet, and honestly I hope it never fully does. Some things should stay a little bit unbelievable even after you've watched the video.
No idea when they actually try to fly this thing to orbit. Every date SpaceX has floated this year has slipped, sometimes by months. I'm not holding my breath for anything before the fall, if I'm honest, and I wouldn't be shocked if it's later than that. But I'll set another early alarm when it happens. Some habits from being twelve years old just don't go away.