I set an alarm for 1:30 AM last night, which is not a thing I do for almost anything anymore, not even New Year's. But NASA's Space Launch System finally left Pad 39B at 1:47 AM Eastern this morning, and I wanted to actually watch it happen live instead of reading about it over coffee like a normal person.
If you haven't been following along, this is attempt number four for Artemis I. There was the August 29th scrub over an engine bleed temperature sensor that never behaved. Then September 3rd, scrubbed again for a hydrogen leak during fueling, the kind of leak that just wouldn't seal no matter how many times they tried. Then the whole rocket got rolled back into the Vehicle Assembly Building in late September because Hurricane Ian was aiming straight at the Space Coast. It went back out to the pad in early November, sat through Hurricane Nicole with some cosmetic caulk peeling off the crew module, and NASA decided that was fine and pressed ahead anyway. So by the time last night's window opened I had genuinely stopped believing it would go. I've watched enough livestreams end in a hold and a sad mission control voice saying "we are scrubbing for today" that I almost didn't bother setting the alarm at all.
It went. Two hour window, and they used almost all of it working through a hydrogen leak (of course) at a quick-disconnect fitting, plus an issue with an ethernet switch at a tracking station that somehow needed a hardware swap in the middle of a countdown. Engineers sent a "red crew" out to the pad while the rocket was fueled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen to manually tighten a leaking valve, which is the kind of detail that sounds insane when you say it out loud. People, actual people, walking out to a fueled rocket to turn a bolt. And then it lit up anyway, right at the edge of the window, and Orion is on its way around the Moon.
I watched it on my laptop at the kitchen table with the sound down low so I wouldn't wake anyone up, and honestly the sound is half the point of a night launch. The whole sky over the Cape went orange for a few seconds like someone flipped on a second sunrise, and you could see the shadow of the plume stretching out over the water. I've watched a lot of launches over the years, Falcon 9s mostly, which by now feel almost routine, like watching a bus leave a station. This did not feel routine. The SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has flown, more thrust off the pad than Saturn V, and it showed.
Orion is now on a 25-and-a-half day trip that takes it farther from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans has ever gone, even though nobody's actually on board this time. That's sort of the whole point of Artemis I: fly it empty first, with a few instrumented mannequins strapped into the seats, make sure the heat shield can survive coming back into the atmosphere at close to 25,000 miles an hour, and then trust it with actual astronauts on Artemis II. Splashdown is supposed to happen off the coast of Baja California sometime around December 11th, so there's a whole month of this thing looping around the Moon before we get to the part everyone actually worries about, the reentry.
I'll admit I have complicated feelings about SLS as a program. It's absurdly expensive, years late, and mostly made of reused Shuttle-era engines, which is either resourceful or a little bit of a cop-out depending on your mood that day. But none of that mattered at 1:47 in the morning watching that thing finally claw off the pad after two months of false starts. Sometimes the underlying politics of a program and the raw experience of watching it launch are just two different things, and only one of them keeps you up past midnight on a work night.
Everything else going on in tech this week feels like it's happening on a different planet, appropriately enough. I'll get to the Twitter mess eventually, probably once it stops changing every six hours. For now I'm just tired and kind of happy about a rocket.