I set an alarm for 1:15 in the morning on Wednesday, which is not a thing I normally do for a rocket, but this wasn't just any rocket. Artemis I finally left the pad at 1:47 a.m. Eastern on November 16th, after two summer launch attempts got scrubbed by hydrogen leaks and a whole hurricane season's worth of delays on top of that. I've been half-following this thing since August, and honestly by the third or fourth "we're standing down" announcement I'd stopped expecting it to actually happen this year.
It happened. I sat on the couch with a mug of Tuesday's leftover cold brew (my coffee maker picked exactly that morning to die, of course) and watched the NASA feed with the chat muted, because live YouTube chat during a rocket launch is just a wall of rocket emoji and people arguing about whether it's really going to the Moon or not. It is. Orion is on its way around the Moon and back, a test flight with no crew on board, and if this one goes well the plan is Artemis II with actual astronauts sometime after that.
I remember doing almost this exact thing back when this blog was brand new, watching Atlantis go up for the last shuttle flight in July 2011, except that was late afternoon and I didn't have to sacrifice sleep for it. There's something about watching a launch live, even through a laptop screen at an ungodly hour, that a highlight reel the next morning just doesn't give you. You get the hold at T-minus 40 seconds, the little audible panic in the commentator's voice, the actual seconds ticking by where you're not sure it's going to happen.
Can we talk about the cost for a second, though. NASA's own inspector general put the per-launch cost of the SLS program at something like $4.1 billion once you spread the development money around, and that's before you add Orion and ground systems on top. I'm not an engineer and I'm not going to pretend I could build a Moon rocket in my garage, but that number is hard to look at with a straight face when a Falcon Heavy launch runs a small fraction of that. I still got a little choked up watching it clear the tower. Both things are true at once. I don't think that makes me inconsistent, I think it makes the whole program kind of a mess that also happened to produce a genuinely beautiful three minutes of video at 1:47 in the morning.
The launch itself only took about eight minutes to get Orion into orbit, and then a couple hours later there was a burn that sent it toward the Moon. It's going to do a flyby, use lunar gravity to swing into a wide orbit, hang out there a while, and then come home for a splashdown sometime in December. I'll probably set another alarm for that one too, though re-entry doesn't have quite the same drama as liftoff.
What I keep coming back to is how weirdly quiet the response has been compared to how loud everything else in tech has been this month. Between the Twitter chaos and the FTX collapse eating every headline, a functioning government rocket program successfully launching after a decade of delays barely made a dent in my feed. Maybe that's just where we are now, everyone's attention pinned to two different companies imploding in real time. Or maybe a controlled, patient, occasionally embarrassingly expensive government program just doesn't generate the same kind of doomscroll energy as a billionaire sending 2 a.m. ultimatum emails to his staff. I don't have a neat answer for that, I just noticed it while I was scrolling past three FTX threads to find one person posting about Orion.
Anyway. Coffee maker's getting replaced this weekend, and I'm setting a much more reasonable alarm next time NASA decides to launch something at 1:47 in the morning.