I set an alarm for 7:15 this morning, which for a Sunday is basically an act of self harm, because SpaceX had a launch window opening around 7:25 Central for the fifth test flight of Starship out of Starbase. I've been half following this program since the early Falcon 9 landing attempts, the ones that used to blow up on the drone ship over and over, so I wasn't going to sleep through this one.
Made coffee, propped the laptop on the kitchen counter next to the toaster, and pulled up the stream on my phone too, because the laptop's wifi has been flaky ever since I moved the router to the other side of the living room three weeks ago and I still haven't dealt with it. Two screens, same feed, just in case one buffered at the wrong second. That's the kind of overkill only a person who has watched a rocket abort at T-minus 2 seconds would bother with.
The part everybody's talking about today is the catch. Instead of landing the Super Heavy booster on a drone ship or just letting it come down in the ocean like they usually do, SpaceX flew it back to the launch tower and caught it in mid-air with two enormous mechanical arms bolted onto the tower itself. People are calling them "chopsticks," and honestly that's exactly what they look like, if the chopsticks were forty feet long and built to grab something the size of an office building falling out of the sky at a controlled but still terrifying speed.
I did not expect to have a physical reaction to watching this. My coffee sat there going cold for a solid forty minutes because I genuinely could not look away once the booster started its boostback burn. There's this stretch of a few minutes where the booster separates from the upper stage and you're just watching a tiny dot on a grainy tracking camera, engines firing, and you have no real sense of whether it's going to work until the very last few seconds when the arms actually close around it. When they did, and the booster just kind of hung there, stable, not falling, I said something out loud to an empty kitchen. My neighbor's dog was barking at literally nothing the entire time in the background, which felt appropriate.
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I know it's not the popular one: the reusability economics angle everyone keeps repeating (cheaper flights, faster turnaround, blah blah) is the least interesting part of this to me. The genuinely wild thing is that the catch mechanism worked at all on a live attempt. No barge, no legs on the booster, no room for a bad landing to just be a write-off that floats away. If it misses, it's smashing into the tower that launched it. That's an enormous bet to make on the first real attempt, and it paid off, and I think that fact is getting a little buried under all the "future of spaceflight" framing that's already flooding my feed today.
I also have a small complaint, since I'm apparently in a complaining mood before 8am. The official commentary during the stream has gotten a bit much for me the last couple of launches, all "go booster go" and forced excitement piped over walkie-talkie style audio. I get that it's for a broader audience now than it was five or six years ago when I first started paying attention to this stuff, back when the streams felt more like an internal ops call than a produced broadcast. But I miss the rougher version a little. Progress, I guess.
Anyway. My coffee's been sitting on the counter for almost an hour now and it's basically room temperature at this point, which is its own kind of tragedy. Going to microwave it, badly, and get back to the actual thing I was supposed to be doing this morning before a giant metal tower ate a rocket booster and derailed my entire Sunday.