So I set an alarm for 3:15 AM last night, which is not a thing I normally do for anything short of an airport run, and I sat in the dark kitchen in my bathrobe watching a grainy NASA TV stream on my laptop, waiting for a rocket to leave the ground. It did, at 3:44 AM Eastern, right on the dot. SpaceX's Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral with the Dragon capsule on top, and if everything goes the way its supposed to, Dragon berths with the International Space Station in a few days and becomes the first commercial spacecraft to ever pull that off.
I know, I know. Watching a livestream of a rocket at 3 in the morning is exactly the kind of thing that confirms every suspicion my non-tech friends have about me. But I've been following this one since Saturday, when the first launch attempt aborted at T-minus half a second. Half a second. The engines actually lit and the onboard computer caught a bad reading on a check valve in engine number five and shut the whole thing down before it left the pad. That's the kind of margin these systems run on, and it's honestly kind of terrifying and kind of amazing at the same time that a private company built something with that level of self-preservation built in. A lot of people online were quick to call the scrub a failure. I don't buy that framing at all: the whole point of the abort system is to abort when something's off, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Three days later they fixed the valve, rolled through the countdown again, and this time it went clean. No holds, no scrubs, straight up.
Here's the part that actually gets me, more than the fireworks of a launch: this is a company, not a government program, trying to fly cargo to the space station. NASA retired the shuttle fleet last summer and since then the US has had exactly zero way of putting its own hardware into orbit and back. Everything's ridden on Russian Soyuz rockets. SpaceX pulling this off (and it's still a big if until Dragon actually docks) would be the first real crack in that dependency. Whatever you think of Elon Musk (and I have some opinions there I'll save for another post), the company has been doing this on NASA contract money under the COTS program for a few years now, quietly, without the theater that used to surround this stuff.
I'll admit the stream itself was not exactly riveting television. Its mostly a static shot of the pad, a countdown clock, and mission control audio that sounds like it was recorded through a tin can. There's a solid ten minutes where nothing visibly happens and you're just listening to a flight director confirm "go" from six different stations one at a time, which is its own weird kind of satisfying if you're the sort of person who likes procedural stuff. My cat was unimpressed the entire time and eventually left the room, which felt like a review.
The Dragon capsule itself is unmanned this trip, loaded with cargo, and the actual berthing with the station isn't scheduled until Friday, so there's still plenty that has to go right — rendezvous, a fly-by, grapple with the station's robotic arm. None of that is a sure thing. But getting off the ground clean after Saturday's abort feels like the hard part is at least behind them for now.
I made coffee around 4 AM and just sat there for a while after the stream ended, main engine cutoff confirmed, second stage doing its thing, watching the little telemetry numbers climb. Its a strange feeling watching something leave the atmosphere from your kitchen table on a Tuesday. I don't think I'll make a habit out of 3 AM rocket launches, my body clock is wrecked today and I've already had two coffees before 9, but I'm glad I didn't sleep through this one. If Dragon docks clean on Friday I might actually set another alarm.