So I set my alarm for 3 AM twice this week for the same rocket. That's not a typo. Once on Saturday, once on Tuesday, and only the second one actually worked.
Here's what happened. SpaceX had a launch window for their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule early Saturday morning, May 19th, and I dragged myself out of bed to watch the webcast because this wasn't just another rocket. This was the first time a private company was going to send a spacecraft to actually rendezvous with the International Space Station. NASA's been paying SpaceX to develop this under the COTS program (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, if you want the full acronym soup) and this flight, Dragon C2+, was the real test.
So there I am, half a cup of coffee in, watching the countdown on my second monitor while the feed stutters a little because apparently everyone else in America was also awake watching this. T-minus ten, nine, eight... and then it just stops. Half a second before liftoff. Half a second! The onboard computer detected high pressure in the combustion chamber of engine number 5 and the whole thing aborted itself, sitting there on the pad in a cloud of its own exhaust like nothing happened. I remember just sitting there going "wait, did it launch?" It didn't. It scrubbed itself faster than I could figure out what I was looking at.
Which, honestly, is the part that got me. Not the launch, the abort. That's a machine making a split-second decision to not blow up a quarter billion dollars of hardware and a mission NASA actually cares about, and it made the right call in under a second while I was still trying to parse the countdown clock.
Anyway. They fixed whatever was up with engine 5, and Tuesday morning at 3:44 AM Eastern, Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral for real this time. No scrub. Dragon separated clean and is up there right now doing systems checks before it attempts to actually get close to the ISS in the next few days. If it goes well, this is the first time ever a commercial vehicle berths with the station — that hasn't happened yet as I'm writing this, so I'm not going to pretend I know how it goes, but the fact that it launched at all after Saturday's scrub feels like the harder part is already done.
I'll say the thing that's been bugging me all week: this is genuinely one of the bigger space stories in years and it is getting absolutely buried under Facebook's stock price. I get it, everybody's got a 401k or knows somebody who bought in at $38 and is currently regretting it, and that's a real story too. But a private company just launched a spacecraft toward the space station and half the tech press coverage I'm seeing is finance reporters arguing about whether Morgan Stanley lowballed the estimates. I'm not going to relitigate the whole IPO thing here, plenty of people already are, loudly, and honestly I think most of it will read as noise in a year. A rocket that didn't blow up reads the same in ten years as it does today.
I grew up watching Shuttle launches on a TV wheeled into the classroom, and after Atlantis flew its last mission last July I figured I'd just stopped being someone who watches launches. Turns out that's not true, I just needed a reason again. Setting an alarm for 3 AM to watch a countdown on a laptop propped against a cereal box is a genuinely dumb thing to do on a Tuesday and I'd do it again without thinking twice.
If you want to watch when Dragon actually attempts berthing, NASA TV streams it, and it's a lot less painful to watch live than reading about it after the fact on a liveblog with a five minute refresh lag. Set the alarm. Worst case you're tired for one day and best case you watched something that only a handful of people in the history of the planet have ever gotten to see happen.