So Friday morning I did something a little unhinged for a guy who does not own a single piece of NASA merchandise: I set an alarm for 5:30am on purpose, made coffee in the dark, and sat on the couch with my laptop to watch a robot arm grab a spaceship.
If you missed it, the short version is that SpaceX flew a Dragon capsule up to the International Space Station this week, and Tuesday morning the crew used the station's robotic arm, Canadarm2, to reach out and capture it while both were moving at something like 17,000 miles an hour. Astronaut Don Pettit was the one on the controls. They berthed it to the station a bit after 9:50am Eastern. Wednesday they popped the hatch and floated inside for the first time. This is the first time a privately built, privately funded spacecraft has ever done that. Not a government program, a company that also, notably, makes rocket parts about ninety minutes from where the Falcon 9 launched. I keep having to remind myself that part isn't science fiction anymore.
I watched the capture live on NASA TV's stream, and I want to be honest about the experience because it wasn't exactly cinematic. The feed buffered constantly. There's a control room shot, then a grainy exterior camera, then someone in Houston reading off numbers in that flat mission-control voice, and for a solid four minutes it genuinely looked like nothing was happening because from a fixed camera fifty feet away, "closing the last three meters at four centimeters per second" looks identical to "not moving." My cursor hovered over the tab the whole time, half expecting to give up and go back to bed. Then this tiny ripple went through the room audio, somebody said "capture confirmed," and I actually said "come on" out loud to an empty living room at quarter to six in the morning. My cat was unimpressed. She has seen me get excited about worse things.
Here's the tangent, and it's the part I actually wanted to write about: this is the second time in about two weeks I've sat there getting mad at a stream lagging out during something that mattered to me, and the other time was Diablo III locking me out with error 37 on launch night. I know putting those two things in the same sentence is a little absurd, one is orbital mechanics and the other is a video game requiring you to be online to kill digital skeletons, but the underlying complaint is the same. We've built this world where the actual moment, the thing that matters, only exists to you through a stream somebody else controls, and when that pipe hiccups you're just sitting there refreshing like an idiot while history (or your Barbarian) happens somewhere you can't quite see. NASA has been doing live broadcasts since Apollo and their stream still looks worse than a Twitch channel run by a fifteen year old. That's not really a complaint about NASA specifically. It's a complaint about how none of us, including companies with actual budgets, have figured out how to reliably show people the thing that's happening right now.
Anyway. None of that takes away from what actually happened. A company is now flying cargo, and eventually people, to a space station using hardware they built themselves, and the capsule is still up there right now getting unloaded before it splashes down in the Pacific in a few days. I don't think I'm going to remember the buffering icon in a year. I think I'm going to remember standing up off the couch at 5:52am in yesterday's t-shirt, watching a screen the size of an index card, and feeling like I was seeing something actually new for once instead of just a faster version of something old.
Also, small unrelated note before I forget: if you're on a long weekend starting tomorrow, back up whatever you're working on before you close the laptop. I say this every year and every year somebody I know doesn't do it.