Complicated Feelings About Rockets
It's been a fun few weeks to be really into space stuff.
Artemis II, the first crewed mission to put people in the proximity of the moon in decades, was a success. Everyone got there and back safely. They took some really great photos while they were out there. They named some craters and had a good cry. And the whole world looked up at the moon and, for the first time in my life, understood that going back was a real possibility. But now that the glow of Artemis II has subsided a bit, it's difficult not to have those conflicting feelings about space stuff start creeping back in.
The Space Launch System, in its entirety, is a disaster. Taking reusable rocket components and throwing them into the sea is criminal. Forcing the square peg of shuttle components into the round hole of going to the moon shows just how much SLS is a political project to keep the old contractors in business. They just cancelled the planned upgrades to SLS's upper stage and boosters and they're just going to stick a Centaur on it instead. There's a mostly-complete billion-dollar mobile launch tower that will rust away without ever being used. The list goes on.
Here's the thing, though. None of that made the launch, mission, and landing anything less than really, really cool.
I've followed along with the progress of a particular Hawthorne-based rocket company for more than a decade at this point. I watched CRS-7 blow up live when I woke up early to watch the stream. I had just watched The Force Awakens a few days earlier when they landed a booster for the first time and I thought it was the coolest thing people had ever done. I gathered my coworkers around my computer to watch them launch a Kerbal-looking heavy rocket variant and send a car out towards Mars orbit. I watched them build dumb grain-silo looking test vehicles in the desert and (mostly) cause them to explode.
Just tonight, I went out to a local mall with a decently high parking garage to get a good view of a Falcon 9 launching southward out of Vandenberg. I was watching the second stage do its thing through a telescope, and my wife managed to see the start of the landing burn just as the booster went over the horizon. It was very cool. It is fun to watch SpaceX do their thing.
But, well. There's the guy who owns the place. And he makes it difficult.
Right now, if you want to be a fan of spaceflight, you don't have a lot of options that feel good to be enthusiastic about. You've got the company owned by the guy who bought Twitter and turned it into a porn slop factory, sabatoged democracy, then fired all the scientists. You've got the company owned by the guy who became a billionaire by exploiting workers and shipping paper towels in cardboard boxes before buying and torpedoing the Washington Post. I have no information on the guy from New Zealand, but a close source tells me it is supremely Not Fun to work at his company. Then there's the aformentioned Big Orange Rocket, which will fly probably one or two more times ever and cost taxpayers more than two billion dollars per flight. The old Big Orange Triple Rocket isn't flying anymore, Atlas is going to spend its final years sending space debris up for the paper towel billionaire, and their replacement can't seem to fly without making its solid booster nozzles explode. The Russians are ruining their own launch pads, the Chinese are just doing their best not to drop first stages onto downrange villages anymore, and ESA and JAXA just kinda have like two boring launches a year.
But.
Just about every launch in the western world is livestreamed now. I have a neat little app on my phone that tells me when it's about to happen. And watching space stuff happen is still awesome. Rockets can just land now! Multiple companies are reusing boosters! There's a whole bunch of smaller launchers that are in development, and those are really fun to watch because sometimes they do crazy things like flip over at max-Q or slide sideways off the pad or just start doing cartwheels in the stratosphere. If you manage to temporarily forget all the politics and money and everything, watching a rocket launch is ten or fifteen minutes of uninturrupted fun.
You could pay a lot of teachers with the two billion dollars it takes to launch SLS once. The billionaires are filling the skies with junk and want to make that junk generate slop. Even the small shops grind their people to dust to get hardware out the door. But rockets are cool, and enable cool science, and take people to places they've never been. All of those things can be true at the same time.
For now at least, from T minus 10 through SECO, I think it's still pretty fun to watch rocket launches.