The Falcon Heavy landed and I can't stop

I’ve watched the replay thirty times.

Not an exaggeration. Thirty. I counted after the fifteenth because I realized I couldn’t stop, and then I watched it fifteen more times while trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop.

Two rockets. Landing at the same time. Side by side, like they choreographed it, like they practiced in front of a mirror. The twin boosters from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy touching down on their landing pads at Cape Canaveral while somewhere over the Atlantic the center core was attempting (and failing, but still) to land on a drone ship.

I think I know what it is.

The thing about rockets landing

Rockets aren’t supposed to land. For sixty years, rockets went up and then either burned up, crashed into the ocean, or drifted away as space junk. That was the deal. You build a skyscraper’s worth of engineering, fill it with explosive fuel, light it on fire, and throw it away. Every time. Like building a 747 for a single flight and then sinking it in the Pacific.

So when a rocket lands, your brain does something weird. It’s like watching a waterfall flow upward. The physics are fine. The engineering checks out. You can read the SpaceX mission page and follow every step. But something in the lizard brain says no, wrong, things that go up don’t come down on their own two feet.

And then they do.

And then TWO of them do it simultaneously.

Why I think this matters beyond rockets

I’ve been trying to articulate this to friends and I keep failing. “Didn’t you see the Falcon Heavy launch?” “Yeah, cool.” Cool. That’s what they say. Cool.

Here’s what I think they’re missing.

For most of human history, getting to space was the hard part. Getting there at all. The Mercury astronauts climbed into tin cans on top of modified missiles and basically hoped for the best. Apollo was held together by slide rules and courage and a computer with less memory than a modern thermostat. The Space Shuttle was supposed to make it routine, and it kind of did, except for the part where two of them killed their crews.

Getting to space was hard, expensive, and dangerous. That was the story for sixty years.

What SpaceX is doing is rewriting the second half of that sentence. Getting to space might always be hard. But expensive? If you can land a rocket and fly it again, the economics change. Not a little. Completely.

Think about it like this: right now, launching a satellite costs tens of millions of dollars. If you can reuse the rocket ten times, that’s a 10x reduction. If you can reuse it a hundred times, you’re in airline territory. And then space isn’t just for governments and billionaires. It’s for everyone.

I’m probably wrong about the timeline. Maybe it takes twenty years instead of ten. Maybe it takes fifty. But watching those two boosters land in sync, I don’t think I’m wrong about the direction.

The car in space

Oh, right. There was also a car.

Elon Musk put his personal Tesla Roadster on top of the Falcon Heavy as its payload. A midnight cherry red convertible, with a mannequin in a spacesuit behind the wheel, playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on repeat (or at least, it was playing when it launched, before the vacuum of space made sound impossible, but the imagery stands). The car is now in an orbit around the Sun that takes it past Mars.

A car. Orbiting the Sun. Playing Bowie.

Some people thought this was a waste. A publicity stunt. And it is a publicity stunt. But I think it’s also something else. Test flights usually carry a “mass simulator,” basically a boring block of steel or concrete with the right weight to simulate a real payload. Musk replaced the boring block with the most absurd, joyful, ridiculous alternative he could think of.

And now there’s a car in space. Somewhere out there, right now, a red Tesla with a plastic astronaut is quietly orbiting our star. It’ll keep orbiting for millions of years, long after every human alive today is gone, long after Tesla as a company is gone, long after maybe we’re gone.

I don’t know why that gets to me. But it does.

The center core

I should mention: the center core didn’t make it. It was supposed to land on the drone ship (the hilariously named “Of Course I Still Love You,” because SpaceX names things like a teenager who just read Iain Banks). It hit the water at 300 mph instead.

Two out of three. Not perfect. But you know what? Nobody landed any boosters ten years ago. Nobody landed one five years ago. Now two land simultaneously and we’re disappointed the third didn’t make it.

That’s what progress looks like. The goalpost moves so fast that miracles become expectations.

The webcast

If you haven’t watched the full webcast, please watch the full webcast. Not a highlight clip. The whole thing. Watch the SpaceX employees in Hawthorne losing their minds when the boosters land. Watch them hug each other. Watch a room full of rocket engineers act like their team just won the World Cup.

Because something happened in that room that I think is the most important thing about the Falcon Heavy launch, more important than the rocket or the boosters or even Elon’s Tesla floating in space playing Bowie.

A room full of people built something impossible and watched it work.

I don’t know what the future looks like. I don’t know if we’ll get to Mars or build colonies on the Moon or do any of the things the sci-fi books promised. But I know what it looks like when a group of humans decides that the future is worth building.

It looks like two rockets landing at the same time while everyone in the room cries.

I’m going to go watch it again.