Something I noticed the other day when scouring older articles of mine about SpaceX is that I used to love the company, and what they do. No, seriously, I used to seriously talk just like the very fans I deride now, right down to even some of the same phrasings about how watching them land rockets “never gets old” and similar comments.
How things change over time, don’t they? Now it’s absolutely boring, and hearing them talk about the same subjects over and over like they are the be-all end-all to rocketry is mind-numbingly annoying, at best.
What changed? Was it me? Was it SpaceX? Was it fellow fans?
Yes, is the answer. Yes to all of the above.
To start, though, let’s focus this first half on what I used to thing – how I used to feel about SpaceX, and their position in the greater scheme of launch service providers.
Let’s go back to about, late 2013. My interest in space and rocketry was really returning to me – my interests come and go as time passes, but usually when they come back around they stay around, and rocketry and the like is one of those loves, like so many, I had to re-discover. I quickly got hooked on watching launches again in this post-shuttle era, finally realizing how behind I was in that I could watch launches online all I wanted! I just had to know when things were taking off.
I would become familiar with Atlas V and Delta IV, would learn that Delta II was still flying every once in a while, would see Soyuz crew and cargo launches to the International Space Station, and then I would see some new names; Falcon and Dragon and the company behind them, SpaceX.
I laughed at the name – it’s kind of lame, honestly, like something a child would come up with, but whatever, they clearly have something going, so I’ll pay attention. I quickly grew to love the Falcon 9. Don’t ask why, I honestly can’t think like this anymore, but something about it was fresh to me – Atlas V and Delta IV felt old, outdated, bulky and just… well, it felt like the choice between a car from 1983 or 2013. Of course Delta and Atlas aren’t that old but you get the idea.
Keep in mind, this was actually before they had become the big deal they are now. Attention was being paid but SpaceX had yet to really even try much for landing rockets at this stage beyond a few tests on smaller prototypes. Hell, Dragon was just that – no V1 or V2, the crew vehicle was going to be the cargo version with seats, basically. Much like everything with SpaceX though, that would change, but that’s another story.
Back to the subject at hand, yeah, everything else felt old. I still loved Soyuz, absolutely, and other rockets were nice for what they were, but SpaceX had that shine, that flash. Hell, a video clip of a Falcon 9 liftoff was even part of my YouTube channel trailer at that time. Their webcasts were a little annoying but tolerable, and the media people really seemed to baby what they said, but I could stand it – this was all around a company I liked.
A Falcon 9 1st stage landing.
Then came their landing attempts. They kept failing. I honestly doubted they would ever get it, but I welcomed them trying. This was the stage when people really started talking big and hyping them up – at this stage they really pushed the idea that if they could re-use whole stages they could provide extremely cheap launches, and everyone hooked on to that.
I, being the person I am, wasn’t buying it outright, but I was waiting to see what would happen – if it did happen, awesome, but don’t try to sell me something you don’t have available. That simple.
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Then came December 22nd 2015; the day SpaceX landed a rocket on, well, land. I was cheering in the house, clapping so hard I actually hurt my hands, I was that excited, that happy that it had happened. “Awesome” I thought, maybe, just maybe, there is something to all of this. Funny thing is, I didn’t write about this on Xadara at all. I blame the fact it was right before Christmas, and I was working my ass off – I didn’t put this site as my main focus back then, after all, so I figured it wasn’t worth discussing. It happened, we all knew it happened, and it was cool.
I would miss the later first landing on the drone ship, I was at work that day, but my friends sure made sure I knew. Hell, I was mad that I had missed it! Landing on a ship bobbing around in the ocean? Hot damn, that’s even more crazy!
JCSAT-16 and how I covered it really showed how much of a fan I was back then.
Eventually I would get to covering SpaceX launches here on Xadara. One launch in particular was very well covered (I believe I live tweeted it, actually – this was the August 2016 launch of JCSAT-16. To read it and compare what it says to what I say now is hilarious, and was the actual spawn of this article – the fact that I was in so deep with what SpaceX was doing, so in love with the ideas that they had at that time that I was enjoying their success as much as anyone could. It was awesome, but I never stopped caring about other launches – the launch of the Orion Test Flight back in 2014 let me have my first personal experience with Delta IV Heavy, a rocket I’ve really grown to love, and of course I still cared about a host of other launch systems. Here we were though, in 2016, with rockets landing regularly, and eventual re-use plans.
It was a pretty good time, I thought, and then came September 1st, 2016, and the explosion of a Falcon 9 on pad 40. Had that happened just a month later, I would have laughed. Instead, I was surprised and saddened. It did remind me of the loss in 2015 of the CRS-7 mission. Between that and the then-common landing failures SpaceX had been having, I did still feel they were in their “growing pains” stage, but a booster exploding on the pad, during fueling for a test firing? Before the engine test? Well, that makes you think, doesn’t it? Seems like someone is messing up the design in a critical spot, or something, I thought.
This event was almost like an omen, in retrospect.
Still, I was concerned and paid attention. That’s really the best way to phrase how I felt between September 1st and September 26th was concerned. I figured though, they would get the problem found, do a slight re-design of the upper stage (where the explosion actually happened) and they would get back to launching and landing rockets, and that would be that – they would continue to be a specialty launch provider like they seemed to be going for, with some future “heavy” booster on the distant horizon.
I wasn’t expecting what happened on September 27th, 2016.