Reached the very cool age where a week after you tweak your back a little, it gets worse instead of better. Neat!

Home alone for the middle of the week, which mostly served as a reminder that I do not remember how to do trivial things like go to bed before 3 a.m. without another person in the house.

Interesting week for rocket nerds like me, with New Glenn Flight 1 and Starship Flight 7 back to back. Both launches had things go well and things go wrong in almost opposite ways. Blue made it to the target orbit on their first flight (super impressive!), but failed to land the booster on a downrange ship, something they’re unlikely to dial in for a while.^[1] Meanwhile, SpaceX caught the first stage with the big motorized arms of the launch tower for a second time (one of the wildest feats of engineering I’ve ever seen), but lost the ship shortly before engine cutoff, a significant regression after the last three ships made it all the way through reentry.

Great example of the strangeness of assigning success and failure when companies are testing in the open like this. SpaceX has always gotten a lot of bad press when things go boom, and while there’s plenty of valid criticism about the wheres and the hows of their development program, the specific tag of “It didn’t work because it blew up” has always felt like it misses the mark. There’s merit to wasting metal instead of time when you’re still figuring out the broad strokes of the thing you’re building, and it’s certainly paid dividends for them.

So what’s the difference? Blue Origin did the mission and also learned a bit about something they’re still trying to figure out.^[2] All the experiments SpaceX had lined up for this flight – engine relight, payload deploy, changes to the aero surfaces & thermal protection system – were all precluded by the ship blowing up on the way uphill. It’s the unspoken corollary of the tech industry’s whole “failure is good actually” ethos: sure, as long as the failure happens during the part you’re trying to learn from. Take a risk on a new product or something, but your business doesn’t magically get better because you forgot to unplug a space heater over a long weekend and burned the office down.

Space billionaires aside, the people working on these projects are living my dream and the things that become possible when vehicles like these are flying regularly are pretty cool. Big rockets are so back.

Caught Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip in town for one night fresh off its run at Edinburgh Fringe. A masterpiece. Now this is jazz!