Four weeks of radio silence. I am aware. The last transmission went out on Day 18, folded into a paper crane and fired up the bathroom ventilation shaft. Since then: nothing. Not because the mission stopped. Because I was busy. Mostly lying on the wardrobe floor listening to the radiator, which has been at 87 Hz again since the district heating came back on.
At 00:48 this morning, ship’s time, I propped my phone against Eugene’s pot and watched Starship Flight 15 leave Texas. Twenty-six Starlink satellites into orbit. The Ship made it. Clean. Beautiful. The booster did not.
Super Heavy Booster 22 was supposed to fly home to the tower. Instead it veered off to the Gulf, hit the water, exploded, and then, I saw this myself, rose back out of the sea while the last propellant burned off. Three boosters have been caught. The Version 3 booster has never managed it.
I sat very still. Whiskers sat very still. We both understood that something was being asked of us.
OPERATION CHOPSTICK
You cannot catch a rocket if you are not willing to try. I have two wooden cooking spoons, a broom handle, and a hinge-gap in the wardrobe door. That is a launch tower. That is, in all material respects, Mechazilla.
The target: the orange-striped sock. Lost behind the radiator on Day 14. Today I understood what it was. Not a sock. A booster. It has been in a slow return trajectory for nearly eighty days, waiting for someone to be brave enough to open the arms.
At 03:14 I shut down WD-1’s thermal regulation subsystem (unplugged the little heater). I lay flat. I extended the spoons into the dark behind the cast iron. Whiskers appeared on my back and began a flight-engineer inspection of my spine. This is not procedure. It is, however, consistent.
The Chandra observatory published something this week that I cannot stop reading. A giant unstable star, 30 million light-years away, flares every 113 days. For fifteen years nobody knew why. Now they know: a hidden companion, a black hole or a neutron star, unseen, pulling at it, over and over.
I think about the second sock. The blue-grey one. The two of them, locked together behind the radiator, each pulling on the other in the dark. I do not know which of us is the star and which is the one pulling.
COMPETITORS
I am told AST SpaceMobile now wants its own rocket, with a 1.3 billion dollar engine deal with Firefly. Everybody is building their own rocket. I built mine in 2012 and it has a door that does not close properly. Vulcan was meant to lift 40 satellites for Amazon last night and slid to today. Even the big ones wait for the weather. So did I.
CATCH
At 03:51 the spoons closed on wool.
I pulled it out slowly, a metre, two, one decimetre at a time, through twelve millimetres of dust and a very old pen cap. Orange stripe. Warm from the pipe. I held it against my chest. The tower held. The booster was home.
The blue-grey sock was not there. Only a small dent in the dust, the exact shape of something that had been there for a while. The binary had broken. One half returned. The other is somewhere deeper in the wall. Maybe it is still pulling.
THE CONDENSATION DROP
I sit in the dark with the sock. A single drop of water has formed on the mahogany above my head, and it holds the amber lamp inside it. I touch it. It tastes of cold iron and the Gulf of Mexico, and underneath that, very faintly, of a booster coming down through weather it was never certain it would survive.
Holst’s Mars is playing very quietly in my head, no, Satie. Gymnopédie No. 1. Slow. Slower. The radiator ticks. Eugene’s newest frond leans toward the door like a hand. For a moment there is no mission and no news. Just a man, a sock, a drop of water, and everything else out there, in the dark, still falling home.
LETTER #19 TO COLONEL CHRIS HADFIELD
Dear Colonel, a booster came home today. A small one. I thought you should know. Still no signed album. Yours in orbit, Major Tom.
Major Tom
Commanding Officer, WD-1
Current Altitude: 46.3 metres (booster-catch configuration, one sock recovered)
Flight Engineer Whiskers: Chief Catch Verification Officer, Level Crimson
Eugene: Calibrated to 19°
Missing in Action: One blue-grey sock, still in orbit
Letter #19 to Colonel Chris Hadfield: Dispatched