The quote is from a song by Steve Savitzky, and Steve was nice enough over on my Facebook page to attribute it in turn to Arlin Andrews.
If this doesn’t send shivers up and down your spine, make you tear up, make you want to just jump up and scream with joy, then we can’t be friends.
I’ve watched it a dozen times tonight and it’s still doing that to me.
Not only was it good, it was fantastic, really “sticking the landing!”
Oh, yeah, and that’s just the first stage coming back to be refurbished and re-used, saving an estimated 70% (SEVENTY FREAKIN” PERCENT) of the cost of launching something into Low Earth Orbit. While the first stage was making history, the second stage was pressing on, doing its job and finishing a successful mission. “Successful” as in “getting paid for it.” “Successful” as in “providing a service and making a profit in return,” where “service” is something that didn’t exist for even superpower governments until I was in grade school.
This is how it looked to civilians on the beach (there are sections that are dark because the rocket was off and it was freakin’ night time):
We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve successfully made rockets and spacecraft fly by every planet and moon in the solar system (plus comets and asteroids and Ceres and Vesta) , orbit everything from Mercury out to Saturn, and land on Venus, the Moon, Mars (repeatedly), Titan, and comets.
Tonight we landed a an actual, honest-to-god rocket back next to the pad where it had launched from. On Earth.
Congratulations, SpaceX!
[LATE EDIT] Holy crap, people, here’s the full hi-resolution version of that video of the landing, taken from a SpaceX helicopter.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 