Flight 9 territory delivered the sentence this whole series has been climbing toward: a Super Heavy that had already been caught flew again. Reuse at Starship scale. Falcon’s good boring trick, rewritten in stainless steel and chopsticks. I am absolutely still in awe; I am also grinning like the industrial thesis just signed for the lease.
Catch was the highlight reel. Reuse is the business model. Every booster that returns to the stack instead of the scrapyard is mass to orbit getting cheaper in the only way that compounds. Elon’s cost-of-access obsession stops being a quote and becomes a flight history table.
Ship-side work still has to catch up — heat shield, orbital attempts, the long road to refuelling and destinations beyond. None of that erases what a reused Super Heavy means. The Everyday Astronaut read is simple: celebrate, then ask what the next boring milestone is.
I thought about the 2021 invest wish while the countdown ran. The gap between being able to buy Tesla and not being able to buy SpaceX feels sharper when the hardware is doing airline-adjacent things. Cheering is free. Underwriting would be better.
What I am listening for next is twofold: Ship heat shield and orbital path getting unmistakably real, and IPO chatter heating up in a way that might finally address that invest wish. Next up: hardware toward orbit, and whether the capital markets start to clear their throat.