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Writing about SpaceX, orbital mechanics, and what the acceleration of human spaceflight means for the people paying attention. By William Ray Brown.
The Falcon 9 Landing: What You're Actually Watching
The boostback burn, the entry burn, the landing burn, and why the whole sequence shouldn't work as well as it does
The first time you watch a Falcon 9 booster land, something in the brain refuses the information. You've seen the footage. You know it's coming. Then the crowd noise hits and the brain finally accepts what the eyes reported. It looks like the video is playing in reverse. Here is what you're actually watching.
What Is Orbital Velocity
The number every rocket is racing toward, and what it actually means to reach it
Two minutes after a Falcon 9 lifts off, the vehicle is moving at roughly 2,000 kilometers per hour. Eight minutes later, it's traveling at 27,600 kilometers per hour. At that speed, something happens that no amount of description fully prepares you for. The spacecraft stops fighting gravity. It starts falling with it.
The Species That Chose to Leave
For four billion years, life on Earth stayed on Earth. What it means that we are about to change that.
Life appeared on Earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago. For every one of those years, it stayed here. Every living thing that ever existed on this planet was born here and died here. The biosphere was sealed. The sky was a ceiling. That is about to change.
Ten Million People Looking Up
What Starlink's subscriber milestone actually represents, and why the number that matters most is not the one anyone is counting
In February 2026, Starlink crossed ten million active subscribers across more than 150 countries. Ten million people. All of them looking up at the same sky. Most of them, for the first time in their lives, connected to the rest of the world.
When Raptor 3 Didn't Light
Starship Flight 12, the boostback burn that didn't happen, and what the FAA's mishap determination tells us about where Starship actually is
The sequence was supposed to go like this. Stage separation. Super Heavy Booster 19 flips and starts relighting engines for the boostback burn. Instead, the outer ring failed. The booster hit the Gulf at a speed that left nothing to recover. The FAA declared it a mishap. Starship is grounded.
Fifty Starlink Missions in 2026
On June 3, SpaceX completed its fiftieth dedicated Starlink launch of the year. The number sounds routine. It is not.
Nobody held a ceremony. There was no press release marking the milestone. SpaceX posted a launch graphic on social media and moved on to preparing the next flight. That response, the complete absence of ceremony, is its own kind of statement about what Falcon 9 has become.
The Booster That Came Back
How SpaceX rewrote the physics of orbital launch and what it means for the rest of our lives
There is a moment, roughly eight minutes after liftoff, when the Falcon 9's first stage has done its job and the second stage has taken over. The booster is traveling at several times the speed of sound, and it is about to do something the aerospace industry spent sixty years insisting was not worth attempting.