Last month, NASA repeated an accomplishment they first checked off in 1964 – with some few improvements hardly worthy of the intervening half-century. But tomorrow morning, assuming the weather is a “go,” we will get to see a space travel event that has me far more excited. SpaceX is going to launch a rocket…and they’re going to turn the first stage around from high altitude and hypersonic speed to land on this:

in the Atlantic Ocean.

I love this.

I love this because of the technical meaning of the capability: being able to reuse a rocket would be seriously cool. It has the potential to alter forever the economics of spaceflight. And it’s not as crazy an idea as you might think at first – SpaceX has actually pretty much done it already, albeit without the barge underneath the landing rocket.

But I also love this because of what the event represents! Elon Musk estimates a 50/50 chance of success. SpaceX is trying this because nobody has tried it before. They are trying it because there’s no way to convince people it’s possible except by doing it. They are being incredibly ambitious, and they are willing to accept failure in order to learn from it.

In an industry increasingly defined by incrementalism and risk aversion, SpaceX recognizes that sometimes reward comes from risk. They are truly innovating; trying things that are new. It seems that while NASA’s human spaceflight programs once had the “right stuff,” they lost it in bureaucratization – but the “right stuff” didn’t vanish. It just moved – to the robotic explorers like Curiosity or New Horizons and to the “new space” companies like SpaceX.

Best of luck to the SpaceX team tomorrow. I know that even if you don’t succeed, you’ll be proud of your achievements and you will try again. But I’d bet you’ll see that first stage again!