SpaceX launch fatigue is real and I’m not apologizing for it

I want to care about SpaceX launches. I really do. There is a part of me that knows, intellectually, that shooting a giant metal tube into space is an extraordinary thing that humans figured out how to do, and I should probably feel more about that.

But here’s where I am right now: it’s a Tuesday, I’m trying to drink my coffee, and every single platform I open is treating a rocket launch like it’s the moon landing. Again. For what feels like the forty-seventh time this year.

At what point did we all agree that every SpaceX event was a national holiday? Because I don’t remember voting on that.

Why does every launch feel like breaking news?

SpaceX launched over 90 missions in 2023 alone, which works out to roughly one every four days. One. Every. Four days. At that pace, calling each one “historic” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for that word.

And look, I get it. The first time a rocket landed itself back on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean, I was genuinely floored. That was wild. That deserved the coverage. But we are well past “first time” territory, and the media coverage has not adjusted accordingly.

Is the science actually that exciting every single time?

Honestly? Sometimes yes, sometimes no — and that’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Some of these launches are legitimately significant. Crewed missions, new technology being tested, things going to Mars — those are worth stopping for. But a lot of what gets the full-broadcast treatment is basically a cargo run. A very expensive, very impressive cargo run, sure. But a cargo run.

If UPS figured out teleportation, the first delivery would be news. The forty-seventh delivery of printer paper to a dentist’s office in Cincinnati would not.

What’s actually driving the coverage saturation?

Elon Musk’s name is a traffic engine, and media outlets know it. That’s the honest answer.

It doesn’t really matter what the launch is carrying or what it means for actual space exploration. His name in a headline moves clicks, and clicks move money, and so every Starship hiccup gets the same real estate as something that actually changes what we know about the universe. That’s not a space problem, that’s a media problem — but we’re the ones sitting in the crossfire.

The steel-man case for going all-in on every launch

Okay, here’s the thing — some people would push back hard on this, and they’re not entirely wrong.

The argument is that public enthusiasm for space, even manufactured enthusiasm, is what keeps funding alive. That every person who watches a launch and feels something is one more person who might support NASA’s budget, or vote for a politician who cares about science, or steer a kid toward aerospace engineering. Normalizing space as a thing that happens regularly could be genuinely good for where we end up as a species. I hear that. I do.

But there’s a difference between making space feel accessible and making it feel like a relentless PR campaign you cannot opt out of. One builds genuine curiosity. The other builds fatigue. And I’d argue we’ve crossed that line.

Why I feel guilty for not being more excited

This is the part that actually gets to me. Because somewhere in the back of my head I know that twelve-year-old me would have absolutely lost her mind over routine commercial spaceflight being a thing that just… happens.

And I feel a little bit like I’ve let her down by being tired of it.

But what do I know? Maybe the problem isn’t that it happens too often. Maybe the problem is that nobody’s doing a good job of telling me why this specific one matters, and so they all blur together into one giant wall of rocket exhaust and streaming countdowns.

Tell me what’s different. Tell me what changes after this one. Give me one actual thing to hold onto, and I’ll show up for it.

What would actually make me care again?

Context. That’s it. That’s the whole answer.

I don’t need less coverage — I need smarter coverage. Tell me what payload is on that rocket and why it matters to people who don’t work at SpaceX. Tell me what the next real milestone is and what we’re still waiting for. Stop treating the countdown as the story and start treating the why as the story.

In my ongoing confusion about why we cover tech the way we do, I’ve noticed this pattern a lot — the spectacle becomes the content, and the actual substance gets buried underneath it. Space deserves better than that. So do we.

If you want people to stay genuinely curious about space exploration — and I think that matters, I think it matters a lot — then help them understand what they’re looking at. Not just that it’s going up. But what it means when it gets there.

That’s the launch coverage I’d actually watch.

I’m not anti-space. I’m not even anti-SpaceX, really. I’m anti-being-told-how-to-feel-about-something-forty-seven-times-a-year until the feeling is completely wrung out of me.

The wonder is still in there somewhere. I can feel it. It just needs a little room to breathe instead of a live countdown timer and a celebrity cameo in the control room.

Give me the story behind the launch and I’ll give you my full attention. That seems like a fair trade.

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