October 2024: two launches and a ring of fire
Spaceflight packed two landmarks into back-to-back days in October 2024. On Sunday 13 October, SpaceX's launch tower reached out and caught a returning Super Heavy booster, a first anywhere. On Monday 14 October, NASA launched Europa Clipper at Jupiter's icy moon. Around those two days sat a month of 31 days, from Tuesday 1 October to Thursday 31 October, with 23 business days, eight weekend days, across ISO weeks 40 to 44.
The month by numbers
October 2024 ran 31 days, with 23 of them for work and eight at the weekend. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays each appeared five times, and the remaining weekdays four. The month sat inside ISO weeks 40 to 44.
The sky opened early. An annular solar eclipse arrived two days in, on Wednesday 2 October, its ring of fire tracking the Pacific towards the far south of the Americas. The Hunter's Moon filled on Thursday 17 October, with last quarter on Thursday 24 October.
A weekend for the engineers
Sunday 13 October was the booster's day. The Super Heavy turned back towards the Texas shore, and the tower's arms, nicknamed “chopsticks”, reached out and caught it in flight. The catch is a step towards rapid reuse, and the booster came home to the pad it left, which is more commuting than most of us manage.
Monday 14 October belonged to NASA. Europa Clipper climbed away on a Falcon Heavy: the biggest planetary craft the agency has built, its destination the ice-covered moon Europa and the ocean beneath. It arrives in 2030, a long errand on a slow road.
Prizes, lights and a budget
The Nobel prizes in Stockholm that week tilted towards the machines. The physics prize went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on Tuesday 8 October, for the neural networks behind machine learning. Chemistry followed on Wednesday 9 October for protein-folding, and literature went to Han Kang on Thursday 10 October, the first South Korean winner.
A severe geomagnetic storm carried the aurora over Britain on Thursday 10 October and Friday 11 October, cloud permitting, as ever. At home, Storm Ashley battered Ireland and Scotland on Sunday 20 and Monday 21 October with gusts near 130 km/h. The first Labour budget in 14 years arrived on Wednesday 30 October, raising taxes by 40 billion pounds.
Floods on two sides of the Atlantic
Hurricane Milton struck Florida's coast on Wednesday 9 October as a Category 3 storm, 120 mph at landfall, and spun dozens of tornadoes inland; more than 20 people died. Then, on Tuesday 29 October, a cut-off storm emptied a year's rain onto the region around Valencia in a few hours, and the flooding killed more than 220 people.
Spain's deadliest natural disaster in living memory arrived in the same month as a caught booster. Both halves of the record stand.
A month that caught a rocket and kept 23 business days: only one of those made the news.