On a crewed mission, sometimes the camera will cut to a view inside the Soyuz capsule after launch. The astronauts, under tremendous force, all make faces that look like this emoji: 😑. And sometimes you can see the “zero-gravity indicator” (a small, stuffed toy) float in the cabin as the craft falls into orbit and the crew experiences weightlessness.

Sometimes, if you see the NASA version of a Russian launch, that same calm voice talks in English over the Russian commanders. So the rocket lifts off, a Russian voice says something brief and stoic-sounding, and then the American says: “And the Soyuz is on its way.”

NASA

* * *

On Monday evening, a SpaceX rocket did something no craft had done before. After depositing its second stage into low Earth orbit, the rocket’s first stage landed upright and intact on an old launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk, had finally pulled off a successful “VTOL,” a vertical take-off and landing. The feat could pave the way for a new era of reusable, and therefore much less expensive, rockets.

It was a historic moment in aerospace engineering. And if you tuned into SpaceX’s online live feed Monday night, you would have seen something else unprecedented. If you have ever seen Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve—or if you can imagine the likely vibe of a major-network broadcast called Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve—then this was Elon Musk’s Rockin’ Private Satellite Deployment.

There was a pregame. There were cheering crowds. There were tours of the SpaceX manufacturing and launch facilities before the main event, which felt very Olympics-on-NBC-esque. It was, in short, a way of treating a rocket launch not like a dry engineering procedure, but like some combination of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Super Bowl.

You can see the entire thing on SpaceX’s website. It looks long—45 whole minutes!—but there’s really only a 20-minute pregame, and then the rocket takes off, and then it flies and the stages separate and and then it lands.

And what a show! First of all, there was a title sequence, with pumping synths and clips of cool space sounds and Thoughtful Elon:

And cheering crowds:

SpaceX

And then we meet our many hosts, who are also all SpaceX engineers. There were four of them, all charming and knowledgable onscreen. (Their high school’s performing-arts curriculum, finally vindicated.) They ranged from Lauren Lyons, a mission integrator at SpaceX who played the MC role well—

SpaceX

—to John Insprucker, the Falcon 9 product director who delivered technical information about the launch’s status.

SpaceX

There was even a celebrity guest: Tim Urban, the writer and cartoonist behind the phenomenally successful nerd website Wait but Why. One of Urban’s most popular series is entitled “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man,” which runs across six posts and concludes with a 20,000-plus-word opus about why Musk is simply different than you and I. Urban was on hand to play, essentially, the amazed straight man, and he could be counted on to say how awesome things were and why SpaceX’s work was so important.

I’m not sure what role Urban was playing—personality? journalist? pitchman? stand-in for the viewer?—but it was a little odd.