For Just a Moment, American Greatness is Displayed Again

Did you see it? It didn’t last very long. But on Sunday afternoon, just before 1 pm Mountain Time, an American spacecraft with two American astronauts on board descended from the sky over a calm Gulf of Mexico and executed a picture-perfect splashdown, the first in 45 years. Though exhilarating in and of itself, the icing on the cake came when seconds after a successful water landing a voice from the Space X control center welcomed the astronauts back to planet Earth and then said, “Thank you for flying Space X.”

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, is a private company headed by Elon Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla. It’s been collaborating with NASA for some time, and those at the top of the Space X chain of command are working hard to meet impressive self-imposed deadlines. It hopes to send a crewed mission to orbit the moon in 2023 with an eye toward building a base of operations on the moon to support trips to Mars. The goal is a human colony on Mars by the end of this decade – yup, 2030!

Though quite serious about these goals, Space X is clearly run by science-fiction fans who I suspect are also video gamers. No government-run space program would sign on to really cool project names such as Falcon, Crew Dragon, Raptor, Starship and more. And only a private company run by space geeks would do what Space X did in February 2018 when it tested its Falcon Heavy rocket by launching into space the 2008 Tesla Model S Roadster Musk used to commute to his office. In the driver’s seat was a human mannequin named Starman wearing a Space X spacesuit designed by Musk with one arm on the window sill and the other hand on the wheel. The sound system was set to continuously loop David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity”. In the glovebox was a copy of Douglas Adam’s quirky novel “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Sunday I watched live coverage as astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, referred to throughout the mission as “space dads Bob and Doug”, with tears in my eyes. I was a child during the Apollo missions and a young man when the space shuttle program began. Had America continued space exploration with the effort and sincerity it did in the 1960s and 1970s, we’d absolutely be on Mars by now.

But politics wrecks everything it touches and government is as efficient as a steer in a herd of ready cows. It took billionaire visionaries like Musk, Branson and Bezos working in America’s private sector to reignite interest in space exploration. Their money, working in the American free-enterprise system has done what could only be done in a capitalist country in the process of reducing government regulations.

Sunday, if only momentarily, the world saw what free people with free minds and freedom to act can accomplish. For an hour headlines about racism, corruption, unrest and politics were pushed aside. It was nice. Let’s make more moments like that.