All things Trump–domestic and international. AMTRAK collisions and derailments. Weather extremes and all its subplots, some of which are tragic. Stock market chaos and corrections. Sexual predators and their victims and their enablers. More FEMA failures. NRA rationales for the irrational. The Alt-Reich. Sean Hannity. Alex Jones. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And more.
But put your frustration, humiliation, confusion, grieving and outrage on hold, however briefly. There is SpaceX.
Have we ever needed a big, grandiose, collective, non-parade, pride-inducing, fist-pumping event more than that successful launch of Falcon Heavy into its well-hyped Mars orbit? The interest was international. The crowd around the Kennedy Space Center was back-in-the-day massive.
Didn’t it feel that we had recovered some of Brand America? That used to be us!
So Elon Musk is from South Africa–not South Florida. So what. He’s quintessentially one of us. An immigrant story to fly for. When the world’s most powerful rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center, it took with it more than Musk’s red Tesla Roadster. It also took the charge–and promise–to change the face of space exploration. Interplanetary scenarios beckon. The sky’s not the limit.
SpaceX–from cost-cutting, reusable boosters to deep-space aspirations–is now the player in the global launch business. The private space industry is more than an entrepreneurial vision. And America, by pragmatic association and innovation, was back, and no one needed a baseball cap for bragging rights.
And the ripple effects matter mightily. From feel-good, group psychology to economic implications. Florida’s post-space shuttle corridor is back. Private rocketeers are bringing jobs into what is morphing into more of a high-tech hub.
Two years ago SpaceX became the International Space Station’s first commercial supplier. Now it’s shooting for the first commercial crew launch.
Keep David Bowie’s Space Oddity cued.