One of the greatest corporate achievements of our lifetime is Elon Musk's SpaceX. Through his vision, innovation, and determination to expand human understanding of the cosmos, SpaceX is a massive success story.
At the end of September, SpaceX launched a rescue mission to retrieve two U.S. astronauts stranded on the International Space Station; stranded because their Boeing space capsule malfunctioned, rendering it unsafe to return the astronauts to earth.
NASA wasn't exactly rushing to rescue them. As I've written about in the past, NASA was anticipating the astronauts -- Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams -- wouldn't return to earth until February, 2025. Now they'll come home at the end of this SpaceX mission.
But the bigger news this weekend, which you may not have heard about, is that SpaceX managed to launch and land a fully-reusable booster in a launchpad tower.
WATCH:
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/6R5YatSVJX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 13, 2024
Here's Elon's explanation:
The strong gravity of Earth makes the physics of a fully reusable rocket with positive payload margin extremely difficult to solve, which is why it has never been done before.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2024
Removing the mass of landing legs from the booster and ship by making the tower do the work of final…
The entire post reads:
The strong gravity of Earth makes the physics of a fully reusable rocket with positive payload margin extremely difficult to solve, which is why it has never been done before.
Removing the mass of landing legs from the booster and ship by making the tower do the work of final velocity attenuation greatly improves payload margin.
This architecture also simultaneously substantially increases launch cadence, because the same arms that lift the booster and ship onto the launch stand also catch them, allowing immediate placement of the booster back on the launch stand and the ship back on top of the booster.
In other words:
you can literally relaunch it in a few hours by refueling. it’s already on the launch pad. plus a bunch of landing gear weight saved but the former is more important in the limit
— roon (@tszzl) October 14, 2024
I have degrees in English and Nursing, so science -- literal rocket science -- is not my area of expertise, but this is a huge accomplishment. It's one even Musk wasn't sure SpaceX could achieve:
Achieving materially positive payload margin to a useful orbit with a fully & rapidly reusable rocket has eluded prior attempts. Many have tried to embark upon this path only to give up when it became clear that their design would have negative or negligible payload margin.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2024
This… https://t.co/WOtCVLasgB
Space exploration is a massive human achievement. At one time, it was a source of American pride. In 1962, JFK gave a speech at Rice University about his determination to lead the space race:
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
His vision led to NASA to put men on the moon before Russia.
But in the last several years, something has changed. While SpaceX continues to live out JFK's vision for space, what is NASA up to?
Well, they're concerned less with space exploration and more with dismantling 'white supremacy.' That's what.
The Left -- driven by animus towards Americans and mired in perpetual victimhood -- cannot create anything. Not artwork. Not entertainment. Not science.
Instead, they take all those things and destroy them.
Artwork? The 'Just Stop Oil' goons routinely deface priceless, irreplaceable works of art and archeology.
When it comes to entertainment -- television, movies, books -- the Left take the works of others, like J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and ruins it with Amazon's 'Rings of Power', which I wrote about here. Or they take 'Star Wars' and turn it into a therapy session with lesbian space witches (no, seriously).
And science? It's become the quasi-religion of the Left, an ideology rooted not in logic and facts but in feelings. This is why outlets like 'Scientific American' think gender differences are merely the product of bias and not biological reality, or why the Left thinks eating bugs or printing the words 'climate change' in textbooks will stop hurricanes.
It's the Left's ruination of science that is the most maddening. They promised us if we just did away with icky, backward, oppressive Christianity we'd have a society akin to Roddenberry's 'Star Trek' -- technologically advanced, logical, rooted in reason and fact.
Instead, we have 57 genders and a cult-like belief that elected Democrats will control the weather.
While NASA is having navel-gazing struggles sessions about racism and sexism, Elon Musk is looking towards Mars.
And I cannot think of a more stark contrast, one that clearly paints two very different paths we can take: being mired in the woke swamp or reaching for the stars.
I know which one I prefer: Ad Astra Per Aspera.
