Liftoff

On Saturday morning, American astronauts lifted off from these United States for the first time in nearly a decade. The launch comes at a time when anything resembling good news is a welcome relief. For a generation of humans who were raised on the hope of missions to the moon and Star Trek, this is a reminder of how things could be. Not how things are.
It should be noted that during the sixties when wars and race riots were making life hard down here on earth, there was a cretin in the White House. Richard Nixon is the one who made the call to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they sat in Tranquility Base. Never mind the fact that he was the man who ran against John F. Kennedy and lost. Kennedy was the man who laid out the grand plan to send men to the moon. Nixon, the challenger, sent more men to Vietnam.
And eventually, going to the moon became a bore. A very expensive bore. A "why don't we save some of that money to fix things down here?" bore. Just a few years after the Eagle had landed, the last man walked on the moon.
1972. The year that Nixon won reelection. The year of the Watergate break-in. It would be another decade before the Space Shuttle program would put Americans back into space. It is no coincidence that the first shuttle was named Enterprise. Their decade long mission was to boldly move payloads to space and to repair broken satellites. Not exactly strange new worlds, but it was paving the way. Americans astronauts were no longer white, crew-cut sporting test pilots. Men and women of all backgrounds had their chance to slip the surly bonds of earth. Finally, space looked a little more like Star Trek. 
And what about earth? How did it look? 
Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell probably put it best: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
Maybe when Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken come back from their trip they'll do just that. 
It's time.