Commentary
A few days ago, something truly incredible happened that will go a long way in advancing human civilization. And while a lot of people know about it, it didn’t get the attention and credit it deserves.
On Sept. 28, SpaceX’s new Starship reached orbit for the first time. Its task was fairly modest—to deploy Starlink satellites—but this breakthrough paves the way for sending humans back to the moon and then on to Mars.
Starship is the most powerful rocket ever made, both in terms of the weight it can carry and the distance it can travel. It’s also a feat of engineering in being fully reusable. The ability to re-land a rocket’s first-stage boosters—a capability SpaceX pioneered—is a revolutionary development. This is because financing and building a new rocket for every launch has been a large part of the massive cost and timeline that has held back recent space exploration.
Looking back, it’s rather frustrating that humans have not been to the moon in over 50 years. NASA’s Apollo program between 1969 and 1972 delivered six human visits to the moon. No one has been there since.
So many technological advances have occurred in daily human living, yet we have been flat in terms of space exploration. We have lost entire generations of space-faring potential and all the advances that would have come with it.
While experts cite many reasons for this inactivity, one of the main ones is the general inability of NASA and its lead private sector contractors to forge through bureaucracy and just get things done. It took the trailblazing activity of SpaceX—and other independently acting private companies—to spur momentum and basically shame NASA and the U.S. government into going along for the ride.
The launch was of course well-covered on international news. The general public was likely exposed to some coverage, but perhaps just a passing headline or news ticket. It didn’t get the viral and in-depth appreciation that was warranted, nor did it become the water cooler topic of the week that got everybody talking.
A large part of this may be because of who the lead visionary behind this great achievement is: Elon Musk. While SpaceX is only now becoming Musk’s dominant headline-grabbing project, it is in fact one of his original companies. It was incorporated in 2002—a year before he founded Tesla.
To celebrate Starship is to celebrate Elon Musk. This is something a lot of people aren’t willing to do. For political and social reasons, Musk is vilified by a certain segment of the population for his blunt social media posts, past collaboration with Donald Trump, and the fact that he is—or at least briefly was—the first ever trillionaire.
This vilification is unfortunate because it puts petty grievances ahead of celebrating awe-inspiring human achievements. An upcoming documentary on Musk indicates, based on early looks, that it is slanted along these lines.
There is certainly commentary that recognizes Musk’s achievements. These just don’t get amplified in mainstream outlets the same way the vitriol does.
“Nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car, they will only remember the Optimus,” said Silicon Valley fixture Jason Calacanis, on a recent episode of the popular All-In Podcast. He made these remarks after touring Musk’s Optimus robot factory. “[Musk] is going to make a billion of those, and it is going to be the most transformative technology ever made in the history of humanity.”
It’s unfortunate these messages aren’t heard more widely because it’s the vision and drive of Musk that is making things like Starship possible. It’s inspiring for young people to watch such vision unfold.
From an early age, Musk contended that he wanted to focus on a handful of goals that would transform civilization—the key ones being sustainable energy and making humans an interplanetary species. He first said this 25 years ago and has stayed true to it throughout.
It wasn’t too long ago that Apple founder Steve Jobs was worshipped as one of the great minds of our time. The idolatry of Jobs extended beyond tech circles into general society, happening both during his life and after his relatively young death in 2011.
The iPod and subsequent iPhone certainly changed our daily lives and how we interact with society. But Jobs’s achievements really don’t hold a candle to Musk’s work, which in some ways is only getting started. Yet mainstream celebration of Musk is frowned upon and filtered through a partisan prism.
It’s another sad sign of how the politicization of everything is having harmful effects on society writ large. It would be sad if a young person were discouraged from dreaming big like Musk because of political propaganda.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
