As Cities Burn on the Ground, U.S. Again Captures Space | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This post appears here courtesy of the LifeZette, and written by David Kamioner.

    With a call to glory and can-do spirit that contrasts sharply with the national situation on the ground, NASA, Elon Musk, the Falcon 9, and the crew of the Dragon rocketed to achievement and honor with the cry of "America has launched!" at Cape Canaveral on Saturday. Many all over the world were choked up at this historic leap into the heavens that recalls American space triumphs of the Apollo program and the 1960s.

    A spacecraft built and designed by Musk's SpaceX company left Earth with two Americans, bringing the globe a new era of American commercial space travel and putting the United States back in the lead of the space launch business for the first time in nearly a decade. Since then the nation and NASA has had to undergo the vexing humiliation of relying on the Russians, once our rivals in the cosmos, to launch our ships into space. But not today and hopefully never again.

    NASA's Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode aboard a Dragon capsule set atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff was at 3:22 p.m. from the same launch pad that sent Apollo crews to the moon over 50 years ago. The dry eyes at NASA were too few to be counted.

    "Let's light this candle," Hurley said before launch, using the historic words of U.S. Navy Commander and legendary American hero Alan Shepard, as he waited for the countdown on America's first manned spaceflight several decades ago. There are indeed similarities to the past.

    In the middle of a presidential campaign that pits a bumbling veep from an unpopular administration against a law and order candidate hated by the Democrats and media, faced with threats to this nation from within and without, and with a global flu running amok, America again achieves preeminence in space. Welcome back...to 1968.

    "We are back in the game. It's very satisfying," said NASA fan Doug Marshburn, of Deltona, Florida, who watched the 260-foot rocket climb skyward. Elon Musk was no less enthusiastic: "This is something that should really get people right in the heart of anyone who has any spirit of exploration," Musk said after liftoff, pounding his chest with his fist in a display of patriotism and commitment to duty not to be found in some other quarters of the country in the present day.

    At a post-liftoff rally held at NASA's historic Vehicle Assembly Building, President Trump applauded Musk and said, "Today we once again proudly launch American astronauts on American rockets, the best in the world, from right here on American soil." He said the U.S. will be the first country to achieve a Mars landing and promised a "future of American dominance in space."

    Vice President Mike Pence also said, "I believe with all my heart that millions of Americans today will find the same inspiration and unity of purpose that we found in those days in the 1960s" during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

    Not present this day, but there in eternal memory, are the luminous spirits of past U.S. astronauts from Shepard to Glenn, from Grissom to Chafee, from Lovell to Borman, from White to Armstrong, who will forever define American valor and remind the world what feats free men are truly capable of when given a noble task.