The Miracle of the Flying Skyscraper- Tim Urban, Katherine Boyle, and Victor Davis Hanson on SpaceX’s triumph.

 Tim Urban, Katherine Boyle, and Victor Davis Hanson on SpaceX’s triumph.

Every once in a while—but especially in the middle of election season—it’s important to look up and focus on what really matters. Today, we mean that literally. 

In fifty years’ time, I doubt we will talk about the strength of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s respective ground games, or California’s attempts to “Trump-proof” their climate policies, or Trump’s rants about Republican donors. (All of these stories were on page one of yesterday’s New York Times.) There is, however, a chance that, come 2074, people will tell their grandchildren about something that wasn’t on the front page of the Times, and that’s what SpaceX’s engineers pulled off a day earlier in Boca Chica, Texas, when they launched the largest rocket in human history to the edge of space and then steered it back to Earth where, somehow, this skyscraper-size hunk of metal was caught in the “chopstick” arms of a giant tower. 

The sheer improbability of what SpaceX achieved was best captured not by footage from the company’s own slick video feed—but on an iPhone in the crowd a few miles away (included here with thanks to Shaun Maguire):

It’s a surreal sight, even on video. And Boca Chica is a surreal place. When I traveled there in late 2020, I made it to the end of a quiet road so close to Mexico I had to pass through border patrol checkpoints, and found a once-sleepy collection of small ranch homes in the process of conversion into a spaceport for interplanetary travel. Back then, the fanciful plans I heard about sounded like a far-off fantasy. But in just four years, many of them have become reality. (That fact should give pause to anyone who dismisses the other plans of SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk—like a manned flight to Mars—as the stuff of science fiction.)

You don’t need to be a space obsessive to be excited by this. Amid what sometimes feels like a relentless barrage of cynicism and doomsaying—including, ironically, from Elon Musk himself—the most ambitious project of the most ambitious private company on the planet is working, and pushing the boundaries of what humankind can do. 

The author of the first of three pieces from The Free Press on the man-made miracle in South Texas is someone who has always been fascinated by space—and SpaceX. So when he heard that the rocket company would be attempting to launch and then catch its gargantuan Starship booster on Sunday, he knew one thing: “I sure as shit wasn’t going to miss this.”

But Tim Urban, author of the incredible blog Wait But Why, didn’t make the journey on his own. He took his 19-month-old daughter with him. Why? Because in a world filled with pessimism and pettiness he wanted to expose her to some “rocket launch emotion.” 

Read Tim’s full account: “Why I Brought My Toddler to Watch SpaceX’s Flying Skyscraper.” 

Our second piece on the Starship success is by Free Press columnist Katherine Boyle. What she memorably describes as “the fall of the century” was, according to Katherine, a victory for America. 

“While America faces swifter competition from China in a host of manufacturing domains, space is now an American empire—as long as U.S. government regulators  allow SpaceX to continue to thrive,” she writes. “If this sounds too hyperbolic, let me repeat myself: There is no space or defense mission that is not reliant on SpaceX.” 

Read Katherine’s full essay: “The Fall of the Century.” 

Last but not least, we bring you an essay by the historian Victor Davis Hanson on why we need more Renaissance people. For Victor, there’s no better example of a contemporary Renaissance figure than Elon Musk. And not in spite of, but in part because of, all the controversy that surrounds him. 

“Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism,” Victor writes. He argues that because such a figure is “not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack.” In other words: You can’t have Musk the genius rocket man without Musk the inveterate social media user. They are one and the same. (That’s what I’ll tell myself the next time I waste half an hour on X.) 

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