LYTLE: It's that old Apollo feeling, all over again

Those of us long enough in years can remember when the lunar lander attached to the Apollo 11 mission touched down on the moon and the remarkably clear black and white images were sent back to earth. Yes, it actually happened.“What a world! What a century! What a country!”we all exclaimed. In the early 1980s, a precursor to the Canadian Space Agency invited me and 35,000 others to sign up for the US space program. I faithfully sent off an official application with an essay describing the experiments that I would perform in space. I was going to convert lead into gold, I think. As more and more applicants were eliminated and I remained, the excitement began to mount. I was flicked out of the line in the final 2,000 candidates but for a while I claimed some minor bragging rights.When my wife and I moved our family to Colombia, we made sure to visit the Kennedy Space Center and, on one occasion, witnessed a Space Shuttle launch. It was a highlight for me, and I was glad that my young kids were able to ignore the event and throw rocks in the ocean as the plumes of water vapour and exhaust drove the spaceship into the atmosphere. Well, we tried.Spaceships and docking stations have always been able to capture the human imagination in a way that few other events can. This was proven again on Sunday, October 13, 2024, when SpaceX engineers caught the Super Heavy booster rocket with the Mechazilla and its 'chopsticks.' It is a modern, mechanical miracle that the direction of the free falling, 17-storey high booster was guided, and its velocity controlled sufficiently that the booster was redocked for reuse. The thousands of witnesses to the event did well to cheer, and I can only imagine the pride of the young engineers and others who work on the SpaceX programs.There is no doubt that the author of this incredible success is Elon Musk, and we can be proud that he received his university education in Canada. He is a remarkable polymath in the line of Renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci. But success, as they say, has many fathers. There was a large team of people who shared Mr. Musk’s shadowy dream and gave pith and substance to it. And they were Americans from American families, towns and schools. Don’t count the Americans out.And I will bet that after the depressing nonsense that attended all things COVID and the constant news of people invading across the US southern border, some bringing death to literally hundreds of thousands per year and the crushing realization that the leader of that country is mentally incapable of much of anything and the ignominy of stranding two astronauts who were supposed to have a brief trip to the space station, SpaceX’s show was a much needed tonic. Is the SpaceX success an augury of better times ahead? I am of the view that cultural worldviews impose restrictions on the development of human philosophy and history. Some worldviews impose few restrictions and are freedom-seeking. How else to explain that almost every innovation that we see on the internet or around the world is an artefact of the American imagination? Are Americans just smarter than the rest of us? I argue that the US founding documents unleashed a cosmic wave of freedom based on the notion that all people are made in the image of an infinitely creative God (a concept eventually expanded to include black, enslaved people) who gave them certain unalienable rights. The radical American experiment in self-government is founded on the notion that if I give you the freedom to be creative and you extend to me the same courtesy then, far from being a fixed pie, our economic circumstances will improve as a power of our aggregated individual creativity. Against a backdrop of increasing government authoritarianism, Elon Musk and his band of believers have proven that the freedom of spirit arising from the Bill of Rights, continues unabated in the United States.Is the US citizenry waking up to the need to stand once again on its founding documents and rediscover its moxy? I sure hope so.

LYTLE: It's that old Apollo feeling, all over again

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