Imagine
Originally published in The Laconia Daily Sun ›
On Saturday afternoon I kept my eye on the clock, not wanting to miss the launch of SpaceX at exactly 3:22 p.m. As I’m certain you know, and hopefully you watched too, this was the first spacecraft to take off from Kennedy Space Center with NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, since the last Atlantis space shuttle was launched in 2011. That mission ended the space shuttle program after thirty-one years as the centerpiece of America’s spaceflight program.
We must salute Elon Musk, who emigrated to the United States from South Africa and Canada and used his education, skills and vision to imagine the new and to found SpaceX in 2002 as a private company with a credo to “make humanity a multi-planetary species.” Known as Demo-2, the launch on Saturday represents the culmination of SpaceX’s progress since the company was founded.
I was at the Kennedy Space Center, invited as a VIP guest, on July 8, 2011 watching the launch of the Atlantis flight. It was a cloudless summer day. There is nothing quite as thrilling as imagining what it might be like to be an astronaut strapped in, blasted into space, and having the opportunity to look down at the spinning blue ball that is earth.
The launch was a diversion from what is happening around us. Events shaping the narrative of our lives.
It has been clear that COVID-19 would result in transformation. How we work. How we are educated. How we are entertained. Our policy decisions. The level of intelligence, curiosity and transparency we will expect from our leaders. You cannot shut off the engine of a global economy, lock down its citizens, shutter its schools, universities, churches, sporting and cultural activities and expect the world will emerge unchanged.
Perhaps it will finally focus more attention on the environment. Rachel Carson warned us in Silent Spring (1962) not to ignore our natural world, our interconnectedness to the earth. We were driving down a superhighway too fast, she said.
James Baldwin could have predicted the racial unrest as minority communities have never had the same access to public health, affordable housing, education. We can track social injustice, our new Jim Crow, to mass incarceration and now to COVID-19, as minority communities have been disproportionately affected by the virus.
Then Minneapolis.
It will take each one of us, all Americans working together to weave the society of our fabric back together. New York City was in the first phase of recovering from COVID-19. The unnatural silence. The pain we could see but couldn’t touch. The fear palpable all around us. Now we are living under curfews. Terrified, after sleepless nights, to turn on the morning news.
It only took nineteen hours for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to dock at the international space station. After leaving on Saturday afternoon, they arrived at 10:16 a.m. on Sunday morning.
Imagine. A vaccine for COVID-19. The end of the bitter racial divide. An America without the highest incarceration rate in the world. The most guns. A peaceful America. It will take sacrifice, forgiveness, innovation, education and empathy. It will take letting go and the imagination and vision necessary to foster transformation.