On May 30, in the midst of a world-threatening pandemic and a surge of protests for racial justice, President Donald Trump arranged a photo op that harked back to the confident heyday of the Cold War American consensus. He flew down to Florida to gaze at the heavens.
The skies were blue over the storied NASA launch-ground of Cape Canaveral in mid-eastern Florida when, at 3:22 p.m., Trump peered from a nearby platform. Two astronauts—Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley—hurtled up from the launchpad, on a rocket roaring toward the International Space Station.
For longtime enthusiasts of NASA’s human spacefaring, it was a singularly auspicious moment. Ever since NASA’s space shuttles were mothballed in 2011, the agency had no American-owned way of getting people into space. It had been paying the Russian government to fly U.S. astronauts up and back, on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. But this flight was different. It was the first time humans had flown in a rocket and a capsule made by a private-sector company: SpaceX, the creation of the billionaire Elon Musk.
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