CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A rocket ship built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era of commercial space travel and putting NASA back in the business of launching astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.
Godspeed.
It was nice to have something other than riot footage, Trump’s blather, or Corona virus to watch with the kid today.
You forgot the picture of Trump and his man Friday, Pence, watching the launch. Then, there was the image of Trump, with the ascending rocket still visible, mugging and waving to the assemblage. The launch was secondary.
Thankfully absent from the Space X livestream.
I’m old enough, think Mercury Astronauts, to remember when all launches were life pausing events, and astronauts were celebrities on a par with rock stars and Super Bowl MVPs.
Did Q-Tip run his hands all over the astronauts before they boarded?
Of course not…there are Russians on the ISS. 
Should have told King MAGAt it was Space Force.
SpaceX Rocket Ship Blasts Off Into Orbit With 2 Americans
That got my hopes up for a moment.
Beautiful lift off, then CNN cut away to a shot of the rocket ascending with the backs of Trump, Pence, and Ms. Pence in the foreground. As the rocket ascended, Trump turned around looking absolutely bored. . . . .Ho Humm.
Good for them. I wonder how fast the turnaround can be after the first-stage landing.
Probably was expecting the capsule to be trailing a MAGA banner.
As we power past the 50th anniversary of the moon landing with another successful space launch with Falcon 9, it has become a truism, even a cliché, that the sky is no longer the limit, now that there are footprints on the moon.
Practitioners of science have also recently provided life-affirming signs of hope for our weary, benighted species:
In November 2018 we landed InSight on the surface of Mars – an extremely complex and delicate multi-year mission that, somehow and amazingly, went off flawlessly, by using the gravitational pull of that distant planet as a slingshot to precisely guide our planetary probe to its intended destination, where it will transmit data to earthbound scientists and hopefully provide some answers about our vast universe.
And last Spring, we finally saw – at last – an image that for decades has been the subject of much tantalizing speculation and theorizing: a ring of fire and particles swirling around a black hole, an object of such unimaginable mass and density that nothing – not even light – can escape its awesome and irresistible gravitational pull.
The image was the product of a global community of scientists and researchers working in a coordinated fashion that effectively transformed a networked complex of far-flung detectors and powerful computers into an earth-sized cosmic telescope capable of peering deep into the universe.
The concept of a world that is knowable by human reason and scientific inquiry is the culmination of thousands of years of human observation, experimentation and discovery.
As the celebrated physicist, mathematician and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The earliest humans looked at the stars in the nighttime sky and dreamed of distant lands beyond the horizon, of worlds beyond the physical earth. Gradually, as they discerned patterns of regularity they were able to chart the stars and reference them to navigate the seas, formulate their calendar, and prepare for the planting season.
And as they increasingly recognized, despite the apparent randomness and chaos of Creation, the physical universe exhibits patterns of elegant, exquisite and profound organization, which evoke existential stirrings and give rise to a sense of joy, wonder, reverence and awe.
And once we realize the beautiful, harmonious, rational basis for universal patterns of organization – and with it the understanding that our lives, too, can have meaning, order, and purpose – the question then becomes:
How should we organize our affairs and personal relations, and those of our community, our nation, and our world, so that we may live our lives in harmony and in accordance with a universal order in a way that ensures peace, justice, freedom and dignity to all living souls on our planet?
How can we walk this Earth as brothers and sisters – each made just a little bit different, to encourage and challenge us to recognize and celebrate our common humanity – and how can we share this world and this commonwealth as family?
That to me is where the excitement surrounding news of scientific achievements and discoveries springs from: the sense of joy and wonder we experience when we contemplate the awesomeness of nature and the beautiful sense of harmony, symmetry and order in an unfolding creation, the vast scope and scale of creation, the ecstatic feeling that we are somehow a part of a living, evolving, unfolding, inter-connected universe, and the sense that, somehow, we too are all on our own journey of discovery.
In explaining the ultimate truth, both science and religion ultimately fall short. But science holds its truths as provisional, and always subject to change upon additional information.
And that’s because science is not actually about “knowing” anything for certain, but about gathering, evaluating and verifying evidence.
When a scientific hypothesis is put forward, it is rigorously tested by many independent researchers, and if the original findings, on rigorous testing, can be consistently replicated, then the hypothesis becomes accepted as the best explanation to date and will stand until someone puts forward a new hypothesis which either disproves the current one or advances it from its present position.
What we have, then, is a weight of evidence provisionally agreed upon by the scientific community which represents our current state of knowledge – but which is also only a work in progress and subject to constant questioning of accepted truths. Scientific certainty betrays the spirit of independent inquiry and the belief that all knowledge is subject to rigorous scrutiny.
Which leaves us with questions and uncertainty. And here, here on this earth, we must live with the sometimes vexing matter of complexity, doubt, and ambiguity.
But which, after all, is the springboard to new discovery.
And so, as we have done since time immemorial, we fix our gaze to the heavens, to the stars …
And dream.
The proper term is “lift off” – for those in the aerospace community, “blast” = “explosion”… something to be avoided.
Just like you really don’t want a “gusher” in your oil field – that means your well is blowing out and you’ve lost control of the flow.
I caught it on Cspan. No sign of the idiots 
.
Big whoop.
It’s only a matter of time before the Scumbag is lauded for this (somehow) by obsequious NASA officials (namely that fat turd Bridenstine) and parroted by NASA’s various social media accounts. Especially right now, but of course, when has “right now” ever mattered at all for white people seeking to congratulate themselves about something?
ETA: Every single robotic mission is sold as “going to solve Big Questions about Big Issue X” that is just utter bullshit. Take a look at how so many of them are described: it’s all template nonsense that no one can come back and say, “Yes, that box was ticked off.” And the InSight mission is no closer to answering any of its oversold promises at all, especially given that it’s not even functioning properly.
seemed like a nice comfortable way to leave the planet for a while.
Technology at it’s finest.
When can I go? no better time to get away than now.
I stopped at 836 skydives, always falling
I want to go up, way up. just once. lol
Because who would want to watch a rocket ascend into the heavens, making the air and ground shake, in a renewed demonstration of this society’s engineering expertise and continued willingness to risk everything to explore the unknown, who would want to watch this inspiring triumph of human talent and spirit when you could look at Trump’s stupid face?
I saw a shuttle launch in person years ago, without even expecting to. I was fishing in the huge lagoons west of Canaveral and suddenly there was this amazing light near the ground and then the rumbling roar started washing over me. I defy any normal person to look away until it’s long out of sight. It’s utterly fascinating. To a normal person.
Trump, however, ain’t normal. Nothing outside himself means anything at all. Nothing inspires him, fills him with awe, moves him, touches him in any way. Nothing makes him genuinely laugh, or fills him with tenderness. He’s empty. Praise is the only thing he wants; he craves it like a man dying of thirst craves water, and whatever he gets is never enough. He might as well be Tantalus or Sisyphus, suffering through an eternity of exquisitely custom-tailored psychological torture.
