Despite all the noise and bad news, this is an insane and remarkable time to be alive.
Imagine you just woke up from a coma. The first memory you have is from 1981. The Iran hostage crisis is just ending after 444 days. You also vaguely remember that NASA is about to launch the first Space Shuttle.
American hostages in Iran
In the first hour, you try to catch up on the news. There’s a lot to take in, but you learn that astronauts have just returned from the moon. They traveled a total of 694,481 miles. The Commander of the Artemis II mission is a widower whose wife recently died after a long battle with cancer. His kids encouraged him to go anyway.
The astronauts rode on the most powerful rocket ever built by man. And they flew further into space than any human has ever flown. According to the New York Times, it was 252,756 miles to reach the moon. That distance is equivalent to 728 million wiener dogs lined up nose to tail. The barking would be insane.
My wieners: Lulu & Maggie
We didn’t just go to the moon, we went full Pink Floyd—to the dark side of the moon. The Mt. Everest of space travel. No other nation has done this. They’d like to, but they have no idea how to pull it off.
Last week I got over 100 emails about Why Your Dog Might Be Smarter Than You. Click here to read it.
Incredibly, the rocket wasn’t aimed at the moon. It was aimed to where the moon would be in six days. Like a quarterback throwing a long bomb on a slant to a wide receiver.
The Slingshot Maneuver
They went around the moon and slingshotted back to earth through a 10,000 degree wall of plasma at 25,000 mph without a hitch. At that speed the capsule would cross the entire United States in six minutes. The news anchor mentions that there are only five flags flying on the moon, they’re all American flags. You get chills.
The Orion capsule hit the atmosphere at 36 times the speed of sound. The air couldn’t move out of the way fast enough, so it compressed into a shockwave twice as hot as the surface of the Sun. The plasma ionized the surrounding air and blocks all radio signals. For several minutes, the crew fell faster than any humans have ever traveled inside a spacecraft, and nobody on the ground could talk to them.
The capsule slowed from 25,000 mph to 17 mph in thirteen minutes. Parachutes didn’t even deploy until the last four. Everything before that is managed by a curved piece of titanium and glue entering air twice as hot as the Sun.
In other news, we are apparently in some kind of skirmish in Iran. You are stunned that after all this time, we’re still dealing with those ass-clowns. We are finally confronting the same regime that took American citizens hostage in the early 1980’s.
While you hate war, you are impressed with our military’s professionalism. They’ve apparently destroyed Iran’s military in six weeks. Meanwhile, what’s left of the Iranian regime is hanging on by a thread. Good riddance.
F-15E Strike Eagle
An F-15E Strike Eagle jet was shot down over southwestern Iran on Good Friday. The weapons systems Officer, a Colonel, went missing. To escape, he climbed 7,000 feet into the Zagros mountains and hid in a crevice.
We sent in a Special Ops team that included SEAL Team 6 and the CIA. It was the most complicated rescue mission in the history of modern warfare. They pulled the Colonel out in a big, nighttime raid on Easter Sunday. Like something right out of a Tom Clancy novel. Nobody on our recovery team got hurt or killed. How reassuring it must be to the families of those in harm’s way that we leave no one behind. No other country does this. You wonder if Burt Reynolds or John Travolta will play the role of the Pilot in the movie.
You envision an image of the rescued pilot on a helicopter, holding an American flag. He’s as American as apple pie. Surely he’ll be on the cover of Time magazine next week. It’s hard not to feel a surge of patriotism—he flew into danger to protect us; we brought him home from the very heart of it.
His rescue is proof that no matter how far the threat reaches, America will fight through it to bring our people home. (see also Saving Private Ryan) Surely Mike Wallace or Harry Reasoner will have him on 60 Minutes this week.
With all this going on, it strikes you that this must be an insane and remarkable time to be alive. In just 15 minutes you’ve seen amazing things that only America could pull off. But you begin to wonder if this kind of stuff happens all the time now. Nobody, including the nurses, seems to be impressed by any of this. How odd.
Why isn’t there a ticker tape parade for the astronauts? Why aren’t we celebrating our brave men and women in the military? And how come the F-15E pilot isn’t on the news and on Johnny Carson?
You wonder when impossible missions became “routinely possible”. Maybe that’s the quiet trade we made: once remarkable; twice mundane. When amazing achievements pile up, appreciation atrophies. We apparently built a country where incredible things happen all the time…and then we forgot to stop and appreciate how incredible they really are.
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