Photo Courtesy: SpaceX
My son just finished US history AP as did many high schoolers around the country. We discussed how many years it takes to know if a certain event is historical.
The answer is usually around five.
For example history textbooks now cover September 11th and Obama’s historic election.
The Great Recession, however, that started before the Obama Presidency is still somewhat in flux as for the history books.
This brings me to something that was of tremendous historical significance that occurred this week. It happened with a 1000th of the coverage that Facebook received for its overhyped IPO.
What was it? SpaceX, a private company, that started as a science fiction dream by some silicon valley dreamers, did what up until now was only done by NASA and the European Space Agency: they launched a rocket into space and delivered a half a ton of supplies to the orbiting space station.
They did what until now was the monopolistic province of government. This folks is a game-changer one of huge historical implications.
There was no governmental red tape, no Congressman begging for the Space Agency to keep jobs in their district, no ridiculous trade-offs between student loans and space exploration budget cuts.
Just as importantly, no Wall Street, no IPO and no unequal playing field for investors.
Just good-old fashioned American tinkering and ingenuity. I say to the rest of the world economies don’t for a second count us out.
Some observers can say what they want about how we have lost our economic capitalistic engine. They can say that many of our banks are mismanaged, too big to fail, and their officers way over paid.
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