SpaceX Rescue Reinforces DOGE’s Privatization Point – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s return in a SpaceX capsule yesterday emanated symbolic meaning beyond even the substantive accomplishment of rescuing two Americans stuck in space.

NASA scheduled the astronauts to spend about nine days in the heavens. Instead, they spent nine months. Like many a temporary government program, this one long overstayed its welcome.

It might have become even longer if that slayer of unnecessary government programs, Elon Musk, had not come to NASA’s rescue. When President Dwight Eisenhower prevailed upon Congress to pass the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, the belief that no private entity could compete with the Soviet Union’s space program undergirded the enthusiastic federal funding of the new administration. Sixty-seven years later, the U.S. government looked to a private entity — as it now does on a regular basis for much else with regard to travel beyond the blue — to rescue its astronauts stranded on the International Space Station.

Last year, the Biden administration squashed any talk of Musk’s SpaceX retrieving the stranded astronauts in 2024. NASA instead scheduled a SpaceX rescue date for long after the election. Cynics regarded this, given Musk’s criticism of the Biden administration and July endorsement of Trump, as an administration playing politics with lives on the line during an election year. The astronauts certainly took their lost-in-space status stoically in stride and studiously avoided Dr. Zachary Smith antics of petulantly assigning blame to any political actors.

Musk insists that in 2024 he offered NASA to send SpaceX to bring the astronauts back to Earth to a listen-to-the-crickets response. A month ago, Musk reiterated this claim in an interview with Sean Hannity by stating that the astronauts “were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”

Andreas Mogensen, a former SpaceX astronaut from Denmark, called this “a lie.”

“You are fully retarded,” Musk responded. “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons.”

In Washington, who receives credit matters. One understands this by the current coverage that mutes mention of Musk and SpaceX’s role in all this (At this time of this writing, the Drudge Report instead displays the picture of a burning Tesla with headlines touting that the company is on “Death Watch” and “Booted from Auto Show”). Musk currently stands as Progressive Public Enemy No. 1B for overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in a federal government that many insist remains relatively free of all that. Radicals, who once praised Tesla for its commitment to clean energy, now firebomb its cars and charging stations. It upends the narrative to portray this “villain” as heroic. So, the Drudge Report and other outlets redact his role.

What happened 250 miles above Earth serves as a microcosm for disputes 89 feet above sea level on Capitol Hill. Elon Musk, as he so often does, stands at the center of both events.

At NASA’s infancy, America entered the Space Age. This conveniently occurred during the era in which Americans believed more in their government than at perhaps any other time.

Nearly seven decades later, Americans no longer trust their government. Watergate, an intelligence apparatus conducting assassinations abroad and more recently seeking to derail a presidential candidate at home, COVID-19, stock-trading politicians on modest salaries becoming multimillionaires, a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency, and much else destroyed that trust.

In this environment does Elon Musk dismantle wasteful programs needed by those administering them but not much by anyone else. In this environment did Elon Musk’s SpaceX do the job that Americans once expected from government.

And if the private sector can recover public-sector astronauts about as far up as Philadelphia sits from Boston and usher them through a 17,000-miles-per-hour reentry without incinerating them, then perhaps it can play the roles currently assumed by the United States Agency for International Development, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corporation, and so many other boondoggles born in that era of faith in government that also coincided with NASA’s heyday.