Back to Earth

By the time I was fifteen years old, splashdowns had become a "thing." Maybe we'd hear about it, maybe we'd catch the the grainy and twitchy live footage on television. Manned space travel is about as old as I am; neither of us has ever known a world without the other. One of us never ceases to amaze, and I'm pretty sure it's not I.

Fast forward to the summer of 2020, when life on earth has become surreal, particularly in America, that hotbed of ingenuity that has somehow morphed into a cautionary tale of chaos born of complacency, a country at war with itself.  But splashdowns have come out of a decades long hiatus, and they could not have come at a better time. 

I flipped on the television and surfed through the channels, hoping for a little respite from handwringing pundits mulling over the latest unprecedented presidential outrages. Enter "SpaceX Dragon." I was transfixed. Transported, really, back to my childhood, watching with my father as the Dragon's precursors slipped out of the clouds and splashed down with precision, wondering each time how that was possible. I could imagine, back then, that a man (or woman) would walk on the moon, but I don't think I could have imagined what walking on earth would be like, in 2020. 

I watched as the capsule swayed beneath its four giant parachutes, seemingly suspended in place while it plunged with unimaginable speed toward the Gulf of Mexico. I could see the opaque haze of a hurricane staying fortuitously at bay in the distance. I watched as the rescue craft floated precariously close to the landing spot, thinking this was the mother of all trust exercises. I realized that, my own ambivalence about life on earth these days aside, the joy of return must have been unequivocal. I imagine these astronauts, like those before them, have the right stuff, the stuff they will need to cope with our earthly problems.