The SpaceX Falcon Heavy Test Flight Brought Me To Tears

"What Hath God Wrought?"
—Samuel Morse—

"People came from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they've ever seen."
—Elon Musk—

I'll admit to being an emotional person.

Even so, I was surprised yesterday as I watched the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy test flight, and found myself crying.

Why would I have such an emotional reaction to a test flight?

Falcon Heavy: First Test Launch
Image courtesy of SpaceX and http://unsplash.com

"The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork." - Psalm 19:1

As a lover of science fiction since early childhood, and as an amateur astronomer, when I look into the heavens, I see the glory of God. I see an unimaginably vast universe created by the hand of Jesus, the same God who created you and me.

By NASA/JPL-Caltech (NASA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (click for larger image)

I long to go out there and see it all,

to explore the nooks and crannies of the lava tubes on the Moon and on Mars.

I long to stand on a planet circling a star near the center of a globular cluster, multi-colored stars filling the sky at all hours of the day and night. I long to travel to the Magellanic Clouds and look back at the Milky Way.

Pioneers like Elon Musk and companies like SpaceX are, little by little, bringing the day closer when I may be able to do those things. Musk and a few other "movers and shakers" are opening up the space frontier on our behalf. My prayer is only that one day, they too might open their eyes and recognize the God who created it all.

The Falcon Heavy side booster landing was epochal.

Rarely have I seen a display of technology with such inherent beauty. Musk himself apparently had a similar reaction. He said:

"Those two side boosters—if you guys were here, you saw the landing. I was happy 'cause that was probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen—literally ever..."

Please take a couple of minutes to experience it yourself (click image below).

Falcon Heavy Twin Booster Landing—Courtesy of SpaceX and YouTube

As the landing progressed,

it became possible to see that, although the views from each of the boosters initially seemed to be identical, they actually came from two distinct viewpoints.

The crowning sight was to see the two boosters slowly descend, side by side, to a perfect landing. This is the embodied realization of the science fiction vision of my childhood and youth. Real, live rockets, capable of taking men—and more specifically, this man—into space, to explore, learn, and perhaps one day, live.

What hath God wrought, indeed.

_FIN

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