WaitButWhy Tim Urban pise tak mile o tom, proc vzal dceru na launch
Imagine if every commercial airplane flight ended with the passengers parachuting to the ground and the plane crashing into the ocean. With every plane flying exactly once, a brand-new plane would be needed for every flight. Tickets would cost millions of dollars, limiting air travel to billionaires and governments. ..
In late 2015 a SpaceX rocket launched, sent its payload into orbit, and for the first time in human history, came back down and landed. I watched from SpaceX headquarters. The cheer was so deafening you could feel the vibration move through your body. In the face of a million doubts, SpaceX showed that a private company could not only launch rockets but do it better than any government ever had. Soon, the U.S. government was using SpaceX, not Russia, to launch its astronauts.
..
I can say with confidence: Watching a skyscraper falling from the sky is one of the most surreal things I have ever seen. Noticing my daughter still fixated on the cloud, I redirected her attention to the falling rocket. Near the ground, with a new streak of fire shooting out of its engines, it slowly hovered its way over to the tower and into the gentle embrace of the robot arms. The crowd roared. My wife, who gives one percent as much of a shit as I do about space, was in tears.
It’s hard to wrap your head around SpaceX’s mission. If they actually succeed in putting a single human on Mars, let alone their goal of a million people, it will be one of the major milestones in not just human history but life history—on par with the moment animals first began to walk on land. Whether or not they end up pulling it off, space is officially exciting again.
But the reason rocket launches make people emotional isn’t about that. It’s the feeling of swelling pride that comes from being in awe of your own species. It’s the feeling of hope that comes from being reminded of our insane potential when thousands of people work together toward a goal. It’s the happy version of the post-9/11 feeling of wanting to hug every stranger you see.
These emotions are especially refreshing at a time when we’re surrounded by their polar opposite: the pessimism and petty cynicism that pervade our age of suffocating tribalism.
As the father to a smiley little gnome, I desperately want to shield her from the negativity that will swirl around her as she grows up. I won’t be able to do that. But what I can do is continually redirect her attention to the rocket, showing her all the ways our species is incredible. I can use “rocket launch emotion” as a parenting compass and try, as many times as I can, to give her experiences that fill her with that particular magical, high-minded feeling.
If along the way I also train her to be my little space nerd friend, all the better.