KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—This will be the third time I have observed NASA’s Orion spacecraft take flight. But with this one, for the first time, am I genuinely hopeful about the future of the space agency and its plans to build a station on the surface of the Moon.
The two previous flights, in 2014 and 2022, both felt hollow. NASA, an aging bureaucracy, has repeatedly sought to recapture its fading glory while also looking toward a supposedly brighter future. Agency leaders would say things like this, from then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, after the first Orion launch in 2014: “This is the beginning of the Mars era.”
It wasn’t. No one who was paying attention believed it. But it was the kind of thing you had to say, I guess.