Such rockets are not to be found in PowerPoints or wooden mockups any longer. They are living, breathing machines nearly ready to breathe fire.

Six years ago next month, this rocket was pretty much just a Power Point presentation. This year it is being fit checked on its launch pad. And all without government funding.

Does this mean that government is not involved? No. Government has given itself the right to get in the way. An irony is that half a century ago, Lady Bird (President Johnson’s First Lady) had wanted to prevent advertising billboards from littering the view from America’s highways. The result of her attempt was the Environmental Impact Report, which actually justifies the existence of such billboards all over the country. It also justifies stopping progress whenever the government wants it stopped.

So, Jester Naybor is right: “The more we ask government to do FOR us, the more power we grant it to do TO us … ‘for our own good’ … because they Know Better.” [ellipses in original]

We the People pay for it ourselves, but this no longer means that the government cannot prevent it from happening. The more we ask government to do for us, the less we are allowed to do for ourselves. Right down to the government putting us in long term lockdown, because government is taking care of us rather than we taking care of ourselves or each other. Government tries to convince us that it is OK to prevent us from working in order to be able to buy our own food, because the government will take care of us by sending us a few dollars to make up for the lost wages. The lost productivity and lost liberty mean lost prosperity. They may (or may not) care for us, but what they do to us is so much worse.

One really has to ask how this makes America a nation “for the people,” when the government has the power to stop the people. How is this a “government of the people [and] by the people” when we talk about government as a separate entity more powerful and more in control than We the People?

In 2004, SpaceShipOne showed the world that We the People could put a man in space, something that had before then been possible only by the efforts of large, expensive, epic, national projects, an achievement that very few nations dared attempt. Private funding and non-governmental organizations now can accomplish national achievements. Two decades later, We the People put on the launch pad a rocket that is larger and more powerful than the most powerful governmental rocket. Should we be amazed that so many people are as excited about this rocket as had been excited about Apollo? The purposes are similar, but this one is without government funding or design. Just like much of the science fiction of the 1950s.

Yet here we are, in the land of the free, home of the brave, worrying that government won’t let us launch the thing.

For later flights there may be a short clang on booster landing.

Those who wish to continue obsessing about N1 get a room.

There. Finished the environmental impact statement.

This is precisely why respect for the life and liberty of the individual, MUST be the primary operating principle of our government … to put a stop to going beyond that because they Know Better when they CAN’T and DON’T.