OPINION:
Inspirational leaders know how to make the impossible possible. Elon Musk demonstrated that recently when his SpaceX engineers sent a Starship rocket into the heavens and then landed it upright on the very pad from which it had been launched.
It was a dazzling display of ingenuity and precision. It was also a taste of what might lie ahead if voters decide to chart a new course for the country on Tuesday. Donald Trump has promised the South African-born entrepreneur a job in the White House.
On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the former president recounted a conversation he had with Mr. Musk about this feat of rocketry.
“‘Was that you?’” Mr. Trump asked. “He said, ‘That was me.’ And I said, ‘Who else can do that?’ He said: ’Nobody. Russia can’t do it. The United States. Nobody can do it.’”
This is notable because in other endeavors, we have fallen behind. Four decades ago, one could fly from Dulles Airport to London Heathrow in a bit over three hours on the Concorde. The same journey now takes about seven hours.
Boom Supersonic, a Colorado startup, is determined to remedy that. Last week, the company completed the sixth test flight of a prototype it hopes will take air travel beyond the speed of sound again. Like SpaceX, Boom is privately held, and none of its aircraft are designed by committees of European bureaucrats — the arrangement that doomed the supersonic Concorde jet.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to land a man on the moon, saying: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Seven years later, we were there, beating the Soviets in the space race. Fast-forward to today, and NASA hasn’t surpassed its 1969 achievement. Meanwhile, China, India and Japan are catching up, landing spacecraft of their own on the moon.
In response, NASA proposes to “land the first woman and first person of color on the moon” in a pale diversity, equity and inclusion imitation of a 55-year-old achievement meant for all of humanity. That’s what you get when government committees run the show.
To remedy that, Mr. Trump says he’ll put the SpaceX founder in charge of getting rid of wasteful government projects — a task surely more difficult than landing a man on Mars, another of Mr. Musk’s pet projects.
But if anyone can make such things happen, it’s Mr. Musk. After he bought Twitter in 2022, he fired 80% of the staff. At the time, his critics predicted that this would cripple the social media platform. It didn’t. A federal judge recently tossed the lawsuit filed by disgruntled former employees who felt entitled to a $500 million settlement.
It turns out that companies — and likely governments, too — can function just fine without hordes of political activists on the payroll. The same might apply to government. At the former president’s recent Madison Square Garden rally, Mr. Musk pledged to discover $2 trillion in savings in the annual budget.
“At the end of the day, you’re being taxed,” he said. “All government spending either becomes inflation, or its direct taxation. Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that.”
This is a moonshot the country desperately needs. It is only with such an ambitious and inspiring objective that the seemingly impossible can be achieved.
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