The Crew Dragon mission is a success for SpaceX and for NASA

THE ECHOES were obvious. The first launch of an Apollo spacecraft with a crew took place in 1968, an election year in which the country was reeling from assassination and riot, at war abroad and divided at home. To some on both sides of that divide, the Apollo programme remained an inspiration, a revelation of what the nation could do if determined to. It was “Man’s noblest venture”, declared Ralph Abernathy, a civil-rights leader, as he demonstrated outside the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida—but moving and heroic as it was, he went on, it threw into sharp relief the priorities of a nation which badly needed to improve the lot of its poorest people. Others were less magnanimous about what they saw as a distraction. “Was all that money I made last year”, asked the poet Gil Scott-Heron, “for Whitey on the Moon?”On May 30th, in the most eagerly anticipated space mission for a decade or more, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a new space capsule, the Crew Dragon, from the same Florida launch pad that saw those Apollo missions blast off to the Moon. Less than a day later the spacecraft delivered her crew, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, to the International Space Station.