SpaceX Rocket Launches Successfully from Canaveral After Delay

Sunday morning the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Dragon spacecraft containing supplies and experiments for the International Space Station, successfully launched after a day's delay.  The original 10 am Saturday launch target from Cape Canaveral was scrubbed at the last minute when a technical complication arose...SpaceX CEO Elon Musk himself made the decision to back off the launch...better to be safe than sorry.  This pioneering company has already had its share of setbacks, including a launch pad explosion last year that destroyed a $250 million satellite. The plan is to eventually transport people into space using the Falcon 9 and Dragon, but I think the company would like to first drastically improve its reliability...

Our previous president, Barack Obama, is often accused by those on the political right of being a socialist and wanting more and more state control over businesses.  Yet in 2010 he essentially privatized our space program by first ditching the plans of his predecessor, George W. Bush, which involved a highly centralized project to establish a permanent moon base, and then placing the future of space exploration into the hands of private companies, SpaceX rising to become the most notable and ambitious of them.  Their goals are very bold: to send a manned mission to Mars and back within ten years and to follow that by settling the Red Planet in the 2030s.  But wait...here comes yet another president onto the scene...

Donald Trump hasn't spoken much about the American space program, except to criticize Obama for scrapping Bush's Constellation moon project.  Does he intend to continue along with his immediate predecessor's privatization/Mars goals or will he veer off in a different direction?  Being pretty gung ho about space exploration, I'm hoping he'll do both: keep our eyes set on Mars while returning to the moon in a more permanent fashion.  But we really don't know what our new president will do, do we?  After all, during the final days of his first presidential campaign in 2008, Barack Obama traveled through Florida and assured the people in the Space Coast area that he would not upset his predecessor's plans...and then proceeded to renege on his word once he stepped into office.  If Trump wants to change my opinion of him in a positive way, he at the very least will not backtrack the way Obama did and will honor the continuity through successive administrations that our space program so desperately needs...