A flawless space mission

Opinion: June 6, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Chicago Tribune: The latest mission of an American spacecraft to the International Space Station was one of those marvels of balletic NASA precision. Except it wasn’t a NASA spacecraft that splashed back to Earth on Thursday.

It was the Dragon, built by a private company called SpaceX.

“Welcome home, baby,” exulted Elon Musk, SpaceX founder, after the nine-day mission ended without a hitch. “It’s like seeing your kid come home.”

The success of the mission — the first of a dozen International Space Station cargo delivery flights SpaceX plans to make for NASA - is a huge boost for Obama’s space program reboot.

Quick flashback to 2010: Obama canceled a planned 2020 U.S. moon mission and yanked NASA funding for the rocket that was supposed to take astronauts there. He said he’d outsource some of the spacecraft business to commercial space companies because they are more innovative, nimble and cost-conscious than NASA.

The sky wasn’t falling

Critics detected a plummeting sky. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, warned that Obama’s plan could doom the U.S. to a “long downhill slide to mediocrity.”

Earth to Armstrong and other skeptics: SpaceX engineers took only four years to develop Dragon from a blank sheet of paper to its first mission. Amazingly, this flight was the first time that the Dragon’s rendezvous system was used in space.

Credit Musk, the Internet billionaire who co-founded PayPal, for creating a lean, nimble SpaceX corporate culture that delivers largely on time and within budget. NASA is known for neither.