America used to be a country that dared great things. We did them because we could do them. The Soviet Union beat us to put an artificial satellite in orbit, so President John F. Kennedy said, "Hold my beer," and made sure that we put men on the moon before the Soviets - and we did, in 1969. The Soviet Union, of course, never made it there and collapsed under the weight of their own economic failure twenty-some years later.

President Kennedy said this about that feat:

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; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

We've kind of lost that drive in recent decades. That may be changing, however, and the signs of that change - that America may again become a nation that dares greatly and wins greatly - may be possible in no small part because of two men: Donald Trump and Elon Musk. As a sign of that change in the making, President-elect Trump will be joining Elon Musk at a test of his SpaceX Starship system.

President-elect Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he really likes rockets. On Tuesday, he’s expected to watch his ally launch a fully reusable, 400-foot mega-rocket out of southern Texas, according to reports.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX aims to begin its sixth and latest test of its Starship rocket at about 5:00 p.m. ET, as the world’s richest person continues to push toward carrying NASA astronauts to the moon and eventually reach Mars. It comes just over a month after SpaceX conducted its previous test, retrieving and “catching” Starship’s Super Heavy booster with its launch tower.

Trump’s planned appearance with Musk is just the latest sign that the two men’s alliance has grown closer over the last several months. Musk became a major donor and surrogate for Trump during the 2024 election, spending at least $120 million of his own cash and leading a super PAC.

President @realDonaldTrump en route to @SpaceX!!! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/gNARfMTAGk

— Margo Martin (@margomartin) November 19, 2024

Elon Musk and the President-elect have worked very closely together during and after the campaign, and Musk, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has been tagged to join the Trump administration as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency - the DOGE that will soon be unleashed on government waste, another great, daring undertaking, one that may just return some measure of sanity to Washington.

Elon isn't content with that, though. He has his eyes set on Mars.

You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.

This is one of the things about recent events that gives one a little hope. Not only is President-elect Trump naming great, ambitious reforms - he intends, among other things, to eliminate the federal Department of Education, which I would categorize as "a good start," but also to reduce the size and scope of the federal government as a whole - thus, the DOGE. He intends to rebuild our troubled military. He intends to turn our sagging economy around, and to restore respect for the United States in the international community, not only among our allies but (perhaps most importantly) among our adversaries.

But his going to watch the Starship test is an interesting indicator that he may be an advocate for even more daring things.

A nation, a person, cannot win greatly without daring greatly. The United States used to be a country that dared the mighty things, took risks to carry out great deeds. Our national survival may well depend on our once more becoming a nation that dares greatly. That does not mean the government must be the driving force; private citizens can, in the name of the American people, also make those daring attempts. If the ascent of Elon Musk has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that Donald Trump may be the man to see that government can be kept out of the way of the adventurous.

We put men on the moon. We brought them safely home. No other nation has ever done that. And we did it in 1969. We did that by daring greatly, but that daring spirit faded somewhere along the way. Maybe - just maybe - Elon Musk and Donald Trump will help us to get a little of that spirit back, to become once more a people of courage, vision, and, yes, daring.