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01 / 05
ULA’s Vulcan Centaur Rocket Set to Launch Monday

Blog Post | Human Development

The Many Reasons to Feel Thankful in 2024

There are so many real reasons for gratitude—regardless of whether your preferred candidate won or lost.

This Thanksgiving comes in the wake of an emotional election that left some celebrating and others mourning. In such a charged political moment, it can be hard to focus on the big picture. Amid the continued effects of pandemic-era inflation, the ravages of natural disasters such as Hurricane Helene, intensifying culture wars, not to mention ongoing actual wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, some may find it hard to feel thankful even during a holiday devoted to thankfulness. Yet there remain many real reasons for gratitude—regardless of whether your preferred candidate won or lost.

Rising prosperity. Extreme poverty characterized the life of most of our ancestors. When George Washington prayed that “the great Lord [might] grant unto all Mankind . . . temporal prosperity” in his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, the average income in the United States, adjusted for inflation, was lower than that in Kenya today. Extreme poverty still plagued over 70 percent of people around the world when Abraham Lincoln made his own Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 9 percent. In 1990, when I was born, over 2 billion people lived on less than $2.15 dollars a day (in 2017 purchasing power parity dollars); today, fewer than 700 million endure that level of poverty, as more than 1.3 billion have risen into higher income brackets. Thanks to rising incomes, literacy and electricity access are spreading, while malnutrition and unsanitary conditions are rarer. And although there is still more progress to be made, rising prosperity thus far has been widely shared, making the world wealthier and more equal. The rate of progress has in some cases stalled amid pandemic-related disruptions, but the long-term trends are still heartening.

Health and abundance. Many Americans will gather with their families for the Thanksgiving holiday. One underappreciated cause for thankfulness is that we now enjoy more years with our loved ones, alive and well. After being flat for most of human history, life expectancy has risen exponentially. While the rate of increase has slowed in the past three decades, the long-term gains are nonetheless dramatic. Death rates are falling, even among those with cancer. What’s more, people spend less of their lives working than in the past. Also, we are earning more at jobs that are safer and more interesting than the endless grind of agricultural labor endured by the majority of people in the past—including the storied Plymouth pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe with whom they feasted during the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Speaking of feasts, farmers now produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet even as the population has grown, making famine a thing of the past outside of areas disrupted by war or natural disasters. The 17th-century pilgrims would have a hard time comprehending that food is so plentiful today that obesity presents a bigger problem than starvation.

Technological advancement. We live in an era of technological wonders. In 2024, for the first time in history, a paralyzed man was able to play chess online using a brain implant. This year, the world’s largest 3D printer debuted. This past year also saw artificial intelligence advances aid everything from breast cancer detection to archeological discoveries. And there has been much progress toward the final frontier. In 2024, Japan became the fifth country to achieve a soft moon landing, and the US private sector landed the first-ever commercial vehicle on the lunar surface. Astronomers detected water molecules on asteroids for the first time. A SpaceX Starship rocket booster landed safely in the mechanical arms awaiting it back at the launch pad.

Environmental stewardship. Farmland has peaked and is shrinking even as we produce more food, while land set aside for nature is increasing, as is support for nuclear energy (currently the cleanest, though not the cheapest, scalable energy source). Harmful emissions have decoupled from economic growth in many countries. A 2024 Nature study found that the pace of total global emissions growth may have plateaued, and some scientists, such as the University of Oxford’s Hannah Ritchie, now believe the world has passed “peak pollution.” Many beloved animal species whose numbers were dwindling are making a comeback. Thanks to the growth in their numbers, the Iberian lynx wildcat, the red-cockaded woodpecker, and the Apache trout all officially ceased to be endangered in 2024. And as developing countries grow wealthier, the world will very likely see further gains in environmental quality.

Freedom. Last, but certainly not least, remember the policies and institutions that underlie so much of human progress. In the United States, there is even more reason to contemplate these pillars of the modern world. As the late Cato Institute distinguished senior fellow David Boaz once wrote as Thanksgiving neared, let us remember to “step back and consider how America is different from much of world history.” Our country helped to birth modern liberal democracy, which has rapidly spread. True, authoritarianism is rising in many parts of the world, but democracies still outnumber autocracies. Finally, consider freedom, which strongly correlates with democracy. The latest Human Freedom Index numbers show that liberty is in retreat globally, “including significant declines in the rule of law; freedom of movement, expression, and association and assembly; and freedom to trade.” Yet the United States is still among the freest countries in the world, especially when it comes to economic freedom. It is that freedom and the American spirit of entrepreneurship that drives the largest economy in our beautifully interconnected world and produces riches beyond our forebears’ wildest dreams. The United States also enjoys robust protections for freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of conscience and religion, and many other freedoms we should treasure and defend. Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation celebrated, among other things, “our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity.” When you count your blessings this Thanksgiving, remember to include freedom among them. Happy Thanksgiving!

CNN | Space

SpaceX Completes Sixth Starship Test Flight but Calls Off Catch

“After firing up its 33 powerful Raptor engines and propelling the Starship spacecraft toward space, the Super Heavy booster separated from the spacecraft, reversed course and steered itself back toward the launch site. SpaceX planned to attempt a precision landing of the booster into the arms, or ‘chopsticks,’ of the launch and landing structure — nicknamed ‘Mechazilla’ by Musk — at the company’s Starbase facility. The company first pulled off the unprecedented maneuver during the fifth Starship test flight last month.

 However, this time ‘automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt,’ SpaceX said in a statement Tuesday. ‘The booster then executed a pre-planned divert maneuver, performing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.’

The Starship spacecraft, meanwhile, fired up its own six engines before entering a coasting phase as it soared through space. The capsule briefly reignited an engine about half an hour later before bracing for reentry — the process by which it veers back into the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere — and executing a daring landing.

It’s the first time Starship, a vehicle intended to eventually carry humans to the moon and Mars, has successfully ignited one of its Raptor engines while in space, according to SpaceX.”

From CNN.

Ars Technica | Space

The Next Starship Launch May Occur in Less than Two Weeks

“Less than a month has passed since the historic fifth flight of SpaceX’s Starship, during which the company caught the booster with mechanical arms back at the launch pad in Texas. Now, another test flight could come as soon as Nov. 18, the company announced Wednesday.

The improbable but successful recovery of the Starship first stage with ‘chopsticks’ last month, and the on-target splashdown of the Starship upper stage halfway around the world, allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thus, the company was able to press ahead on a sixth test flight if it flew a similar profile.

And that’s what SpaceX plans to do, albeit with some notable additions to the flight plan…

The Starship upper stage will also fly the same suborbital trajectory it successfully followed in October, however it will incorporate an in-flight relight of one of the rocket’s six engines. As Ars explained in a feature last week, this is the next milestone on the development path for Starship and is critical to allowing orbital missions of Starship to make a controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Successfully demonstrating the capacity to re-relight Raptors in space enables SpaceX to begin flying commercial missions with Starship and likely opens the way for Starlink launches, possibly as early as the first half of next year. These larger Starlink satellites can only fit within Starship’s capacious payload and will provide direct-to-cell Internet capability.”

From Ars Technica.

Associated Press | Space

SpaceX Capsule Returns Stranded Astronauts to Earth

“Four astronauts returned to Earth on Friday after a nearly eight-month space station stay extended by Boeing’s capsule trouble and Hurricane Milton.

A SpaceX capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast after undocking from the International Space Station mid-week.

The three Americans and one Russian should have been back two months ago. But their homecoming was stalled by problems with Boeing’s new Starliner astronaut capsule, which came back empty in September because of safety concerns. Then Hurricane Milton interfered, followed by another two weeks of high wind and rough seas.”

From Associated Press.