WHILE THE WORLD ARGUES, AMERICA PUT A CITY-SIZED ROCKET IN ORBIT At 7:48 this morning, while the rest of the planet was still arguing about tariffs and elections and whose fault everything is, a rocket taller than the Statue of Liberty lifted off a beach in South Texas and did something no rocket that size has ever done. It went to orbit and stayed there. That's Starship, on its fourteenth try. Thirteen times before this it flew and fell short, sometimes spectacularly, and thirteen times a certain kind of commentator declared the whole thing a billionaire's fireworks show. This morning it had an engine quit on the way up. The old way of doing things, the way of committees and cautious men, would have been to abort and study it for a year. Instead, the ship relit an engine it wasn't supposed to need, pushed itself the rest of the way to 17,500 miles an hour, and opened its doors. Out came twenty-six satellites, each one the size of a 737 when it unfolds. The company's own spokesman said the payload was worth about twenty Falcon 9 launches of bandwidth. Twenty flights' worth of internet, delivered in one morning, from one ship, and then the ship came home and splashed down in the Pacific in time for lunch. Here's what I keep coming back to. Nobody made the country do this. No five-year plan, no ministry of rockets. A bunch of engineers on a Texas beach decided the future should arrive sooner, and it did, and the rest of us got to watch it on our phones. That's not something that happens everywhere. It happens here. Every empire in history was built by whoever controlled the high ground. For a few thousand years that meant the hill above the river. Then the sea. Then the air. This morning, in the time it takes to eat breakfast, we reminded the world where the high ground is now, and who's standing on it. Argue about the rest of it. That's fine. That's what a free country does. But somebody put a city-sized rocket in orbit today, and it wasn't them.