For Just a Moment, American Greatness is Displayed Again

Did you see it? It didn’t last very long. But on Sunday afternoon, just before 1 pm Mountain Time, an American spacecraft with two American astronauts on board descended from the sky over a calm Gulf of Mexico and executed a picture-perfect splashdown, the first in 45 years. Though exhilarating in and of itself, the icing on the cake came when seconds after a successful water landing a voice from the Space X control center welcomed the astronauts back to planet Earth and then said, “Thank you for flying Space X.”

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, is a private comp...