The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles. Confirmation of the successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST).

“This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. “The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.”

America’s biggest problem is ignorance of proven precepts of political economy. I don’t mean fancy econometric techniques or models full of malarkey (i.e., much of professional economics), I mean the basic, irrefutable concepts and empirical regularities sketched below. If those had been widely understood and applied a year ago, states would not have locked down in response to a highly contagious virus deadly only to a relatively small and easily identified segment of the population. All the costs associated with lockdowns would have been avoided and the number of excess deaths would have been lower, if not nil.