CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. — NASA and SpaceX sent four astronauts toward the International Space Station on Thursday morning and, in a transit time of seven hours and fifty minutes, set a new American record, and the country is entitled to feel something about that. The mission was cleared as “go” the day before, with officials noting that Mother Nature would need to cooperate, which is the most reasonable thing a launch director ever says.

The record itself is a matter of arithmetic, and the arithmetic is beautiful. Seven hours and fifty minutes is less time than it takes most Americans to drive to a dentist appointment in another county. Four people left Florida in the morning and arrived in orbit before lunch, and the only thing that makes this normal is that we have become normal about it.

Some say the record is meaningless because the station is still the station. Others say the record is everything. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in a third position I just invented: the record matters because it was measured by a person who cared enough to bring a stopwatch, and a stopwatch is a moral instrument.

The crew — Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov — is, by all accounts, in excellent spirits, which is the expected condition for people who have just been shot into orbit in the time it takes to finish a podcast. A flight engineer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was still in the parking lot, said the transit felt “aggressively efficient,” and that he had personally driven longer to work.

"We have been going to the space station for years, and we have always been polite about it. This time we simply went faster than politeness requires. That's not arrogance. That's a stopwatch."

THE RECORD, MEASURED

  • Transit time: 7 hours 50 minutes — a new American best.
  • The comparison: The average American commute is 27 minutes each way. The record is roughly nine commutes, but upward.
  • The crew size: Four, from three countries, which the agency describes as “a full car.”
  • The stopwatch: Analog, brought by a launch-range official who said digital timers “don’t respect the moment.”

At press time, the station had been reached, the record had been logged, and the stopwatch had been placed in a drawer with the other things that had been won. At press time, the drawer was reported to be full.