In Washington DC with my three small boys. Breakfast dispatched, and it’s off to Air & Space! Where else, you may ask. It was a sunny, mild day on the National Mall, a barker sold my six-year-old a baseball cap, and soon we were looking at rockets, spy planes, biplanes, jets and telescopes.

And any visit to a big science museum requires an Imax. The thing on offer was “Journey to Space.” The little guys were restless and the 3-D glasses kept falling off. I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted: it was like a trance. Long perspectives on mountains, coastlines, lit-up cities at night, from an aerial and then from a space perspective. Teams of engineers working together on making things go: folks who understand the concepts of truth, consistency, operability and experiment. Teams of astronauts floating around in space, running experiments, exercising, having a laugh. Handshakes and hugs between members of different national astronaut teams: in space, it doesn’t matter what country you’re from, human company is rare and precious. The weightlessness of the bodies and the omnidirectionality of the corridors inside the ISS (up and down are matters of convention) matched the mannerisms of the men and women sharing the craft: cheerful, competent, tolerant, non-hierarchical, task-focused people.

I’m one of those Americans whose belief in this country is aspirational: my patriotism connects with a set of ideals and not with “my country right or wrong.” Knowing how massively we have failed, over time, to honor high-sounding commitments, I can’t imagine living in a self-congratulatory narrative about “the greatest country on earth” that depends on obliterating memories of slavery, murder, genocide, fraud, and theft. Even the space program, I know, was cooked up out of military objectives and public relations. We need to know ugly history. The uglier, the better for our morals. But watching crews of science-minded people creating amazing adventures for our whole species, with indifference to the race, gender or income of the scientific talent brought to bear, allowed me to forget for a few minutes of blissful relief the ignorance, resentment, bigotry and sheer non-fact-based screaming that seem to have overtaken “the American way.”

A few hours later, it comes to me that a Miltonic Satan would look on that pragmatic, inquisitive, open-minded, multinational group in zero-gravity not with admiration but with envious resentment, and find satisfaction in the explosions that killed fourteen members of that “élite.”