We’ll Have A Blast

Who cares if our first transport to the void

Exploded? Did our SpaceX Starship not

Lift off and leave the launch pad undestroyed,

Log reams of data to discover what

Half-sabotaged our maiden voyage, and

Achieve a record size for upward bound

Vehicular assemblies? Our unmanned

Explorer’s first success is on the ground …

As SpaceX engineers, we’ll have a blast

By blowing up expensive rockets to

Learn what went wrong. Our mission will be classed

A triumph since we’ll know more than we knew.

So we can’t fail on practice trips to Mars—

The secret to success is, set low bars!

 

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, MONO., the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly. The poem was prompted by the CNN story: “Was the SpaceX launch really a ‘success’?”