Plenty of critics weighed in on last month’s stock market debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, questioning the staggering valuation of a company that has yet to turn a profit, and evidently miffed that its oddball founder is now the world’s first trillionaire. But what is most remarkable – and most important – about SpaceX, writes Gleb Lisikh, is how it has launched a revolution in space. By driving down the costs of lifting objects into orbit by multiple orders of magnitude, Musk’s reusable rockets have sparked a new industrial space age that appears set to transform the economy and the way we live. And has already revived excitement, optimism and a sense of adventure for a new generation. With a special Editor’s Introduction, this final installment of C2C’s series marking the U.S.’s 250th anniversary shows how individual ingenuity unleashed in a country offering the freedom to risk it all is once again changing the world.