Look, I get it. If you were talking about college football, there would no shame at all in losing to Alabama. Everybody loses to the Crimson Tide. Anything else stings a little, especially losing the headquarters for Space Command to the Yellowhammer State.

The broken Heart of Dixie ranked 45th for its pre-pandemic economy by U.S. News and World Report. It was 46th for health care, dead last for education and 49th out of 50 overall. As they say in Alabama, “Thank God for Mississippi.”

On Jan. 13, a week before President Trump left office, he yanked the rug from beneath Colorado.

Last Friday, the Department of Defense announced an investigation into whether his decision was based on competition and cost, as it should have been, or executive fiat.

If it’s competition, well, in football, fans who chant “we want Bama” are hardly ever pleased with the result when they get Bama.

In Bama they say, “You can’t get to the moon without going through Huntsville.” 

They call it the Rocket City, and schools around town are named for astronauts. 

In 1962, when John F. Kennedy asked, “Why, some say, the moon?” Huntsville answered.

Today Marshall Space Flight Center employs a small city, about 6,000 Alabamians, who have made America proud while making history. 

Huntsville is the Detroit for the rocket engines that propelled the Apollo missions, the space shuttles, Skylab and ballistic missiles.

Skylab was conceived on a blackboard at Marshall Space Flight Center three years before man landed on the moon and seven years before Skylab became America’s first orbiting space station in 1973. The lunar rover was built in Huntsville, birthplace of the “moon buggy,” for Apollo 15 in 1971.

The International Space Station is called “a little piece of Huntsville real estate,” sailing 254 miles above the Tennessee Valley.

The Hubble Space Telescope was designed, developed and built in Huntsville, allowing us to peer 20,000 light years into space.

Space Camp? It’s here, too. In 1959, NASA shot a Huntsville monkey on a Huntsville-built Jupiter rocket into space and returned Miss Baker safely. The spider monkey lived a celebratory 13 more years in Huntsville, then was buried with a headstone outside the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a fine museum’s tribute to the hero monkey. 

Three-hundred private companies, all the big defense contractors, are in residence in the adjoining Cummings Research Park, and Jeff Bezos isn’t building his Blue Origin rockets there because he likes the fried catfish and slaw.

As a footnote, America beat Russia to the moon because of Hitler.

Wernher Von Braun, the brains behind the moonshot, brought a dark history to Huntsville after building his rockets with slave labor to launch Nazi missiles. As Germany fell, he and his engineers sought the Americans for surrender, instead of the Russians, and lucky for us they did. 

In 1975, just 30 years after the war, Huntsville named its new 10,000-seat performance hall the Von Braun Civic Center.

Politics has always had a way of souring a good thing.

Trump dangled Space Command before Colorado a year ago, as he stumped for then-Sen. Cory Gardner in Colorado Springs.

“And you have all of the infrastructure, so you’re being very strongly considered for the Space Command,” Trump said more than 38 minutes into his address. “Very strongly.”

He said Gov. Jared Polis came to him, hat in hand.

“And actually, I have to say this,” Trump said, signaling he was going to say something he didn’t have to say, pivoting to look at Gardner. “I think I can say this, Mr. Senator, but the governor showed up at the plane today, your governor, Democrat. No, but in all fairness, he showed up because he wanted to lobby to see if they could get it. That’s OK, that’s all right. And we are going to be making that decision, Cory, when we make that decision, all right? OK.”

So it wasn’t the Gettysburg Address.

The presumption was that the permanent HQ would be Peterson Air Force Base, which already is home to NORAD, which keeps an eye on the sky for incoming visitors, debris and Santa Claus. Colorado also has  more than its fair share of researchers and contractors, no doubt.

Wednesday, Lloyd Austin visited Colorado, his first official trip as defense secretary, just as the Department of Defense begins to review Trump’s decision on Space Command.

Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper bragged on the U.S. Northern Command’s role in the state’s COVID-19 response, demonstrating “… Colorado is the best – and only – home for U.S. Space Command … the epicenter of the national security space mission.”

Polis called for an investigation to stop the steal.

“It’s clear that the decision to relocate U.S Space Command is fiscally irresponsible and would cost taxpayers money,” Polis said in a statement. 

As it were, Trump lost Colorado in November by almost 14 percentage points. Gardner lost by 9 is the seat that could have allowed Republicans to keep the Senate majority and keep a firewall against Biden’s agenda. 

In Alabama, Trump won by 26.

It’s a mixed bag, though, measuring anything against Alabama.

Politics there has always been like a barrel of drunk possums, shameful if it wasn’t so ridiculous. Alabama is the state of George Wallace, the two-timing Love Gov and Judge Roy Moore.

Yet, it is also the state of Rosa Parks, Jimmy Buffett and Bo Jackson, Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Windshield wipers were invented in Alabama, and so were auto air bags and the Super Soaker.

The guy who invented Wikipedia? He’s from Huntsville, too.

My point is that if you’re going to beat Bama, you need to pick your battles. The race for space was won by Huntsville a long time ago.