An Interplanetary Future?

SpaceX, Science, Films, &tc.

—AI’s continued inability to spell makes me skeptical that it is going to take over the world anytime soon.

Dear Friends,

Kamala Harris once wrote a book when she was running for Attorney General of California, Smart On Crime. She plagiarized significant portions of it, often from Wikipedia. You can read about it here. This is not shocking. She is the mediocrity of all mediocrities.

I know I’ve been very hard on the Republicans this election cycle. But now I should just say that the Democrats might just pull this off: to elect Donald Trump a second time. First, they ran Hillary Clinton, who was probably the only person who could have lost to him. Now, they lied and lied and lied about Joe Biden’s mental condition until it blew up in their faces and it was too late to have any kind of process to replace him with anybody but … the second “only person” who could lose to Donald Trump. (Although this Tim Walz fellow is clownish enough to also possibly accomplish the feat.)

This much is certain: whomever loses next month will have more than deserved it.

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Elon Musk is the world’s richest man (on paper) and in the news a lot for his newfound support of Donald Trump and how he runs “X” (formerly known as Twitter). He has somehow made himself a political lightning rod.

I literally couldn’t care less about any of that. What impresses me is what Elon Musk’s companies do. I don’t care to own an electric car and have no use for one; I think they will be a small portion of the market for decades to come because the tradeoffs and infrastructure challenges are significant; but if you’ve never ridden in a Tesla, you are missing out. It is an amazing vehicle.

But SpaceX is where the action really is. Those people are accomplishing jaw-dropping feats of human ingenuity. Elon dreams it up and his team delivers. On Sunday they performed their fifth test flight of Starship, the spacecraft they hope will take astronauts to the moon and then eventually on to Mars. It was pushed into space by their “SuperHeavy” booster, the largest and heaviest flying object ever conceived or built. It’s basically a skyscraper. The booster got it up there, turned off its engines, fell back down toward earth, fired up its engines again, righted itself, and made a perfect pinpoint landing on the launchpad, caught by the twin arms of “Mechzilla”—the launch tower. It was a sight to behold:

Musk’s business plan is eventually for this booster to be ready for another flight in one hour. He’s going to make Corpus Christi, Texas, a highway to the stars carrying the tonnage necessary for interplanetary colonization. I don’t know why, exactly, we need to become an “interplanetary species” (as Musk calls it) nor do I know the real feasibility of putting a colony on Mars, but I do know that Musk thinks he has it figured out and I would not bet against him. Or SpaceX. Those people know what they’re doing. I’ve paid pretty close attention to all of these test flights and there is one tell-tale sign of extreme competence: they never have the same problem twice. They just fix it.