Well worth a reading from Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of fire 🔥 on X:
”I have a very simple message for everyone who complained that I included the real-world company, SpaceX, in Theft of Fire. For everyone who complained that this was too topical, too on-the-nose, too current-year.
Shut your statist pie hole.
You didn't complain when I mentioned NASA, did you? You had no problem believing a future that included NASA. And if I had credited the bureaucrats at NASA, instead of the entrepreneurs at SpaceX, with conquering the solar system, you would have swallowed that preposterous notion hook, line, and sinker.
No matter how bloated, wasteful, and inefficient NASA is, and continues to be, no matter how many astronauts they kill, statists will continue to believe in them because government.
But if you actually watch the video below, and truly understand it, you will realize that when we manage to conquer space travel, if we manage to conquer space travel, it will be with technology built by free enterprise.
And if we fail, and become irrelevant as a species, it will be because government stopped them.
What you're seeing here is the fourth test flight of Starship, SpaceX's super-heavy orbital launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful thing humanity has ever flown.
Only thirteen months after the first test flight.
They made it all the way.
They lifted a 40 story building into space. All the way up, and all the way home, and they only lost a camera.
And they did it for a total program cost of under 15% of NASA's annual budget.
Watch the video.
I'll wait right here.
If it doesn't move you, then let the rest of us know, and we'll see if we can fit you with prosthetic soul.
Okay, got all that?
Now try to imagine you're a science fiction writer. You're writing a future where humanity stops listening to idiots blithering about pronouns and third world tribal conflicts, and other shit that doesn't matter, and decides to colonize the solar system.
What do you think is the most likely way that happens?
This shit right here, that's how.
Oh, it might not end up being SpaceX. The laws of physics work for other people, too. But it sure as hell is going to be a private company, because the laws of economics work for everyone.
And government agencies only do two things: perpetuate themselves, and try to look busy enough to justify their budgets. NASA has regressed from landing us on the moon to putting stuff in orbit to... well, paying SpaceX to do their job faster and better.
This is the future, people.
SpaceX, and other private launch companies, aren't current thing in current year. They are the technology and architecture of humanity's future.
They are no less the stuff of science fiction than a cybernetic eye, a genetically engineered posthuman, or a prototype AI copied from the brain of a teenage girl.
The future is just a time period that comes along at one second per second, and it happens to all of us. The future of science fiction is something that we, not just as a species, but as individual humans, have to work to create, or tomorrow won't be different from today, except slightly dumber and more infused with arguments about microaggressions.
Somebody has to do the mathematics, run the simulations, design the valves, write the software, pour the concrete, weld the steel.
The shape, the destiny, the very survival of our species has always been dependent on technological advancement.
So building science fiction shit isn't just a thing that matters. If you can see past your job interview on Tuesday, or the next election cycle, it's the only thing that matters.
Make more humans, make more tech.
Latter, rinse, repeat.
Conquer the galaxy, or die trying”.
https://x.com/spacex/status/1798689697184764071?s=46&t=-Ks4q52A7vJzQnCci96yHw
