SpaceX Evolution (Appendix B: Why SpaceX Superstate)

A serialized version of this book for SubStack

Link to First Installment: https://chrisprophet.substack.com/p/spacex-evolution

Most western nations are fundamentally restricted by the quality of their leadership. The politicians in democratic countries tend to be popularist, i.e. they put personal and party approval above all else. Usually this makes them cautious, with decision making slow and/or partial in effect, overall not very conducive to the advancement of technology. A good example of this effect would be the Corona virus, where most democratic countries were slow to react, allowing relatively small outbreaks to quickly spiral into a pandemic. Some countries like China took a more autocratic approach, which allowed them to quickly react to the initial outbreak, and through implementing widespread countermeasures, they were able to return to near normality in months rather than years. While China’s political system is far from perfect, it did allow them to move quickly in response to changing circumstances.

Similarly western politicians are already challenged by the fast advances made by Musk enterprises, particularly SpaceX and Tesla. It’s fair to say the legacy launch industry is struggling¹ and the automotive industry is increasingly threatened by the march of Tesla. This is because slow moving politicians and state bureaucracies cope poorly with radical change, such as profound shifts in technology. So it seems more than likely they will try to stay the more cautious path while Musk enterprises make for new technological heights and indeed new worlds. Establishing commercial space transport and self-sustaining settlements will no doubt provide plenty of new challenges, prompting some original approaches to improve living conditions and the chances of survival. Overall this will result in an enormous impetus to improve technology, which steadily puts these offworld endeavors further ahead of the more sluggish Earth, which will likely become increasingly dependent on their advances. Why buy outdated products from legacy companies when you can order online the best space tech from X.com, who’ll fabricate it locally for delivery within hours? For instance, rugged Mars rovers could easily become fashion items here on Earth but the expense of transporting one from Mars would be magnitudes greater than the actual cost of the vehicle. Hence to fulfill any Earth order, a quantum encrypted packet of instructions for how to construct the latest version rover would be transmitted from Mars, allowing it to be constructed at an urban X.com facility, then the vehicle would drive itself to the customer location and message its new owner on arrival. Eventually X.com could operate fleets of autonomous delivery vehicles for all manner of goods, hence have enormous advantages of scale, if logistics are coordinated by AI.

While it might be possible to stall X.com’s ascent, there seems little evidence of such so far, at least from influential nations in the West or East. Tesla’s innovations have been widely welcomed in Europe, the US and China, and the free world has become SpaceX’s happy hunting ground for commercial launch and satellite broadband services. While it seems inevitable the future will become more commercial, at least it will be libertarian. On balance the alternative is far less palatable. Should Musk enterprises derail, this would return the West to the status quo, i.e. little to no progress regards electric utilization and a steady decline in space technology.

“If you look at American access to space with crew, we were able to go to the moon in ’69. Then with the Space Shuttle can only to go to low-earth orbit and the Space Shuttle retired and then for almost a decade there was no - America had no access to space for its people. So this is a pretty bad trend it’s trending to zero. We need a very strong trend in the other direction in order to have any chance whatsoever of making life multiplanetary.”² ~ Elon Musk

However, China has for decades made a determined effort to pursue space exploration, in what they call the tortoise and hare approach (i.e. slow and steady progress). This implies if SpaceX should for any reason fail, the US would effectively take a breath, allowing China to reach the moon and Mars first. In this doomsday scenario, China would gain the technological upper hand, in turn threatening to turn the West into client nations. So it seems SpaceX is the last best hope for the West to avoid this dire outcome; there are worse fates than becoming clients of X.com, who at least share some liberal values.

Link to next installment: https://chrisprophet.substack.com/p/spacex-evolution-appendix-c-why-spacex

1 https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/european-leaders-say-an-immediate-response-needed-to-the-rise-of-spacex/

2