Why SpaceX Matters
igniting big ideas
The start up culture is at fever pitch. Every week hundreds of napkin sketches morph into venture-funded reality. Everyone has an idea for how to manage or manipulate the torrential flow of data surrounding us and, for $1.99, I can do it on my phone. Convenience is at an all time high, and yet, my mind keeps tripping over one fact: all this hype is just data manipulation. I’m a developer myself, and live for shifting those bits and bytes around, but is it possible we’ve lost our big ideas in the big data?
Photo credit: NASA
In 1969, Neil Armstrong, and an army of 400,000 terrestrial workers conquered the moon. With slide rules, a 1Mhz computer, and a bold flight plan that would make Wan Hu proud, humanity left earth to undertake one of the greatest challenges in history. To achieve this, they built the most powerful machine the world has ever seen, the Saturn V rocket. It is an absolute fire breathing behemoth, producing over 7 Million pounds of thrust (about 160 million horsepower). When the beast roared to life on May 18th 1969, it hurtled 3 men towards the moon at over 24,000 miles per hour, faster than any human has ever traveled. Three days later, Earth held its collective breath as humanity set foot on another world.
Fast forward nearly half a century and we’re stuck on earth reading status updates from your aunt’s litter box.
Photo credit: NASA
Photo credit: NASA
It’s not that our achievements today are less significant in our daily lives–I use my cell phone a lot more than I use a Saturn V rocket–but they aren’t producing big ideas. Space exploration is a fantastic lens through which we can gauge humanity’s aspirations.
Undoubtedly, the greatest opponent of Space exploration is economics. The void of space offers very little return on investment. Neil Armstrong didn’t discover a gold mine on the moon, and yet that one small step will go down in history as one of our greatest achievements. Why? Because it’s our human nature to explore, to push the boundaries of whats possible, to understand where we’ve come from, and where we are going; we all identified with that one leap for mankind. Space exploration embodies those nobel aspirations like no other initiative since the Spanish explorers first sailed towards the new world. Yet today, in an age of exponential advances in technology, our space shuttle program is gone, we’ve terminated its replacement (constellation), and our astronaut core is a mere shell of its former self.
Enter SpaceX.
Finally, someone has found a way to put the power of the free market behind space exploration. What we have here, for the first time in decades, is grand ambition. Startups develop new features for their apps on a regular basis, a better photo gallery here, and snappier interactions there. On the drawing board for SpaceX? Rockets that land, heavy lifters, and even travel to Mars. Each of these represents a massive risk, financially thin returns, and monumental technical challenges. Risky. Bold. Big.
Yet when they succeed–soaring higher and reaching further–humanity will look again with awestruck wonder at a truly big idea.
