Why Politics Gets Space Wrong
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Courage and patience. Risk-taking. Boldness. Thinking big. All of this language swims against the current political narrative on both the right and the left.
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The Martian Farm Act
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America's success in agriculture offers a critical economic lesson. In “sciencing” farms, the government sparked unprecedented growth in an essential sector. It should come as no surprise that the government used a comparable model to help create the aerospace economy.
Read MoreThe Space Pen Myth
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Government missions actually work best in areas of high uncertainty, such as space. Failures not only get spread throughout society, where they can be absorbed without shock to a particular sector or system; those “failures” often turn into business successes. The seeming wastefulness of NASA got encapsulated in an urban legend about the so-called space pen.
Read MoreSpace Fact #10: The First Airline Flight Cost $400
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The first commercial flight took place on New Year’s Day, 1914, with a ticket price of $400.
Read MoreSpace Lunacy
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Future generations will see the decision to turn back from “the Moon as an act of sheer lunacy—one akin to the Chinese burning their world-dominating fleet of ships in the early fifteenth century.
Read MoreHistory's Greatest Thought Experiment
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The idea that the best way to beat the Soviets wasn’t with the military but by accomplishing a miracle was far from obvious. In fact, it was brilliant.
Read MoreFrederick Jackson Turner, Spaceman
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In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an influential paper declaring that American-style democracy, a radical reinvention of the classically inspired republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers, had been created by the expanding frontier. Turner could not realize that, ten years after he wrote his thesis, the Wright brothers would enter a new frontier of an entirely different dimension: the air.
Read MoreWhat Freedom Meant to Our Ancestors
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Today, when we talk about America as a land of freedom, we tend to think about freedom (or the lack of it) from taxes and regulation, or we celebrate our Bill of Rights. The early settlers in America—those who came voluntarily—sought freedom of a more literal nature.
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