Political Memes

We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.

Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn't care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.

SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing's rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.

SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.

NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.

Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can't grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.

We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.

Give the power to the people. All of them.