I. The kid with the book on his lap
There is a particular kind of person for whom the SpaceX IPO is not a financial event but a vindication. I was that kind of person — the boy in glasses who was no good at football and read all the time. While the other kids kicked a ball in the sun, I had a book open on my lap: Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, the boy who found Jules Verne before he found girls. Throughout my life, I was told, gently and repeatedly, that the rockets were a phase I had to grow out of. That the future in those books was a child’s future, and the adult one was smaller, grayer, and mostly about managing decline.
I was lied to. A private company now lands its boosters upright, on a barge, in the sea, and reuses them — a thing that was science fiction inside my own lifetime — and has just gone public at a valuation that makes the entire space economy of my childhood look like a rounding error. The reusable rocket is not a metaphor. It is a fact, bolted to a drone ship, and it is the single most concentrated rebuke I can think of to the spirit of our age, which is dystopian, declinist, and — this is the part worth fighting about — empirically wrong.
This essay is an argument against that spirit, made with data rather than sentiment, because optimism that cannot survive contact with the numbers is just temperament. The good news is that the numbers are overwhelmingly on optimism’s side. The bad news is that we have built an intellectual class, and a politics, dedicated to not noticing.