I think the private spaceflight industry is just another example of how far the whole private sector has fallen behind in the physical sciences. Back 30–40 years ago, companies like AT&T and IBM were both industrial and scientific titans, with Bell Labs and IBM Research keeping technical staff from a wide variety of backgrounds—and now, they’re gambling everything on risky, hype-based business ventures like “the Metaverse” and quantum computing, assuming that their fundamental research will turn profits in the short-term, which is famously stupid.¹

Likewise, the modern spaceflight industry is trying to turn profits with technologies that should be fundamental research. You can’t just make a reuseable rocket and expect it to suddenly work—you need to pour a lot of R&D funding into that, making sure you have systems capable of sustainably withstanding the extreme conditions in even suborbital flights. Reusable rockets are all SpaceX has, and they’re basically the only thing keeping its investors happy—if they stop trying to build fancier rockets and focus on making better systems, they’ll lose all their funding.

If any of these stupid billionaires had even a shred of management knowhow, they wouldn’t go by their silicon valley motto of “move fast and break things.” That motto might work great for websites, where you can rapidly iterate on software, but rockets—or any large infrastructure project, such as telephones—are not privy to that fast iteration. The Saturn V rocket wasn’t built by people moving fast and breaking things—the engineers on that project worked deliberately and methodically, with the support of scientists from all arms of the US government; the SpaceX Starship—which is being worked on by a single, isolated company focused on profits and a wild sci-fi fantasy—is doomed to fail.

Companies like Westinghouse,² Bell, IBM, and GE were successful in part from their gigantic R&D labs, which focused on both science and engineering, ensuring the long-term success of both their underlying infrastructure and customer-facing goods, whether they were gigantic mainframe computers or televisions. (The other half was, of course, ruthless business tactics and terrible working conditions for everybody else—but I’d like to remind you all that the firm’s horror is the firm itself, not that the firm has a boss.) On one hand, scientists would work on, say, the physics behind semiconductors, and engineers could find ways to exploit those physics. Researchers at Bell Labs never found a way to exploit the cosmic microwave background or the quantum Hall effect, but they sure as hell found them.³

It’s easy for me to say that billionaires would be better off investing their money into massive R&D labs, but even that comes with its own set of caviats. X, owned by Alphabet né Google, is a giant industrial research lab dedicated towards “moonshots,” projects that will solve large societal problems with some far out technology and land Alphabet a lot of money. There’s a reason you haven’t really heard about X’s projects—other than Waymo, which probably spends more on PR than R&D—and it’s because they’re all dreamt up by Silicon Valley technofetishists who assume building infrastructure is just as easy as building a website; X’s projects are gigantic wastes of money, and the whole laboratory is like a version of Bell Labs ran through Google Translate a billion times, keeping surface-level elements while removing the important bits. I find it obvious that, even if people like Elon Musk put loads of money into industrial labs, they would run them the same way they run their companies—as hype machines generating short-term profit as quickly as possible, believing in an accelerated linear model of moving science from idea to application, just like how RCA did back in the 1980s.

Deleuze, in Postscript on Societies of Control, had warned everyone about the industrial laboratories overtaking university research, but, ironically, the university has become the main bastion for research in the physical sciences; private companies—outside of military contractors—barely do any real physics anymore. Universities have, ironically, become their own cog in the industrial machine. Most major companies don’t need their own physics R&D, because they can just get universities to do it for them; science has been cheapened in a really sad way. Science was once one of capitalism’s best assets on both sides of the Cold War—now that the war is over, there is only the consumer economy.

The Gentry are wasting their money on art instead of armies. Let them eat cake, I suppose.