We're not ready for the imminent explosion in space technology

Elon is good again (at least until his next tweet)

TONIGHT! Come to the pub with me and Zion Lights – and watch us talk about why Britain needs more nuclear energy, and how we can make it happen. Details and tickets here.

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A former SpaceX employee once described to me why he thinks Elon Musk is… the way he is.

As he sees it, Musk thinks like an engineer. You try to build something, continue to iterate on it, and once you’ve successfully built it… you have been proven correct – whatever you end up with is proven to be the correct way to do it.

And the problem is that this approach is, as we know, utterly disastrous if you’re trying to build a social network like Twitter, because people are not just widgets that respond mechanically to the laws of physics. People are complicated.

However, there is some value to this approach.

For example, if you’re building electric cars or rockets, thinking like an engineer is extremely effective. In those cases, development is about changing variables and seeing what works best. If prototypes blow up en route, it doesn’t matter, as each experiment nudges you closer to your goal.

We saw this for ourselves on Sunday. On the fifth ever fully-stacked launch of SpaceX’s new Starship rocket, Musk’s company successfully used a pair of ‘chopsticks’ on the launch tower to capture the ‘Super Heavy’ first stage booster of the company’s new Starship rocket as it returned to Earth.

I watched the live stream, and I can safely say that it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. Even more so than when the company landed two Falcon Heavy boosters for the first time six years ago.

Why? Because Starship and the Super Heavy Booster are together the height of a 40-storey building, and capturing the first stage is equivalent to precision manoeuvring a 22-storey building, and plucking it out of the air.

However, it’s not just the visual spectacle or the feat of engineering that was important. What really makes it incredible is what this technological moment represents.

In the medium to long term, this is the first rocket we’ve ever built that could conceivably one day, get humans to Mars.¹

But in the short-term, this was the moment that SpaceX transformed the economics of space… again.

And I think the consequences of this are going to be a really, really big deal for everyone back on Earth, for reasons that I’ll now explain.