Tag: SpaceX

Ascending from Plato’s Cave: Don’t suffer from second husband syndrome

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where humanity stands at this pivotal moment. As of late March 2026, NASA is days away from launching Artemis II—the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo, targeted for no earlier than April 1, 2026, with astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen aboard Orion for a ten-day lunar flyby.   This isn’t just another flight; it’s NASA finally getting aggressive, the way it always should have been. I support the Artemis program with my whole heart. I want to see timelines compressed, second and third shifts running around the clock, Saturdays and Sundays included—full throttle output. We’ve talked for decades about whether we ever really went to the Moon. I respect people who doubt it; many have been lied to by institutions they once trusted. But I’ve traveled the world, seen the curvature of the Earth with my own eyes, understood time zones through lived experience, and studied how ancient mathematicians calculated that curvature to plot constellations and voyages. Those advances in human culture demand we go to space—not just with drones or robots, but with people living sustainably off-world. That’s the only way we climb out of Plato’s cave, stop staring at shadows, and see reality for what it is.

My perspective is rooted in a deep love for knowledge, ancient history, and the biblical call to dominion. I don’t dismiss fears about transhumanism or the occult origins some attribute to NASA. I get the Tower of Babel parallels—humanity trying to replace God. But I also believe God gave us intellect and drive precisely for exploration. Leaving Earth isn’t rebellion; it’s fulfillment of the creation mandate. And with AI, robotics, and companies like SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace pushing boundaries, we’re on the cusp of a flourishing space economy that will create jobs, not destroy them. I’ll explain all of this below, drawing on the examples and reasoning I’ve shared in conversations, while adding substantial background, historical context, scientific details, and references for further study. This is my view, expressed in the first person because these convictions are personal—forged from years of study, travel, and reflection on what makes civilizations thrive or collapse.

Let’s start with the skepticism that still lingers. I’ve met kind, thoughtful people who defend Flat Earth theory aggressively. I feel for them. Decades of institutional deception—from governments to media—have left many clinging to simplicity as a shield against complexity. Yet the evidence against a flat Earth is overwhelming and ancient. Around 240 BCE, the Greek scholar Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated Earth’s circumference with remarkable accuracy using nothing more than sticks, shadows, and geometry. At noon on the summer solstice in Syene (modern Aswan), the Sun shone directly down a well with no shadow. In Alexandria, 5000 stadia north, a stick cast a 7.2-degree shadow—exactly 1/50th of a circle. Multiplying the distance by 50 gave him roughly 250,000 stadia, or about 40,000 kilometers—within 1% of the modern equatorial value of 40,075 km.   Ancient cultures used this spherical understanding to navigate oceans and align monuments with constellations. Time zones, the Coriolis effect on weather, and lunar eclipses (where Earth’s round shadow falls on the Moon) all confirm it. I’ve seen the horizon curve from high altitudes and across oceans. We don’t need to argue endlessly; we need to move forward.

The same institutional distrust fuels Moon-landing conspiracies. Yet commercial progress is demolishing doubt. In March 2025, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander achieved the first fully successful commercial Moon landing in Mare Crisium, near Mons Latreille. It operated for over 14 days on the surface—346 hours of daylight plus lunar night—delivering NASA payloads and proving robotic precision.  This wasn’t government theater; it was private industry landing hardware right near prior Apollo sites. The best proof, though, will be routine human traffic: Starship ferrying thousands to lunar bases and back. When people vacation on the Moon like they do in Hawaii, the shadows-on-the-wall debate ends.

This brings me to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which I invoke often because it perfectly captures our situation. In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates describes prisoners chained since birth in an underground cavern, facing a blank wall. Behind them burns a fire; between fire and prisoners, puppeteers carry objects whose shadows dance on the wall. The prisoners believe these shadows are ultimate reality; they compete to predict the next shadow, mistaking illusion for truth. One prisoner breaks free. Dragged upward into sunlight, he suffers pain but gradually sees real objects, then the Sun itself—the Form of the Good. Returning to the cave to free others, he is mocked as blind. Plato uses this to illustrate education’s purpose: turning the soul from illusion toward truth.  

I see modern humanity in that cave. We’ve been fed institutional shadows—media narratives, bureaucratic lies, power-maintaining myths. Space exploration is the ascent. Drones and rovers have sent back data, but they’re still shadows. Humans must go—live, work, have children off-world—to grasp the fire and the Sun beyond. Only then do we understand what cast those flickering images on Earth’s wall. My entire worldview, from business to culture to faith, rests on this quest for unfiltered knowledge. I refuse to remain chained, interpreting shadows while interpreters with agendas lie about what they see.

Ancient history reinforces this urgency. I study civilizations full-time because they reveal what builds success: boldness, truth-seeking, and expansion. Many past cultures achieved greatness then lost momentum—collapsed under internal rot or external conquest. I call this “second husband syndrome.” Imagine a second husband tormented by thoughts of his wife’s first husband, especially if children from that marriage remain. Jealousy poisons the new relationship. Likewise, modern elites suppress or dismiss prior cultures’ achievements to claim sole glory. They rewrite history so previous “husbands” (Atlantis legends, megalithic engineering, advanced astronomy) never existed or were primitive. This intellectual jealousy stifles progress. Studying the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, or Maya shows they grasped Earth’s sphericity, built with precision, and reached for the stars. To build successful cultures today, we must leave the mother’s womb—Earth—and psychologically inhabit other worlds. Labor shortages on Earth are irrelevant; AI and robotics multiply our hours exponentially.

Biblically, this expansion aligns with God’s design, not against it. Genesis 1:28 commands: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Theologians call this the creation or cultural mandate—image-bearers exercising responsible stewardship and creativity across creation.   Some interpret it Earth-only, warning against “playing God.” I counter: God gave intellect, curiosity, and the stars themselves. Exploration within biblical rules—humility before the Creator, ethical stewardship—strengthens faith. Western civilization’s prosperity flows from this worldview: truth-seeking fused with moral order. Space doesn’t dismiss Scripture; it illuminates it. Ancient myths and biblical echoes (Ezekiel’s wheels, chariots of fire) hint at cosmic realities. When we settle the Moon and Mars, we’ll confront those stories with fresh eyes, not fear.

Transhumanism and AI raise valid anxieties. I sympathize with those guarding the “temple of the human body” against occult-tinged experiments that seek to dethrone God. Yet I support robotics and AI enthusiastically. They’re tools, not replacements. Elon Musk’s Optimus robots—demonstrated in recent high-profile events—represent progress, not erasure. The robot Melania Trump walked onstage symbolized partnership: machines handling hostile environments so humans thrive. Blue-collar fears about job loss in trucking or fast food miss the bigger picture. Space will explode opportunities. Lunar mining, orbital manufacturing, tourism, and research will demand millions of roles Earthside and off-world. NASA studies project Artemis driving economic growth through commercial partnerships and a burgeoning lunar marketplace.  PwC forecasts a $127 billion Moon economy by 2050, fueled by energy infrastructure, resources, and services.  I think it will be a lot higher than that.  Far from regression, we gain jobs by the mass. I’m bullish because history shows technology expands human potential when paired with moral vision.

Look at the hardware already proving the path. SpaceX’s Starship must fly aggressively; routine, reusable flights are non-negotiable. Firefly’s success shows commercial lunar access is here. Artemis II tests Orion and SLS for crewed lunar operations, paving the way for Artemis III’s landing (targeted 2027–2028 under current plans) and eventual bases. I want Americans—led by visionaries like President Trump—first on the Moon again, first with permanent colonies (dozens, then hundreds, then thousands). A 10,000-person lunar hub by 2050 isn’t fantasy; it’s engineering plus will. People will live there comfortably: internet, power, hotels. I’ll be among the first tourists with my wife—enthusiastically. Imagine vacationing on the Moon, then returning transformed.

Mars follows. Elon Musk has highlighted the Fermi Paradox’s scariest resolution: we might be alone, or nearly so, in the observable universe—a tiny candle of consciousness in darkness.   That rarity demands we multiply life outward. Different gravities will reshape humanity—taller or shorter frames, new adaptations—yet our core experience evolves. Space archaeology will resolve earthly mythologies: Was Mars once lush? Did prior intelligences leave traces? We boldly go, not in fear, but in faith.

Opposition comes from anti-human forces—regressive ideologies that prefer controlled scarcity on Earth over expansive freedom. Democrats and globalist mindsets sabotage by slowing timelines, inflating costs, or prioritizing Earthbound politics. They fear off-world colonies because independent humans are harder to dominate. I reject that. Human destiny is multi-planetary; it guarantees species survival against asteroids, climate shifts, or self-inflicted woes.

I want answers. I want the space economy flourishing, exploration routine, and humanity confronting the fire behind the shadows. My book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business outlines principles of decisive action and moral clarity I apply here. Subscribe, engage, study ancient history, support aggressive NASA and SpaceX timelines. Let’s compress Artemis, land Starships weekly, and build hotels on the Moon. The cave is behind us. The stars await. Godspeed.

Footnotes and Further Reference Material

1.  Plato. The Republic, Book VII (514a–520a). Standard translation by Benjamin Jowett or Allan Bloom recommended. For modern analysis: SparkNotes or MasterClass summaries align with my interpretation of enlightenment through ascent. 

2.  Eratosthenes’ method detailed in Cleomedes’ On the Circular Motions of the Heavens and modern reconstructions. See APS News (2006) or Khan Academy for accessible explanations. 

3.  NASA Artemis Program: Official site (nasa.gov/artemis) for timelines; Wikipedia for historical delays. Economic report: “Economic Growth and National Competitiveness Impacts of the Artemis Program” (NASA, 2022). 

4.  Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1: Firefly Aerospace press releases and end-of-mission summary. Confirms March 2, 2025 landing. 

5.  Biblical Creation Mandate: Genesis 1:26–28; extended discussion in Answers in Genesis or Focus on the Family resources. 

6.  Space economy projections: PwC Lunar Market Assessment (2026); NASA’s commercial lunar payload services page. 

7.  Elon Musk on Fermi Paradox and solitude in cosmos: Public statements 2018–2026, including Davos remarks and X posts. 

Additional reading: The Republic (Plato); Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan) for perspective (though I differ on some philosophical points); NASA’s Artemis economic studies; The Case for Mars (Robert Zubrin); ancient astronomy texts like Ptolemy or modern histories of Eratosthenes. For AI/robotics ethics: Musk’s own writings and Tesla Optimus updates. Study these, visit NASA facilities as I have with my wife, and join the ascent. The future is ours to seize.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an aerospace executive, political strategist, systems thinker, and independent researcher of ancient history, the paranormal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition. His life in high‑stakes manufacturing, high‑level politics, and cross‑functional crisis management gives him a field‑tested understanding of power — both human and unseen.

He has advised candidates, executives, and public leaders, while conducting deep, hands‑on exploration of archaeological and supernatural hotspots across the world.

Hoffman writes with the credibility of a problem-solver, the curiosity of an archaeologist, and the courage of a frontline witness who has gone to very scary places and reported what lurked there. Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

Its Time for NASA to get The Right Stuff, Again: They need to work faster, longer, and launches need to happen much more often

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to NASA’s Space Coast in Florida, a place that has held a special significance in my life for over 30 years. My family has owned a condominium complex in the area for decades, and we’ve visited the Cape Canaveral region dozens of times. It’s been a big part of our lives, from family vacations to watching the ebb and flow of the aerospace industry along the coast. This latest visit was particularly exciting because I wanted to get a firsthand look at the facilities tied to the Artemis program, as well as the impressive campuses of private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. I am deeply invested in the expansion of human presence off-planet Earth—not just for the adventure and acquisition of knowledge, but for risk mitigation against existential threats to humanity and to unlock the full potential of human intellect beyond our world. I want a thriving space economy, and I want NASA to succeed spectacularly in leading that charge. However, my observations during this trip left me with a mix of enthusiasm and constructive criticism about the current state of NASA’s Artemis program.

We timed our visit toward the end of February 2026, hoping to catch some activity. SpaceX had a busy schedule with multiple Falcon 9 launches deploying Starlink satellites, including one on a Wednesday, another on a Friday, and a Saturday night launch around 9 p.m. that I was particularly eager to witness. These launches have become so routine and reliable that they barely make headlines anymore, which is actually a good thing—it means the infrastructure is robust, dependable, and taken for granted like buses running on schedule.¹ Yet for me, personally, it was a milestone: after all these years of visiting the area, including many stays at our family condo with views toward the launch sites, I had never personally witnessed a launch until that Saturday night. I set up my camera on the balcony, and when the Falcon 9 lifted off, it was thrilling—a bright streak lighting up the night sky, followed by the booster’s controlled descent. It felt like a long-overdue personal victory, but it also underscored a deeper issue: launches from the Space Coast should be commonplace, not rare exceptions.

In contrast, the Artemis program felt stagnant. While touring the Kennedy Space Center facilities, I noticed a heavy emphasis on historical reverence—the Apollo era, the Shuttle program, the achievements of the past. There’s immense pride in what NASA accomplished when it was the only game in town, but far less visible momentum on current endeavors. The exhibits and tours celebrate the “right stuff” mentality of old, yet the gift shop selling “The Right Stuff” merchandise feels like a relic rather than a living ethos.² When stacked against the dynamic energy at SpaceX and Blue Origin, the difference is stark.

SpaceX’s operations are behind secure gates, but their pace is undeniable. During our visit, we saw a Falcon booster that had just landed on a droneship being towed into Port Canaveral on a flatbed truck, cleaned up near restaurants where cruise ships depart, and prepared for reuse—all on a Saturday, with crews working as if it were a regular weekday.³ The company had three launches in a short window that week alone, demonstrating frequency, reusability, and high employee engagement. Blue Origin’s campus, visible right outside the visitor center gates, is enormous—once an empty field, now dominated by a massive factory complex for their New Glenn rocket and lunar lander work, rivaling or exceeding large industrial sites I’ve seen elsewhere, like GE facilities in Ohio.⁴ Their footprint signals serious investment in a new space economy.

Artemis, however, hit a snag during our stay. NASA had been preparing for an early-March launch of Artemis II, the crewed lunar flyby mission using the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft. But during final checks, including a dry run or wet dress rehearsal, issues emerged: leaks (including helium flow anomalies in the upper stage and prior hydrogen concerns) and other mechanical problems.⁵ The decision was made to scrub the March window, roll the stack back into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for fixes, and target April at the earliest.⁶ This delay was disappointing but not surprising given the program’s history of setbacks.

I offer this as constructive criticism because I genuinely want Artemis to work. The program represents NASA’s path to sustained lunar presence, eventual Mars exploration, and broader human expansion. But it suffers from several structural issues. First, the cadence is too slow. Apollo launches happened far more frequently, with shorter intervals that kept teams sharp, knowledge fresh, and momentum high.⁷ In Artemis, years pass between major flights—Artemis I was uncrewed in 2022, Artemis II is now pushed further, and landings are delayed. This leads to entropy: experienced personnel move on, retire, or shift careers, and institutional knowledge erodes. High turnover in skilled aerospace roles exacerbates this.

Second, there’s a cultural shift away from the bold, risk-accepting “right stuff” era.⁸ In the past, engineers and workers stayed late, worked extra shifts, and treated the mission as an adventure worth personal sacrifice. Today, NASA seems more bureaucratic—9-to-5 mindsets, emphasis on protocols (even lingering COVID-era restrictions in some views), and fear of media backlash from any failure. Catastrophic risks like Challenger and Columbia are memorialized heartbreakingly at the Atlantis exhibit, but those risks were part of pushing boundaries. Adventurers accepted it; today, there’s paralysis by analysis and PR caution.⁹

Third, workforce engagement appears lower than that of private firms. SpaceX recruits passionate people who work multiple shifts, weekends included, to meet aggressive schedules. NASA has fallen into patterns where not all hires prioritize the mission’s higher purpose—some treat it as just a job. This ties into broader criticisms of prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) metrics over merit-based selection of the “best and brightest” for frontline problem-solving.¹⁰ While inclusion is valuable, the core must remain technical excellence and drive.

The recent program changes highlight these struggles. NASA announced major revisions: adding an interim mission (now Artemis III in 2027) for low-Earth orbit tests of docking with commercial landers (from SpaceX and Blue Origin), life support, and other systems—pushing the first lunar landing to Artemis IV in 2028, with potential for another that year.¹¹ This “sprinkling in” another mission before attempting a landing suggests the original Artemis III step was too ambitious given accumulated delays and risks, including ongoing Orion heat shield concerns from Artemis I (unexpected char loss, leading to trajectory adjustments rather than full redesign for Artemis II).¹² Changing reentry vectors might be more practical than material overhauls, which could take a decade, but it still reflects caution over boldness.

Historically, political decisions have hampered NASA. The Obama-era cancellation of Constellation, reliance on Russian Soyuz for ISS access, and redirection toward other priorities (like studying Islamic contributions to science) felt like a betrayal of the adventure spirit.¹³ The Trump administration’s creation of Space Force and push for resurgence helped, but sustained congressional support has been inconsistent.¹⁴ Without it, NASA can’t match the frequency of private players.

The local Space Coast economy reflects this. Property values have stabilized but not exploded as they could with consistent activity.¹⁵ Cocoa Beach and the surrounding areas thrive more from tourism and private launches than NASA events. When launches were rare, the vibrancy lagged; now, with SpaceX’s dominance, there’s renewed energy—people shopping at Publix, upper mobility in aerospace jobs, families coming to watch launches.

I remain optimistic. NASA has the infrastructure—Kennedy Space Center is ideal for launches—and partnerships with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others. Administrator statements post-delay emphasized fixing issues quickly, increasing cadence (targeting more frequent SLS flights), and returning to basics to accelerate progress toward 2028 landings.¹⁶ But success requires cultural revival: robust second and third shifts, seven-day operations, passion over paycheck, acceptance of managed risk for exploration, and political unity beyond one administration.

I’ve seen the Space Coast transform, from Apollo’s glory to the Shuttle era to today’s commercial boom. My first personal launch sighting was exhilarating, but it shouldn’t have taken 30+ years. Launches should be daily occurrences—maybe grab pizza and watch one every evening. That’s the expectation we need: frequent, reliable, advancing humanity. Artemis can lead if it recaptures the right stuff—not just in a gift shop, but in every engineer, worker, and decision.

The space economy could double U.S. GDP contributions through innovation, jobs, and knowledge gains.¹⁷ It’s not just money; it’s human bandwidth expanding. Congress, local leaders, the White House—everyone must rally. Private companies are setting the pace; NASA should leverage that, not lag.  But to do all that, NASA needs to work harder and faster.  A lot faster. 

Footnotes:

¹ SpaceX Starlink launches in late February 2026 included multiple launches from Cape Canaveral.

² “The Right Stuff” refers to the 1979 book/1983 film on Mercury program bravery.

³ Reusable Falcon 9 boosters routinely recovered and refurbished.

⁴ Blue Origin’s KSC facility is massive for New Glenn production.

⁵ Helium flow anomaly in SLS upper stage led to rollback.

⁶ NASA targeted April 2026 for Artemis II post-rollback.

⁷ Apollo had a higher launch frequency in peak years.

⁸ Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” captured the early astronaut/test pilot ethos.

⁹ Analysis paralysis and PR fears cited in delays.

¹⁰ Broader debates on merit vs. DEI in technical fields.

¹¹ NASA added a mission, shifted landing to Artemis IV in 2028.

¹² Orion heat shield char loss from Artemis I prompted changes.

¹³ Obama-era program shifts and ISS reliance on Russia.

¹⁴ Space Force established in 2019 under Trump.

¹⁵ Local economy tied to aerospace activity levels.

¹⁶ Post-delay press conference emphasized speed and fixes.

¹⁷ Estimates of space economy growth potential.

Bibliography / Further Reading

•  NASA official Artemis updates: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis

•  Artemis II delay announcements (Feb 2026): NASA blogs and press releases on helium issues and rollback.

•  SpaceX launch manifests: https://www.spacex.com/launches

•  Blue Origin facilities overview: Wikipedia and company announcements on KSC campus.

•  Orion heat shield investigation: NASA technical reports post-Artemis I.

•  Historical Apollo cadence: NASA history archives.

•  “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe (1979).

•  Space economy reports: Various economic analyses on growth projections.

•  Political history: Coverage of Constellation cancellation and Space Force creation.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Starship SN10: A Turning Point in Human History

It’s a remarkable thing to witness history being made, especially when it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. That’s precisely what happened with SpaceX’s Starship SN10. Against all odds, and despite a series of setbacks, SN10 completed its mission, withstood the stress tests, and landed a fully intact craft in the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t perfect—there were damaged components, mysterious explosions, and some tough engineering challenges—but it worked. And that’s the point. It worked well enough to prove something extraordinary: that this vehicle, this Starship, is more robust than anyone expected. And that robustness is precisely what we need if we’re serious about going to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond.

Starship SN10 didn’t just fly—it endured. It burned through the atmosphere, held together under pressure, and landed with controlled precision. That’s not just a technical achievement; it’s a philosophical one. It’s a statement about what’s possible when you push boundaries, when you accept failure as part of the process, and when you keep going anyway.

Let’s talk about what actually happened. Starship SN10 launched from Boca Chica, Texas, and demonstrated its full capabilities. It wasn’t just a test flight—it was a stress test. Engineers deliberately pushed the limits. They removed some heat shield tiles to see how the stainless steel would react to hotspots. They pushed the flaps to the edge of their tolerances. They wanted data, and they got it. That’s how you improve a spacecraft. You don’t play it safe. You push it until it breaks, and then you figure out how to make it stronger.

Previous missions had ended in explosions. SN8, and SN9, had spectacular failures. But each one taught SpaceX something new. That’s the beauty of iterative engineering. You fail fast, you learn fast, and you build better. SN10 was the culmination of those lessons. It didn’t just survive—it performed. Even with one flap malfunctioning and a mysterious explosion near the edge of the bay, it managed to stay stable, burn through the atmosphere, and land close to its intended target. That’s not luck. That’s engineering.

This mission was critical. It wasn’t just about proving that Starship could fly—it was about proving that it could be trusted. That it could be repeatable. That it could be the backbone of a new space economy. And yet, where was the coverage? Where was the excitement? Back in the days of NASA’s space shuttle program, every launch was a media event. It was on every channel. It was a national moment. But Starship? It barely made a blip in mainstream news.

That’s bizarre. Because what SpaceX is doing is arguably more significant than anything NASA did during the shuttle era. This isn’t just about sending astronauts into orbit. This is about building a reusable, scalable, interplanetary transport system. This is about making space travel routine. And yet, the only people who seem to care are the science geeks, the tech enthusiasts, the Comic-Con crowd. I’m one of them, proudly. I build my day around every Starship launch. Because I know what it means. I know what’s at stake.

I’ve watched every launch. I’ve felt frustrated when things blow up. I’ve celebrated the small victories. And this one—SN10—felt different. It felt like a turning point. It felt like the moment when things started to work. The payload simulations worked. The Starlink satellite dispenser inside the craft functioned with pinpoint precision. The reusability goals were achieved. This wasn’t just a test—it was a proof of concept. And it worked.

This is the moment people will look back on and say, “That’s when it changed.” That’s when space travel stopped being a dream and started being a reality. That’s when we stopped talking about going to the Moon and started planning it. That’s when Mars stopped being science fiction and started being a destination.

Of course, none of this happens without technology. And that brings us to AI. There’s a lot of fear around AI—people worry about Skynet, about machines becoming conscious, about losing control. Science fiction has been warning us for decades. And those fears are worth thinking about. We shouldn’t let technology get away from us. We need to stay in control. But we also need to embrace it.

AI is how we get to space. It’s how we process the massive amounts of data needed to run these missions. It’s how we make things repeatable, reliable, and scalable. The computing power we have today makes the Apollo missions look like kids’ toys, with the technology of a laser pointer. We’re operating on a whole different level now. And AI is the key to unlocking that level.

Take self-driving cars, for example. They’re not just a convenience—they’re a shift in how we live. They free up time. They make commutes more productive. They change the way we think about transportation. And that same shift is happening in space. The commercial space enterprise is poised to become a thriving economy. It’s going to require hard work, innovation, and yes, AI. Because humans can’t do it all. We need help. And AI is that help.

Starship SN10 was just the beginning. Starship 11 is already in the pipeline. Engineers are learning from SN10, making adjustments, and preparing for the next flight. Elon Musk has hinted that Starship 12 or 13 could launch by the fourth quarter of 2025 or early 2026. That’s rapid iteration. That’s how you build a space program, not with bureaucracy, not with delays, but with action.

And it’s not just about launches. It’s about deployment. It’s about getting to the point where Starships are flying like buses—routine, reliable, and everywhere. That’s the vision. That’s the goal. And it’s achievable because SN10 proved it.

We’re talking about the Artemis program. We’re talking about putting people on the Moon. And whatever people believe about past moon landings—whether they think it was real, staged, or somewhere in between—we’re going back. And this time, it’s not about beating the Russians. It’s about building a future. It’s about expanding humanity’s reach. It’s about survival.

There’s a segment of the population that doesn’t want to leave Earth. They’re comfortable here. They worship the planet. They fear change. However, if you genuinely care about humanity, you must think bigger. Elon Musk says it best: if we want to preserve human consciousness, we must venture into space. We have to take our intelligence, our creativity, our spirit—and let it grow beyond Earth.

That’s what Starship is about. It’s not just a rocket. It’s a symbol. It’s a foundation. It’s the first step toward a multiplanetary civilization. And SN10 was the proof that we’re on the right path.

Even under stress, even with problems, SpaceX pulled it off. That means we have stability. That means engineers can trust the system. That means we can innovate. We can take chances. We can improve. And that’s how progress happens.

This was a milestone. A pinnacle moment in human history. And it didn’t get enough coverage. We need to discuss this. We have to celebrate it. We have to recognize it for what it is: the beginning of a new era.

Starship SN10 wasn’t just a successful flight. It was a statement. It was a declaration that space is open for business. That humanity is ready to expand. That our past does not limit us—we’re driven by our future.

And it’s happening fast. The rate of acceleration is astonishing. Every launch gets better. Every mission teaches us something new. And every success brings us closer to the stars.  I love every one of these launches. I build my day around them. Because I know what they mean. I know what they represent. I’m eager to see more.  Starship SN10 was a success. Not just technically, but philosophically. It proved that we can accomplish complex tasks. That we can push boundaries. That we can dream big—and make those dreams real.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I Feel Sorry for Elon Musk: CEOs build culture, and are extremely important

I do feel sorry for Elon Musk. I would say to him, the government is a very negative experience, full of losers.  And that fixing it will take a lot more work than he can give in short spurts.  People who choose to work for the government are quite different from those drawn to the private sector.  Government is filled with entitled losers who want to make a lot of money off taxpayers without the risk of earning it themselves.  Therefore, it will require significant reform, which is just getting started with the Trump administration.  But it will take decades to unwind the mess that has been given to us.  And I can see that Elon Musk began his DOGE campaign with a lot of bright ideas.  But making the cuts permanent that he has identified isn’t as easy as it would be at one of his companies.  The government is full of parasites, and you have to play the long game with them.  Elon Musk can do the world a great deal of good if he focuses on what made him great to begin with.  He needs to be back at SpaceX every day, sending Starships into space every three weeks.  It has been evident that he has been absent from those companies; they have been experiencing a decline.  The job of a CEO is often not well-defined; they create the culture.  It’s not the work they do but the culture they make in their wake.  And SpaceX has slipped significantly since Elon has been frequenting the White House daily since Trump’s return to office.  It will take more than CEO stunts to save the government.  However, some business success on the frontier of innovation is the best way that Elon Musk can make the world a better place and establish a civilization to save by going to Mars. 

I thought it was astonishingly short-sighted for Disney-run ABC to characterize the Starship 9 mission that launched this past week as a series of failed missions.  The process SpaceX uses for data collection involves launching these Starships to see what works and what doesn’t, so that every configuration of the problem can be witnessed and designed, modified in real-time.  Drawing on extensive experience with this very issue in the aerospace industry, the world is fundamentally flawed in its approach to manufacturing processes.  And SpaceX has taken a noticeably different approach, one that is much more akin to the Skunkworks at Lockheed Martin many years ago.  The world has learned the wrong lessons and incorporated them into its management systems, and the entire industry is in desperate need of an overhaul.  And if Elon Musk wants to change and save the world, he can do it most effectively with Tesla and SpaceX.  The big secret is that you can’t put engineers in a room and get everything right the first time, which is the assumption in aerospace that began with NASA and the need to avoid any accidents that would become public relations nightmares.  When you can automate flights, you can afford to have launches to measure cause and effect, and approach the whole process of technology development much more aggressively.  Even though Starship 9, which launched at the end of May 2025, burned up during re-entry, as did the booster rocket, much of what SpaceX needed to achieve was successful, leading to the technical adjustments that need to be made at the engineering level. 

However, the way the industry operates now is very risk-averse, and, of course, the least risky thing to do is to do nothing, which is why things are so slow in aerospace and why cost overruns are so common.  And when ABC says that the previous SpaceX missions were failures, they are speaking from the vantage point of the administrative state —the kind of world that the government has created for us, with over-regulation and a world shaped by insurance industry lobbyists.  From that world, exploding Starships are a bad thing.  For the innovative SpaceX world, they provide a lot of information, and when you look at the rate of innovation that is needed to build Starships, you need to collect a lot of data to get repeatability outside of engineering tolerances, because until you see all those inventions working together, there is no way to know how stable a process is.  When it came to the NASA approach, you get lucky with a design and then never deviate from it, fearing the unknown, and that is essentially how they built the space program.  SpaceX is seeking complete, automated redundancy that remains reliable after thousands of trips.  To achieve that, SpaceX needs to be launching a new Starship every week, which is why Elon Musk has been so crucial.  Since he has been at the White House, doing good work that often goes unappreciated, SpaceX has been addressing engine bay leaks that have compromised spaceflight, and the Starships have been exploding.  Not a great way to have a space program.  However, the best thing about this most recent Starship 9 mission was that much of it had become so commonplace now.  The Starship was able to undergo stage separation and space flight, solving many of the problems it previously had, so now the other lingering issues can be addressed. 

The best engineering is to do things and fix things as you see problems emerge.  And for something as complicated as Starship, it will take Elon Musk to foster a productive culture among the many great people at SpaceX, guiding them toward corrective actions to address the numerous problems that must be solved for stable space flight.  It’s fantastic that we’ve had only 9 Starship missions and that they’ve made getting them into space so routine.  Now, getting re-entry right, with stable space flight, will be the key, and it will take a full-time Elon Musk to pull it off.  However, when it comes to cutting the deficit, given the current state of affairs, the first step in fixing the American economy is to achieve magnificent growth through new market sectors.  The SpaceX Starship is the best way to reach that point.  China, in their wildest imaginations, won’t be able to copy SpaceX, because they don’t have a person like Elon Musk to act as the CEO.  Just like other considerations of the administrative state, people cannot be swapped out.  Great people are irreplaceable; when they take vacations or are absent from work, things don’t run smoothly.  Exceptionalism comes from unique people.  Not process controls that allow losers in life to be just as good as winners.  Exceptionalism matters, and Elon Musk needs to stay on the cutting edge at SpaceX for it to continue its success.  And if he wants to save the world, he can do it best in the private sector.  DOGE will still be a good idea that will do good work.  But it’s going to be a slow boil.  What we need most is Starship, and missions going to space so routinely that people take it for granted, as usual.  And with the recent Starship 9 mission, that is becoming the standard.  Normal is launching the biggest rocket humanity has ever produced into space, routinely.  Now, getting it to do what we need it to do time and time again is the next challenge, which is very close to being completed. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Capitol Hill is the Most Intelligent Place on Earth: Correcting humanity where they fell short in the Book of Judges

For the first time in my life, I was ready to give Washington D.C. a fair shake, only because Trump was in the White House, and Republicans now controlled the House and the Senate, and the Supreme court has a general 6 to 3 majority toward the thinking I think is necessary in our American Republic.  And I would say at no point before this precise moment would I say otherwise, because there has always been something wrong with our system of government which I affiliate with George Washington himself and his attachment to the Bible’s Book of Judges and the character of Gideon.  With those political conditions fulfilled, I wanted to return to Washington with a fresh perspective and allow myself to see it the way it was designed to be, not to the level that humans failed to live up to the lofty expectations that established the capital of America to begin with.  We typically view these kinds of things by how people fall short of the goals to achieve high honor.  But looking at Washington D.C. from the perspective of centuries, not days, weeks, months, or decades, I saw something coming together with Trump that I think our young nation was designed from the beginning to achieve, and now we have arrived at that moment.  So, with that in mind, my wife and I allowed ourselves to see Washington from a scholarly perspective and to love it.  To come to terms with it.  And to help lead it to this next phase of America’s fascinating story and in what I would say was the purpose all along, to restore to humanity the intention established in the Book of Judges to create the kind of government God wanted for the world, from the beginning. 

So before my wife and I could do what we intended to do, which was go and spend a few days specifically on Capitol Hill in the legislative corridors itself, then the Library of Congress, as well as a whole day at the Supreme Court, I needed a few days at the Museum of the Bible, and a day a George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  We spent significant time on the Mall just reading and thinking and getting away from the noise of the current world and dug deep into the Masonic references that were all over the layout of the city that Pierre L’Enfant had intended with all of George Washington’s Master Mason friends from Alexandria just to the south.  To step beyond the conspiracies that have not understood the purpose from the very beginning, which had come into fulfilment through a lot of blood and sacrifice, to what kind of government we now had, with Elon Musk and President Trump up Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, past Ford’s theater where Lincoln was shot, past the Trump hotel that has the steeple of the Old Post Office that points to celestial references on August 12th from the vantage point of the Capitol steps, to the truth of the matter.  And I mention those names, President Trump, and Elon Musk who are new best friends in all sincerity, only America could have produced people like that to do what they are doing now.  To see it, I needed to dive deep into Washington D. C’s history, to walk and touch things myself.  Over a couple days I bought 56 new books and read most of them by the middle of the following week in a fury because I was looking for an answer and upon visiting Capitol Hill with a fresh perspective and the context of 5000 years of human history, I felt I understood it in the way it was always intended.  And I can honestly say that I love the place for all its lofty ambitions. 

I was standing outside Speaker Johnson’s office with Steve Scalise when they recessed due to the disruptions in the Well during the censor of Al Green, for the mess he and other Democrats made of themselves during Trump’s State of the Union speech just a few days prior.  And I was thinking of that even in the context of the history I referenced.  The place itself, Capitol Hill, was dedicated to the best and most intelligent perspective that human beings could strive to unleash, and that was the point of the censor.  It wasn’t political as much as an insistence on a specific level of sincerity as a representative republic.  As I stood there, I thought of the J6 protestors overwhelming the security and what they were rightfully angry about.  The place had failed to live up to the expectations of “The People,” and they were letting the political characters know that they had failed and weren’t entitled to the gifts of Capitol Hill by default.  I had been to Washington D.C. on other occasions, but this was the first time with this perspective. After much research, I could honestly say that I understood it as intended.  To that point, I had never been to the Library of Congress, even though I’ve had a lot of interactions with it over the years.  I was impressed with the Capitol building, but I was astonished at the beauty and splendor of the Library of Congress once we took the tunnel from the Capitol cafeteria after eating some lunch down there with many recognizable characters that are on television all the time, and emerging directly into the basement of the Library of Congress.  My first thought was that this was a place intended to be Heaven on Earth, which is what my idea of Heaven would be.  The foyer was laced with gold and high ceilings of white marble, which was a purposeful statement about lofty American ambitions.  Why isn’t this place promoted more to the outside world? It was every bit as impressive as anything they have in Europe.  I would have to say that the Library of Congress is my favorite place on Earth because I love books so much. It is such a collection of intelligence placed into the context of Heavenly ambitions that seeing it in person, then going into the reading room, was as good as Heaven. I could spend an eternity there and never get tired of it. 

From there, my wife and I spent the day at the Supreme Court, next door.  I asked a lot of questions, so many that we were able to get into places that visitors aren’t typically allowed to go, and of course one of those places was the courtroom itself.  But I wanted to see the world the way members of the Supreme Court did.  Thinking of the Bible and the laws that successfully made their way into the creation of all Western Civilization, and were the foundations of the American Constitution, here was a place in the Supreme Court that was trying to do what the Israelites couldn’t in the Book of Judges, and that is have a prosperous self-governed society without screaming for a king to rule over them.  We sat on the Supreme Court’s steps after much reflection and looked over at the Library of Congress, then the Capitol building right in front of us.  I was thinking of Steve Bannon doing his famous podcast behind me over on A Street and all the intelligence happening on that little hill in Washington D.C., and it was the most intelligent place on Earth.  Many people don’t live up to that expectation, but the place was built to evoke in people the best they could utter.  From my perspective, I could see that it was working, and working better than any place in the world.  And finally, after many years of striving, it is evident that the American experiment in republic government, meant to correct humanity where they had failed in the Book of Judges, was succeeding in ways that were always intended.  But that it had taken a few hundred years to come into bloom.  And it was wonderful to see. 

The spot where Trump gave his Inauguration speech

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Firefly Lands on the Moon: Another step toward a space economy

Never forget that at 3:34 AM on March 2, 2025, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon’s surface.  It’s the second time a private company achieved a soft lunar landing, indicating many good things to come.  The first was Odysseus from Intuitive Machines almost a year ago.  I know several people at Firefly and know how significant their company is growing in the right direction, and this landing was an important historical marker showing that a smaller commercial company can pull off something like this in a partnership with NASA.  It would take NASA decades to do these launches, and now we see these private companies in a profoundly competitive undertaking, and they are doing so successfully.  There will be many more good things to come from Firefly, which is very exciting, and this goes along with what I have been saying about space.  This landing occurred one day before SpaceX sent Starship 8 into space, and just ahead of Blue Origin, a ship full of women, like celebrity Katy Perry, going into space as if it were just another day at the office.  Space is becoming routine, which is what we want to see happen.  And the moon has needed much more attention than it has received; we should have never stopped going.  I don’t care if aliens were on the moon to scare off Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, pushing us never to return.  NASA moved into the Space Shuttle program after the Apollo missions, but we have never since the early 70s dared to return to the moon.  Now, we have private companies doing the job that governments were too slow to do themselves.  And it’s all very exciting.  Firefly is a great new company, and it will play a significant role in the expansion of a space economy that I have been talking about for quite some time now.

And while discussing it, I’ll make a few predictions.  Just as Elon Musk is pushing for humanity to get into space and settle on Mars, to ensure that humans survive, I would dare say that this isn’t the first time our species has encountered this problem.  I think we will find that the relics on Mars are from our history and that our move to Earth was for many of the same reasons that we want to now return to Mars.  Not to discover it for the first time but to return there and complete a story that began for us many thousands of years ago.  Elon Musk is simply fulfilling the hard-wired desires that are built into human consciousness to ensure the continuation of the species, in the same way a sperm knows to penetrate the egg within a woman.  We must penetrate space to move our species as a thinking consciousness into the universe, as we were meant to.  On earth as it is in Heaven.  We are meant to ascend into Heaven, to the kingdoms we know from our past, which are in the sky. Mark it on your calendar and remember who told you all this.  Once we move into space and start checking things out, that’s when we are going to learn about ourselves.  The proof is coming.  I would say that it is all around us, hidden behind our institutionalized history.  But that won’t last very long; the evidence is abundant and will be confirmed with a space economy.  I could go into quite a long discussion about hidden lifeforms behind a curtain of Dark Matter made of neutrinos and cold fusion.  But let’s save that for other times.  Instead, let’s talk about the excitement of this growing economy brought to us by commercial-driven space utilization.

At a recent Vivek Ramaswamy governor announcement event at CTL Aerospace, I must have had more than 100 people ask me why I love aerospace.  And I tell them that the future is there.  It’s been like panning for gold in a little mountain stream during the Gold Rush.  I get a lot of offers to make a lot of money doing many things, especially in communications.  But I like to stay close to where the gold is, and I like knowing people like the cool cats at Firefly and other companies.  I get very excited every time SpaceX puts up a new rocket.  From all I know about history and science, I see aerospace as the ultimate gold nugget, and I’ve been committed to it for over four decades.  To use a Western metaphor, I’d rather dig for gold in aerospace than sit in a comfortable job in town as a lawyer or communications expert.  It’s not the money that excites me; the growth of human intellect and what adventure can bring us is the ultimate treasure.  But that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter.  But on a scale that I think is better than just some average well-paying job.  The growth of the space economy will far outpace any technical time humans have ever experienced, whether it be steamships, early airplanes, trains, or automobiles.  The space economy will likely contribute hundreds of trillions of dollars to the first to utilize it.  And that, to me, is the best of the big gold nuggets.  But this time we should have learned some critical lessons, to keep the Marxists out of this business, as they dramatically crippled every modern industry that humans have invented.  The Firefly launch is more vital than past attempts when Trump is in office and cheerleading on all these efforts.  So, the resolution rate is much higher than at any other time in history.

I watched Brit Hume on Fox News the other night stumble around perplexed about how Trump thinks he will go into all these tariff wars, cut taxes, and still expand the economy.  As everyone was, he spoke about an economy that they think has seen the climax of its days and that all government management has to be wrapped around managing those fixed assets.  But that’s not where Trump is as he is facing down what we all are, a 36 trillion dollar deficit that is out of control.  If you want to fix that without touching the Social Security and Medicare concept, something dramatic has to happen.  And as I have been pointing out, it’s in this space economy.   With Firefly putting their lunar module on the moon after a drought of 50 years, a half a century.  Our economy has been held back by a lot of Marxist parasites who moved into administrative positions at NASA and the Pentagon and held back human civilization in a very catastrophic way.  However, the more private people have grown more powerful, and the more that government has lost it, the more companies like SpaceX and Firefly have grown and are now doing the big things.  And that is where the future treasures are.  And that is the only kind of treasure I care about in the long line of treasures in any economy.  The best to my mind is in space, and the adventures to come.  And when I see scrappy companies like Firefly have success, I am more than happy for them.  These are fascinating times! 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

It Takes “Big Balls” to Reform Government Efficiency: To have a job, high performance matters

To answer a question that has come up recently from government workers shocked by the DOGE exploits of a 19-year-old young man who is known as “Big Balls,” this debate is already too late to have.  The wasteful practices of the federal government and all the massive amounts of terminations that need to be made to make government much smaller and to push those workers into the growing private sector employment will not be fought in the courts, as many hope.  It will be fought in public relations.  For instance, the poor-performing government workers at USAID will not be able to hide behind polite society and continue to underperform for the American taxpayer without exposure any longer.  I’ve been warning about this day for decades, and here it is.  Everyone was told, and they chose not to listen.  So, don’t be surprised when some wiz kid that Elon Musk hired right out of high school can come in and eliminate many government jobs with the push of a button on a laptop.  Nobody in the world is better at finding overachieving engagement from employees than Elon Musk right now; he has been very successful at finding those types of people at Tesla, SpaceX, and just about everything else he has touched.  And, of course, we see the same practices from people like this: Edward Coristine, the young man who has the world melting down as he calls himself “Big Balls.”  Well, it takes a lot of guts to step into a very corrosive work culture with the power of government behind it and tell them all that they are worthless and that they need to go.  They have been underperforming, and in the case of USAID, the Pentagon, and many other places that DOGE will be analyzing for President Trump, if you want to be great as a nation or at anything, you can’t accept underperformance.  There must be standards that define winning, and employees must meet or exceed those standards.  But coming up short was never going to be acceptable.

I’m not surprised that Musk has hired many bright-eyed young people to perform these analysis jobs, such as in the case of Edward Coristine.  I know many young people like this “Big Balls” kid.  They remind me of the old hot rod culture we used to have in America, where kids coming of age to drive could get their hands on an old car and hot rod it up so they could race on the weekends.  That kind of car culture has been taken away from kids so they have turned to computer coding.  Getting computers to do things better and faster than stock options right out of the store is what many kids like Big Balls spend all their time thinking about.  Elon Musk has given those kinds of kids homes in his companies.  They can take their passion and put it to good use right out of high school.  So, they end up with a pure view of the world that makes things easy to see.  Edward Coristine has an advantage as a young person who has not yet learned to fail.  Many people who have failed a lot in life seek a government job to hide those failures even from themselves, and they hope all their lives that nobody notices.  So, government employment has become a joke over time, and nobody feels confident in criticizing it because the power of the government might crush them for doing so.  I’ve been through all that myself, where I have been very critical of the government and have seen its wrath firsthand.  Not that it did them any good.  But I can see why Musk has people like Big Balls on his team.  It takes a person who has not lived long enough to accept failure sometimes and the ambition to change the world without learning to hold back so as not to hurt other people’s feelings to walk into a roomful of government employees and tell them they are all worthless and could be removed immediately and all their jobs could be done in the corner of the room with one guy and a second-hand laptop.  It takes Big Balls to be that honest.

I have received a lot of hate mail these last few weeks, much more than usual, which is usually quite a lot.  But the hate comes in the form of an almost mirror mirror on the wall complex where they are trying to convince themselves of their point more than me.  They think government jobs are protected and the courts will protect them from the realities of performance measures, a standard labor union fantasy.  Through mass collectivism, they can be insulated from the rigors of reality.  But of course, I say to them, generally politely, that these fights won’t be conducted in the corrupt courts, but in the realm of public opinion.  The next time we get to a government shutdown, for instance, and Congress has to vote for more appropriations, how are they going to do that when it is a PR nightmare now that people know how useless a lot of these government workers are?  They aren’t worth the money wasted on them, and the fear of continued services lost because those employees aren’t there will be removed. 

The low-engagement people will lose whenever you have a high-engagement culture fighting against a low-engagement culture.  You can’t fight against people who work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day because they love their job with people who barely work 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, even if they still report to the office, which many of them have been working from home.  Those low-engagement people will get slaughtered in the process, which DOGE brings to the table.  Not just in the one young man, Big Balls, but in many like him.  And behind him is a vast army of like-minded people who don’t want some stuffy adult government worker culture holding back their future from them.  They have more than a few reasons to be angry about how they approach their job of performance revolution.  If people are going to be in a government job, we always expect performance.  Not to hide behind some social constructs like a worthless college degree in basket weaving so that they could get into one of these government union jobs and sit on their butts for the next thirty years until they retire with a ridiculous benefits package for essentially doing nothing that whole time.  Those days are over and have been for many years.  But it’s catching up now because it took people like Big Balls to expose how useless those government workers were.  They need to be removed from that comfortable, expensive position and put into the private sector, where they must compete for a job every day.  And if they fail there, it is because in competition, they didn’t make the team.  If you want a great country and economy, you have to make it so that the people doing the work are the best.  And those who don’t work so hard are not just sitting around milking the system from the taxpayers who worked so hard to provide the funds.  Regarding Big Balls and the kind of people Elon Musk typically surrounds himself with, they are not losers who have learned from society to lose.  They are rebelling against that premise, which I think is fantastic.  This is why I have been a fan of Musk for a long time.  And I love what he is doing with DOGE.  We don’t want losers doing these government jobs; we want winners.  And the best way to do that is to put people in place to analyze these jobs who have not yet learned to lose.  Big Balls has yet to learn how to lose, much to his credit.  And we need in the world a lot more people like him.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Tariff’s on Mexico, Canada, and China: Stopping the looting of Marxist countries and their unearned merit

Let’s do some basic math to understand the genius of Trump’s economic proposals of using tariffs to replace internal taxation, and to put the wealth that America generates back to the people who make it, not the leeching socialists, communists, and Marxists who have been living off America for over a century with unearned merit.  President Trump is talking about getting rid of the ridiculous Jekyll Island progressive income tax system that was devised in 1913, which generates around 2.4 trillion dollars a year.  The new proposed tariffs for Mexico and Canada are around 25% to deal with a trade deficit of around 200 billion dollars for each country.  DOGE is discussing cutting around one trillion dollars from the budget, which I think is a very conservative start.  There is much more to get, but it’s a good beginning.   And with China, Trump is imposing a 10% tariff on top of an already maintained limit of roughly 10.1%.  So there is a long way to go to get all these countries up and over 20%.  And we haven’t even started talking about Europe, specifically the EU, and the lack of support they all have poured into NATO, which we have almost funded at 100%.  Socialist economists, just about everyone coming out of the university system, can’t get their minds around this.  But essentially, enough money would be generated to take America back to wealth levels before the creation of the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service.  Enough money will be generated to create an External Revenue Service, allowing us to eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with better revenue generators. 

The problem with Jekyll Island was that it was created by very wealthy people who were globalists in their assumption about where the world was headed, and it essentially planned to use the United States to fund a one-world government off the backs of Americans.  And even if America were left a carcass in the end, it would be, from the socialist point of view, for the greater good.  And that’s where we find ourselves today.  Only, they never planned for Americans to ever put someone like President Trump in office with a promised platform to undo it all.   I think the Jekyll Island participants were trying to do what they thought was right when they came up with the Federal Reserve and the Progressive Income Tax system.  But most murderers could also justify their crimes in the same way.  It sounded like a good idea then, but upon reflection, over a century later, it was a disaster.  And we’re tired of it.  What Trump is talking about doing is brilliant and well-needed.  It will be earth-shattering for the world.  It will cause some short-term disruptions in the supply chain and profit margins.  It will drive up prices a bit, but that’s OK.  There are a lot of costs that will snap into shape quickly, and people will be pleased with the result.  We have needed as a nation to cut ties with all these socialist and communist countries who, by design, were set up to loot and pillage American capitalism to choke it off and destroy it and call it good, friendly international relations. 

Watching Justin Trudeau speaking from Canada about the pending tariffs was quite a spectacle.  That Canadians would cry over tariffs from America, which would undoubtedly be painful for them, indicates how out of touch they have always been.  They have existed off the good work that America has produced, which has allowed them to spread Marxism to every corner of the planet while not paying the price for too much-centralized government.  In many ways, Mexico has enjoyed the same liberties, which is why the country is run essentially by drug cartels.  Their trade imbalance with the United States has allowed them to make bad economic decisions because if they stumbled and fell, it was the United States that always picked them back up.  It is through the theft and looting that China has gained superpower status from emerging as essentially a third-world backwater armpit of a country, as it was during World War II and would have easily been conquered by Japan if America had not intervened.  The same people who put together the plan for Jekyll Island are the same type of investors who propped up China to become a world power of dominant communism and the global, centralized government model.  And these efforts are over a century old, but they didn’t just start there.  They emerged with the Marxist movement as soon as transportation allowed for easy travel and communication from country to country.  Globalism planned to loot off the success of America, steal American wealth, and redistribute it through centralized government to every corner of the world.  That is the hard fact of centralized banking and their intentions at Jekyll Island.  It was an early form of predatory lending to destroy the host for some lofty investment in social construct.  China didn’t earn its wealth; it was created by the very same global investors who purposely tried to destroy America without firing a single shot in a military campaign.  And President Trump is doing as he promised he would upon re-election; he’s stopping the carnage. 

America’s best years were around 1870 to 1913.  After that Jekyll Island mess, everything started going downhill from there.  And it is back to those policies that President Trump is proposing to return.  This is the period of western expansion, gold coming out of the west, railroads, and great optimism.  It’s why progressives want us to think of that period as an imposition on the American Indian.  At that time, boatloads of Marxists were stepping off ships in New York from Europe and trying to convince everyone what a brilliant idea Karl Marx had.  Because Americans were personally wealthy, compared to other places in the world, they could afford to listen, and the poison was injected into our political system, which has stayed there for more than a century now.  However, President Trump is finally starting to remove that poisoning from our political and economic systems.  And it will happen quickly because the value of what is made in the world primarily comes from America—and consumed.  So goes America, so goes the world.  It might take a minute to untangle the mess given to us.  However, Trump’s tariffs are the first step toward a much more excellent economic recovery package.  Not one that looks at the 80s and wants to replicate Ronald Reagan.  However, one that steps back to the 1870s, the period of Reconstruction, where more people of all places and colors could elevate their lives through personal wealth than had occurred at any point in history.  The economy Trump is proposing to build and do it quickly will be the greatest that history has ever seen anywhere in the world at any time.  But best of all, these countries getting tariffs to cover trade imbalances are all losers who have adopted Karl Marx’s thoughts about economic development.  America is turning away from that garbage, and it will force those other countries to do the same, or they won’t be able to compete.  They have avoided that fate up until now because America funded their communist fantasies.  But with Trump’s moves, that isn’t happening anymore.  And that is great news ahead of an exciting future.

Rich Hoffman

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I Really Like Palmer Luckey: What the new Anduril Plant in Ohio means to global manufacturing

Stories like this one are my favorite because they get down to the fundamental issue of why I do all the things I do socially.  I get pretty frustrated with people sometimes, and a few times in 2024, I came really close to just closing up my tent flap and not opening it again for anybody and letting them rot away.  To be honest, I don’t try to help people because I want to help them with their lives.  I do it because I have to share space with them and I get tired of their limitations holding back the kind of world I want to live in.  So, I try to teach as many people as possible how they should live so they don’t hold back so much from the world I want to live in.  But when they stall out and don’t listen to what I tell them, I come close to just letting them rot away and turn to things that make me personally happy, and forget about them.  But sometimes it is worth it, and stories like the announcement in mid-January in Ohio about Anduril, the defense contractor, investing a billion dollars to a south of Columbus campus led by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Facebook Oculus virtual reality headset, are a ray of hope.  The plan is to build a giant campus to build autonomous drones for a direct market defense need that is going to arise during the Trump administration in the year 2027.  So, this manufacturing ambition will be over 90 football fields long and host over 4000 jobs. It will be quite an addition to the loop around Columbus, Ohio, and will join the new Intel factory that is being built just north of the city.  And as exciting as all this is, I can say from inside knowledge that this is just the tip of the iceberg in Ohio. 

Many people have worked hard to lay the political foundation for something like this Anduril project.  They could have gone anywhere in the world that they wanted, but they picked Ohio, a spot just above Washington Court House for a reason.  I know all those reasons, and there is a reason I have been saying the things I have about vertical takeoff taxi markets, regenerative medicine, and hyperloop.  I told everyone weeks ago that Vivek Ramaswamy would be the governor and Jon Husted would be appointed to J.D. Vance’s senate seat.  And that Bernie Moreno would be the other very pro-business senator.  Many very good people have been building this political structure to facilitate massive growth in Ohio, which I think will be the next Silicon Valley, but only much more significant.  Ohio is the place to be and I’m not surprised by any of this news.  More people are out there, like Palmer Luckey, a wonderful young man who was homeschooled full of ambition, so he knows how to think outside the box. I think he’s fantastic.  He is proposing essentially with this Anduril ambition to be the SpaceX of the defense industry.  He is a massive Trump supporter.  He gets what is coming, and he is building this fighter drone technology to meet a change in state war obligation that is looming from information that is well known.  Trump will try to negotiate us away from a war with China.  But odds are, all that will fall apart; they will lose their power and won’t like it.  And they aren’t going to just turn the world back over to the sovereignty of America.  No, they are going to want to fight it out.  And Palmer Luckey is doing what he needs to do to get out in front of it with this Anduril factory. 

But this is where things get interesting.  The defense industry is filled with cost-plus companies and a structure that protects it from innovation, so what does this young man Palmer Luckey think he will do to change things?  Luckey is talking about shipping drone units in 2026 ahead of a 2027 need date.  And things just don’t happen that fast in the defense industry.   Well, they will now.  The people behind Anduril, including the investors, understand what the game is, and that is the destruction of the cost-plus model that has long hampered the defense industry.  You see it everywhere: the old legacy companies and their suppliers all act like trolls under a bridge, charging extraordinary amounts of money to do basic things.  Most of these cost-plus companies have radical labor unions whose costs are way out of alignment with reality, so you must throw a lot of congressional money at delayed schedules to get mediocre results.  Anduril is proposing to take the cost plus out of the equation and to become the SpaceX of the defense market, and they will change the way business is done.  And the Trump administration will be very supportive, so Anduril’s timeline is not far-fetched.  Anduril has the money.  They have the vision.  They have a political structure that wants them to succeed.  They have all impediments out of their way.  And it makes me happy because I want to see more people like Palmer Lucky and companies like Anduril born into reality.

The way it works at SpaceX and Andruil is that to avoid the cost-plus supply chains; they vertically integrate so they can work around the compliance loops that protect cost-plus companies and their sandbagging techniques that are designed to prevent the product from hitting schedule targets so they can always drive congress to more funding through the extortion of the schedule.  Cost-plus suppliers constantly force expedited fees based on their purposeful limited capacity because that is how the cost-plus game has always worked.  Companies like Andruil and SpaceX are just doing everything themselves, which is why Andruil is building such a large facility: for self-reliance and vertical integration.  The trend was to get as many people in a supply chain as possible in as many countries as possible.  However, globalism put that trend into motion to protect the cost-plus scam.  And that is all coming apart now under this new Trump administration and Ohio politics.  And people like Palmer Luckey are some of the first to see it.  That’s also why Intel is building a plant in Ohio out of all places.  Innovation needs to be fast and vigorous.  Not slow and stupid.  And I am very encouraged that there are companies like Andruil out there and that there are young people like Palmer Luckey who want to do good things in the world.  I want to see a lot of companies, preferably all companies and education systems, adopt approaches to business like Andruil and SpaceX.  It’s the rate of resolution that I can get excited about, and while the industry hopes Andruil will fail in its ambitions and slip schedule like all the other fools in the world, I am betting they won’t.  I think Palmer Luckey understands in a way I have been working to teach people for many years.  And he’s doing it, and once people see his success, they will all want to copy it. And for me, that is the best news of this century!  I can live in a world with people who think like Palmer Luckey.  But I have no desire to deal with the losers of the cost-plus structure of stalled ambition and lazy labor that has emerged from the defense work scams that have been so embarrassing.  With this announcement from Andruil, I see a lot of hope for the future.

Rich Hoffman

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SpaceX Does it Again: Crawling out from under Cost-Plus restrictions

For perspective, you can go back through all my writing, millions and millions of words back to 2013 when I wrote an article from Florida about the essential end of the Space Shuttle program and that Obama’s vision for NASA was to partner with Russian cosmonauts for any future space missions.  I was very outraged at the policy, and if I never liked Obama for anything, it was his anti-growth attitude to suppress American exceptionalism as it often presents itself in space travel, that I hated the most.  We were going backward under Obama and Biden, and the only growth we have seen in over two decades came from the four years we had from Trump the first time.  So, I have been very excited about watching the civilian infrastructure for space develop, and anywhere I can help it, I certainly do.  So if I’m more excited these days and very enthusiastic for every day, as many people pointed out to me at a Jags get-together ahead of the inauguration of Trump, I’m sure eventually they’ll understand.  I don’t think people realize what a miracle the week of January 13th was in 2025.  Yes, SpaceX did it again; they landed their Superheavy booster rocket back on the pad it launched from after carrying another Starship into space.  They lost the ship due to a pressure problem that couldn’t gas out fast enough on a new second-generation Starship, and it ruptured the hull, causing the whole thing to break up in the atmosphere.   That was unfortunate but very correctable.  The real trick was repeating the landing of the booster rocket to show that the first time wasn’t an accident.  Watching that rocket capture chopsticks system work now repeatably was a fantastic thing to witness, and it takes us a long way from my complaints about when Obama ended the Space Shuttle program over a decade ago.

But that wasn’t all; just a few hours before SpaceX launched, Blue Origin put their own rocket into space, but this one was carrying a lunar lander from Firefly, a Texas-based company, that was returning to the moon.  Another personal problem I have is with NASA and governments around the world.  I don’t care what anybody found when we went to the moon the first time.  There was no excuse not to have a Hilton there by now so I could vacation on the moon with my family.  This raw, primitive embrace of backward thinking that came to us from both political parties has infuriated me to no end.  When people ask me why I have had my war against public education, it starts with this lack of preparation as a culture to advance people into space.  We should have been doing this since the original moon missions, and as I was growing up, it looked good.  But the Department of Education under Jimmy Carter and the socialist politics that held our society down through labor unions and liberal politics stopped that advancement and I have never been good with it.   If we don’t have a culture pushing for adventures into space, we are deliberately trying to suppress the ambitions of the human race in a very unhealthy way.  So, for me, watching all this space activity just a few days before President Trump’s return to the White House was fantastic and deserved as a subject of massive optimism.  For a culture to produce two space launches like Blue Origin and SpaceX produced, it would have taken NASA a decade to do one of them.  Let alone two significant ones.  We are dealing with good times, finally.

The amount of capacity and bandwidth is the real challenge, and that’s what is changing, which I’ll be pointing out often because I am pretty sure people don’t know what to think of these displays of monumental ambition.  It takes thousands of manhours and intelligence calculations to produce one rocket into space, especially when discussing complicated payloads.  But here we have a culture that did it twice in the same week. Additionally, there are several Falcon rockets that are taking constant payload into space, whether people or satellites for the Starlink system, we have come a long way from the Obama administration sending Americans into space through partnerships with Russia.  As soon as SpaceX realized that they had lost their Starship, they were already planning to pull another out of their manufacturing facility, where several others were waiting, and they were planning another launch next month.  SpaceX expects to launch at least 20 more times in 2025 to develop Starship further.  What they learned from this recent one, even though it burned up in the atmosphere, was extremely valuable compared to the traditional hindrances of a cost-plus company.  The way SpaceX is attacking the problem is the definition of how these things will be done in the future, and it embodies a whole new view of manufacturing that is escaping the clutches of global socialists like Obama, who were deliberately trying to hold back humanity.   It’s one of those situations in which small-minded people have been trying to destroy society to rule over the ashes.  And these new manufacturing methods being developed at SpaceX are a rebellion against that sentiment.  And it’s precisely what space needs for humans to colonize the stars.  Other companies are now moving in that same direction regarding the “rate of resolution.”

Cost-plus companies have been hijacked by all kinds of horrible forces that have held back the aerospace industry since the first moon landing.  When parasitic characters realized they could stall contracts and make money off ignorant governments for more congressional money to be thrown at the trolls to build something, trouble was clearly on the horizon.  That’s why space had to move into civilian care because there was looting politics in government control that held us back with people like Obama.  A setback like Starship had at SpaceX this week would have stopped advancement at a typical cost-plus company for a decade in the past.  Instead, Elon Musk said immediately that the plan was to roll out another Starship and get ready for a second try next month.  The only thing that will hold them back is the speed of government, which will increase dramatically once Trump is back in office.  There is a lot to be very excited about, and I am.  It’s not just about going to space that is exciting; it is about watching the human race crawl out from under a very oppressive political climate and an education system that has sought to cripple us purposely.  Not to inspire us to grow.  And due to all that, we see that the human race is doing big things again, and the American culture, which has produced the world’s wealthiest people, is putting that wealth to good use in adventure and enterprise.  As good as this past week was, and it was, I see under the incoming Trump administration launches like that happening every single day.  I don’t think people realize yet how important all this is and what it will do for us.  But I can see it and am very excited about what’s coming.   In many ways, it’s a dream come true. 

Rich Hoffman

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