Tag: SpaceX

Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

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We Don’t Have the Right Politics for Space Travel: We’ll have to change that before settling Mars

To move into Space, we need Capitalism as the driver of our politics

I am by far not an Elon Musk fanboy.  I like a lot about Elon Musk and the great work he does with Tesla and SpaceX.  But I’m not crazy at all about his talk about universal incomes and climate change.  I view a lot of what he says as a guy throwing up ideas, much the way he runs his companies, and if someone can shoot holes in his thoughts, he welcomes that chance.  He sees it as making things better.  I could talk and argue with Elon Musk all day and year, and I would have fun doing it.  And I think he would too.  But I found an extraordinary moment from him recently on Part III of the exclusive Everyday Astronaut interview where Elon walked them around the Starbase facility ahead of a Superheavy launch attempt. I’ll put those interviews up here for you to watch, but I found them remarkable.  Space X is how most companies should be run. It reminded me of the eventual aim of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is to learn not to be afraid of those who intend to impose fear on you.  To learn not to fall in love with rigid rules and to reunite yourself to risk because that’s how the human race advances.  During Part III, Elon paused and referred to just that very concept.  But he knows he can’t say such things.  He has all kinds of people who follow him, liberals, conservatives, people who have no idea what they are.  He currently has to work with the Biden administration if he wants to send ships into space.  He must also work with other countries, like China, because we are all tangled together in unhealthy ways.  So, I get why he couldn’t say what he wanted to say.  But I am under no such restriction. 

I don’t typically think of the “degrowth movement” as an accurate word. Still, the way Mark Levin talked about it in his recent book, American Marxism, seems more appropriate when talking about the sciences than just saying “socialism” or “communism.” Many young people think of these things not as a recent threat but as an ancient menace that expired well before their time.  But they understand growth, and for this topic, it’s certainly the correct way to term what the political left has been doing.  Elon Musk has played around with left-leaning ideas, such as the universal income, electric infrastructure ran by solar, and even smoking pot on a podcast to show how cool and hip he was.  Those are all things that have made me ignore what Elon Musk has been doing.  That is until he does something magnificent like developing the Falcon rockets for reusable landings and building the Starships in Texas.  Slowly over time, I’ve watched Elon as he has tried to do “growth” things in a world run increasingly by “degrowth” personalities; he has been getting frustrated.  For instance, he moved to Texas, leaving California behind after the ridiculous Covid policies shut down the state economically.  And recently, when environmentalists threw protests toward his desire to build a Starship factory at the Starport facility because of water concerns, he sounded more like a Trump supporter than a centralist libertarian. 

Musk is trying to do all pro-growth in a world being drug into a no-growth period by the participants of the Vico Cycle, which I explain in detail in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  These cycles are not new to the human race, they have occurred many times in the past, and we end up constantly re-inventing ourselves.  And that is what Elon Musk sees he is up against, and he let it out a bit during that Part III interview.  That was the primary reason I wrote my book, to help people not repeat the past, but to punch through into this new space age not with restriction and fear, which the communists of the world want, but with unrestricted adventure fueled by the power of capitalism.  When it comes down to the various philosophies, we cannot all have different ideas about the direction of the human race.  We either want to grow or retreat into the huts of history and return to yelling at lightning bolts and attributing gods to their origins to make sense out of a storm.  Or, we want to fly about those mysteries into the worlds beyond and fulfill our quests for adventure, both large and small, on a vast playing field of unlimited possibilities.  The two views of the world will not live together forever.  The inflection point is upon us.

And that’s when Elon Musk realized that everything done at SpaceX would disappear in an instant without him.  It is he alone that is doing all these outstanding achievements.  Sure, he has lots of brilliant employees who do the heavy lifting, but he provides the vision, and without vision, nothing happens.  If human beings are going to be a space-oriented society, then a new type of government will have to be embraced.  The one we have now, which fought hard to keep Donald Trump from being president and wanted to get rid of him when he was, will not allow the efforts of Elon Musk either to carry humans into space.  We have to solve one problem at the philosophical level if we are ever to put 1 million people onto Mars like Elon Musk wants to do.  We have to have a growing economy with an increasing workforce to accommodate it all.  To have hundreds of thousands of people on the moon, Mars, and wherever else in the next couple of decades, Elon can do the math that was in his words during the interview.  The illogical politics of our current moment, driven by communism and Marxism, are just wrong for the adventure of space. 

Going even further, we have never solved these problems even in our science fiction, except perhaps in Star Wars.  People need to be free, adventurous, experimental, and free to fail for space to work.  A micromanaging government will always be in the way of what Elon Musk wants to do.  He can only smoke joints so much, enough to keep the parasites off his heels.  He can only spout off so much greenie weenie appeasement to keep the environmental protestors from standing in the way of a new Starship manufacturing plant in the middle of the desert.  And that is the point of my book, not to crawl back into the Old West and sleep in hot unairconditioned cabins using the restroom outside.  And getting water with a bucket every time you wanted a drink.  Modern conveniences are good to have.  But what we may not want to leave behind is the courage and adventure of discovery and wealth building.  I would say that those are far more essential things than climate preservation or the appeasement of soft-natured Marxists looking for a big daddy government to care for them the way their parents failed.  Once we solve those problems, we can then move to space.  Elon Musk has figured out how millions of people are excited about it and follow his every move.  They don’t know that the politics they wish to ignore are just the very thing that will keep their feet on the ground and their starships from flying.  We must solve the politics before we can solve the space. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Starship 15 Lands: Risk is the key to all things in life

I felt great pride and was delighted to see that SpaceX managed to land their Serial Number 15 at their Boca Chica facility in Texas this past week.  It was quite a week, on May 4th, “Star Wars Day,” SpaceX launched successfully more of their Starlink satellites only to have the Falcon rocket land on a small platform in the Atlantic Ocean, right on the X painted on the surface.  Then the next day, with all the public scrutiny hoping for failure toward the Starship program in general, SpaceX took a big-time chance on a cloudy day to launch Serial Number 15.  A failure would have been a big hit on an otherwise triumphant week for the company, and nobody blamed them.  Most companies wouldn’t have taken that risk, but that is why SpaceX is so good.  They are highly competent, they are constantly striving for tomorrow, and they aren’t afraid of risk.  Much of that comes from Elon Musk, a guy who works 80 to 100 hours a week, showing in his products—and his employees.  Even with his pot-smoking incident on that radio show a few years ago, he has won me over because he has guts; he has a great imagination. He has injected into his companies great youthful ambition.  He loves what he does, work is not a nuisance to him, and we are all benefiting as a result.  So, when that Starship Serial Number 15 nailed their landing on a Wednesday afternoon in May, as four astronauts had just splashed down from the International Space Station on Sunday in the middle of the night, then they had the Falcon rocket launch and triumphant return on Tuesday. The Starship launch on Wednesday, I was more elated not just at all the successes but in the bold ambition of it all. 

Maybe even more than all that, though, during the previous week, Elon Musk warned enthusiastically that once these Starships start going to Mars and the Moon, that there would be accidents, that people would die as a result of the various adventures that are yet to unfold.  That was an important thing to do especially given the target on the back of himself and his companies.  The media parasites are looking for any slight stumble to cripple Musk in perpetual court battles. Yet, Elon has managed to stay in front of that ankle-biter mentality with some focused warnings that indicate danger and even death is not the worst thing in the world.  Then I might add, which is implied in Musk’s position, which he could never afford to endorse, that stagnation and yielding to crippling governments are far worse than death.  When Musk said that the Moon missions and going out to Mars would be volunteers who would know what they were getting themselves into before climbing on a Starship to head into space, it is fair and should be understood.  The media representing the government’s control of society through fears of safety is far more dangerous than a stagnant society. That is a conversation we need to be having.  Its time.

All the great leaps of the human race involve risk.  Most great things that we do in life involve risk.  Even asking someone out on a date requires risk; the fear of rejection can be paralyzing.  In this age of online dating and matchmaking, even that is being taken away from us as human beings, the thrill of facing down risk and enjoying the fruits of the rewards when you hit it big is the primary driver of human behavior.  We can blame the government for overstepping its bounds in assuming that averting risk is their direct way of measuring the value of government.  From their point of view, sure, it seems logical.  Make it so people never die and protect them from everything, and the government thinks they can justify their existence.  But the payment for that incursion is that our society stagnates dramatically.  A safe world is a boring world.  Now we’ve managed to simulate danger in our society with amusement parks, zip lines all over the place, MMA sporting events.  We understand the need for risk and threat that is a part of all our lives.  But there is nothing like real risk in a rickety airplane that we built at the start of the Age of Aviation or NASCAR drivers who risk a great deal every weekend on national television.  NASCAR is a lot safer than it used to be.  Drivers can crash at over 200 MPH all the time and now walk away.  That is because the trail of tragedy that led to that safety record did have many people who died, specifically drivers like Dale Earnhardt.  Now, who thinks the old “Intimidator” would take back his life to avert that risk?  It’s only the weak people who are timid in the world who believe in such a way that they would put safety over risk.  Risk is what drives the world forward and makes everything better.

Back in the day, every space launch from NASA would be broadcast on live television.  People understood the risk, and they wanted to watch the space race.  But when NASA did have an accident here and there, the federal government would lockdown on the safety aspects and kill the momentum of innovation needed to advance us into the stars.  SpaceX was barely covered with all the mentioned activities just over this past week because people have become used to the excellent safety record that SpaceX has.  But there will be accidents; people will get hurt.  People will die eventually.  Yet that doesn’t mean we should stop doing anything risky.  People die every day in car accidents, and we do not stop driving cars.  We deal with the risk because we value the benefits.  Now the government would love to get rid of cars and put us all on public transit where they can manage the risk by going 20 MPH and stopping at all railroad crossings.  But that is boring and not good for our lives.  It might be good for the government to measure things, but it’s not suitable for the species of the human race.  We need risk, we need danger, and we need adventure.  We must push ourselves in challenging ways, and we must strive to succeed even if the blood of failure has been spilled on us.        

Anyway, a big congratulations to SpaceX for such a fantastic week; significant risks were taken. Still, the hard work and thousands of important decisions that went into these programs certainly paid off, even if most people don’t understand the relevance.  They will eventually.  Watching Starship 15 stick that landing was a marvelous thing to see.  The door to the future was kicked open, and I liked the glimpse of what I saw on the other side.  It was breathtaking to watch. It’s been a long time since I was that happy to see someone else accomplish something, but that’s what I felt for the entire SpaceX team.  And Elon Musk, a billionaire who has never lost his way, sets the example of what hard work looks like by often sleeping on a couch in the middle of the shop floor of his companies because he doesn’t even have an office.  The result shows in all these successes, and I am proud to be in a culture that shares space with him.  I share with him the same work hours, and there is no way to cheat the system.  And it’s good to see other people working hard and always finding the positives no matter how challenging the problems are. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Escaping the Vico Cycle: Elon Musk’s Starship and a new Trump administration will do it–the big view of world events

Its time to take a bigger picture view of our current political situation and to step beyond even the intent of global markets to crash America in an attempt to advance themselves, and to reset the clock from the point of view of the United Nations, into earthly communism showing a complete eradication of capitalism in all its forms.  There is a good, hard wired reason that many desire that.  Of course, it’s not a “good” reason, but from their point of reference, it all makes sense.  Before addressing the internal problems in America with the massive corruption of the FBI and its attachment and activism within the previous White House, ran by the community organizer, Barack Obama, we owe it to ourselves to understand why the hell anybody would think crushing America would even be a good idea.  The answer is rather simple if you pull back far enough to see it clearly, but in this case, we have to look at the entire solar system of our present residence to grapple with the problem then to understand the urgency for the forces fighting the onslaught for which human kind has decided to move against.  For the last 200,000 years, or even millions, humans have been confined to a cycle of thought known as the Vico Cycle, constructed by Giambattista Vico in his great book La Science Nuova and most explicitly utilized in one of the most difficult books to read in all of human history, Finnegan’s Wake.  I think it takes reading and understanding Finnegan’s Wake to truly grapple with the meaning of the Trump Presidency occurring in history at the same time that a person like Elon Musk is building a fantastic factory in Texas that is planning to build one of their new Starships, MK1s each week and soon every 72 hours.  Elon Musk is essentially building a railroad into space and he has a president who is willing to fight off the red tape of history to pave the way to do it and that is what has the Vico Cycle jealous and up in arms.

We’ve seen this kind of period in history before, when railroads crossed the unclaimed vastness of the American West, but at no point prior.  In literally every place around the world, tyrants and monsters always occupied unclaimed lands and territorial battles ensued which put all people in one camp of thought or another only to spend their entire lives boot licking one power or another.  In the modern sense, most of our governments yearn for that same type of approach to everything but they can feel people’s support for that Vico Cycle way of life fall away where everything goes through four basic cycles of existence, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then anarchy only to begin again anew.  Presently that is the global desperation, is to advance our cultures into the anarchy state so that the world can have a great reset of economics and global coordination so that everyone can be reborn into a new age theocracy.  If you talk to Bill Gates and George Soros and get to what they think is right and just, you will find these thoughts at their core beliefs.  In such a system the old age takes with it the dead who are on the same cycle of life personally, but its to be celebrated because a new rebirth of the whole thing leads to a chance to begin again.  Not for those who perish of course, but for society in general, and the organizers are of course poised to be the leaders of that rebirth.

Many don’t understand how with the freedoms unlocked in the American concept that massive innovations were unleashed in 19th century minds like Sam Colt and Thomas Edison—we’ll get into Edison and his light bulb in great detail in a later article—but with the railroad West a new way of thinking was born that divorced itself from the Vico Cycle.  The Indians were of course functioning from the Vico Cycle just as all people around the world had been, and that crash of conflict of course occurred in violent ways.  But innovation crushed essentially the imprisonment of the Vico Cycle and that led to where we are presently.  Throughout the last hundred years in America the old world of the Vico Cycle struggled to take over global politics with a move toward communism yet the ambitions of science and innovation had finally freed those with the courage to look at it from the Vico Cycle unleashing countless opportunities for mankind.  The most obvious clash of these ideas exploded on the stage after the first moon landing by Nasa back in 1969 which was followed by the Vico Cycle stand of Woodstock where a month later young people stripped off their clothes and had vicious sex and mind numbing drug abuse in the mud of a field listening to tribal music of a culture trying to hang on to a flow of life that had endured for thousands of years.

But now, with the technical breakthroughs of Elon Musk’s great technicians at Tesla and SpaceX we are seeing something radically new and different which has opened up all the raw emotions that have been pent up for millenniums.  SpaceX has already shown this past year what they can do with reusable rockets and how journeys into space can be done safely, and steadily without great discomfort.  Now with their Starships, essentially busses into space happening all the time, soon to be daily, the escape from the Vico Cycle will now continue the type of thinking that made America in the first place, but instead of it being westward expansion it will be to the moon, and Mars—quickly and before the end of Trump’s next presidential term, we could have a new technology and way of life that will be even more revolutionary than the internet was, or the invention of the personal PC.  The kind of world that the Starship brings to humanity will be the last dagger in the heart of the Vico Cycle which will have long lasting implications that people can see and fear, yet the trends of discovery are happening whether they like it or not.

The riots, the Deep State, the desire to focus on viral outbreaks that lock down economies are all in an effort to keep us all imprisoned to the Vico Cycle which the old powers control.  They may die in the process, but that path is understood throughout time.  Leaders rise and fall, rule and are ruled then they die only to be born again to judge the living and the dead—that is our own personal Vico Cycle.  However what is coming with Trump and Elon Musk’s Starship—along with many other inventions that are splashing through the patent office as we speak is a complete divorce from the Vico Cycle for something to replace it that has never been known to human kind, ever.  So, it is in that understanding that we must use to grapple with the elements of our times.  And to understand why there is so much desperation from those who are now calling themselves the political left.  They do want communism, but deeper than that, they want Giambattista Vico’s Vico Cycle.  They want to understand the cycle and their place on it because they are not adventurers and daredevils who thrive in bold climates and risk taking.  They are timid souls who just want to know what’s coming next, even if its death.  At least they can understand the steps and accept their fate.  But what comes with Starship and the next Trump administration is scary for them, and they can see that no matter what they do, the trends of life are against them, and there is nothing they can do to stop it now that the Vico Cycle is breaking and mankind is inventing something new for itself for what looks to be, the first time.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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Asking Questions: Elon Musk understands that answers are less important

This interview shown below with Elon Musk and the very popular YouTube Channel ‘Everyday Astronaut’ was remarkable in many ways, so it is worth sharing here for those who don’t find themselves exposed to these kinds of things. I thought both participants in this interview were covering some very extraordinary aspects of our current culture and how we are getting from here to there so to speak. For me, I think the concept and pace of engineering that is going on at SpaceX regarding the Starship MK1 is truly transitory for our civilization and is one of the most important things going on in the world today. I’m a huge fan of the work SpaceX is doing on many levels, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that Elon Musk’s primary philosophical motivation is science fiction, especially the work of Douglas Adams in his pinnacle work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is of course a little Star Wars sprinkled in for good effect behind the scenes making this interview unusual in the boyish optimism displayed that is unheard of in government driven attempts at space travel and for one main reason, the understanding that its not always the answers we seek, but the question.

For me the work of Joseph Campbell has always been what has unlocked the ceiling of intellectual potential. It doesn’t matter what does it for an individual, it could be Douglas Adams, George Lucas or Joseph Campbell, what matters is that the creative work does something to unlock the limits of human understanding by provoking the questions that need to be asked, instead of always focusing on the answer. Answers to questions are relative to the interpretations of those responding. What matters more than anything no matter what the endeavor is in life is in discovering the questions that then need answers, otherwise the results are always ambiguous. For this Starship MK1 where conventional avionic development would favor composite construction, due to a lack of autoclave availability in such sizes and not wanting to wait for one to be built, SpaceX moved on to this stainless steel design, which is brilliant not just esthetically, but in function. It is an excellent example of how asking the right questions can change everything and bring to life the benefits of invention.

And watching Elon Musk give that interview was a true delight, not in that it was a stuffy discussion about how smart all the engineers are and how dangerous space flight can be, but it was beholding the energy of a child who just wanted to play with new toys for the sake of discovering new questions to ask where smart people could relish in answering those ponderances. To do something for the joy of it that changes our perception of reality is quite an important thing to do and it all starts with the mechanisms of discovering the questions that need answers, otherwise answers without questions have no relevancy. It is the question that matters more than the answer.

This is certainly the case with all leadership functions, and when people wonder why CEOs or presidents of companies are so important to growth and prosperity it is for this basic function. A company can hire hundreds if not thousands of people to answer questions, but often it is only a small number of leadership who knows how to ask questions drawn out from obscurity to set people on a pace to discover an answer. If the questions are never asked, then what work is there for people to do to resolve it? So the creative aspect of something like building this new Starship is that Elon Musk thought to ask the questions of, “why can’t we make it out of stainless steel.” “Why can’t we fly it to Mars.” “Why can’t we refuel in space?” “Why, why, why.”

When humans stop asking questions is when they cease to become effective in their roles, and their intellectual decline is not long behind. Children naturally ask lots of questions, but we are all taught that at some point, maturity means you have the answers and questions are less and less asked—which is the state of decline for any culture. Seeing Elon Musk and his engineers at SpaceX asking lots of questions that often outpace what reporters even think of considering was refreshing because its not something we see much of these days unless you happen to be at a SpaceX media event, or a gathering of geeks and freaks at a local comic con. The optimism of those events is not in the answers, but in asking about the possibilities—the what if scenarios, even in science fiction ponderances. For Musk ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ inspired him to ask lots of questions and the results of those pursuits is in the creation of very wonderful things, like the Starship MK1 complete with its 6 Raptor engines carried to orbit by 37 others in the Super Heavy booster powered by cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen.

Innovation is always directly connected to having the ability to ask questions and to provoke a quest for answers, and that is the reason that everyone in the world is not equipped to be a leader at the level of a CEO. Its not the work that is important, the spreadsheets and presentations that are often associated with such roles, it’s in the ability to ask what if questions and to set the mind of others on fire seeking answers. A society without questions is one that is on the decline victimized by their own stagnation. And to see Elon Musk so alive with enthusiasm the way a seven-year-old might be is refreshing because we can all see the benefit. Musk when presented with a problem such as, “sir, we can’t find an autoclave anywhere in the world where we can build the fuselage out of composites.” “Well, what other material can we make it out of?” Thus, we have a question that unleashes a new technology and means to build very large craft to enter into space. Otherwise, in less innovative companies driven by less ambitious leaders, the engineering staff would have forced the project to remain on a path to stay within the confines of the accepted practices for aviation, which would be composite construction as someone builds an autoclave of the proper size.

Perhaps more important than asking the right questions is the ability to move quickly, and in that regard, that too comes from the ability to ask questions to keep everyone’s feet moving. Entering market share while imaginations are still hot is more important than all other aspects of development and the pace of engineering at SpaceX is remarkable because the employees are allowed to ask lots of questions and to drive innovation toward the proper answer for questions that are pursued beyond relativity, but in the abstract rules of science which are not discovered by any other means but in asking questions. The more questions the better. And when questions are asked, we as human beings come alive with that same excitement that we had as children discovering things for the first time, and that is what will ultimately save us. Its not the science we discover in the process, but in the quality of the questions we think to ask no matter what the means is in discovering which questions to ask as adventure demands the contemplation of a thinking species.

Rich Hoffman

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The Next Big Thing: Cheering on Richard Branson and his wonderful company Virgin Galactic

Putting politics aside which is hard to do because ultimately everything is political, but considering our modern conditions, those definitions are changing by the moment. I am and have always been a very excited person for everything new little thing that comes along as I am very much in love with the things that humans imagine. Nature is nice too, but I really like what humans do with the tools provided by nature and to see how civilization can advance. While many look at cell phones and the hyper communications that come with them as dangerous to the old order of doing things I think it’s all part of our natural evolution as a species accelerating toward some yet to be known destination. While everyone who knows me understands how much I love tradition particularly the American western mythologies and concepts, I am very much an achievement driven person excited for tomorrow in so many ways. And that is why despite his politics, I have been very much a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic endeavors. And according to him from the interview shown below, he still plans to get his space airline into space before Christmas of this year, which would be a great feat. I am very much hopeful that he will be successful.

It’s been coming along for a while now, but if it is considered the sheer amount of information that is coming at us so fast and furious these days as opposed to when man landed on the moon in 1969 the human race is scratching at a huge change in thought and processing. As I was catching up on what Virgin Galactic was up to and if they were going to meet their timeline one of the lead stories on the Microsoft News dashboard was the newly recorded sounds of Mars as captured by the recent rover that just landed there. Much of this past week due to the very good series on the National Geographic Channel about colonizing Mars radio broadcasts across the country were contemplating what the steps to such an act would look like and what we’d all do once we got there. Elon Musk has after all been turning up the heat for his own departure from earth to live on the ancient red planet. I see many of his antics such as the smoking pot incident on a recent podcast as his teenage moment of creating enough escape velocity for himself to make the journey. He is sabotaging his own relationship with the earth so that he can psychologically make that journey to be the first to live on Mars. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is about to unleash a series of space endeavors that are quite ambitious with his Blue Origin company. Between all these adventurous billionaires fueled by childhood loves of movies like Star Wars and Star Trek compounded by a strong deregulatory economy by the Trump administration—the primer is set for some very exciting technological breakthroughs on the frontier of space.

As I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games on my PlayStation 4 and started messing around with the online play with many thousands of other players all over the world simultaneously, I couldn’t help but think of how subconsciously as a human species this visit to the western genre was necessary for our current age to accept what was about to happen. It’s not the safety of the herd that the human race is after, it’s the rough existence away from the support of civilization for which adventure promises great rewards and many opportunities for death. This next generation needs to be someone reckless and masochistic in order to endure the rigors of a dynamic shift in human consciousness, leaving the comfort of our earth and scratching at the unlimited barriers of space travel. Presently we call space anything over 62 miles, or anybody who travels over 50 miles and astronaut. We think of the moon as a long way away, and Mars prohibitively distant. But all those definitions are about to change just as they did in the period of American westward expansion once electricity and phone communications shrunk the world with power. The main observation I had about that great video game was that human beings needed to revisit that last period of adventure and see what it looked like so that they could take this next big journey.

I don’t really like the term “collective consciousness” because it assumes that we are all functioning out of one great well of wisdom which is not what I think is going on. Rather, there are certain rational decisions that are common to reality so it is bound to be a mathematical probability that all humans will come to similar conclusions just by the mandate of deductive reasoning. And that is why texting is more interesting than talking to an actual person for most people, the human mind to seek out the rapid communication forms that come from something like a modern smart phone as opposed to a very static conversation with one single human being is needed for the world of tomorrow, where information must be process quickly as our knowledge base explodes from what was previously understood. Young people especially will have to think much faster than humans do today and be shocked by much fewer discovers than previous generations just to keep up with all the news stories that will began to demand our attention as the frontiers of space are unzipped.

Aerospace is one of my favorite industries due to its exploratory nature. I desire to be a part of it as much as possible and to be quite honest, I love every day of my life because I am. I love to help build the vehicles that take humans to the frontiers of our imagination and I have had a front row seat to many of these new developments. So out of a love of adventure which transcends politics, I am happily cheering on the events of these coming days. Richard Branson has worked hard with his team to get into space first and if he doesn’t make it soon, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will overtake Virgin Galactic. So he doesn’t have all the time in the world, competition and capitalism demand results and the pressure is certainly on. If Branson can get into space by Christmas of 2018 it would be a life changing moment for many people around the world. But if Christmas comes and goes and Virgin Galactic is still mired in testing, then Blue Origin or SpaceX will get there first. This new space race isn’t between nations and governments, it between billionaires and capitalist mandates and that is redefining everything rapidly.

Humans are such conceptual creatures and once we get an idea in our heads reality has a way of growing around it. And from what I see that growth will spawn entirely new industries and lifestyles. There is great reason to be optimistic. Once space tourism is unleashed, likely by Virgin Galactic first, our conceptual knowledge will expand at such a pace that the world has never witnessed. We have been preparing ourselves for this age for years with the rapid digestion of so much information. It’s not by accident or greed, it’s all by necessity. As I’ve said many times my goal in a very busy life is to read at least one book a week, but I am even feeling the pressure to read not just one, but five. So grudgingly I have turned to audio books for some of them because by necessity I need the information coming at me faster than I could possibly read everything and still do everything else needed in an 18-hour work day which is pretty typical. We are all going through a similar transition and that’s what it takes to live and grow in an expanding economy driven by human adventure and curiosity. And much of that next phase starts when Richard Branson gets his Virgin Galactic space tourism over that 50-mile line where humans become technically astronauts.

Rich Hoffman

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The Hyperloop Competitions at SpaceX: Let’s make this happen!

Although the political left does not like Donald Trump as president including Elon Musk, (who I think is a wonderful person) I would have never entertained an idea like the Hyperloop before the Trump inauguration.  Now after the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency the Dow closed at over 20,000 for the first time and many big ideas started moving forward, then the wonderful company of SpaceX hosted the Hyperloop competition in Los Angeles at their facility inviting colleges and engineering organizations from around the world to compete with designs of their own fresh perspectives in a very capitalists manner.  The Hyperloop is a radical transportation innovation that is wonderfully revolutionary.  When I was a kid I had something I played with like this design called Rocket Tubes for the Micronaut toy line.  Now under the sponsorship of Elon Musk the reality of Rocket Tubes is coming to life and taking its next evolutionary step.  Prototype designs have been gathered at SpaceX during the weekend of January 28th and 29th to see which works best in head to head competition.  Before Donald Trump’s presidency I couldn’t see any path forward for these liberal leaning dreamers—but under Trump’s presidency and perhaps his daughter Ivanka taking over in the years to come to keep continuity in the White House—Hyperloop as a transportation device may happen on a large continental scale.

http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

Hyperloop is essentially a large rocket tube that allows passengers to travel at around 1000 miles per hour inside.  That means travel to Disney World in Orlando from Cincinnati would be one hour from a Hyperloop station in theoretical Monroe in the northern suburbs to the Kissimmee station at the gates to the famous theme park.  There are already plans for a Hyperloop line from Columbus, Ohio to Chicago, which would only take 30 minutes of travel time.  There is another proposal for a line from Columbus to Pittsburg in less than 15 minutes.  So for Ohio residents wanting to attend a Steelers game, just get on the Hyperloop and you’ll easily be in Pittsburg within 15 minutes. It takes longer to walk across a parking lot once you’ve parked at a stadium.  But first there are thousands upon thousands of engineering feats that have to be invented and that is the purpose of the Hyperloop competitions mentioned at SpaceX. As you are reading this just click the link above and you can see what’s left of them since most of my readers are on the east coast and will still have time to view the last entries of the day at that link.

In my old toy Rocket Tubes there was a large compressor that injected air into the tubes to move a little Micronaut man in a capsule through the tubes on a bed of air.  The compressor filled the tubes with airflow that actually overtook the weight of the capsule holding the man.  I played with that thing for hour and hours year after year.  I think I got the toy around 10 or 11 and it still worked when I got my first car at 16.  I loved it because it appeared to be a vision into a world of tomorrow.  Now the Hyperloop is that next generation of thinking and instead of just using compressed air to create a bed of air to ride on, the vehicles are expounding on the levitation magnets used in other high-speed rail around the world.  But, the Hyperloop technology further utilizes the removal of that air to create a close simulation to the vacuum of space to take away that wall of resistance that would otherwise build up at the front of the vehicle.  That is how the speeds can be so extremely fast.  Inside the car even at such high speeds you could sit as you would a train with a little drink on a table in front of you and watch the world literally go by outside at a 1000 miles an hour—and your drink wouldn’t spill.  Pretty cool.

As I’ve said about the sky car projects that are now becoming a quick reality which will take traffic to the air as opposed to ground congestion through major cities—having a Hyperloop line would be a tremendous asset—particularly for the shipping industry.  It would really benefit DHL, FedX, and Amazon by getting products from the west coast to the east in the same day as opposed to the expense of flying it against the weight restrictions of air travel.  And many of the Hyperloop lines could exist along existing highway routes—that big grassy area that sits between north and southbound lanes, or east and west, could easily hold a Hyperloop line without disturbing property owners with new acquisitions of property to get a nice network across the country within a short period of time—a decade or so.

Around the world I can think of fine examples of how the Eurostar has greatly helped transportation in Europe, which I plan to visit very soon to see for myself.  And then there is the bullet trains in Japan which I have some personal history with.  For instance I was meeting people for dinner recently in Kobe, Japan who were from as far south as Himeji.  I was staying at the Oriental Hotel and was meeting at the Ikuta Road steakhouse for dinner. By highway Himeji was about an hour to the south so I was emailing my guests as they were about to board the bullet train thinking that I’d get to the dinner location way ahead of them–after all I had a driver picking me up as I was heading to the elevator and from there the drive was only about 5 minutes. By the time I made it down to my car, spoke to a few people, drove down all the one way roads to arrive at the steakhouse, my guests were there, very relaxed and unhurried.  Those same people could easily get up to Tokyo for a night out by the same means, the train works very well in Japan—and its fast. I’m not big on big mass transit projects and traditional rail is just too slow and cumbersome.  But when it comes to the examples listed there are times when it’s just the right thing.  The Hyperloop would be the next generation of these transportation systems and could let us take advantage of great distances for further economic expansion.

Before Donald Trump the cost of the Hyperloop would have been prohibitive.  With 20 trillion in national debt and a world spinning out of control economically with China controlling all the chess pieces, there wasn’t much chance of the Hyperloop getting funded in America.  Too much regulation and bureaucratic red tape would have stood in the way.  Its one thing to dream of these things at SpaceX but quite another to get politicians to see the reason to fund it—the political will just hasn’t been there.  For instance, the Eurostar was privately funded, but it is still upside down and shows no sign of recovering the cost because there just isn’t any way to have enough people travel on it per day to justify the enormous cost of digging under the English Channel and building all the infrastructure to make it happen.  It’s a technical marvel—but was entirely too expensive for two economies that have been stagnant for years—the socialist country of France and the heavily restricted economy of England.  But in the United States with a projected economic expansion rate of over 5% with Trump’s policies, there may be a huge chance to pay down our debt, and actually come out ahead for the Hyperloop network in the 2020s—about the time that the engineers from this Hyperloop competition work out all the bugs with technical innovation.  It won’t take long.

My advice to Elon Musk is to drop all the discussion about carbon taxes and environmental thinking when talking to Donald Trump at the White House because that’s not going to happen.  It would also be good to stop complaining about his immigration policies.  The borderless world concept is done in America so if you want people to embrace Tesla, and to give Hyperloop a chance, you have a friendly president to those technologies so long as you don’t use more regulation to move people from oil based vehicles to electric ones.  My next car may be a Tesla and I’m not a green economy advocate. I would just want a Tesla because it most intelligently applies power to the wheels that hit the road as opposed to what’s out there.  I think the Tesla is a wonderful rethinking of the personal car.  I fully support Trump opening up the coal mines and drilling for oil in the United States so that we can have an economic renaissance like the UAE is experiencing with excess cash from their oil industry alone funding exciting new projects.  But I am open to new methods coming along to replace what we’ve had.  I am ready to see a leap in technology from a combustion engine to a Tesla, or from a commuter train to a Hyperloop—so long as what comes next advances our civilization.  The carbon tax issue and other environmental concerns from the political left will work themselves out if we truly move into space as a human race—where there are full cities on Mars within a hundred or so years and the moon becomes a base of operations for deeper space travel.  We can’t restrict ourselves on earth economically, technically, and politically by fighting the wrong battles.  The human race has to leave the earth and these kinds of technologies take us to that point.  So keep the politics out of the Hyperloop and we could very well have them all over the United States over the next thirty years because they make sense.

With that said the Hyperloop races were very inspiring and provided a glimpse into the kind of nation and world we can become.  I know I’m ready for such a world.  I would love to leave for Orlando at 8 AM in the morning after grabbing a quick breakfast at McDonald’s and arriving an hour before Disney World opens so I could take advantage of the early open to pass holders.  After a day of fun I could be back with my family for dinner and never feel like I had just traveled all day needing to recover after sitting for so long.  The Hyperloop would make such a trip as common as driving to the grocery store for milk, and that would greatly expand our internal economic output, and GDP.  For instance it would greatly benefit me professionally to be able to same day ship from California to West Chester, Ohio because often lead times on things I need mostly involve transit times and ridiculous shipping costs by air.  Hyperloop could dramatically reduce those costs—so it’s very exciting.  But first, we have to get through this infancy period with a president who gets it and can sell it to the politicians.  And that’s what Donald Trump can do that others had no chance at before.  So make friends, keep dreaming, and let’s make this happen!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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