Accelerating Space
I wrote a new article for the Boyd Institute substack on accelerating space development and why we need to do it.
I got a chance to write an essay for the Boyd Institute on how to speed up space development.
Here’s the gist of the problem:
"It should be evident to everyone that making sound decisions is getting more complex at every level of society and across every institution. In nearly every case, decisions are getting bogged down in politicized infighting and irreconcilable inconsistencies, uncertainties, and ambiguities. It’s less obvious why this is happening.
The best answer is what John Boyd, arguably America’s best strategic philosopher, saw as a consequence of shifting from an externally focused decision-making system to an inward-facing system."
According to Boyd (from Destruction and Creation), in situations like these, if the inward focus persists, there's only one inevitable outcome:
"We can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often. Furthermore, unless some kind of relief is available, we can expect confusion to increase until disorder approaches chaos— death.'
Networked tribalism's emergence is a sign that this inward collapse is underway.
My proposed (out-the-box) solution for reversing this is to refocus our decision-making on an ever-expanding external goal: space development. To pull this off, I synthesized a novel concept for radically accelerating space development.
I hope you enjoy it, it was fun to write.
Sincerely,
John Robb
This is an idea I've seen in a few places, not a bad idea but 20th century history shows that programs that provide an external focus are easily subverted. Consider when people start talking about starting a colony on the moon or even just repairing the hoover dam people start asking, "why spend precious money on that when homeless people in San Francisco Have no shelter or kids in Baltimore aren't getting an education or people in Africa have no food etc...."
Sadly the current paradigm is a 'sky without eagles'.
Cannot agree more, and here’s great news- and allies;
https://a16z.com/why-america-must-develop-space-and-how-well-do-it/
A16z.com is Andreessen Horowitz.
In this loop here is Anduril, also serious. Here are resourced and serious people who care about the country.
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50/?mkt_tok=MzgyLUpaQi03OTgAAAGItX0ntb3rdfKiQDJ4ZdjV9yiKe6fM0lgx3EwUAIQAMX_0Z53sTByIjLT5p0DMpctPjgyaebwoM0WwSryxDEW2yZfie-tNEkhjHhcYM7QvzIjuPg