FALCON FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM

This may come as a shock, but space used to be, like, a big deal.

Seriously! I don’t just mean for the people who got to witness the Apollo moon landing (or rather, the “moon landing.” Stay woke, sheeple). Though the Nazis invented space travel (Operation Paperclip, look it up) and the Soviets got both dogs and humans into space before us, since before the moon landing (“moon landing”) in 1969 the exploration of space has been synonymous with American ingenuity, technological advancement, and government-funded science at its best.

Even late into the 20th century, the final frontier held captive the imagination of countless Americans. “Star Trek,” “Alien,” “Independence Day,” “E.T.,” “Armageddon,” “Contact” – the list goes on. The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, too, drew us together as a nation. We. Loved. Space.

But with the meteoric rise of the internet, the smartphone, Wi-Fi, Facebook, and all the dizzying innovations we have added in their wake, it seems as if we’ve set our sights a bit… lower. Do you even know when Cassini was launched? The International Space Station? You realize we have a robot roving Mars right now? And yet the night sky seems, somehow, to have lost its luster, all efforts of Neil DeGrasse Tyson to the contrary. Maybe it’s all the streetlights. It seems as if we’re more fascinated with machine learning, with AI and driverless cars and all things digital.

Which is why SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch is the best thing that’s happened to space travel in the 21st century.

Iconic image

Okay, okay, it’s an overstatement, but still! SpaceX as a company, particularly with someone as savvy as mega-innovator-entrepreneur Elon Musk at the helm, is exactly the jump start, the face lift, the makeover – whatever you want to call it – that interplanetary travel needed.

It’s kind of ridiculous, if you think about it: If NASA had shot off that rocket, it would no doubt have made headlines in all the respectable publications, probably scored some YouTube footage, and that would have been that. A mere blip on the radar. But put a car in space with an astronaut? Stop the goddamn presses.

In the wake of the Feb. 6 launch, the internet shared a now-iconic picture: a sleek “astronaut” behind the wheel of a Tesla Roadster, with Earth in the background. This picture is everything NASA isn’t: it’s funny, it’s simple, it’s approachable, but mostly it’s just cool. It’s got style. It’s a sports car in space, for crying out loud! It would be ridiculous, if it wasn’t so busy being awesome.

It’s so awesome, in fact, that it almost eclipses the reason why the Falcon Heavy is genuinely noteworthy: The rocket cost a mere $150 million to build, which sounds crazy expensive, until you take into account that the only other rocket that can do what it can do costs $400-$600 million. This launch is, in every sense of the word, a game-changer.

So why SpaceX? What is it about this company?

Two words: Elon Musk.

Man of action

Pretty much everything that’s associated with Musk promises “the world of tomorrow” that the old science fiction paperbacks promised us. Electronic currency? He started a then-little-known company called PayPal in 2000, selling it to eBay in 2002 for a whopping $1.5 billion in 2002, founding SpaceX with the proceeds that very year. A year later, he founded Tesla cars, and since then has consistently been starting awesome companies. With his cousins, he helped found SolarCity, currently the leading solar panel installation company in America, in 2006. He’s currently pursuing, among other things, so-called “friendly” AI, brain-computer interfaces and a tunneling company called (we cannot make this up) The Boring Company.

In other words, if anything like the stuff we see on “Black Mirror” is actually going to happen any time soon, it’ll be Elon Musk – or another of his type – who’s doing it.

Why, you ask, is it that billionaires are the ones who are propelling us into the future? You would think the federal government, with its lofty ideals, workforce, wealthy tax base and partnering military research companies would have accomplished all this long ago (though, depending on who you ask and how much LSD they’ve taken over the course of their life, you will be assured the government already has, man).

Maybe it’s the lack of a bulky bureaucracy that enables Musk to change the world. If he gets a revolutionary idea, he literally just starts a company to do it. No committees, no public input, no haggling over which state it’s going to be built in and how the funds are going to use. Historically speaking, large populations are drawn toward this exact style of leadership, because it gets results. It gets things done.

‘True’ science fiction

These are the billionaires the world truly needs. While others in positions of power jockey for geopolitical supremacy, buy elections, or engineer financial scams, the idea that someone instead could use their power for the betterment of the whole almost comes across as naive in our cynical culture.

This vision of a united humanity, of transcending our limitations in the name of cooperation and advancement – these are the true ideals that science fiction once embraced. We’re so often drawn to the aesthetic of the genre – the gadgets, the jumpsuits, the whooshing doors – that we forget what it’s really saying: that technology, in the right hands, truly can be a force for good in the world.