Scaling: Spectacle and Perspective

I spent an evening at a friend's wedding, got exactly two hours of sleep, woke up, and immediately drove four hours to Washington D.C. for the International Space Development Conference.

This transition put things into perspective. At the wedding, I was talking to people who had no idea that the space industry was even a real thing. These are people who don’t think about space as something that actually exists or matters. To them, space isn’t a future. It’s just movies, ideas, or dreams of a better tomorrow. Then, just a few hours later, I was standing in a room full of people who treat colonizing the solar system as an undeniable fact of daily life. They are actively spending their effort and energy developing the exact things that will make it happen.

Seeing this shift made something very clear. The space industry currently lies in a massive echo chamber. Cycling within itself, which fundamentally creates a social cap. We are building incredible things, but are only talking to the people who already believe in them. Space, and truly any cutting-edge industry, is built on spectacle. It is built on the desire of the people to have a vision that can be worked for by all necessary to make it a reality.

If you look at some of the most successful companies of our generation, they share a common strategy. They have the wow factor. Regardless of whether a specific test is the most practical, they do things for the sole value of knowing it will look cool and be spoken about. They understand the power of spectacle. Humans now, have more options and expect to be entertained more than ever, spectacle is a requirement. You have to break records to reignite inspiration. We saw this in the early days of the Apollo and Luna missions. With the moon landings, media constantly flooded with sci-fi visions, and people could clearly see what the next generation could look like. But when that reality took longer to build than expected, the public lost interest.

Today, we have a new advantage. With social networks, we have ways of creating that interest and delivering that wow factor directly to people on a regular basis. Spectacle is the best tool we have to wake people up and show them what is possible. We need to show the world what can be achieved from an Earth-space economy, and how we can get there within a generation. We must get people inspired to work on and provide the support necessary to get humanity there. The ultimate goal is not just to do cool things, but to access and use the value we so clearly see out there for all. It is to show the people back at that wedding what a future humanity, with full access to the resources of the solar system, can actually achieve. We have to use the spectacle to break the bubble, so we can finally build the infrastructure that changes the world.