On his April 2nd podcast Yaron Brook answered a question about what the Objectivist Movement 2.0 is about. Check out his complete answer starting at about the 68 minute mark, but in essence it is about creating a community where we “highlight success, highlight successful people, highlight successful values, highlight the positive.”
“A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.” – Ayn Rand, Ideal
This struck a chord for me as I have been thinking a lot lately about spiritual fuel. Given the state of politics today, it is all too easy to just write about what is going wrong in the world. Focusing on those things is not something that can really sustain a man, at least not for long. To keep going, to keep fighting, you need spiritual fuel and that comes from looking at the things that are going well, things that show just how creative, innovative, productive, in a word successful, man is.
Yaron’s answer to the Objectivism Movement 2.0 question inspired me to give myself a standing order to be on the look out for positive news stories to write about here on the blog. As luck would have it, the CBS Evening News on April 2nd had two stories that I think qualify. I will cover one of these stories in this post while the other will form a later post.
Blue Origin Flight Three: Pushing the Envelope
The first of the stories was about Blue Origin’s successful third flight, using the same booster, of its New Shepard rocket. From the CBS website:
Blue Origin launched its reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft on its third test flight Saturday, successfully boosting an unpiloted capsule out of the discernible atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness before a parachute descent to the company’s West Texas launch site.
The New Shepard booster, meanwhile, plunged back to Earth tail first, re-igniting its hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine at an altitude of just 3,635 feet. The engine quickly throttled up, four landing legs deployed and the rocket settled to a gentle touchdown, according to Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin.
The last-second braking maneuver occurred as planned just six seconds before the rocket otherwise would have crashed into the ground, a deliberate test “pushing the envelope” of performance, Bezos tweeted earlier in the day.
Check out the exciting, short video below highlighting the launch and landing. It is hard to imagine how they are able to bring the rocket back down with such pinpoint accuracy. Truly amazing.
The ability to reuse both the launch vehicle and the crew capsule is central to being able to reduce the cost of lifting people into space and critical for bringing such flights within reach of “space tourists,” and eventually other private development in space.
While Blue Origin has so far been limited to suborbital flights, SpaceX, another private space travel firm, has been making deliveries to the International Space Station and is also working on landing the first stage of its rockets. The company has been successful in landing one on land, but attempts to land the rockets on a barge at sea have failed so far. Once they are able to land and reuse their first stages, the cost of launching stuff into space will likely drop another 30% from their already low $61 million. (Compared to $225 million for a ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, launch.) I have no doubt that both of these companies will continue to succeed and the competition will certainly drive costs even lower.
Since I am currently reading Equal is Unfair, it is largely setting the context in which I evaluate things these days and so I could not help but wonder what the fate of companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX would be if the inequality critics get their way. Both companies were founded by men who had made large fortunes founding other companies, Jeff Bezos with Amazon and Elon Musk with PayPal respectively. If we had confiscatory taxes for high earners and global wealth taxes such as advocated for by Thomas Piketty, or perhaps the 100% tax on any wealth over $1 billion as advocated for by radio host Thom Hartman, would Bezos have had the money to start Blue Origin or Musk the money to start SpaceX (not to mention Tesla)? My guess is they would not.
If politicians give in to the advice of the inequality critics in the future, who knows how many exciting advances like Blue Origin we will forego simply because those who could have funded them won’t have the money to do so?
Featured image, Blue Origin Ascent, is (c) Blue Origin and can be found at http://www.blueorigin.com