A long time back I remarked that eye of Soros has fallen on Musk. It is starting to look like that the hand of Soros is going to fall upon him.
American technology has been declining across the board. Some stuff started declining in the seventies, and as time went by, more and more things went into decline.
Apple is still advancing cpu design, but they have no in house capability to actually implement those designs in hardware. They depend on Taiwan Semiconductor. AMD and Intel just put more circuits of their old design on the chip when TSM upgrades its chip fab technology.
But the one shining counter example to tech decline has been Musk and SpaceX.
Musk’s internet in space has the highest satellite technology (those laser links are a big advance in space to space communication), but the key requirement is the capability to launch huge numbers of satellites cheaply.
For which he needs Starship. Not to mention making mankind interplanetary.
Currently the FAA is slow walking approval. When something gets slow walked in this manner, chances are that approval will never be forthcoming, or will be approved with poison pill conditions.
The vast majority of the objections that they are supposedly so carefully evaluating are just random variations on a script, a very familiar pro forma script, with the word “pipeline” replaced by “rocket”. This is a stalling tactic while bureaucratic infighting over the real decision continued. Reading between the lines, it starting to look like the bureaucratic infighting has ended in victory for a priesthood that sees techies as adherents of a hostile faith. They no longer need to manufacture stalls, they can just stall.
On the other hand, it is going to be mighty embarrassing if the US government has send men to space station by hitching rides on Russian rockets again. The rhetoric of progress is a key part of progressive ideology. We are supposedly so much wiser than our ignorant racist sexist predecessors, and supposedly all this wonderful technology makes the advance of the left inevitable and irreversible. They don’t want to kill off space access, but may be unable to restrain themselves.
If, as is likely, Starship is sitting on the launch stand ready for its first orbital test, and the FAA is still indefinitely stalling the launch, some top level pressure may be applied to approve it. I was quite surprised when the obvious desire for war with Russia was reigned in from above. Perhaps the same may happen with Starship.
They perceive access to space is status and power for an enemy faith. One big reason for Musk’s success is that when he hires people, he shows profound disrespect for official Ivy League qualifications. He and his organization are not putting the right people in power over his rockets. They don’t like that. (They don’t like open source software either, and Linux has succumbed to the demon worshipers.)
If Musk wants to get us to space, it starting to look like a launch facility on the periphery of the Chinese hegemony or the Russian empire might be necessary, or the borderlands between the US empire and the other two. The Russians seem to have given him an invitation for a launch facility in Russia, but that is likely to prove a little close to the bear’s embrace.