But won’t.
I’ve never wanted to be famous — it looks like a miserable life to me. But I would have no problem being rich. The problem with most lottery winners is that they don’t have any sort of higher purpose to life, and don’t understand how to handle sudden wealth. I have no interest in making people envious of my possessions. I’m not a very materialistic person in general. I buy things that will provide enjoyment to me, for practical reasons, and give very little thought as to what others will think about them. But the main thing is that I know exactly what I’d do if I became suddenly wealthy. I’d do the same thing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did, but I’d do it right, because I already know what I’m doing, and wouldn’t have to hire other people to figure it out.
Oh, and the one about power?
The thing is, it’s the desire itself that’s poisonous. You find that need for power most in the type of person who hates having to obey all of society’s social contracts, particularly the ones that require them to not act like cocks all day. These are the people who are only nice guys because of fear of retribution if they do otherwise, so their main goal is to become strong enough that no retribution is possible (this is why sociopaths tend to seek positions of power, by the way).
Anybody who wants to be president badly enough to go through everything that it takes is intrinsically not to be trusted. I think that we’d be a lot better off with a search committee, who sought out someone for their competence and character, and who didn’t really want the job, but was reluctantly willing to do it. He’d probably still get corrupted eventually, but at least he wouldn’t start off that way right out of the box. Actually, I think that a Fred Thompson would be a good candidate in that scenario.
“But the main thing is that I know exactly what I’d do if I became suddenly wealthy. I’d do the same thing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did, but I’d do it right, because I already know what I’m doing, and wouldn’t have to hire other people to figure it out.”
Could you direct me your post that summarizes your plan? This is genuine interest.
Bob.
One of the things I likes about Bush was that he didn’t seem to want the presidency all that much — at least, not as much as Al Gore did. Sure, that may just have been a calculated pose, but I think that his behavior bore out the fact that he knew there were more important things in life than being president. Part of this comes from his religious beliefs, and part of it from being comfortable with who he is as a person. Gore, on the other hand, obviously thought that being president was more important than anything, so important that when he didn’t get elected he pouted and stamped and demanded twenty-billion recounts, and when he still didn’t get his way he refused to leave the stage, instead setting himself up to become the patron saint of global warming. He also seems to have no inner life — he was raised to be a public person and he can’t be happy unless he’s got an audience.
Now some may say that Obama also acts like being president isn’t all that big a deal. But it’s different — he seems to do so from a position of contempt for the office itself, and that contempt stems from an attitude that it’s somehow too small a position for someone as important and wonderful as he is. It has nothing to do with knowing that there are more important things outside himself, but that there are more important things than being president that he himself is entitled too.
My plan would be very similar to what XCOR has been doing, except faster, because it would be better funded.
Bush may have projected personal nonchalance, but his campaign (as demonstrated in the 2000 S. Carolina primary and the Florida recounts), was as power-hungry as anything we’ve seen lately in American politics.
Anybody who wants to be president badly enough to go through everything that it takes is intrinsically not to be trusted.
I would expand that to include anyone willing to work as hard as it takes to make their favored candidate the president. Even if the president isn’t personally invested in power, those around him or her will be.
I don’t think there’s a way to keep power away from the power-seeking. The best we can hope for is checks and balances, a free media, etc.
The best we can hope for is checks and balances, a free media, etc.
We don’t even seem to be able to hope so much for that any more.
Dead on. Lord would that have been a disaster had he won that election. I still get nauseated just remembering the sanctimonious, second-grade-teacher way he spouts about “The planet has a fever”, and “You don’t throw out the baby with the bath-water”. Or whatever. Disgusting.
“My plan would be very similar to what XCOR has been doing, except faster, because it would be better funded.”
Looked at XCOR again this morning, they are doing some components and sub-orbital. However, no “Plan” could be found. So my question remains “what is your plan”?
My plan would be to build suborbital vehicles and gradually evolve them to become orbital vehicles.
I’ve read or heard that Reagan had to be drafted by others to run for political office. Also that he probably never would have run in today’s political environment.
I have never cared about fame, either. However, I would definitely not mind being rich and, yeah, I would use the money the same way Rand would, radical life extension and space development.
Fame is for people who like attention. Maybe we should only allow the anti-social to hold office.
…and no, I’m not volunteering.
Read “Dreaming in Code” for what can happen when a business is too well-funded. Sometimes the plan can’t be rushed.
I totally know what they were saying about being beautiful. It is such a burden.
As my dad used to say, “Why was I born pretty instead of rich?”
Yea. I was a Fred Head. I liked the fact that he wasn’t salivating over the presidency. 😛
Read “Dreaming in Code” for what can happen when a business is too well-funded. Sometimes the plan can’t be rushed.
No, but I do think that XCOR could have moved much faster over the past decade if they’d had more money.
Fame, the only chemotherapy for the desperate toxicity of narcissism, is deadly enough on its own to be avoided.
My plan would be to build suborbital vehicles and gradually evolve them to become orbital vehicles.
Details! Please! Lots of them!
Details! Please! Lots of them!
Why?
Rand,
Actually the original intention of the Electoral College was for it to be a search committee. You elected someone you trusted to represent your district on the Electoral College and then they decided. But instead we got the party system that President Washington warned us about.
What has happened to the country is just what the Founding Fathers feared would happen when the passion of the people was allowed to go unchecked in general elections and they elected people based on how well they worked the crowds instead of their abilities to govern.
Oh, yeah. A bit more cash and we’d be test flying Lynx now. And our “plan” is to get off the planet, eventually. We’re going about it in increments: learning as we go. We have orbital plans, but we don’t talk about them in public. If anyone is interested in details, lots of them, you can ask me.
Why?
Don’t be so coy Rand. Let’s just say you have rather a lot of form for making declarative statements that you don’t back up with data.
Aleta: I’d love to hear them. Both Paul (the other half of Atomicrazor) and I met you at the Glasgow Worldcon in 2005 and I’ll be honest I need a lot more convincing as something of a space cynic.
We are both extremely interested in how you are going to handle the problem of the energy and mass equation as you scale the vehicle and need to get to orbital speeds and get back.
I’m making no assumptions on how you handle those problems but I’d love to hear the details. All the links in my name work.
Don’t be so coy Rand. Let’s just say you have rather a lot of form for making declarative statements that you don’t back up with data.
I’m not being “coy.” It’s a stupid demand. If I knew the exact evolutionary path and the end state of the orbital vehicle design, I’d just skip all the steps in between, and go straight to that. Do you have no idea how technology is developed?
I’d also be really interested in the details of your plans, Rand. For example, given that you had a fortune to invest, why would you build sub-orbital craft first, and not just work on an orbital craft straightaway? For the suborbital tourist dollars? For the learning experience? Why would you build a winged HTOL craft like Lynx and not something more like Masten’s & Armadillo’s VTOL approach?
Given your hopes for the development for the rest of the solar system, any thoughts on what you’d do beyond LEO would be even more interest. Would you stick to chemical rockets? Would you (also) fund the long-neglected development of solar sails or the long-neglected development of nuclear-powered systems? Would you have interest in the many varied kinds of beamed propusion? I’d really enjoy reading about what you do with respect to space, if you were very very rich. I’ve understood for years that you believed that a lot of approaches should be tried, and that the market should decide, but it would be interesting to read about where you would spend your money.
The other “Bob”
For example, given that you had a fortune to invest, why would you build sub-orbital craft first, and not just work on an orbital craft straightaway?
So I could learn how to build operable reusable vehicles.
Why would you build a winged HTOL craft like Lynx and not something more like Masten’s & Armadillo’s VTOL approach?
I might do both.
Given your hopes for the development for the rest of the solar system, any thoughts on what you’d do beyond LEO would be even more interest. Would you stick to chemical rockets? Would you (also) fund the long-neglected development of solar sails or the long-neglected development of nuclear-powered systems? Would you have interest in the many varied kinds of beamed propusion?
I don’t possess the conceit to think that I know what the technical answer is. I would put out contracts for moving various things (propellant, hardware, people) from one point to another, and let the market figure out how to do it.
Okay, with an e-mail address I can send you a NDA and we can get started.
I think that a Fred Thompson would be a good candidate in that scenario.
That was exactly my thought.
Rand, the idea of a fabulously wealthy aerospace engineer like yourself is appealing. I recognize that “let the market decide” is the best way to go, but it is more interesting to imagine that you were only rich enough to investigate one or two particular technological answers.
When you said “I’d do the same thing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did, but I’d do it right, because I already know what I’m doing, and wouldn’t have to hire other people to figure it out.” , I thought that you were saying something about your technical expertise with regard to the technnical answers. But now I think you meant something else. What did you mean?
The above question is not a snarky challenge – I’m genuinely interested, given my great respect for your thoughts on space despite all your wrongheaded political ideas. 🙂
As for me, I don’t have enough technical knowledge to be worth respecting, but here’s my thought anyway: If I was fabulously wealthy (and foolhardy), I might start with the thought that I want to explore the extrasolar neighborhood via telescopes and probes in my lifetime, and then I would work backwards. That would lead me to fast-track beamed propulsion methods such as Jordin Kare’s Sailbeam, since these are the most reasonable near-term way to get to the stars (and to the sun’s gravitational focus past 550 AU to examine extrasolar systems via telescope). Even if this wouldn’t be the very best way to go to the moon and mars, it would serve those purposes, and it would get the relevant technology into development sooner than simply letting the market decide based on the whims and needs of others.
The other Bob
Sudden wealth might not make me happy but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
I thought that you were saying something about your technical expertise with regard to the technical answers. But now I think you meant something else. What did you mean?
No, I was referring to my decades of space business experience, combined with my knowledge of what won’t work technically, which still leaves a lot of potential things that will.
Regrettably, Cincinnatus is dead.
Sorry Rand for putting you on the spot with “the other Bob”. But I think that Elon is doing things right. He has learned the hard lesson that he will not be able to reduce launch costs as much or as fast as he wants. But he does understand learning curves and that do make progress you have do do it and do it a lot.
On the other hand I feel that Jeff’s ideas and starting with h2o2 is a money sink.
I don’t have a good feel for what you would suggest from a technical standpoint, but I do agree with you that lots of things have to be tried and the government needs to get out of the way.
I also agree with most of your political positions. So I’m on the other side of the fence in relation to “the other Bob”.
Bob.
Bob, one of the reasons I don’t mind sharing a name with you is that you’re so reasonable, it doesn’t really bother me if people mistake you for me. Given that I’m a collectivist pinko (meaning that I think taxes might have to go up 3%), you might feel differently, so I’ll strive to differentiate us anyway!
MG, Oddly, Gov. Sanford exhibits a Cincinnatus-like respect for term-limits, and also unfortunately exemplifies the benefits of them.
Rand, like Bob, I think I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on why you think SpaceX and Blue Origin are making mistakes. It would be particularly interesting to hear you spell things out if you think that Xcor isn’t making that particular set of mistakes. Also like Bob, I don’t wan to put you on the spot, but maybe you’ll share your thoughts in a future blog post some time. I’ve been reading this blog daily, and I don’t recall you making a side by side comparative analysis of the approaches of the various alt.space players. If you do want to do that, it would be very interesting.
The bad Bob.
I think that SpaceX’s mistake was going for orbit from the get go, and building Yet Another Expendable (even if they talk about making it reusable Some Day). They may be successful, but they won’t be as successful as they would have had they put the same amount of money in a suborbital tourist business.
Bezos’ mistake was in being so insular and secretive, and not making common cause with the industry. He could have learned a lot by becoming part of the community, because we’re building an industry, not companies. He may be frustrated by the FAA, but he hasn’t chosen to join up with others who are as well, and making more progress with the regulatory situation. He seems to want to play space millionaire, but he doesn’t have the background for it, other than a childhood interest, and hasn’t tapped the abundant resource of experience in space entrepreneurism to move his project along faster. In that regard, he seems like Andy Beal or Walt Kistler. I hope that his fate will be better.
Give me ten billion dollars and within ten years I’d offer passenger and thousands of cubic meters of cargo service to orbit any rock from Venus to Ceres. Clients must provide their own landers which I will transport to their orbital destination. If my business failed, I’d have half a dozen spaceships of various designs in Earth orbit for sale to the highest bidders.
To paraphrase the great David Lee Roth:
Money might not buy happiness, but it lets you pull up a big a$$ boat right next to it!!
Ah, but you know what they say: the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it!