The physicist Gerard O’Neill thought a planetary surface isn’t the right place for an expanding civilization. As launch costs fall, we need more ambitious goals to drive technology further.

Educational and military systems can work together to let the most competent people rise to the top of society.

Postwar America’s aerospace industry combined captured German personnel with manufacturing excellence to accomplish the most incredible engineering feats in history. But process knowledge can be easily lost.

Bill Gates has used his foundation to win prestige and secure the goals of the elite consensus. But without strategic independence, he cannot act against its worst ideas.

In 1959, the U.S. government gave an elite group of physicists classified information and free reign to research. The JASON program’s rise and fall tracks a golden age of American science.

The future of energy will be more mineral-intensive than ever before, leading China and the U.S. to compete for the world’s mining and refinement capacity.

In 2009, a disastrous project on Sepulveda Pass revealed the roadblocks that stop the U.S. from being able to build.

With war underway in Ukraine, Russia and Europe are once again divided. Their ultimate dependency on China and the U.S. sounds the death knell for a multipolar world.