Responses to my Quillette Article

Mostly positive, some frustrating. Some takeaways for future outreach projects.

After the recent Starship launch, I got the chance to write an article about it for Quillette. As part of my ongoing attempts to talk to people outside the normal space “bubble” this was a great opportunity.

If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend you do so first here

My objective was to reach a wider audience with the idea that mass is the fundamental constrained:

There are still many engineering problems to be solved, but there is also an ample supply of problem solvers on Earth, whose work will be enabled by the coming dramatic drop in launch prices. Just as the density of transistors was the fundamental problem that had to be solved to enable the entire computer industry to rapidly solve software problems, cheap mass to orbit is the fundamental problem which, when solved, will allow rapid solutions to all the other problems of living in space. If the Starship development program succeeds, it is going to unlock this for us.

I think this has been fairly well understood by the audience…