Rockets

Friday

John Steele Gordon

How Elon Musk changed the world

Technological revolutions can only change the world when the new technology becomes cheap enough for it to be widely applied. Just ask Elon Musk. The rocket age began with Germany’s V-2 in 1944, but the single-use technology was so expensive that it required state resources to utilize. Then, last Sunday, SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster, the most powerful ever launched, returned from space and was secured by its gantry for reuse. Thus it became, in the words of the New York Times, “more like a jetliner than a rocket.” It is estimated that reusable rockets will reduce the cost per pound of launching things into space by at least an order of magnitude and a new space age can now begin.

elon musk

Sunday

Teresa Mull

The right to keep and bear fireworks

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It's a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up. In the Pennsylvania Wilds — the romantic name a tourism agency gave to the hick region of the state where I reside — things go boom year-round.

Monday

Matthew Lynn

Branson vs Bezos: In praise of the billionaire space race

From our UK edition

They are rich boys with some very expensive toys. As Richard Branson completes his first space flight, it would be easy to dismiss the race between the Virgin founder and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to be the first billionaire in space as the self-indulgence of a couple of tycoons with too much testosterone and too much money.  The competition will be seen by some on the liberal left as a symbol of widening inequalities. They will view it as the emergence of a plutocratic class separated from the rest of us, and as proof of the argument that space should be left to the public sphere. Of course there is an element of truth in all of those complaints.

Saturday

Arieh Kovler

Inside Israel’s Iron Dome

From our UK edition

A dramatic photo from the Gaza strip taken in the early hours of Friday morning looks like something out of a Marvel film. On the right, rockets fly from Gaza. The gentle trajectory of their parabolic curves shouldn’t fool anyone: these are unguided explosives travelling at hundreds of miles an hour towards an Israeli town. On the left, each one snaking a unique, winding path, interceptors from Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system shoot up to meet the missiles. In 2001, when Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza into Israel (and, at that time, the still-extant Israeli settlements in Gaza), the terrorist organisation introduced a new weapon that would change the strategic picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.