Rocket Man

I’m always recommending that people should zoom out from party politics to view the geopolitical world stage, to find out what’s really going on. But recently, I’ve come to see that we should be zooming out even further than that. Much further. We have to look at who is going to dominate space – because whoever wins the space race wins the world.

So far, it’s a dead tie between the Chinese and Elon Musk, with Musk coming up fast on the inside, being, as he is, less hampered by any governmental bureaucracy to slow him down. Of the 180 rocket launches from Earth last year (which was a third more than in 2021), 62 were made by the Chinese. But SpaceX – the company of which Musk is chief executive, chief technology officer and chief designer – came a close second with 61.

So it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to put it together that a lot of the Rocket Man Bad bile-spilging from the mainstream media is as much about trying to stop him in space as it is about his encouragement of free speech on Twitter.

Musk’s Starlink has already launched more than 3,300 of its internet communications satellites into low Earth orbit, making it the largest constellation of its kind, and it’s planning as many as 42,000. Rival satellite companies – such as OneWeb, Viasat and Amazon’s Project Kuiper – are carping that this proliferation of Starlink satellites risks the launch and operation of other space services – i.e. theirs… those who currently wield the levers of Earthly power, who play both sides of the killing fields of perpetual warfare. They know they are in a race against time, because they know that whoever comes to dominate space will be the real power to reckon with.

Given that NASA is now backing SpaceX to the tune of billions, to land a man on the Moon, possibly as early as next year, I think the sensible money should be on Musk who we at least have some commonality of understanding and purpose with.

He believes in free speech for all at least, which is a start. He is actively lobbying for AI to be prevented from becoming so powerful that it would cause an existential crisis for humanity. And he really doesn’t approve of globalism.

He was beamed on to a screen at the World Government Conference in Dubai last week, to explain to them how one world government is a bad idea. He very cleverly reminded these Arabs that after the fall of the Roman empire, it was only because all the scientific knowledge – known as ‘alchemy’ then – was preserved by the Arabs, that the human race was allowed to progress in its scientific understanding. He was quite right, and so no-one could deny it. The realm of Christendom had been plunged into a Dark Age from which we are only now barely recovering. If there had been one world government at that time, everything would have been lost and humanity would have had to start all over again.

Despite its unfortunate name – which is more about the international nature of the conference than about global hegemony – the attendees at the World Government Conference were largely sympathetic to his ideas anyway. They came mainly from BRICS member countries, an international trading organisation which has it written into its constitution that they support a multi-polar world. And while it also declares that BRICS countries should be as green as possible, they are vehemently against Green (with a capital G) policies because, as they quite rightly say in their statement, it unfairly picks winners and losers.

So this is the real race we’re all in, and much of what we’re witnessing here below is just vaudeville – the Punch ‘n Judy fights for terrestrial political power, huge mushroom explosions and aerial balloons being shot down – all to distract us from the much more important race for power going on in the thermosphere above our heads.