Sublime

giddy.

Even when riding on top of a flimsy rocket, many of the early astronauts felt in control because they were personally involved in designing the spacecraft. But they also knew what they didn’t know—what to be concerned about and what to ignore. Acknowledging these uncertainties was the first step in resolving them. Once the scientists determined, fo

They cared where the planets really were, and they wanted to understand the planets through explanations, just as Galileo did.

The Marshall Space Flight Center is run by one man, William R. Lucas. His style of management can be best described as feudalistic. In his ten-year tenure as Center Director, he established a personal empire built on the “good ol' boy” principle. The only criterion for career advancement is total loyalty to this man. The loyalty to country, NASA, t

distancetomars.com,

Ever since he flew back from Russia and calculated the costs of building his own rockets, Musk had deployed what he called the “idiot index.” That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was

With the completion of the space elevator, humanity had begun the large-scale exploration of the other planets in the Solar System. Manned spacecraft landings on Mars and the moons of Jupiter had not caused much of a stir because people knew that the purpose of these expeditions was much clearer and more practical than in the past: They were purely

At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurp