Yet the President seems to have overcome his misgivings, for Isaacman has been re-awarded the nomination. Today, Isaacman will face the final hurdle, a Senate hearing. Senators are likely to quiz the entrepreneur, who has never worked for Nasa, on his “Project Athena” report. In the report, which was leaked earlier this year, Isaacman called for Nasa to retire its main rocket program, the Space Launch System, to ruthlessly cut down on bureaucracy, to rely more on private enterprise, and to redirect its energies towards the exploration of Mars. Democrats are likely to be skeptical of some elements of Project Athena. As for the Republicans, Isaacman has evidently been on a charm offensive: donating $1 million to pro-Trump organizations, and giving at least one MAGA influencer a trip in his private jet.

Isaacman has also made a more spiritual pitch. Not two months prior to the hearing, he spoke at a rally organized by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing advocacy group founded by the slain activist Charlie Kirk. “Having gone to space twice and looking back on our planet,” Isaacman told the crowd, “it’s hard not to be spiritual. But it was only recently that I was inspired to pick up the Bible again. I’ll tell you why — it’s because of Charlie, and it’s for Charlie.”

Isaacman’s remarks at the revivalist-like meeting raised alarm among some secular observers. Had Trump nominated a Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist to lead America’s space agency? They need not be so concerned. Isaacman, as it happens, is Jewish, but said in 2021 that he was not religious. It is conceivable that Charlie Kirk may actually have meant something special to Isaacman, but it would not require extreme cynicism for one to imagine that there might have been an element of political expedience in his Turning Point comments.

If Isaacman gets the job, he’ll be up against a Trump administration determined to wreck many of America’s scientific powerhouses. It is currently busy eliminating the National Science Foundation and radical cuts to the budgets of the National Institute of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Even worse, Trump has appointed RFK Jr., an opponent of modern medicine, to head the Department of Health of Human Services, turning the agency into a propaganda center for anti-vaccine activists.

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Trump said in his second inauguration speech that he wanted to send Americans to Mars. But far from proceeding with any such program, Trump has turned his fire on Nasa, focusing his destructive efforts first and foremost on the agency’s most productive division, which is its Space Science Directorate. This is the part of Nasa that does the space telescopes, the Mars rovers, planetary orbiters, deep space probes, and Earth observation satellites. It gets about 25% of Nasa’s budget, but for the half-century since the end of the Apollo program, it has been responsible for close to 100% of the agency’s accomplishments.

The Trump administration has proposed to devastate this section of Nasa by cutting its budget in half, while leaving the wasteful parts of the space agency nearly unscathed. If the cuts are not stopped by Congressional resistance, some 50 working spacecraft already operating in space — including the Curiosity Mars rover, all the space telescopes except Webb (and maybe for a while Hubble), the Mars Odyssey and MAVEN orbiters circling Mars, the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, the New Horizons and Voyager mission that probed the outer planets and are now probing the Kuiper Belt, and most of the Earth observation satellites — will all be shut down. Furthermore, missions currently in the pipeline, including the Roman space telescope (already built and waiting for launch next year) and the Dragonfly mission to Titan, and many others, will be aborted, and there will be no new starts after that.

If Trump actually were interested in getting Americans to the Red Planet, the last thing he would do would be to destroy the existing Mars exploration program. This is so not only because robotic explorers are the essential scouts needed to prepare and support human expeditions, but for political reasons as well. Contrary to Trump’s inauguration speech boast, there is zero chance that his administration will even attempt a human Mars mission during his four-year term. In order to last long enough to be successful, any humans-to-Mars program will need bipartisan support. Such support could be readily obtained by allying the humans-to-Mars effort with the largely university-based Mars exploration program. Doing so would make a great deal of engineering sense too, as the best way to test out the heavy payload delivery systems human Mars missions need would be to use them first to land large robotic expeditions on the Red Planet. These could deliver dozens of rovers and helicopters to Mars at a time, collectively carrying hundreds of instruments and experiments supported by thousands of university investigators. This would not only produce a massive scientific bonanza, but provide a strong political base for the program among the Left-leaning university research community. But doing this requires scaling up the robotic exploration effort. Instead, Trump is murdering it, in the process putting a mark of Cain on his putative program that would insure its destruction as soon as the political fortunes of war shift.

But it is worse than that. Under the Trump administration’s plan, not only the Mars exploration program, but the entirety of Nasa’s terrific space astronomy and planetary exploration programs will be effectively wiped out. This epic program is not just a jewel in the space agency’s crown. It stands, as the Gothic cathedrals did in medieval times, as the greatest celebration of one of the highest ideals of modern Western civilization — the search for truth through science. Nasa’s space science program is very much the flag of modern science, and the Trumpists are disdainfully burning that flag.

It is quite true that many of the science-wreckers infesting the Trump administration have taken to wearing prominently displayed crosses. But religion isn’t the problem here. While Christianity is certainly not science, it actually shares some important common roots.

A core idea underlying Western civilization, advanced by the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato, is that there is an innate faculty of the human mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth. Embraced by early Christianity, this idea became the basis of the concept of the conscience, which therefore became the axiomatic foundation of Western morality. It is also the basis for natural law, the theory that moral principles are real and can be identified from human conscience. The idea that the human mind can distinguish truth from untruth is also the basis for science, man’s search for universal truths through the tools of reason.

As the great Renaissance scientist Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, put it: “Geometry is one and eternal, a reflection out of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is one reason to call man the image of God.” In other words, the human mind, because it is the image of God, is able to understand the laws of the universe. It was the forceful demonstration of this proposition by Kepler, Galileo and others that let loose the scientific revolution in the West.

Over the years, science and Christianity have frequently disagreed on what the truth might be. But nevertheless, they have agreed strongly on the most fundamental point: that there is such a thing as the truth, and finding it is among the highest of human callings.

It is this intellectual foundation that drove the West’s creation of science, and which has continued to motivate those moved by a Judeo-Christian outlook to broadly support the scientific enterprise. This has not been without practical consequences. The Catholic Church, for example, not only created the first universities, but has extensively funded astronomical observatories and medical research centers right up to the present. In 2005, I was able to convince the highly religious Senate Science Committee Chairman Sam Brownback to reverse the decision by Sean O’Keefe, the then-Nasa administrator, to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope. As I pointed out to Brownback, it is through learning about creation that we can learn about the Creator.

Trump, in contrast, denies the relevance of truth. As part of his political makeover from a sexual epicure to a conservative, Trump has taken to waving crosses around. But the President is more of a Nietzschean than a Christian. For him there is no good or evil, justice or injustice, truth or untruth — it’s all just bullshit. He spouts lies as readily as a sow pisses. And he can do this because he has no intent to convince, but only to confuse.

This is not a worldview that is supportive of science. Where the leader goes, the followers follow. It is impossible to serve both Trump and the truth. The real problem with the Trump administration is not that it is filled with Christians, but that it is packed with Philistines.

And now the Trump administration is promising a return to the Moon via the Artemis program. Yet, put simply, Artemis is a fraud. While vast amounts of money are being distributed to contractors, there is no real intent at the top to use the program to send astronauts to the Moon. This can be seen by examining the program’s design, if it can be called that, which consists of five primary flight elements which do not fit together to enable any functional mission capability. Instead, each of those five elements — the SLS heavy lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Lander, and the Lunar Orbit Gateway station — is being funded as an independent project whose primary purpose is to support the companies that are working on it.

The SLS will only fly once every three years, so it is just useless. Starship could be a useful heavy lift vehicle for the program, but in order to create a nominal role for SLS, it will be employed instead as a lunar landing and ascent vehicle. But Starship has an empty mass of 100 tons — 50 times more than that of the Lunar Excursion Module used during the Apollo program — making it wildly impractical to serve in such a capacity. When Starship got the Human Landing System contract, the National Team, led by Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, demanded that they get a contract too. This might have made sense, had Nasa insisted that they build a reusable lander employing the same methane/oxygen propellant as Starship, so that a Starship stationed in lunar orbit could serve as a tanker supporting orbit to surface excursions by their much lighter vehicle.

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But instead, since the goal was just to appease the National Team by sending it cash, Nasa allowed them go their merry way with an expendable hydrogen/oxygen-propelled lander that can’t be supported by Starship or anything else. With a weight of 26 tons, the Orion capsule is too heavy for the SLS to deliver to low lunar orbit with enough propellant to come home, and so can only go to a Gateway station in high lunar orbit instead.  This serves to provide a nominal function for the Gateway, which otherwise serves none. In fact, far from being part of rational lunar program design, the Gateway was conceived of by the Obama administration prior to the invention of Artemis as an (absurd) alternative destination to send astronauts in place of going to the Moon. But the Trump team decided to make it part of Artemis, and to pretend it is necessary, imposed a requirement that all excursion vehicles must travel back and forth from its position in high lunar orbit to the surface instead of from low orbit. As a result, the Gateway greatly increases excursion vehicle propulsion requirements. Instead of being called a Gateway, it would be more proper to call it a Tollbooth — and a very expensive one at that.

Artemis is not a Moon program divided into five independent efforts. It is a flim-flam man’s cover story for five random pork-barrel programs that don’t lead anywhere.

The bottom line is this: unlike the purpose-driven Sixties Apollo Moon program, Artemis is vendor driven. While Apollo spent money to do things, Artemis does things in order to spend money. Artemis was started eight years ago by the first Trump administration, yet a piloted landing on the lunar surface is nowhere in sight. Eight years after John F. Kennedy announced the Apollo program, astronauts were walking on the Moon. The difference is that while Apollo was real, Artemis is bullshit.

Engineering, though, cannot be based on bullshit. Engineering must be based on truth. The truth is that you can’t conduct a Moon program using a random set of vendor-supported hardware elements that don’t fit together. Reality-deniers may pretend that you can, but that is just bullshit. Reality-deniers may claim they are working on getting humans to the Red Planet while they are wrecking the Mars exploration program — but that is just bullshit too.

This is the problem that Jared Isaacman needs to solve if he gets the job. Isaacman is a very accomplished businessman, with a demonstrated commitment to advance science and expand humanity’s reach into space. He is fully qualified to be Nasa administrator, and I believe the Senate will confirm his appointment to that post with solid bipartisan support.

But once he gets the job, he will be working for a team that does not believe reality is relevant. If he wants to save the space science program, let alone get Americans to the Moon or Mars, he will need to restore respect for the truth. That will be the real challenge.

Progressives like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson complain that America looks the way it would “if the Confederacy” had won. Yet the South’s triumph today is one the old rebels would barely recognize. The region, to be sure, still has more than its share of Blimpish nativists and religious fanatics. Even so, more people, including African-Americans, led by those with college degrees, now flock there in search of opportunity.

This marks a huge historical turnaround. Well into the Twenties and Thirties, the South was lagging and losing migrants to the North and the West. Slavery, and then segregation, notes historian Gavin Wright, kept down labor costs and, with them, the incentive for innovation and labor-saving technology. The South was almost its “own country,” as Wright says, a poor appendage to a much richer, more dynamic nation.

But now, the South is capturing cutting-edge industries, drawing in capital as well as a swelling tide of migrants from within the country and abroad. Overall, the southeast quadrant of the country is now the most dominant economic region, and since 2018 has produced almost all the country’s population growth and half its new jobs, according to the Texas Stock Exchange.

By contrast, it’s the Northern and Pacific cities that are pursuing John C. Calhoun-style nullification to resist Washington. And the Trump administration has taken note of this. Recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that “we want the US to be more like Florida and less like New York.” With Gotham about to embrace socialism and a globalized intifada, things look good for Trump Central in Palm Beach, the new favored boomtown for millionaires and billionaires.

Of course, inertia still works for the North and California after decades of dominance. Even today, per-capita incomes remain higher in the Northeast and California, but this likely reflects fewer families and higher costs, which often wipe out income gains, particularly for minorities and the working class. The income disparity has been receding since the Forties, as the South grows in power and influence and shifts to sophisticated businesses like aerospace, software, and finance — once unthinkable for the agrarian region.

One key factor to the Southern ascendancy has been investment in education, which has long been a critical weak spot, with average expenditures half the national average well into the Forties. With an economy built around labor-intensive farming and light manufacturing, generations of ambitious Southerners sought opportunities elsewhere. Many headed to colleges in the Northeast and West Coast. But today, that flow has reversed, with ever more college students choosing to attend schools in the South.

Perhaps even more important, the once widely admired Northeastern and particularly California grade schools, although still better funded, have declined relative to those in Florida or Texas. Schools in many states have become increasingly forums of indoctrination for “social justice,” with even long-time leader Massachusetts eliminating honors programs.

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In contrast, the South, and even truly backward states like Mississippi, are focused on improving their long-woeful grade schools. A strong focus on basic reading and math skills has led to dramatic improvements in both. At the same time, many of these states — South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee — have developed a system of trade schools for those who don’t wish to go to college. Eight of the 10 best states for this kind of education are located in the South.

This focus makes sense, since the South has enjoyed the fastest growth in US manufacturing in the past five years, much of it stimulated by foreign direct investment. Last year, South Carolina led the nation in the share of jobs created by overseas firms, with Kentucky and Alabama seeing strong growth, as well.

These investments are helping drive the South’s growing dominance in tech-forward industries like aerospace. The Lone Star State, in particular, is considered by PwC to be the best state for aerospace manufacturing and the Texans are now tied with Californians for the most Tier One research universities. SpaceX and Blue Origin each have large test facilities in Van Horn and Brownsville, respectively, including one to be used for an upcoming NASA launch. In addition, Texas has two spaceports, one in Midland and the other in Houston.

As Bryan Chambers, who runs the Capital Factory in Austin, points out, these firms, many in defense, are headed south, as they require factory space, skilled workers, reasonable housing costs, and, as one executive told me, “good places to blow things up.” It helps that Austin is home to the Army Futures Command. Texas also has the talent, ranking second behind California in the number of aerospace engineers. Astonishingly, Alabama ranks fourth — an achievement that would have horrified Confederate agrarian ideologues who loathed mechanized industry, if they were around to see it.

Like SpaceX, many of the most innovative California aerospace firms, like Jet Zero, based in Long Beach, tend to move to the South as they grow. The innovative low-emission jet manufacturer recently announced a $4.7 billion investment in Greensboro, NC, that will employ more than 14,000 people over the next decade. The company also indicated that it would move its headquarters to the same city, once the plant is finished.

A similar trajectory is taking place in semiconductors and artificial intelligence. Between 2022 and 2023, Texas led in new tech jobs, Florida came second, and Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina also made significant gains; California was basically flat. According to the Computer Technology Association, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina are projected to enjoy the biggest growth in tech over the next decade.

With the rise of AI and quantum computing, tech companies facing soaring need for affordable electricity will likely look to the South, which has generally lower electricity prices. That will allow the likes of NVIDIA to fabricate chips, supercomputers, and data centers for AI in the South. By contrast, states like New York and California suffer the highest energy prices in the United States.

Southern boosters are also aiming a shot at the last great bastions of the California-Northeast economy, such as entertainment. Georgia, Nashville, and Austin have all become major players as Hollywood retreats and loses both its historic allure as well as jobs. Surging media hub Atlanta may not have LA’s great weather, but it is far more affordable and closer to the national mainstream culturally.

An even more deadly blow could come in finance, the other bulwark of the blue-state economies. The recently established Dallas-based Texas Stock Exchange, scheduled to open next year, has raised more than $161 million from such firms as BlackRock, Citadel Securities, Charles Schwab, Dell Family Office Management, Fortress, Jump Trading, Squarepoint, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, Tower Research, and other market leaders.

Nicole Chambers, the Texas Stock Exchange’s global managing director, only smiles when I bring up the fact that New York seems poised to elect a socialist as mayor. She sees the new exchange as providing a more business-friendly environment for both small investors and companies. “We want to be a Wall Street for all,” the San Diego native suggests. This is part of the whole “y’all street” meme, which sees Texas capitalism as a more open, even populist alternative to more hierarchical Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

Another strength: Texas now has more finance professionals than New York. As Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda, once told me, “more important than gold or diamonds are people.” For much of its history, the South failed to attract people who could build a stronger, more advanced economy. Today’s reversal is proof that there are few inevitabilities in the political economy.

Housing is another consideration. Although both progressives and even some conservatives now claim the South is suffering from the same shortage of affordable housing as the Northeast, this is limited to a few select areas, notably Austin and Miami. Due to more rapid construction, and lower development costs, Southern cities tend to overproduce housing, already leading to price declines. Overall, notes Wendell Cox in a recent report on housing affordability, prices in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Jacksonville are all half or less the price, based on incomes, of those in LA, San Francisco, and San Jose.

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In most of the century after the Civil War, Southerners, black and white, headed to other regions, with a diaspora that peaked at 12 million in 1980. That pattern, too, is shifting. Since 2000, Florida alone enjoyed net domestic migration gains of 3.5 million, Texas 2.5 million, and the Carolinas roughly 2.5 million; meanwhile, New York, Illinois, and California have hemorrhaged roughly 10 million together. Nine of the 10 fastest growing metros since 2020 have been located in Dixie.

This migration has also generated a huge infusion of capital into the South. Between 2019 and 2022, states like California, New York, and Illinois lost more than $150 billion in taxpayer income. In contrast, the Sunshine State alone gained more than $100 billion, while Texas, Tennessee, and South Carolina made major gains.

But if the capital comes largely from Boomers, the real shift has been among younger generations. In the last decade, the four leading destinations for millennials were all in the South: Nashville, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas-Ft. Worth.

Perhaps nothing more dramatically reflects the ascendancy of Dixie than its embrace of migrants from developing countries. Historically, the South received few immigrants. In 1910, only 2% of Southerners were foreign-born, compared to almost 15% nationwide. That era’s predominantly legal migrants helped build great cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. But in the last Census, notes demographer Wendell Cox, all three of the cities that led in the growth of foreign-born residents were located in the South: Miami, Houston, and Dallas.

The appeal of the South to these newcomers lies in the same thing that drives domestic migration: opportunity. Immigrants need such things as low entry costs and an expanding economy. Many find that Southerners increasingly mix their traditional courtesy with a renewed sense of openness. “We are a resettlement city,” suggests Steve Clark, a former CEO of the Fayetteville, Ark., Chamber of Commerce. “The chamber has a Hispanic heritage festival each year; it’s held downtown on the square. We teach five languages in our school here.” The metro vision, he suggests, is one that dispels the racial past and seeks a different future.

The South’s demographic destiny will be further accelerated by its appeal to families. The highest birth rate among the nation’s major metros is found in Hinesville, Ga. Other high-fertility areas include Jacksonville, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Memphis, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City. Meanwhile, the lowest rates are found in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with New York also back in the pack. As families move to the South, many of the region’s metros, even in famously doddering Florida, are getting slightly younger. This, even as Northeastern and West Coast regions age more rapidly.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. The region could still fall back in the pack by rejecting its transformation and embracing neo-Confederate nostalgia. Nominating morally dubious candidates like Texas’s rabid-red Attorney General Ken Paxton and pushing mindless Trumpism certainly invite a resurgence of blue politics. But for now, the demographic and economic trends promise a bright future for the South.

If he is looking back up from hell, or wherever he ended up, Jefferson Davis is unlikely to appreciate the racially tolerant, migrant-welcoming South of today. Yes, the South has risen again, but this has happened largely by copying the old playbook of the detested North.

Rather than simply growing the social media sinkhole, hard tech focuses on building real-world equipment. “We’re inventing the new factory town, and recovering the sense of what works in America,” says Cameron Schiller, whose Rangeview Corporation startup uses 3D technology to make castings for the metal parts used in aerospace. And if Schiller feels his team is fighting the right fight, he’s far from alone. El Segundo, after all, is home to around three dozen such firms, the biggest concentration in the region, together making everything from drones to engines, drilling systems to satellites.

As Schiller implies, all this could finally restore America to the kind of blue-collar prosperity it enjoyed after 1945. It could also protect the country against threats from overseas and even take the country to the stars — if, that is, El Segundo can fend off competition from both other states and the looming threat of China’s own high-tech space sector.

The emergence of El Segundo, known to locals as “Gundo”, comes after decades of struggle. With the end of the Cold War, America’s traditional aerospace industry stumbled. Big contractors like Lockheed and Boeing got fat and lazy, particularly given the lack of competition after the Soviet Union’s demise.

Over recent years, and especially with the end of the Pax Americana, the country’s aerospace sector is making a comeback, jumping by 7.1% in 2023. Yet this revival isn’t really focused on poorly managed primes — Lockheed Martin’s Artemis moon rocket has been plagued by delays and failures — but rather on the smaller firms snatching up their engineers. Scattered like lost pennies from LAX to coastal San Diego, a stretch of about 100 miles, these firms are concentrated in old industrial areas like El Segundo, where the daytime population reaches 50,000, or else Long Beach’s Douglas Park, with a million square feet of industrial space.

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Around 40 of these new firms are spinoffs from SpaceX, which is now worth an estimated $350 billion and whose founding headquarters once sat just 11 miles east of Gundo. One good example here is Relativity Space, a Long Beach-based outfit that develops reusable rockets and raised $650 million in 2021. Another spinoff is Impulse Space, a satellite developer that lately secured $300 million of its own.

As the SpaceX connection suggests, this is something new. For if American tech was once dominated by coders and marketers, these jobs are increasingly disappearing off to Bangalore, with software firms from Salesforce to Google facing eye-watering job cuts. Not that it’s all bad. For if algorithms are on the way out, America’s virtual economy is being replaced by what Delian Asparouhov calls “harder tech”.

Cofounder of Varda Aerospace, Asparouhov set up the firm with yet another Elon Musk protégé. More to the point, and like many of its neighbors in El Segundo, his company is interested in solving distinctly practical problems: in this case, testing pharmaceuticals in zero gravity. “There is an aerospace renaissance,” the Bulgarian MIT graduate explains. “This can’t be done with AI — you need people to build spaceships. It’s a paradigm shift.”

It’s hard to disagree with that last phrase, and not just scientifically. For if firms like Varda represent a more practical form of science, the “hard tech” revolution, with its circuit boards and machinists, equally implies a different kind of corporate culture. They may, after all, flap like palm trees to the political winds: but, in general, the lords of Silicon Valley are socially progressive, and believers in an elite culture that has little in common with everyday Americans.

With the military implications of satellites and space, however, spots like El Segundo are rather more comfortable in their Right-wing patriotism. “There’s a sense of being comfortable in America,” says Tom Feldman, founder of Durin, a startup that wants to use new technology to bolster mining. “There’s a nationalist theme here. We feel we are building for America. That’s why there’s so much concern about who has the biggest flag.” That sentiment is echoed by the area’s broader cultural vibe. Lunch for Feldman is less about locally sourced salads or Asian fusion and far more about comfort food at Wendy’s Place, a wood-paneled diner where young engineers eat eggs, pancakes and meatloaf amid calloused-handed older aerospace workers.

To establishment media outlets, El Segundo’s “bros” appear a threat to everything they hold dear. To quote Vanity Fair, they love fast cars, tobacco, and “their Lord and savior Jesus Christ.” These nerds, the liberals report, are inspired by blue-collar aesthetics, wearing tattered jeans, leather work boots, and dark t-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets.

And, to be fair, this cynical tone isn’t totally unreasonable: waving the Stars and Stripes can be lucrative indeed, with almost half of 2024’s top 100 defense startups newcomers to the scene. These firms have together secured $52 billion in private capital, far more than they received from defense or space agencies. The majority were located in California. Tiny El Segundo, for its part, was home to four, equal to San Jose and its 970,000 people.

Yet if a dash of patriotism isn’t bad for the balance sheet, the two are hardly incompatible. Indeed, the Gundo squashbucklers arguably echo the conquistadors that roamed California in the Age of Exploration. As one of Hernán Cortéz’s captains explained back in the 16th century, the Spaniards crossed the seas to both “serve God and His Majesty” and “to grow rich, as all men desire to do.”

Historical analogies aside, it’s obvious that the upstarts are making a real splash with the White House. Shaym Sanker, CTO of defense giant Palantir, sees Donald Trump as a chance to break the “manager” mode of Boeing and Nasa, a view that is fair enough when challenger firms like Anduril are now worth over $30 billion. “This is where the exciting things are happening,” agrees Ian Cinnamon. The 33-year-old cofounder of Apexspace, which builds buses for satellites and rockets from its El Segundo factory, describes the production process as something that ends not in digits: but in something more tangible.

Cinnamon is clearly proud of these developments, especially compared to his rivals further up the coast. “Silicon Valley,” he says, “is not so exciting.” Perhaps — but the El Segundo boom is clearly about much more than tech bro rivalries. For if firms here are making it big in defense, they’re also adapting to, and indeed shaping, the future of warfare thousands of miles from California. Faced by the rise of drone and missile attacks from Gaza to Yemen to Ukraine, the Pentagon is rethinking the equipment it needs, all part of a $36 billion procurement overhaul. Arguably somewhat less essential are the eye-wateringly expensive tanks and jet fighters produced by legacy firms — replaced by cheap and replaceable alternatives.

In truth, though, the biggest pool of money splashing around Gundo isn’t from the Defense Department, but rather the burgeoning space industry. In a sense, of course, El Segundo is just following global trends. Boosted by a huge surge of investment, space industry global revenues have jumped tenfold since the early 2000s, from $175 billion in 2005 to almost $385 billion in 2017, a growth rate of just under 7% per year. All told, the space economy is now estimated at $570 billion, and could reach $1.2 trillion by 2040.

Here, at least, Southern California can rely on its history. For if the Boeings of the world are in trouble, the state retains almost twice as many aerospace engineers as second-place Texas. These skills, including those of skilled machinists and other blue-collar specialists, provide the sinews of the new space economy. One great example here is Arkisys, a small startup located 25 miles from El Segundo. Squatting in a low-rise building, across the road from an old-school pasta joint and a Mormon church, it is developing ports to service satellites in space. These sites are serviced by robots, controlled from Earth, which can help with everything from repairs to fueling.

“This is the right space because it’s the bastion of historical space intellect,” says Dave Barnhardt, Arkisys’ professorial founder, who among other things has worked at high levels at DARPA, the originator of the internet. At 63, Barnhardt is a grizzled veteran compared to most other space people, wearing the button-down shirt and slacks that once were the preferred uniform of engineers.

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Fair enough: its reservoirs of talent have allowed California to expand its dominance of aerospace. The Golden State enjoys a 19% share of the global space industry, dovetailed by 40% of the government’s largest space-related programs.

Yet here, as elsewhere, California’s dominance is threatened by rivals. The two obvious internal candidates are Texas and Florida. Unlike California, both boast their own Space Commissions, combined with lower costs and friendly taxes. No less important, both Texas and Florida have all-important rocket launch sites, not least iconic spots like Cape Canaveral. Together with California’s continued bickering with space leaders — his heirs may have plumped for El Segundo, but Musk himself left the state after tiring of its wokeness — and the exact contours of American aerospace remain uncertain.

What’s not in doubt, though, is that this technology looks set to dominate our century. For if those robots and satellites are all impressive enough in theory, they could yet be used as a geopolitical battering ram.

Combined with the kind of drone technology developed by the likes of Palantir, and it’s little wonder America’s leading rival is taking the hard tech revolution so seriously. Under the tight control of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing’s deep tech companies reflect a desire to dominate human affairs both on the ground and amid the stars. Though it didn’t put an astronaut in space until 2021, the People’s Republic enjoyed a record number of launches last year, not least when the Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) mission drove a rover on the surface of Mars. China is also the first country to return samples from the far side of the Moon. The country’s future goals are no less ambitious, including a mission to Jupiter and its moon, Callisto in 2029 and 2038 plans for establishing a research base on Mars.

The impact of the new hard tech has implications back on Earth too. Both Russia and China are developing space-based military systems, while satellite communications, such as Starlink but also proprietary systems serving soldiers on the ground, have become critical to military conflicts from the Middle East and Ukraine to a possible fight over Taiwan. Wars will be won on earth, in short, but the critical battles may be in space.

If this were a battle of bureaucracies, China’s chances would be excellent: as Rand Simberg, one industry veteran rightly says, today’s NASA wouldn’t be able to pull off Apollo 8. But if the American federal government is creaking, it’s equally clear that El Segundo represents something of a way back. Filled with small, innovative companies, the industrial parks of Southern California are a denim-jeaned riposte to Chinese central planning. What could be more American than that?

Given the magnificent performance of the stock, it should be little surprise that many in Reddit’s “r/rycey” community share the view of the user “globalpm-retired”. He or she put it plainly in an update two weeks ago: “I am not selling any shares, I hold it like it was one of my children.”

Every part of this story feels quintessentially American. But the memes aren’t of Joe Exotic, but Roger Moore. The man they call Turbo isn’t a silent-retreat-attending founder, but an ex-BP executive living in St John’s Wood. And the company is far from a NASDAQ darling, but a stalwart of the pale, stale, FTSE100. What these devotees call Rycey, you and I would call Rolls-Royce.

The name still conjures polished wood, hand-stitched piping, and the hum of an electric clock at 60mph: the company Charles Rolls and Henry Royce envisioned when they met at Manchester’s Midland Hotel in 1904. But today, it makes no cars, having sold the brand to BMW in the late Nineties. Instead, it builds the kind of technology nations depend on but barely notice.

First, the jet engine: specifically, the advanced gas turbines that power modern commercial aviation. The company has dominated this space since the late Sixties, when it developed the RB211, its first engine built specifically for a new generation of wide-body aircraft (twin-aisle planes designed for long-haul travel). The RB211 evolved into the Trent. This is the flagship of Rolls-Royce’s current fleet of engines, and it has powered aircraft carrying over 3.5 billion passengers.

These engines are so commonplace we forget they are miracles. The XWB, the most advanced in the Trent series, inhales 1.3 tonnes of air per second — a squash court’s worth — while each of its 68 high-pressure turbine blades generates around 900 horsepower. That’s the equivalent of the entire Formula 1 grid, tripled, with extra cars to spare, strapped beneath an airplane wing.

Rolls-Royce is one of only three companies on Earth that are capable of building these engines. The other two are American, making this one of Britain’s few genuinely sovereign capabilities. They are our largest high-value manufactured goods export, generating $27.4 billion annually: roughly 1% of GDP.

The company’s reach, however, extends far beyond commercial aviation. Its engines lift the F-35B, the only fifth-generation fighter jet capable of vertical takeoff, as well as the Eurofighter Typhoon, Europe’s air superiority workhorse. Rolls-Royce will also keep the B-52, NATO’s largest heavy bomber, flying into the 2050s.

At sea, the company drives the world’s most advanced warships — from the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers to the USS Zumwalt, the US Navy’s experimental destroyer. This ship was recently pictured test-firing a directed-energy weapon known as Helios — though the specifics of how, and even if, its Rolls-Royce MT30 engines power the system remains classified.

Yet, the company’s most vital contribution to national security lies beneath the sea. In 1965, as Harold Wilson entered Downing Street and Rubber Soul hit the charts, the PWR1, Britain’s first naval nuclear reactor, went critical. Since then, Rolls-Royce has designed three generations of pressurized-water reactors, the core (quite literally) of the UK’s continuous at-sea deterrent.

Rolls-Royce remains at the frontier of nuclear engineering. The latest generation of its reactors will power Australia’s new AUKUS-class submarines, while its Small Modular Reactor program, launched in 2021, will adapt submarine-proven technology to use on land. It’s the only company in the SMR race that has actually built and operated this kind of reactor before.

Most of this power will go to homes: each of Rolls-Royce’s proposed 470-megawatt SMRs will be able to power around a million of them. But in an era where new energy demand is being driven less by households and more by the demands of hyperscale computing, the company couldn’t be better positioned: already, it’s the world’s third-largest supplier of emergency power systems to data centers.

For security reasons, its clients in this space remain undisclosed. But one is described in official materials only as a “well-known provider of search engine, web portal, and email services”. If you need to Google it, you probably already have your answer.

Despite all this, Rolls-Royce remains oddly absent from the public imagination. Perhaps that’s because we expect the companies of Britain’s future to look new, and different: not the fourth or fifth reinvention of a 100-year-old company that has experienced its fair share of challenges.

Take the RB211: an engine so advanced it bankrupted the company in 1971, after costing $7 billion in today’s money to develop. Rolls-Royce was nationalized, only clawing its way back to private markets in 1987. Three decades later, the Trent 1000, designed for the Boeing 787 dreamliner, ran into critical durability issues, forcing an expensive redesign and a public dispute with British Airways.

To solve its financial problems, Rolls-Royce perfected a model they call power by the hour. Instead of simply selling the engines outright, their products today are sold on a subscription basis, whereby customers make payments based on their usage.

In theory, it’s brilliant. Instead of making money only when an engine is sold, Rolls-Royce keeps earning for years. For example, the Trent 700, a three-decade-old engine, still generates revenue. Airlines keep flying it, and Rolls-Royce keeps maintaining it under long-term contracts.

However, if you wanted to design a business model to implode during a global pandemic, you’d struggle to do better. When global aviation ground to a halt in 2020, so did Rolls-Royce’s revenue, taking the company into its second existential crisis.

Emergency measures kept it alive, but the rebuild would, it was assumed, take years. It’s here we return to r/rycey, and to the man they call Turbo: the ex-BP executive Tufan Erginbilgiç, who has been the Rolls-Royce CEO since January 2023.

US tech companies are now so culturally dominant that our image of a CEO is almost entirely Silicon Valley-coded: athleisure by day, Loro Piana by night; a rotation of niche hobbies, and a faintly (or not so faintly) messianic presence. Despite the “Turbo” nickname, this most certainly is not Erginbilgiç.

We’ll never see Turbo writing Substack essays about the future of energy or publishing books about the fate of the West. Instead, when Erginbilgiç makes headlines, it’s usually for his brutal honesty. Most famously, in a 2022 all-hands meeting, he called Rolls-Royce a “burning platform”.

On arrival, Turbo moved fast. He replaced the company’s heads of civil aerospace and defense, and he brought in BP allies Helen McCabe (CFO) and Nicola Grady-Smith (Chief Transformation Officer): both firm favorites of r/rycey. Entire divisions — electric flight, fuel cells, and direct air capture — were sold off or shut down. Prices went up. Customer contracts were renegotiated.

Last month came the 2024 results: a financial blowout. Profits surged by 57% to £2.5 billion. Operating margins hit 13.8%. Free cash flow nearly doubled to £2.4 billion. Key turnaround targets — originally set for 2027 — are now on track to be hit this year. The company also announced a £1 billion share buyback and reinstated its first dividend since Covid.

Yet beyond the r/rycey subreddit and the writings of a handful of financial commentators, the company is little-discussed. Perhaps it’s understandable. This is not a charismatic founder story, a moonshot bet, or a desperate Hail Mary. Rather, it is a brutal return to business fundamentals: cut costs, raise margins, sell more.

And in an era where tech companies live and die by narrative, Rolls-Royce refuses to play the game of hype. According to the company website, their mission is to “build a high-performing, competitive and resilient business with profitable growth; grow sustainable free cash flow; and build a strong balance sheet and grow shareholder returns”. Not exactly Mars by 2028.

Yet, Rolls-Royce embodies everything Britain claims to want — a homegrown industrial champion, a provider of sovereign capability, a builder of the hardest things in the world. Not vaporware, not hype, but physical technology of weight and consequence, positioned at the intersection of the defining forces of the next decade: energy and war.

While most moonshots exist as demos and press releases, Rolls-Royce is actually building leading-edge nuclear reactors, laser-firing warships, and micro-reactors designed for space. Yet Britain, fixated on the next big thing, refuses to look up.

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How the UK sacrificed its car industry

By Ian Birrell

A week after Rolls-Royce’s blowout results, the Ministry of Defense announced a new partnership: not with a British firm, but with the American defense startup Anduril. The announcement caused a stir not for its substance, but for its wording: the company was described not as American, but as “Anglo-American”. The basis for this claim appears to be nothing more than the presence of a UK subsidiary. In the absence of homegrown industrial champions, the Ministry of Defense felt the need to invent one.

But the ability to build great things isn’t something Britain has lost. Instead, it’s something we’ve chosen to overlook. This is because Britain’s industrial struggles aren’t just about the obvious — energy costs, planning permission, regulatory inertia — but about a deeper failure of political imagination.

In every economic roundtable featuring ministers or government advisers, the same question is, at some point, inevitably asked: What would it take to create a trillion-dollar company in the UK? But before we even ask that, perhaps we should start with a simpler one: If we had one, would we even notice?

Simone Weil wrote: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them.” And yet, when we imagine Britain’s economic future, we picture something new, disruptive, exciting. Not a century-old company with a CEO whose favorite word is “efficiency”.

But efficiency built the modern world. And for those who want Britain to succeed, the real failure isn’t a lack of ambition, but a failure of attention.