I personally grapple with the dichotomy of space as an asset class instead of a human mission.
I read your main point as participation > spectating. In art, it's a POV composition bringing a viewer in, with an original artist's POV as the idea itself, all next to an engineering concept.
It was interesting you bring up Chesley Bonestell in particular. I think what made him extra special in his time period is his ability to imagine landscapes that we didn't even imagine having the technology to show us yet. We were at the edge of even KNOWING at all what the landscape looked like (beyond what he could calculate with the position of the light etc.) And most of them were painted before the moon landing. I think his paintings (and many others) are the WHY that inspired the people creating the technology-- as they strived for humanity get that view personally.
And, sidebar, I think it's particularly cool he was also involved in the Golden Gate bridge, a landmark here at home.
Re: "both of them talk to ordinary people as future participants rather than spectators":
Today, we have real photos from the Moon, Mars, Venus. We can generally extrapolate what others might look like (and unfortunately AI will churn that out endlessly), so the romanticism of "a persons idea and point of view" for the place alone is gone.
You probably won't find many casual fans of fine art nowadays. Heck, even printed magazines are rare. What remains dominant in the culture now I think are interesting interpersonal stories set in space, e.g. For All Mankind, Project Hail Mary, IMAX documentaries (A Beautiful Planet, Deep Sky) etc. These do get us to care because the story is told from the point of view of regular people we can understand, living human emotions with space as an interesting setting or goal.
Like you said, I can understand a feeling the James Webb turns out pointless beautiful images because CONTEXT matters. I saw these images in an IMAX theatre. I felt dwarfed and small, and the images gaves me an incredible sense of awe and smallness at the universe. When the regular person sees it on their phone... I can understand that feeling. Some people who help make that better are ex-scientist and engineer space communicators who give it some context.
Re: "This is about as far from the original promise of spaceflight (a public mission, collectively owned, addressed to everyone) as it is possible to get."
I feel MoonDAO is an interesting example of steps towards changing the core framework by involving everyday people in voting on which projects get funded - https://moondao.com/. Although again it is veiled in the dichotomy of being built on crypto, which is not necessarily as accessible as the community dreams it to be.
Anyway. Love this conversation you are starting. Kudos. I might write more thoughts later.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! On moonDAO, I went to a couple of their early meetings and it was very much crypto outsiders trying to grift on a loose SpaceX association (perhaps it has now changed). Missing among all of this in the industry is a genuine passion and curiosity for people, community and Earth (not with most engineers, but certainly leadership). And the further the vision gets from Earth, the more apparent it seems that there’s just nothing there. Plus the recent dominant vision for space via SpaceX was so successful that it was repurposed for political and financial gain for the few, at the cost of the many, and it will genuinely take the industry a while to recover from that.
Gotcha. I think they have gotten better since then. I joined as a crypto outsider, got to learn about how it works, get involved in interesting projects and even got funding to go to a conference that helped me a lot with my business.
I agree that it will be sad to see investor slop overrun space discourse but this article seems to miss a burning optimism felt by those who grew up in the institutional era and were very pessimistic about spaceflight 10-15 years ago
Among my peers, 10-15 years ago there was peak excitement! VC was staring to come into the industry in a huge way, Elon hadn’t fried his brain yet, Mars was getting more attention than ever… so perhaps we have different friends! Those promises have largely fallen away. VC investment led to SPACs and then companies collapsed. Elon ketamined his brain out. Mars was “postponed”. SpaceX became a holding company for Grok. NASA has been massively downsized. Launch startups put down their tools and space stations disappeared.
Also the Ted example- Jennifer was on the VIPER team, and her project was canceled a couple of years ago…
Maybe there are still some super motivated and excited people. I haven’t come across them in a while!
The VC perspective is interesting here -- from a hardware PoV, we are much much much closer to Mars (and obviously the Moon) than we were 10-15 years ago, while many promising(?) but ultimately dubious startups died between 2020 & 2023ish.
Its important to remember that the first reuse of a rocket* was in 2017, now we have 3-4 reusable rockets, including one fully reusable, which genuinely is the holy grail of rocketry. Starship has a ways to go, but IMO its looking good. SpaceX is a for profit company - Paul Wooster (Spx Chief Mars engineer) emphasized that when I talked with him. Someone else will certainly have to pay to go to Mars, but people (government) will.
I was too young to know this, but I suspect that if you asked industry 'experts' in 2010 when humanity would get a super heavy reusable rocket they'd say 2040+. I'm certainly biased on this issue as the author of two papers on how transformative Starship is, one published, and one in the process:
A couple of your points resonated with something I’ve been writing about recently and on a few other levels.
I put some points into AI based on a couple of thinkers / books / a documentary that struck me as relevant and it has elaborated better than I can on. Friday evening 🫣
I also totally get the irony that because AI wrote it you may have absolutely no interest in reading this !!! 🤣
The Structural Analogy: Who’s in the Room
This pattern of breakdown appears across several fields right now:
• Digital health / EHR design: Systems like Epic were built primarily to satisfy billing and compliance requirements, not clinical workflow. Clinicians became spectators of “digital transformation” keynotes that bore no relationship to what they experienced at the terminal. Patients were further still from the design process. The content (glossy conference demos, ministerial announcements) was decoupled from the engineering, and neither was accountable to the end user. This is identical to the space problem: you get impressive-looking content instead of a credible plan
• Climate communication: Extraordinary imagery — calving glaciers, coral bleaching — but rarely paired with institutions that have real skin in the game and can say here is the specific plan and here is your role in it. The IPCC report becomes dentist-ceiling content
• AI governance: The people building frontier models and the people explaining why they matter (ethicists, policy communicators) are increasingly separated, with neither fully accountable to the public as future participants in an AI-shaped world
• Public health: COVID illustrated this directly — communications worked better when scientists were visibly in the same room as policymakers, answerable in real time. When that arrangement collapsed, so did credibility
McLuhan: The Medium Produces the Spectator
McLuhan’s argument is that the medium itself — not its content — determines the structure of human relationships around it. The Webb telescope images are distributed through a medium (social platforms, institutional press releases, curated content pipelines) that structurally produces passivity. The medium’s message, in McLuhan’s sense, is: you are an audience for this. Bonestell’s paintings were embedded in a different medium — Collier’s magazine spreads anchored by engineers, public lectures, congressional testimony — a medium whose inherent structure said you are a future participant in this. The problem isn’t which pictures to show; it’s that the current medium for communicating science and public ambition is architecturally incapable of producing the accountability relationship the passage describes.[mmg-1 +2]
Berger: Who Controls the Gaze
Berger’s argument in Ways of Seeing is that images carry power structures within them — that how we are positioned to see something determines our relationship to it. The same Webb photograph means something entirely different depending on whether it appears in a democratic forum where a credible institution says this is our shared project, or on the ceiling of a dentist’s waiting room. Berger would note that the image doesn’t change; the social arrangement around it determines whether the viewer is a subject with agency or an object of flattery. The passage makes the same point in political terms: beautiful images produced by institutions with no credible plan position the viewer as a consumer of wonder, not a citizen with a stake.[gradesaver]
De Zengotita: Content as the Flattered Self
De Zengotita’s Mediated argues that media saturation has produced what he calls the “flattered self” — every representation is custom-tailored to make us feel that it was made for us, which paradoxically dissolves genuine engagement into performance. Webb images become content in precisely this sense: they are spectacular, they momentarily flatter our sense of wonder, they make no demands. We perform being impressed. De Zengotita’s “method actor” — someone who performs authentic experience rather than having it — maps directly onto how people engage with space content now. Bonestell’s paintings made a demand: decide whether you believe this is possible, and whether you want it. That demand is what content structurally cannot make, because the moment an image requires a decision rather than a reaction, it stops being flattering.[filmsforaction +2]
The EHR Case in Depth
Your instinct on EHR is sound and not a simplification. The design failure of electronic health records is structurally isomorphic to the space problem:
• The “story” (vendor demos, ministerial digital-health strategies, conference keynotes) is produced by people accountable to procurement and compliance
• The “engineering” (the actual system) is built to satisfy billing codes and regulatory requirements, not clinical cognition
• Clinicians are consulted performatively at best, and patients almost never
• The result is systems that look like innovation from outside and feel like obstruction from inside
The fix the passage gestures toward — getting the vision-people and the engineering-people in the same room, answerable to each other and to ordinary people as participants — is exactly what co-design methodologies in health IT propose but rarely achieve structurally. It’s not a UX problem. It’s a procurement and governance problem: who has skin in the game when the system fails at 2am in an emergency department.
What ties all three thinkers together here is a single insight the passage arrives at independently: the arrangement precedes the message. McLuhan says the medium shapes perception before content arrives; Berger says the social frame around an image determines its meaning; de Zengotita says saturated representation flatters rather than obligates. The passage adds: and when the arrangement involves no mutual accountability, the only thing any medium can produce is content.
You nailed it with the Jeff Bezos observation. Why are they still dreaming? The entire wealth of the world has flowed through these people and not even a public library to show for it (is that even true?), a grand marble construction, or a new city laid out to hubris.
"This sounds like a petty observation but I mean it very seriously! Bezos and Musk are men whose imaginative lives were shaped almost entirely by a handful of science fiction novels read before adolescence. Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, the usual. And who never moved past them. They are not readers, they are not curious about Earth’s own strangeness, its history, its literature, the depth of what’s already here. They find this planet boring, which is why they want to leave it, and that boredom shows in everything they build. Their visions of space are thin because their experience of life is thin."
This line sticks with me. Tolkien's work was informed by a lifetime of philology. Writing The Hobbit itself was a sidequest to his main goal of trying to explore a form of English divested from Norman and Latin influence. He had a deep love of languages and carved a world out of this mass of academic material and conjecture. This mission was deeply entwined with Tolkien's personal life and era, and this sincerity is why his work remains iconic. A space age Tolkien would take the concept of a Martian or Lunar colony and ask how this informs the settlers' sense of self, their relationship to the land, and how this would be borne out after generations detached from Earth. Who are we (or who must we become) in a world which is hostile to life itself? Discussions around space exploration today seem to be couched in executing the great technical achievements, finding volunteer colonists, and hoping to find an economic rationale for it all along the way.
I think the absence of a truly authentic ideological goal which has moral alignment with today's culture is why so much space talk fails to catch the public imagination.
Sinéad, this was an incredible read. The five-eras framework is going to be stuck in my head. I spent 15 years in retail strategy and came out caring less about consumerism than when I started. Something about being inside the machinery makes you see through the packaging. I get that same energy from how you write about space, although I don't share your detachment from it. I actually love space. But I get why you feel that way after being inside the industry this long.
Just read a piece on China's moon program from another Substack writer and the contrast is wild. Slow, methodical, boring, but the plan and the execution never separated. Maybe that's the real race versus whatever we're doing over here.
Question though: curious about your opinion on helium-3. If there's a resource on the Moon that could reshape energy (or motives) back on Earth, does that give ordinary people actual skin in the game? Or is it just another narrative waiting to be sold? I keep going back and forth on it.
Very well written and poignant take.
I personally grapple with the dichotomy of space as an asset class instead of a human mission.
I read your main point as participation > spectating. In art, it's a POV composition bringing a viewer in, with an original artist's POV as the idea itself, all next to an engineering concept.
It was interesting you bring up Chesley Bonestell in particular. I think what made him extra special in his time period is his ability to imagine landscapes that we didn't even imagine having the technology to show us yet. We were at the edge of even KNOWING at all what the landscape looked like (beyond what he could calculate with the position of the light etc.) And most of them were painted before the moon landing. I think his paintings (and many others) are the WHY that inspired the people creating the technology-- as they strived for humanity get that view personally.
And, sidebar, I think it's particularly cool he was also involved in the Golden Gate bridge, a landmark here at home.
Re: "both of them talk to ordinary people as future participants rather than spectators":
Today, we have real photos from the Moon, Mars, Venus. We can generally extrapolate what others might look like (and unfortunately AI will churn that out endlessly), so the romanticism of "a persons idea and point of view" for the place alone is gone.
You probably won't find many casual fans of fine art nowadays. Heck, even printed magazines are rare. What remains dominant in the culture now I think are interesting interpersonal stories set in space, e.g. For All Mankind, Project Hail Mary, IMAX documentaries (A Beautiful Planet, Deep Sky) etc. These do get us to care because the story is told from the point of view of regular people we can understand, living human emotions with space as an interesting setting or goal.
Like you said, I can understand a feeling the James Webb turns out pointless beautiful images because CONTEXT matters. I saw these images in an IMAX theatre. I felt dwarfed and small, and the images gaves me an incredible sense of awe and smallness at the universe. When the regular person sees it on their phone... I can understand that feeling. Some people who help make that better are ex-scientist and engineer space communicators who give it some context.
Re: "This is about as far from the original promise of spaceflight (a public mission, collectively owned, addressed to everyone) as it is possible to get."
I feel MoonDAO is an interesting example of steps towards changing the core framework by involving everyday people in voting on which projects get funded - https://moondao.com/. Although again it is veiled in the dichotomy of being built on crypto, which is not necessarily as accessible as the community dreams it to be.
Anyway. Love this conversation you are starting. Kudos. I might write more thoughts later.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! On moonDAO, I went to a couple of their early meetings and it was very much crypto outsiders trying to grift on a loose SpaceX association (perhaps it has now changed). Missing among all of this in the industry is a genuine passion and curiosity for people, community and Earth (not with most engineers, but certainly leadership). And the further the vision gets from Earth, the more apparent it seems that there’s just nothing there. Plus the recent dominant vision for space via SpaceX was so successful that it was repurposed for political and financial gain for the few, at the cost of the many, and it will genuinely take the industry a while to recover from that.
Gotcha. I think they have gotten better since then. I joined as a crypto outsider, got to learn about how it works, get involved in interesting projects and even got funding to go to a conference that helped me a lot with my business.
Re: SpaceX - yeah true
I agree that it will be sad to see investor slop overrun space discourse but this article seems to miss a burning optimism felt by those who grew up in the institutional era and were very pessimistic about spaceflight 10-15 years ago
Eg this NASA scientist is pretty excited:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li7PsYiwxVc&t
Among my peers, 10-15 years ago there was peak excitement! VC was staring to come into the industry in a huge way, Elon hadn’t fried his brain yet, Mars was getting more attention than ever… so perhaps we have different friends! Those promises have largely fallen away. VC investment led to SPACs and then companies collapsed. Elon ketamined his brain out. Mars was “postponed”. SpaceX became a holding company for Grok. NASA has been massively downsized. Launch startups put down their tools and space stations disappeared.
Also the Ted example- Jennifer was on the VIPER team, and her project was canceled a couple of years ago…
Maybe there are still some super motivated and excited people. I haven’t come across them in a while!
The VC perspective is interesting here -- from a hardware PoV, we are much much much closer to Mars (and obviously the Moon) than we were 10-15 years ago, while many promising(?) but ultimately dubious startups died between 2020 & 2023ish.
Its important to remember that the first reuse of a rocket* was in 2017, now we have 3-4 reusable rockets, including one fully reusable, which genuinely is the holy grail of rocketry. Starship has a ways to go, but IMO its looking good. SpaceX is a for profit company - Paul Wooster (Spx Chief Mars engineer) emphasized that when I talked with him. Someone else will certainly have to pay to go to Mars, but people (government) will.
I was too young to know this, but I suspect that if you asked industry 'experts' in 2010 when humanity would get a super heavy reusable rocket they'd say 2040+. I'm certainly biased on this issue as the author of two papers on how transformative Starship is, one published, and one in the process:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-00565-7
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401072856_Starship_as_an_Enabler_for_Faster_More_Ambitious_Missions_to_Europa
But I think we are in for a wild wild.
*Ignoring the Space Shuttle - a very long story
Wordplay with NASADAQ was right there…🤣
Shiiiiiit. You’re always ten steps ahead of me 😂
🤣 more like once in a blue moon😵💫 🚀🌕
A couple of your points resonated with something I’ve been writing about recently and on a few other levels.
I put some points into AI based on a couple of thinkers / books / a documentary that struck me as relevant and it has elaborated better than I can on. Friday evening 🫣
I also totally get the irony that because AI wrote it you may have absolutely no interest in reading this !!! 🤣
The Structural Analogy: Who’s in the Room
This pattern of breakdown appears across several fields right now:
• Digital health / EHR design: Systems like Epic were built primarily to satisfy billing and compliance requirements, not clinical workflow. Clinicians became spectators of “digital transformation” keynotes that bore no relationship to what they experienced at the terminal. Patients were further still from the design process. The content (glossy conference demos, ministerial announcements) was decoupled from the engineering, and neither was accountable to the end user. This is identical to the space problem: you get impressive-looking content instead of a credible plan
• Climate communication: Extraordinary imagery — calving glaciers, coral bleaching — but rarely paired with institutions that have real skin in the game and can say here is the specific plan and here is your role in it. The IPCC report becomes dentist-ceiling content
• AI governance: The people building frontier models and the people explaining why they matter (ethicists, policy communicators) are increasingly separated, with neither fully accountable to the public as future participants in an AI-shaped world
• Public health: COVID illustrated this directly — communications worked better when scientists were visibly in the same room as policymakers, answerable in real time. When that arrangement collapsed, so did credibility
McLuhan: The Medium Produces the Spectator
McLuhan’s argument is that the medium itself — not its content — determines the structure of human relationships around it. The Webb telescope images are distributed through a medium (social platforms, institutional press releases, curated content pipelines) that structurally produces passivity. The medium’s message, in McLuhan’s sense, is: you are an audience for this. Bonestell’s paintings were embedded in a different medium — Collier’s magazine spreads anchored by engineers, public lectures, congressional testimony — a medium whose inherent structure said you are a future participant in this. The problem isn’t which pictures to show; it’s that the current medium for communicating science and public ambition is architecturally incapable of producing the accountability relationship the passage describes.[mmg-1 +2]
Berger: Who Controls the Gaze
Berger’s argument in Ways of Seeing is that images carry power structures within them — that how we are positioned to see something determines our relationship to it. The same Webb photograph means something entirely different depending on whether it appears in a democratic forum where a credible institution says this is our shared project, or on the ceiling of a dentist’s waiting room. Berger would note that the image doesn’t change; the social arrangement around it determines whether the viewer is a subject with agency or an object of flattery. The passage makes the same point in political terms: beautiful images produced by institutions with no credible plan position the viewer as a consumer of wonder, not a citizen with a stake.[gradesaver]
De Zengotita: Content as the Flattered Self
De Zengotita’s Mediated argues that media saturation has produced what he calls the “flattered self” — every representation is custom-tailored to make us feel that it was made for us, which paradoxically dissolves genuine engagement into performance. Webb images become content in precisely this sense: they are spectacular, they momentarily flatter our sense of wonder, they make no demands. We perform being impressed. De Zengotita’s “method actor” — someone who performs authentic experience rather than having it — maps directly onto how people engage with space content now. Bonestell’s paintings made a demand: decide whether you believe this is possible, and whether you want it. That demand is what content structurally cannot make, because the moment an image requires a decision rather than a reaction, it stops being flattering.[filmsforaction +2]
The EHR Case in Depth
Your instinct on EHR is sound and not a simplification. The design failure of electronic health records is structurally isomorphic to the space problem:
• The “story” (vendor demos, ministerial digital-health strategies, conference keynotes) is produced by people accountable to procurement and compliance
• The “engineering” (the actual system) is built to satisfy billing codes and regulatory requirements, not clinical cognition
• Clinicians are consulted performatively at best, and patients almost never
• The result is systems that look like innovation from outside and feel like obstruction from inside
The fix the passage gestures toward — getting the vision-people and the engineering-people in the same room, answerable to each other and to ordinary people as participants — is exactly what co-design methodologies in health IT propose but rarely achieve structurally. It’s not a UX problem. It’s a procurement and governance problem: who has skin in the game when the system fails at 2am in an emergency department.
What ties all three thinkers together here is a single insight the passage arrives at independently: the arrangement precedes the message. McLuhan says the medium shapes perception before content arrives; Berger says the social frame around an image determines its meaning; de Zengotita says saturated representation flatters rather than obligates. The passage adds: and when the arrangement involves no mutual accountability, the only thing any medium can produce is content.
You nailed it with the Jeff Bezos observation. Why are they still dreaming? The entire wealth of the world has flowed through these people and not even a public library to show for it (is that even true?), a grand marble construction, or a new city laid out to hubris.
What's wrong with a legacy?
"This sounds like a petty observation but I mean it very seriously! Bezos and Musk are men whose imaginative lives were shaped almost entirely by a handful of science fiction novels read before adolescence. Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, the usual. And who never moved past them. They are not readers, they are not curious about Earth’s own strangeness, its history, its literature, the depth of what’s already here. They find this planet boring, which is why they want to leave it, and that boredom shows in everything they build. Their visions of space are thin because their experience of life is thin."
This line sticks with me. Tolkien's work was informed by a lifetime of philology. Writing The Hobbit itself was a sidequest to his main goal of trying to explore a form of English divested from Norman and Latin influence. He had a deep love of languages and carved a world out of this mass of academic material and conjecture. This mission was deeply entwined with Tolkien's personal life and era, and this sincerity is why his work remains iconic. A space age Tolkien would take the concept of a Martian or Lunar colony and ask how this informs the settlers' sense of self, their relationship to the land, and how this would be borne out after generations detached from Earth. Who are we (or who must we become) in a world which is hostile to life itself? Discussions around space exploration today seem to be couched in executing the great technical achievements, finding volunteer colonists, and hoping to find an economic rationale for it all along the way.
I think the absence of a truly authentic ideological goal which has moral alignment with today's culture is why so much space talk fails to catch the public imagination.
Sinéad, this was an incredible read. The five-eras framework is going to be stuck in my head. I spent 15 years in retail strategy and came out caring less about consumerism than when I started. Something about being inside the machinery makes you see through the packaging. I get that same energy from how you write about space, although I don't share your detachment from it. I actually love space. But I get why you feel that way after being inside the industry this long.
Just read a piece on China's moon program from another Substack writer and the contrast is wild. Slow, methodical, boring, but the plan and the execution never separated. Maybe that's the real race versus whatever we're doing over here.
Question though: curious about your opinion on helium-3. If there's a resource on the Moon that could reshape energy (or motives) back on Earth, does that give ordinary people actual skin in the game? Or is it just another narrative waiting to be sold? I keep going back and forth on it.