So another private rocket has turned itself into a firework over Florida. Blue Origin’s latest offering decided that the sky was not its destination but merely a backdrop for a very expensive explosion. And now, British safety regulators want data. How quaint. How utterly, delightfully Victorian.
Let us pause to appreciate the spectacle. A machine costing hundreds of millions of dollars, designed with the finest engineering minds money can buy, disintegrates into a cloud of debris and burning fuel. The cameras capture it. The internet applauds. And somewhere, a bureaucrat in a grey office demands a spreadsheet. This is progress, apparently.
We have convinced ourselves that space travel is our manifest destiny. That Mars is a backup drive for human civilisation. Yet every time a rocket fails, we are reminded that the universe is not impressed by our ambition. It is a cold, indifferent void. And our little machines, our tiny candles against the dark, often gutter out.
The irony is rich. Blue Origin, the poster child of privatised space exploration, suffers a failure in full public view. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, once spoke of a future where heavy industry is moved off Earth. Perhaps he should start with the heavy industry of actually reaching orbit reliably. The explosion is not just a technical failure; it is a philosophical one. It exposes the arrogance of assuming that government oversight is a hindrance rather than a safeguard. British regulators, with their demands for data, are not killjoys. They are the sober adults in a room full of drunk visionaries.
But let us not stop at NASA or Bezos. This is a parable for our age. We are addicted to the idea of disruption, of burning the old rules to build something new. Yet the old rules were written in blood. They were hard-won lessons from a century of industrial accidents, from the Hindenburg to the Challenger. And we discard them because we believe ourselves smarter, faster, more nimble than our predecessors. We are not. We are merely more reckless.
Consider the parallels to the Roman Empire in its decline. The Romans built aqueducts, roads, and a legal system that lasted a thousand years. They did not achieve this by ignoring safety or demanding that the gods work on a startup timeline. They understood that discipline and caution were the foundations of lasting achievement. We, by contrast, celebrate the entrepreneur who throws caution to the wind. And when his ship sinks, we demand not an investigation but a new boat. Faster this time.
The explosion in Florida is a symptom of a larger cultural malaise. Our intellectual elite, our tech barons, have convinced themselves that they are exempt from history. That the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of regulatory committees do not apply to them. They are wrong. Rockets still explode. Empires still fall. And the British regulators, with their tedious requests for data, are the last line of defence against our own stupidity.
Yes, let them have the data. Let them have every last piece. Because if we are to reach the stars, we must first learn to walk without collapsing in a heap of burning metal. And if that means fewer dramatic explosions and more boring paperwork, so be it. The Romans would understand. And so should we.
