Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Corbin Bartold. Corbin is the Internet Policy Council and Director of Appellate Litigation at Tech Freedom, an organization that examines the policy

and legal questions raised by technological change. He writes regularly for a City Journal, and his work has also appeared

in publications such as Reason, The Bowork, Vaughan Liberty, and other outputs. Corbyn also hosts

Tech Freedom's Tech Policy podcast. Today, though, we're going to discuss his recent essay for

City Journal. Do we still have the

right stuff, which appears in our autumn issue and describes barriers to American space exploration

and innovation and our need to compete in the new 21st century space race? So, Corbyn,

thanks very much for joining us. Great to be here.

So you describe our present era in this essay as the space industry's second golden age. New rockets

and their designers, you know, I think it's fair to say, and this is something you note in the essay, they don't

get the kind of fanfare given earlier astronauts and space engineers, but, you know, this whole

kind of initiative holds enormous potential to transform humanity's relationship to space,

to the extraterrestrial world. So I wonder if you could just give

us a brief overview of where things stand with the modern space industry. Some people follow

what SpaceX is up to, so perhaps you can update us on where they are. Who are its major players? What significant innovations

have they come up with? So that first golden age was very geopolitical. We all know the space

race between the Soviet Union and the United States. And to simplify it only slightly,

we wanted to get footprints and flags on the moon.

And we succeeded.

That was a technological, marvel, amazing stuff.

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