(thread) The idea that going to the Moon was expensive, a big show that led nowhere, gave us nothing but Tang and Velcro — that's all silliness, even if it is the conventional wisdom. We misunderstand Apollo, almost completely.

Why don’t bank deposits go through on the weekends are the computer systems home with their families?

Gwynne Shotwell rang the Nasdaq bell yesterday as SpaceX went public for the first time, raising $75 billion, more than double the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. She was employee #11 when the company had never launched a rocket. Twenty-four years later, she runs a $2 trillion company that launches one every two to three days. Before SpaceX, she spent over a decade at a government space research firm in California. She joined SpaceX in August 2002, three months after the company was founded, as VP of Business Development. She had engineering and applied mathematics degrees from Northwestern. The job was to sell launch contracts for a rocket company that had not yet reached orbit. She sold them anyway. By 2008, three back-to-back Falcon 1 failures had burned through the company's cash, leaving SpaceX weeks from bankruptcy. Shotwell walked into NASA and closed a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station, a research lab the size of a football field orbiting 400 kilometers above Earth. That deal saved the company. Musk made her President and COO, the person responsible for making his ambitions actually work. What she built from there: SpaceX now completes around 165 rocket launches a year, more than every other rocket program on the planet combined, with roughly 82% of the global commercial launch market. Putting one kilogram into orbit on a Falcon 9 costs about $2,720 today. The Space Shuttle charged $54,500 for the same kilogram. That 95% price drop is what opened space to everyone outside of governments. Shotwell spent two decades making it routine. Starlink, the satellite internet service she helped build, now has more than 9 million active subscribers. It drives most of SpaceX's estimated $15 billion in 2025 revenue. The company holds over $22 billion in government contracts from NASA, the Pentagon, and the Space Force, including an $843 million deal to bring down the space station itself when it retires. Yesterday at the Nasdaq, she told the crowd: "Today, we make history again, and we have a history of making history." Forbes shows her net worth at $2.1 billion, up $140 million on the day.

7/ Every 1 hour of spaceflight required 1 million hours of work on Earth. 1 million hours = the entire work lives of 10 people. Every hour of Apollo flight required work equal to the entire careers of 10 people on Earth. So not quite the same as organizing martial arts fighters.

6/ Going to the Moon in 100 months — that's what NASA & Apollo did — was literally the hardest thing humans have ever done outside of war time. Every 1 hour of Apollo spaceflight required 1 million hours of work back on Earth. Think about that for a moment. —>

5/ Founding a martial arts fighting league? Well, businesses get started every day. It's fine to appreciate & admire that. But this kind of comparison needs to be called out — because it wildly overstates something relatively routine — UFC — and trivializes Apollo. —>

4/ It took 400,000 people, working with furious intensity across American society, to make the Moon landings happen. That's more people working on Apollo than were fighting in Vietnam for much of the war. —>

3/ Founding a mixed martial arts fighting business, & flying to the Moon, aren't remotely the same. Going to the Moon was literally impossible in May 1961 when JFK proposed it in a speech to Congress. There were no spacesuits, no rockets, no flight computers to do the job. —>

2/ Here's the Rubio quote comparing Apollo & the UFC — scheduled improbably to have a fight on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow: 'When President Kennedy announced that we were going to put a man on the moon and return them safely to the earth, no one thought that was possible, and we did it. 'We are a nation founded on doing what no one else dared to do, and no one else aspired to do. 'And at some level, that’s what this whole company, what UFC has been.' —>

Secretary of State Marco Rubio just said that the founding of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship)—the mixed martial arts league—is similar in challenge & impact to the US going to the Moon with Apollo. No, it's not. —>

This is true. Musk & SpaceX have launched thousands of satellites into orbit. But they've done so selfishly and cavalierly. Pure capitalism, with no concern for a larger 'space society.' In astronomy, 'the greatest resource is the dark sky.' forbes.com/sites/startswitha…

2/ Click through to see the original prototype of the pocket calculator — which looks very much like what we all used in the 1970s, 80s, 90s. (I have one on my desk to this day.) How cool is that? Theoretical physics. And desktop-scribbling practicality, in the same guy. —>

Jack Kilby is 'co-inventor' of the integrated circuit — the computer chip on which modern life depends as much as air or water. Kilby was at Texas Instruments. Got a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. But he *also* invented the pocket calculator! —> americanhistory.si.edu/colle…

SpaceX sold 555 million shares in its IPO. Today, over 517 million shares were traded. Nearly an entire IPO's worth of stock changed hands in a single day. $SPCX