The Astronauts & The Spies - Part I

Exploring godhood through boundary pushing rocket-men

Part of our continuing ‘flâneuring’ series. This one is from an older tweet thread I did where I explored what it means to navigate effortlessly through our twisted, sinewy world — and the personality archetypes that are most poised to win.

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You Gotta Have The Right Stuff

IF YOU WANT to understand the sheer chutzpah of the individuals involved in the space race between the US and the Soviets, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is the adrenaline-inducing account.

It captures with immense vitality the accounts of the individuals who pushed the frontiers of space, and the boundaries of human potential.

In brilliant language, Tom Wolfe writes:

“A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”

These early astronauts were risk takers in a way you and I can't comprehend.

The Mercury Seven astronauts

In an interview¹ Buzz Aldrin one said:

“Those who risk their lives to accomplish great ends, who have a vision of something larger than themselves, lift all of our lives to a higher level. All too often we forget that there can be no meaningful success without the opportunity to fail.”

IN THE EARLY chapters of the Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe details the antics of Chuck Yeager, ace test pilot and the first person to break the sound barrier in level flight. When he was chosen to be the test pilot for the X-1, he kept pushing the envelope²:

“The only trouble they had with Yeager was in holding him back. On his first powered flight in the X-1 he immediately executed an unauthorized zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel, then stood the ship on its tail and went up to .85 Mach in a vertical climb, also unauthorized. On subsequent flights, at speeds between .85 Mach and .9 Mach, Yeager ran into most known airfoil problems—loss of elevator, aileron, and rudder control, heavy trim pressures, Dutch rolls, pitching and buffeting, the lot—yet was convinced, after edging over .9 Mach, that this would all get better, not worse, as you reached Mach 1.”

This dedication to the craft — to master the domain, to master technology and to probe at its depths — is something we should learn to embody.

Can we consider these astronauts to be a personality archetype? Maybe like Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehogs? Surely these hedgehogs are ‘roided up’ in a way that makes them have nerves of steel, a thirst for new frontiers.

Here’s a fun question: should great companies also have these Astronaut types in their midst? I’m curious what @honam’s thoughts are here — he once made a list of industry titan hedgehogs³ that fit my criteria too.

I spent a fair amount of time last month studying the semiconductor industry (which explains this piece), hence my next sentence: ASML strikes me as one of those rare companies that possesses the authority to match those of early Astronauts. Their business model and their string of acquisitions tells me they are entirely focused on advancing the cutting edge of technical superiority in the realm of optical wizardry - the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography market.

Where Chuck Yeager and the X-1 team worked to break the sound barrier (Mach 1), Martin van den Brink and his team at ASML have pushed harder and harder into the unknown - until they could write with light⁴.

But is being an Astronaut enough?

As Above, So Below

READING ABOUT THE exploits of the Mercury Seven and the early test pilots, we get to see a specific characteristic of the human condition come alive. The sort of tale that you only hear about in myth, or in old histories by the historians of antiquity like Plutarch, Herodotus and Thucydides.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmós⁵ — a feeling of ecstasy that happens when you are possessed by a higher power, compelled to undertake brave, otherworldly deeds. The Sufis had a word for it too: jazbah, which is a similar yearning — an attraction that can align us towards majestic things.

Evan Armstrong is right: “to work in technology is to dally in godhood”:

We fly as Hermes with our rocket ships, know as Athena with our large language models, hold power like Zeus with our nuclear reactors.

But I believe having the astronaut’s ecstasy and drive to push is only one part of the blueprint.

There is one other personality archetype we must consider. The Spy.

Like the Astronauts, Spies are also ambitious - but they exhibit their ambition in a networked way. Where Astronauts look up to the skies, Spies focus on the earth, laying the groundwork through their vast connections.

But I won’t go into that now. Wait around for Part II⁶, where I explore what that looks like in practice, and how we can combine the best of the Astronaut and the Spy.

1. The Explorers Journal - quoted in https://avenuemagazine.com/tales-from-the-explorers-club/. 

2. Here’s what the ‘envelope’ actually means: “The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first “pushing the outside of the envelope” was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports” - Tom Wolfe

3. Ho Nam’s list of industry hedgehogs (which embody the best of Astronauts): Scott Cook (Intuit), Michael Dell (Dell), Ray Dolby (Dolby), Dick Egan (EMC), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Dave Filo (Yahoo), Paul Galvin (Motorola), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jack Gifford (Maxim), Jim Goodnight (SAS), Andy Grove (Intel), Bill Hewlett (HP), Irwin Jacobs (Qualcomm), Steve Jobs (Apple), Jim Morgan (Applied Materials), Gordon Moore (Intel), Ken Olsen (DEC), David Packard (HP), Hasso Plattner (SAP), Ray Stata (Analog Devices), Bob Swanson (Linear Technology), Robert Swanson (Genentech), Bernie Vonderschmidt (Xilinx), John Warnock (Adobe), Tom Watson (IBM), Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica, Wolfram-Alpha)

Isaiah Berlin’s list of literary hedgehogs is also something to marvel at: “The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.”

4. @mariogabriele at The Generalist has a very nice essay on ASML everyone should read.

5. See here for more detail.

6. I’m almost done drafting Part II - I swear!