The Suez Canal, Spaceflight and Infrastructure Are All Similar or At Least They Should Be.

This past week the breaking news has been that a large container ship has been stuck in the Suez Canal. This canal serves as a major shipping lane for a large amount of the world’s commerce, about 10% to be exact. With this shipping lane obstructed, the supply chain for delivering goods across the world was interrupted and it highlighted a vulnerability in our modern supply chain system, centralization. While listening to a podcast called “All In” this past week, I heard an interesting point being made about our “modern” industrial world that I thought would be important to touch on especially as our representatives in Washington, DC begin to plan and assess an infrastructure bill. Allow me to explain.

Prior to the modern industrial revolution, our technology and efforts towards manufacturing, distribution and sales were on a local scale and often took individual efforts to manually make and craft our goods. Goods, that would then be taken to the local market. With the invention of machines like the cotton gin and others, our manufacturing began to grow and become larger in scale, which would allow our distribution and supply to have greater and greater reach. Eventually, reaching a point where we would be placing items aboard a large container ship and sending them around the world. The problem with our current state within the industrial revolution is a lack of redundancies which would protect this centralized supply. Should something in the supply chain or factory go awry, the entire system is broken. This same design has taken place in our power supply, and many other public systems and supply chains. Think about it, currently if a power plant goes down the entire town loses power. If the Suez Canal gets stopped up, the entire shipping lane gets put on hold.

While decentralization is currently being popularized by Bitcoin and blockchain technology in the economic and tech world, the idea would work very similarly in more physical applications. Instead of having one power plant supply, if we could enable each household to have its own solar panels and backup battery, then an issue with one house would not cause the entire block to go dark. Again this could be applied to our shipping and supply chains too.

So where does spaceflight come in? NASA and the original space projects were funded by the federal government with ambitious goals set to be the first to space and then eventually the first to land on the Moon. The outcomes of the space race may not seem like it had major implications but the technology developed along the way was beneficial in demonstrating the possibilities for other technologies to incubate and grow. Now, it is no surprise when a satellite gets launched or a news network beams their signal into space and then around the world, but that technology had to be developed and built out at some point. This was largely thanks to the space race. With an infrastructure bill being planned, I think it is important we address the true potential of the bill instead of the same old funding of projects we have seen in the past. According to an article in Vox, “President Joe Biden is preparing to unveil his ‘Build Back Better’ plan Wednesday during a public address in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The White House discussed an approximately $3 trillion infrastructure package on a call last week with Senate Democrats, but the price tag and final details are still under discussion”. While the details of the bill are still unknown there are a few things that I would like to see come out of it.

I think we should take infrastructure spending by the federal government not as an opportunity to repair roads and bridges, which is what it is always touted as by legislators, but rather to fund new technology the same way we did with the space race. Currently, we are relying on private industry to solve problems and develop technology. For example, Elon Musk’s Boring company which aims to solve traffic in highly congested cities. The problem with relying on private industry is that it often sees technological development and progress as too expensive to outright pursue. If we had waited on private industry in the space race we would have fallen way behind as the funding necessary to tackle such a project is just not readily available in the private sector. However, if we use our federal spending like this upcoming infrastructure bill to help push new technologies out, we can then let private industry fill in the gaps as the developments become cheaper and more achievable. High speed rails, electric trucking fleets, better electrical systems with redundancies on our grid, these are all technologies that could be developed by federal resources and then built out by private industry. This way of developing new technology is not new, we often get a large leap in technological advance after we have been to war or mobilized our nation towards a common goal, it just hasn’t happened very recently. Implementing decentralized supply chains and manufacturing would help alleviate our all or nothing supply chains that we have today. These have been most recently exposed by the Suez Canal blockage and the Texas power grid issues. Its time to take our domestic development in technology and infrastructure seriously, and I think this upcoming bill has the opportunity to do so if executed correctly.