Newsletter 052

Howdy, folks, from Team PA. This week marks our 52nd print and, thus, our 1-YR anniversary with you all. 🙏 🙏 🙏

For 52 weeks, Ryan refused to let us put an AI-rendered version of himself on these pages. This one-year anniversary finally earned the exception — and one gets to grace this edition!

It’s been a HUGE year for the movement — for the industrial economy, for progress in the physical world, and for hard pursuits everywhere — fittingly culminating in SpaceX’s S-1 yesterday. All of this forward motion is really thanks to the work of you all.

👇 Today, we’re celebrating, reflecting, and also looking forward.

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
💌 Letter from the editor
📜 5 (unofficial) principles
🏭 America’s Shenzhen, final vote
💪 Your moves of the year
💸 IceNine, Jeff’s new fund

Forwarded this? 1-YR down, 100 to go. You’re still early… join the crew and subscribe to Per Aspera.

Fifteen months ago, the founders of Per Aspera were holed up on Valentine’s Day Weekend, putting the final touches on a manifesto. We named it after JFK’s riff on a much older Christian prayer — Pray Not for Easy Lives, But to Be Stronger — and (soft) published it Feb. 14, 2025.

Even back then, our central contention was nothing new:

America had spent forty years cruising on the path of least resistance, choosing abstraction over atoms, financial engineering over the real thing, bit-flipping over progress in the real world, and cultural complacency over a society that honored building, making, and doing hard things.

Why jump into a space that was already getting noisy?

We couldn’t find anybody starting these conversations and trying to scale them beyond specific segments and silos… or building a brand for hard pursuits… or convening a wider coalition. No media team focused squarely on the ideas, research, war stories, cautionary tales, and useful playbooks that we wanted to consume.

What we were after was the point at which physics, engineering, capital intensity, obsessive drive, and a give-a-damn ownership mentality meet. This is the crossroads at which you'll find the most consequential hard pursuits of our time, where strategic advantage is won or lost, and the Next American Century will be decided. (+ Allies! We see y’all 👀.)

It is not enough to say: Houston, we have a problem. You need to be part of the solution. And to do that, a project in this space would need to be practitioner-led — created for, edited by, and guest-starring people closest to the work. No sitting nice and pretty in the cheap seats as an armchair critic.

And we had a specific, opinionated, systems-of-systems worldview, with some notable points of departure from the usual story: We had outsourced the middle of the value chain — stripping ourselves of what Dan calls the "meat of the sandwich" — and in so doing, slowly started suffocating a long tail of suppliers, shops, factories, and fabs. We convinced ourselves we could thrive as a nation that just designed and marketed. Without fabrication, sovereign supply chains, or embodied tribal knowledge… in this economy?! Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” warning deserved a harder reckoning than we as a nation had given it. And once you see the original sin, you can’t unsee it — across materials science, rare-earth processing, telecommunications, hypersonics, tool-and-die work… the list goes on, and on, and on.

So we decided we needed to create the thing ourselves. We resolved to not chase clicks, vanity metrics, or transient traffic (our name is Latin, for goodness’ sake!). In a world of empty calories, we wanted to provide nutrient-dense provisions, and words of encouragement, to those on the hard path. We wouldn’t dumb things down, cater to least-common-denominator formats, or get pulled into culture wars. These commitments produced a particular kind of research, writing, creative direction, publishing, and storytelling. (Get a few whiskeys in any one of us and that ‘storytelling’ will turn into wildly gesticulating, more passionate proclamations.)

Peeling back the curtain, I want to share five principles that bind our work — or, at least, greatly shape what we’ve set out to do:

001 // It’s up to us: A few months left of launch, at Torrey Pines, we convened a small group of early leaders of ‘the movement’ — our founding community — to raise a glass to American agency. As Gilman Louie of America’s Frontier Fund said in his toast: "If the U.S. is to lose its leadership position, it will not be because of what our adversaries do. It will be because of our willingness to let go of the things that made us great." To which, moments later, Kevin Czinger of Divergent offered a fitting coda: "We didn't say uncle to Chinese manufacturing. We flipped the script. That's American agency." These two toasts are the bedrock of PA’s belief system: the future is winnable, but only if we put in the work.

002 // Don’t deal in absolutes: We reject the doomer’s eulogy that says America is finished. We equally reject the accelerationist/techno-optimist’s rapturous take that AGI will solve everything, or the VC’s view that VCs will, or anyone else who thinks a single entity will. We don’t share the Washington (strawman) statist’s view that our problems can be handed to the government to solve, nor the libertarian’s faith that the invisible hand alone will do the job. America’s challenges, the solution space, and our perennial pursuit of exploration, prosperity, security, and dynamism require a wide, deep coalition. And this story cannot be flattened into either (i) it’s so over or (i) we’re so back.

003 // Hold the math next to the matter: In this house, we hold first-principles thinking, proficiency in the laws of physics, and unit economics fluency in equal regard. This space has more noise, snake oil, hand-waving, information asymmetry, and vibe-analysis than we can afford. You’ll get one or two but you cannot have the full enchilada: a political slogan without a model, or a model that ignores thermodynamics, or a science project without any credible commercialization curve. What we’re after are the best ideas at the intersection of all three.

004 // Go where the question takes you: When the answer to something we’re asking doesn’t exist yet, we go find it. For instance: curious how Americans actually felt about reindustrialization, we ran a national survey — twice — to see what 2,100 American adults thought. Nobody had thought to ask them! We also publish ideas, research, and data that some readers may not want to see. (Sometimes, what we publish is polarizing within the PA partnership). Across more than one in five of every weekly issue we’ve published, early and often, we’ve called out the rising unpopularity of datacenters, predicted it would reach a fever pitch, and pressed the financiers, industrialists, statesmen, and stewards of these projects to fix their messaging problem.

Our community challenges each other — and you all challenge us. You pushed back on Dan Goldin's proposal that the Great Lakes corridor has the water, workforce, and infrastructure to bring copper smelting and refining home. Plenty in the VC community did not love the thesis that megafund dynamics might be sub-optimal for deep tech. And some of you did not care for our detailed insider’s look/breakdown of Palantir’s FDE model (although, funnily enough, one reason was because you wanted us to know that you had implemented FDE way before the PLTR did). Ohhh… the list goes on.

But at day’s end, we’re glued together by our willingness to be comfortable with uncomfortable ideas/challenges, and by our belief that the future of the country can only be built by pursuing hard things. How 🇺🇸 is that?!

005 // Specialization is for insects: Part of the founding credo of PA was to not draw walls between industries, disciplines, systems, generations, or coasts (see below for more 😅). We believe breadth vs. depth is a false choice. Once you’ve gone down the rabbit holes of sustained Mach 5 combustion, photonic computing, fusion plasma, orbital thermal management, or advanced alloys, you realize: we’re not so different after all. We are not a “space” or “energy” or “defense” or “compute” tribe. We are not for boomers or zoomers. We are a hard pursuits tribe.

In closing, we just want to express our gratitude to you all for being here, whether you’ve been with us since 001 or just recently jumped on board. And for showing up every day with obsessive drive and endless psyche to pursue whatever hard problem it is that you’re working on.

It’s a great privilege and responsibility for us to build the proverbial rocket ship (or, for some of you, a literal one) with you, to convene y’all here each week, to start and scale the important (and, in moderation, fun/unserious) conversations, and — through hardships — to reach for the stars.

The wind is at our backs, folks, but the job’s not done. Per Aspera Ad Astra!

— Ryan Duffy, Editor in Chief

VOTE NOW. We’ve officially cleared our 2% critical-mass threshold on this poll, which we’ve run for the last two weeks — thank you, you gorgeous non-scientific sample. We’re going to run it one more time, today, for the sake of community, continuity, and spicy takes. So if you haven’t voted yet, now’s your last chance:

Do write in with your thoughts and takes after you vote! We’ll publish the results and highlight the best comments next week.

NOW, SOME MOVES BY YOU ALL. Per Aspera is really about all of you pushing the movement forward. A few standouts from the past year:

🪨 BARBARA HUMPTON. Took the helm as CEO of USA Rare Earth, transforming it into a federally backed (to the tune of $1.6B), vertically integrated, mine-to-magnet rare-earth player across multiple continents.

👑 AARON BURNETT. Cofounder and CEO of Mach33 (+ co-author of Starlink and the New American Frontier), Aaron became King of the Orbital Datacenters this year, which included dropping a physics-packed 80-page report on power density, radiative cooling, SSO orbits, and why the cost crossover hits ~2030. (P.S. we wrote one, exactly one year ago, too 😛.)

🏜 JORDAN BLASHEK. U.S. Marine combat veteran, investor, and close friend of PA, Jordan launched the Endless Frontiers retreat — with 200+ public servants, founders, scientists, and military leaders in Austin — and the Endless Frontiers Institute at Baylor. (Jordan and Ryan are together in Waco as we speak at Space x Demand Signal!) Also closed an oversubscribed $250M Fund II at Overmatch Ventures, and took Perimeter Acquisition Corp. public on Nasdaq.

💨 TOM MUELLER. SpaceX’s 1st employee and Founder/CEO of Impulse Space, Tom Mueller vouched for Faster, Better, Cheaper.

🚀 NASA CREW. There are sooo many of you — engineers, contractors, flight controllers, astronauts — here in this PA community who spent years (decades, for some) making Artemis II possible, either directly or by paving the way. The first crewed lunar mission since 1972, and a whole lot of Per Aspera fingerprints on it. Hardware on surface next!

🍀 SOME MORE! Bryon Hargis and co have been pushing US hypersonics forward at Castelion; Aaron Slodov pushed the Reindustrialize conference into Years 2 + 3, alongside a broader campaign that landed ‘reindustrialization’ in the 2025 National Security Strategy; Christian Keil traded his operator-builder hat at Astranis for an investor role at a16z in January; and thanks to editor’s privilege (EP 😛!) we’ve got to plug Array Labs’ Series A + DARPA contract extension + more to come soon…

TO THOSE WHO’VE SHOWN US LOVE. Thank you 🫶 — a few quotes from you that drive us:

“Love your work, love the mission, and your brand is sick. The industry is truly better off because of your work.” — Payton ♥

“Love what you have built and continue to build here. Cheers to sprinting towards the explosion.” — Chris ♥

“Love the ethos, mission and looking forward to future content and inspiration.” — Michelle ♥

FOR EARLY-STAGE FOLKS. Jeff, our Resident VC here at PA, has a big update for you all. He’s launched his new early-stage deep tech VC fund: IceNine.

THE THESIS. New industrial companies need a VC with a rare blend of three things: 1) investing experience, 2) operational chops, and 3) technical acumen. This is hard for founders to find across the capital stack, especially in early-stage VC. We provide this rare blend.

That said, our best rounds are built with co-investors who bring additional domain depth. We back low-ego, high-horsepower founders with technical credibility and commercial drive.

OUR TEAM. We've spent our careers inside some of the hardest industrial environments, scaled complex hardware engineering programs, won competitive government contracts, and taken products from cleansheet to high-volume production.

TIMING. We are unapologetically early-stage. The 0-to-1 phase is like living on the knife’s edge for an industrial tech founder, who has to juggle critical-path development, recruiting, capitalization cycles, requirements shaping/customer engagement, and so much more.

PORTFOLIO

HOLLER AT US. For founders who fit the bill in space, defense, advanced manufacturing, energy, robotics, new compute, or frontier biotech: come find us.

AUTHORED BY JEFF: Megafunds, Deep Tech and the New VC Order; Space Power; Who Controls the Air?; Critical Minerals.

CONNECT WITH US. The PA team wants to chat w/ you on how we can show up better for you and your hard pursuit. We're choosing 5 of you from the community to hop on video w/ us — on your work, why doing hard things for 🇺🇸 matters to you, and what you want more of from Per Aspera. Drop us a line!

📩: [email protected]

LASTLY, OUR SPONSORS. Thank you for backing Per Aspera this past year — and more importantly, for dedicating your work to ‘the big American bet’.

SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

There’s so much more to come, but for now — thank you all for rockin’ with us for the past year. ❤🫶🫰🇺🇸💫