Howdy y’all. Thanks to those of you who toasted to the 1-YR bday of Per Aspera with us last week. Year 2 starts now.
And what better way to start than the results of our longest-running, highest-participation reader poll, which had some true gems from you all. As a teaser: a triangle in “don’t mess with [this state]” took the plurality, a Midwest corridor won the comments section, a vocal minority wrote in with “my city/state/region,” and one in ten disputed the premise altogether.
Keep reading for more… Year 2 is off to a hot start!
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION…
🇺🇸 You’ve spoken, re: America’s Shenzhen
🤝 NASA administrators & Faster, Better, Cheaper
📈 SpaceX IPO @ $1.75T: are you a buyer?
🎙️ New Aesthetics, NatSec100, & More from IceNine
Forwarded this? You’re still early — join 10,000 other people pursuing hard things and subscribe to Per Aspera today.
When Alexis de Tocqueville rode through America in the 1830s, the Frenchman kept noticing the same thing: the strength of the country lived in its regions, towns, and voluntary associations. A century later, Justice Louis Brandeis captured that spirit when he called states "laboratories of democracy." Our PA-coded contribution to the canon, another century on: America consists of crucibles of capability — the clusters and corridors with the right mix of industrial specialization, capital concentration, physical capacity, and political experimentation. We’re looking for the spikiest concentrations of hard pursuits, production, and physical dynamism. Which brings us to our poll, where we asked you to map it out.
Where will America’s Shenzhen be built? We’ve been asking this for a few weeks and 154 of you have now answered. Call it 3.5% of active recent readers, but do not call us Gallup, because this was very unscientific: a self-selecting sample, an opt-in comment box, and the median voter probably voting for their home corridor. Caveats notwithstanding, the responses gave us a nice… cross-section… of opinion across this great nation of ours. Here’s how you voted:
🤠 The Lone Star State, 44% The Republic of Texas The Texas Triangle ran away with it. Which is funny, because Texas loves nothing more than to talk about Texas, and yet only a handful of the 69 Texas voters left a note. Y’all good?
🏭 Ohio–Michigan corridor, 16% Rust Belt/Great Lakes partisans came armed and ready to argue:
One wrote: “Intel, Anduril, GE Aerospace, Path Robotics, data center galore, Vertiv, Oklo w/ Meta, Centrus uranium. The list goes on and this is just the beginning."
And the geographic case: “Rust Belt, from Minneapolis to Pittsburgh has the Great Lakes & industrial infrastructure ready to be reallocated for the next-generation of microelectronics/robotics manufacturing at scale."
A proud Pittsburgher took the omission personally: "It pains me we didn't make it on this list, but it's the wake-up call we need."
And finally… because of course… “Go Blue!”
🌴 Southern California, 14% A healthy showing who rode for SoCal. One reader, who sounds a lot like Dan, offered their rationale: "Historically it was Bay Area and California because you had a confluence of strong education / universities and manufacturing next to each other. This could work because back then higher education was cheaper and you had a larger workforce that could innovate rapidly." And from a town that one could only guess: “Gundo forever!”
🗺️ Somewhere else, 11% Here we had a split between those nominating their own place — Seattle/Tacoma/Kent Industrial Valley, Denver and the Front Range, the Carolinas, Chicago and St. Louis, the Gulf Coast, Georgia, Flagstaff, the mid-Atlantic — and those who say we’re asking the wrong question.
A PNW maximalist: “Seattle/Tacoma/Kent…[are] way ahead of the country. Boeing supply lines are 100 years old… materials science, robotics, chemistry, electronics, precision manufacturing… the cloud computing capital of the world, and our bioinformatics industry is legendary. No place else is better prepared."
The Southeast partisan: "They built two new AP1000s before the nuclear renaissance. They never quit. Why not in the backyard of where Kitty Hawk flew?"
A (mountain-loving?) reader: “We're moving toward the post-RTP/Silicon Valley/Shenzhen geocentric era… it will be about cybersecurity and people going to where the mountains are, not creating a mountain around where people are."
A dispersion appreciator: "In the US it would be more distributed… I just dont see the US concentrating that much in a single corridor."
🚫 It won't, 9% Nearly one in ten voters don’t think an American Shenzhen will be built. As one full-spectrum skeptic wrote: "Texas won't attract talent and logistics mean extra $ to move across those miles. Not California due to earthquakes and need for stabilization for super high-tech components. Ohio-Michigan won't attract talent and there’s weather anomalies. Phoenix can't even keep $250-300k folks in the fabs. These things need to happen on the coasts, but we just don't have the right city to do it." Bleak. But plausible.
🏜️ Phoenix / Sun Corridor, 6% Rounding it out: the fab-pilled, sun-loving voters of Arizona. And one was happy to share the love: “AZ will grow heavier in Semi, TX is the new Virginia of Data Centers, Ohio is joining the fray, and upstate New York is adding 5 FABS in Clay County…All of the Above, the more the better.” Amen to that.
Thanks to those who voted and wrote in. Send us your own thoughts, your rebuttals, or rebuttals to the rebuttals, and stick around for our next poll (spoiler alert, it’s two scrolls away).
A few weeks ago, we posted a quote from current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman that caught quite a bit of attention:
We move way too slow as a nation… We're in this period of stagnation where a lot of our skills of doing big, bold things have atrophied while you have rivals out there hitting their stride and just moving fast — and that's a dangerous spot to be in.
👇 Since we’re all in this FBC 2.0 era together, we’re highlighting some of your responses below:
It’s easy to move fast, but you have to be willing to fail - and then punch through. That’s incompatible with most bureaucracies. Especially in government, the first sign of potential trouble invites more oversight, rather than delegation and trust.
To use a movie analogy from "Office Space" ... there are too many 'TPS reports' and also trackers of ‘TPS reports’.
One of the friction points is the resistance to move off of cost plus contracts on the “commercial” side.
👇 Catch up on our FBC series:
SPACEX’S S-1. In what surely shattered the SEC’s record for single-page web traffic, SpaceX filed its S-1 on May 20. The 24-year-old firm is gunning for a ~$1.75T IPO — and teeing up the largest liquidity event in history for the company that revived American rocket manufacturing, cracked reusable launch, proved it at scale, and is still aiming for Mars.
The math has Wall Street and finance Twitter X in somewhat of a tizzy:
$18.7B in 2025 revenue against capex-driven losses pencils out to a 94–110x price-to-sales multiple, with bears like Aswath Damodaran (base case ~$1.22T) and Scott Galloway (“a $600B company asking for $2T”) warning of Musk’s voting control, Starship risks, and capex black holes.
The bulls insist today’s numbers are the floor — justified by the future earnings of a megacorp with platforms across telecommunications, space, defense, datacenters, and AI. They say it could hit $150B in revenue by 2040. Plus, it has a TAM that looks like this:
Credit: Hubble
Nothing about this IPO is normal, and these are not normal times. PA, for one, is very optimistic on the downstream effects (liquidity, narrative, talent, etc.) for everyone else in ‘the movement’ chasing hard things.
So… at $1.75T, are you a buyer? (Take it literally or figuratively.)
At $1.75T, are you a buyer?
001 / NEW AESTHETICS. On May 25, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen announced the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants, an effort to seed the next major aesthetic movement.
The premise: what should the future actually look like? Art and architecture have minted plenty of movements since the 1950s, but nothing has captured the culture the way early-20th century modernism did. What this era is asking for now: bring beauty back.
We took a closer look at one grantee: Hamzah Zahprano, who will use the funding to build a lab for modular, 3D-printed and CNC-milled bespoke ceiling facades drawn from a range of cultural heritages. The idea is mass production of “tokens” that are fasten-able to the varying materials that exist on the outsides of homes from brick to stone to stucco, as well as interior ceilings.
In Hamzah’s words: 👆 A loose idea of how he intends to create the solution although there are many obstacles (e.g., load sharing, residential codes and design philosophies).
Plus a few more S/O’s:
Robbie Tilton (former Google + Apple) who’s developing AI-First Computers: hardware prototypes rethinking what personal computing should be when the software inside it can think.
Ben Lee, who’s working on an architectural language that defines visual character + aesthetic ambition.
Congrats to the full cohort — we’re cheering you on! 💫
002 / THE NATSEC100 IS OUT. If you follow the defense tech space, the annual NatSec100 is probably already on your radar. Compiled annually by Silicon Valley Defense Group (this year, in partnership with J.P. Morgan), the list highlights 100 of the top VC/PE-backed American defense companies. Private capital into defense hit $39.6B in 2025, nearly doubling the year prior — and yet, federal awards to these same companies are still rounding to zero as a share of the overall defense budget. Early fundraising & fielding momentum ≠ conquering the infamous Valley of Death. Big wins (such as a program of record) and more positive changes to the procurement system take time. Here’s to those of you chewing glass and pushing through, nonetheless. Special S/O to SpaceX for dropping off the list — because it filed for an IPO, which SVDG (rightly) frames as the win condition. So here’s to those of you on the list dropping off the NatSec100 in the not-too-distant future!
ICENINE. It warmed our hearts 🥲 to see you all excited that your favorite Resident VC Jeff Crusey has launched IceNine (new early-stage deep tech fund). Since we get to tap Jeff for his spicy takes, we asked him to share one with you all:
Across Western Allied nations, there's basically no orbital defense, period. We're kind of flying naked right now.
Why does the gap persist? Jeff's read comes down to two things:
#1 There was never a market. Nobody outside the government ever had a reason to work on orbital defense — so that's the only place the expertise exists.
#2 Defense runs on relationships. It's still a business where, as Jeff puts it, if you don't know the contracting officer by name, you're probably never getting the contract — which makes it brutally hard for outsiders to break in.
So how does a VC concerned about allied orbital defense, find the winning founders who can address the gap? He goes straight to the source — government. He found True Anomaly by tracking down who was writing orbital-warfare doctrine at DARPA — that team went on to start the company — and backed Shield Space in the UK, founded by ex-military.
And for all you pop culture nerds: Ice IX is Kurt Vonnegut's fictional doomsday substance from Cat's Cradle — a crystal form of water that stays solid at room temperature and, on contact, converts ordinary water into more of itself, setting off an unstoppable chain reaction. That small input, irreversible transformation is the idea behind the name, IceNine 🧊.
🎓 CONGRATS GRADS!! Congratulations to all the new grads this season. S/o to rocket photographer Joe Bernardin, whose epic graduation pic just upped the bar for Class of 2027++. Category is: America asfffff 😍 🤩 🇺🇸.
|