In the fiery debate on American patriotism and exceptionalism, American patriots have missed one vital element – measurement. Most of those who talk about measurement, lament that ours is one of the few countries left that still uses ancient units of measurement that do not relate to one other in “clean,” powers-of-ten ratios. In short, only in the laboratory (and not always at the drugstore) does any American use “the metric system.” Nor is this for lack of effort by its proponents to cram it down Americans’ throats. But to make any coherent defense of our American system of measurement (other than “we grew up with it, so why change”, one must understand where those ancient units came from. Once one does, one realizes that those ancient units are the only units that relate reliably to regular human experience. And that alone makes them worth keeping.

Measurement began with human anatomy and physiology

Any system of measurement requires a standard so that everyone understands what a given unit means. When human beings first started measuring things, they used themselves as the standard of measurement. Or if that didn’t make sense, they used something in common human experience, like water.

The United States Customary System of Units uses most of those ancient units of measurement, plus some not-so-ancient. In fact many of those units are as ancient as the Roman Empire, or more ancient than that. Admittedly, humans have stopped using at least two: the cubit (from elbow to middle fingertip) and the span (from thumb to little finger on a stretched-out hand). But the inch (breadth of the nose), foot (length of the foot), and yard (from nose to fingertip of the outstretched hand) are still part of the U.S. Customary system. So is the fathom, or length of an anchor rode between two outstretched hands – six feet.

This system contains many other units of length, most of which have fallen out of use. (Examples: link, rod, chain, furlong.) But we still use the mile, which is a thousand paces on the march. And some might have heard of the league, though they never learned what it meant. A league is an hour’s march in full infantry kit. The standard speed on the march is three miles per hour, so one league is three miles.

The beauty of these units

All these units of length have one thing in common. They relate to the human experience. That makes them absurdly easy to use. Want to know how long is the boundary between your yard and your neighbor’s? Step it off. If you’re in a boat and want to know how deep the water is, drop a lead weight attached to a length of rope, then pull it in by stretching it between your arms. The number of times you do that, is the number of fathoms.

Obviously one doesn’t convert from one length unit to another by multiplying by a power of ten. But one doesn’t have to. All that matters is using the unit appropriate to the activity.

Units of area have a similar derivation, as do the units of liquid capacity. The units of weight initially derived from the units of liquid capacity – one pint of water weighed one pound. Sadly, that’s no longer true – different “prototypes” changed sizes too often. Also, in the ancient world, weight and mass meant the same. Not until Sir Isaac Newton would anyone even think of going to a place where a one-pound mass weighed less. Or, for that matter, more.

Temperature had a similar connection to human experience. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit famously defined zero as the freezing point of saturated ammonium chloride brine. His high point was 96 degrees – his estimate of normal body temperature. So now you know why, when temperature drops “below zero,” salting the roads is useless.

Vive la révolution!

Then came the French Revolution – the first great excuse to abolish human anatomy and experience as a standard of measurement. European kings had, to be sure, laid the groundwork for this change. A new king would redefine the foot as the length of his own foot. The infamous Asymmetrical Ship shows what can happen: halfway through its building, the king was dead, long lived the king, and the foot changed. Needless to say, that ship was never seaworthy.

The French Revolutionists wanted to get away from all things royal. In the process, Joseph Lagrange and his Revolutionary Committee on Weights and Measures also broke away from human experience. They invented the metric system, or at least the first version of it, and the forerunner of Système International d’Unités – International System of Units, which we abbreviate SI.

The meter would be one-ten-millionth of a quarter-meridian of Earth. All other units of length would be powers-of-ten of this unit. To form the names, the Committee ordered affixing Latin prefixes for shortening, and Greek prefixes for lengthening. So the units of short distance would be the decimeter, the centimeter, and the millimeter. The unit of long distance became the kilometer, or one thousand meters.

How does any of this relate to human experience? It doesn’t. The meter is longer than anyone’s arm – unless that person is an acromegalic. And the kilometer bears no relationship to how fast one walks, on the march or otherwise.

Derivation of other metric units of measurement

Similarly, Lagrange’s Committee derived units of liquid capacity and mass from the meter, using pure water as the standard. One cubic decimeter (one-tenth meter) became the liter, the base unit of liquid capacity. The Committee defined the gram as the mass of one milliliter of pure water.

But not at any temperature! Anders Celsius, in 1742, had proposed his own centigrade temperature scale. It went from 100 (the freezing point of pure water) to zero (the boiling point of pure water). The French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin inverted this scale to produce the Celsius scale we know today. Water is at its most dense at four degrees Celsius. So a milliliter of water at that temperature became the standard for a gram of mass. So said Joseph Lagrange’s Committee.

Again, none of this relates to the human experience. True, Fahrenheit’s scale now has a redefinition, but at least Fahrenheit tried to define his scale in relation to human experience. Neither Celsius nor his successors can make the same claim.

One quantity of which no one has successfully substituted a new unit, is time. Humans everywhere still use the second and all its multiples, with ratios dating back to ancient Babylon. Emperor Napoleon tried to change to a decimal unit of time – and faced armed rebellion as a result. No serious effort at time conversion has occurred since.

Further distancing from human experience: redefinition

The United Nations General Convention on Weights and Measures, in 2019, made matters worse. Originally, SI had seven base quantities for defining everything, with definitions that made some sense. Furthermore, these definitions had a traceable history, and one could understand the need for a redefinition.

So for decades the units of time, length, mass, temperature, electric current, amount-of-substance, and luminous intensity had common-sense definitions. But that wasn’t good enough for the keepers of SI. That held especially for the unit of mass – the kilogram – then the only unit defined in terms of an artifact. But they also felt that way about the other units, except perhaps the unit of time (the second).

So in 2019 this UN body replaced seven units with seven constants, which now are defined constants. They are the:

1. Hyperfine transition frequency of cesium-113,

2. Speed of light in a vacuum,

3. Planck Constant,

4. Boltzmann Constant,

5. Elementary charge,

6. Avogadro Number of elementary entities, and

7. Luminous efficacy at a frequency of 540 tera-Hertz.

Behold! This Convention finishes the job of Lagrange’s Revolutionary Committee. They have utterly divorced our units of measurement from any semblance of human experience. True, they did it to “future-proof” their definitions. But they make no attempt to tell us where the original definitions came from. Given that, these definitions, such as they are, are purely arbitrary.

Why doesn’t America use the metric system – yet?

YouTube influencer Joe Scott publishes this history of attempts to “metricate” the United States. This and other sources reveal an interesting sequence of events.

In 1793, Joseph Dombey traveled to France and acquired a standard kilogram. But pirates seized his ship, took him hostage (he died as a hostage), and apparently destroyed his artifact. Five years later, the United States almost went to war with France. Even the effort in 1832 to establish a uniform system of measurement, failed.

1875 saw a new effort to “metricate” the United States. The only practical result has been the complete switch to the metric system (actually SI) in research laboratories. A few industries (like food and beverages) will sell their products in metric quantities. Toolmakers offer either metric or “English” tools. But never once has anyone made conversion to the metric system compulsory. For that reason, only one major highway in the United States (Interstate Highway 19 between Nogales and Tucson, Ariz., stretching for 102 kilometers) has metric distances throughout its length.

One cannot explain this in terns of American exceptionalism, because until today, no one has consistently defended U.S. Customary units on that ground. Perhaps one can make allowance for simple “cultural inertia” – not wanting to change the units one has lived with. But why did the French embrace Lagrange’s new system so readily? Revolutionary fervor?

Perhaps. But perhaps the real reason why metrication remains incomplete in America is … supernatural.

American measurement and American patriotism

Today, CNAV will be the first to defend the American measurement system on grounds of American patriotism.

Human beings have no reason to insist on having only one unit of length, mass, or liquid capacity. Multiplying these base units by powers of ten doesn’t change them. The metric system, and its current variant (SI) have one base unit each for length, mass, and liquid capacity. Everything else depends on these three.

Tellingly, this is not true of units of time. Humans still measure time in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, as appropriate to the application. Nor does the one-unit rule hold for length in absolutely all applications. Astronomers do not measure stellar or even planetary distances uniformly in multiples of the meter. They use other units that, again, reflect the experience of the application. These are the:

• Astronomical unit (semi-major axis of the orbit of Earth around the Sun),

• Light-year (the distance that light travels in a year), and

• Parsec (Parallax of one second, or the cotangent of one second of arc, multiplied by an astronomical unit).

An American patriotic system of measurement would retain these units – while also retaining miles, yards, feet, and inches.

Extending the American Patriotic System

At present, the American Patriotic System would still be incomplete. It would retain three units from what some call the Gravitational English System. They are the second, the foot, and the slug, or that mass that accelerates by one foot per second squared when pushed or pulled by a force of one pound. It would also retain the Rankine, or the unit of absolute or “thermodynamic” temperature equivalent to a Fahrenheit degree.

But it would need three more units – of electric current, amount-of-substance, and luminous intensity – to be complete and coherent. (Coherency means deriving one unit, other than a base unit, from others with ratios of one.) To arrive at that, one must revisit the original definitions of the SI units of these quantities. For instance, one mole of a substance was its molecular (or formula) mass expressed in grams. Substituting the dram (slightly heavier than the gram) will require recalculating Avogadro’s Number to make it fit.

Similarly, before 2019, SI defined the ampere in terms of meters and newtons (the SI unit of force). A “patriotic” unit of electric current would start with a definition in terms of feet and pounds-of-force instead. (Call it the franklin, after Benjamin Franklin.) One would need a similar accommodation to arrive at a “patriotic” unit of luminous intensity. (Call that the patriotic candle.)

Conclusion

In 2016, and again in 2024, Americans elected a President who believed in America as an exceptional country. If Americans are going to embrace their exceptionalism, then they should embrace it in every context that could possibly matter. That the United States has never managed to switch measurement systems in more than two centuries, cannot be an accident. That’s one reason to retain, and expand, the system of measurement that has served us well for those two centuries.

The use of ratios other than powers of ten to convert between and among different applications is not a good reason to abandon the American system. If decimal conversion is so important, why do astronomers still measure stellar and planetary distances in astronomical units, light-years, and parsecs? The answer is that the choice of conversion ratios is far less important than is their consistency within the system. Abandoning decimal-power ratios is a small price to pay to retain appropriateness of various units in various applications. Put another way: is it worth remembering that 5,280 feet make a mile to retain a definition of a mile as a thousand human paces? Yes.

At a minimum, President Trump should resist, roll back, and cancel any further attempt at metrication of the American people. And at maximum, the President should consider extending an American Patriotic Measurement System to all quantities, not merely time, length, mass, temperature, and their derivatives.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2025/07/11/editorial/talk/measurement-american-patriotism/

Video:

Joe Scott’s history of attempts at American metrication:

https://thatjoescott.com/2023/09/25/the-many-times-the-us-tried-to-go-metric/

Declarations of Truth:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/

On the last Friday of its term, the United States Supreme Court finally laid down the law on universal injunctions. Simply put, the Court forbids the federal trial bench – the District Court judges – to issue them. From now on, anyone seeking an injunction with nationwide import must file a class action – the old-fashioned way. Most commentators have totally missed the significance of this ruling, because everyone’s concentrating on the cases behind the consolidated Applications for Stay that President Donald J. Trump filed. This ruling – a rare instance of a full-blown Battle of Opinions on an application for stay, not a writ of certiorari – carries implications far beyond “birthright citizenship,” the subject matter of the cases at hand. The Court’s Institutionalists have finally gotten fed up with trial judges usurping their authority, and have now reasserted it. No one can properly understand the ruling, apart from that fact.

The actual makeup of the present Court

To understand what happened last Friday, remember that the Court does not have only two blocs, the conservative and the liberal. Instead, it has three:

• Originalists – Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito and Neil Gorsuch (in order of seniority of service),

• Equitarians – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and

• Institutionalists – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Originalists need little introduction to understand their role and their desires in the cases they review. Equitarians try to assert equity powers that the Supreme Court does not have. (They also sympathize with trial judges, who do have equity powers, when said trial judges abuse those powers.)

Institutionalists have only one loyalty: to the institution that we call “Supreme Court of the United States of America.” To a lesser degree, they extend their loyalty to the entire national judiciary. Anything that threatens the authority or the reputation of the national judiciary, and/or the Supreme Court, is their enemy.

In the present three-bloc structure of the Court, the Institutionalists rule. Rarely do the Institutionalists split on any given case. That they side more often with the Originalists than with the Equitarians, merely reflects the confluence of interests of Institutionalists and Originalists in most cases. Sometimes – as in FCC v. Consumers’ Research, also decided Friday – the Institutionalists side the Equitarians. But not often – and definitely not in the three cases at hand.

Three universal injunctions at issue

The cases at hand are named Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, versus:

• CASA (Central American Solidarity Association),

• State of Washington, and

• State of New Jersey.

These three cases all concern the notion of “birthright citizenship.” According to it, any person born on American soil, regardless of the citizenship or residency status of mother or father, is a citizen. The Latin phrase for this principle is jus soli – the Law of the Soil. But contrary to popular belief, jus soli is not a holding of Roman law. Jus sanguinis (whereby a born person inherits the citizenship of his or her parents) is a part of Roman law.

President Donald Trump sought to abolish birthright citizenship with his Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Almost at once, CASA and the States of Washington and New Jersey sued, both on their own behalf and in behalf of several pregnant women who hoped to have citizenship extended automatically to their children as soon as they were born. These birth tourists have two interests in acquiring citizenship for their children by these means:

• Defined charitable benefits the government extends to citizens, and

• A means by which the “birth tourists” involved can obtain citizenship for themselves.

The governments of Washington and New Jersey apparently want to protect Democratic Party control of their States. Mendicants overwhelmingly vote Democratic. CASA has a conflict of interest. “Central American solidarity,” by definition, cannot square with patriotism.

Applications for partial stay of the universal injunctions

President Trump filed an application for partial stay of each of the universal injunctions in those three cases. Those cases found their way to the Supreme Court. (Docket Nos. 24A884, 24A885, 24A886.) On May 15, 2025, the Court took the unusual step of hearing oral argument on those three applications. That step was unusual because the Court does not ordinarily hear argument on applications for stay. Furthermore, the Court does not hear argument on any kind of case in the month of May.

The argument transcript should have given everyone the vital clue to Friday’s decision. In particular, Justice Thomas – who, as senior serving (and living) Justice, always opens questions at oral argument – asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer to expound on the history of universal injunctions. Mr. Sauer addressed a specific analogy upon which the lower courts relied: a bill of peace in English courts. Sauer argued – and Thomas accepted – that class actions are the modern analogs of bills of peace.

In fact, the Court has been down this road before. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ____ (2018). That was another immigration-related case, involving the barring of nationals from foreign countries that refused to provide enough information to “vet” said nationals. The Court voted 5-4 to uphold President Trump (first term) in that matter. More to the point, that case also had involved a universal injunction. Justice Thomas had warned then that the Court would have to review universal injunctions, as to their appropriateness, propriety – and authorization.

The main opinion forbids universal injunctions

Justice Amy Coney Barrett – most junior in age and second most junior in service – delivered the opinion of the Court. As plainly as she could write, she said universal injunctions have no authorization in the Judiciary Act of 1789. (This is the act that first “ordained and established” the first “inferior courts” according to Article III.) The Judiciary Act grants the equity powers the District Courts enjoy. Those powers extend only to the grant of complete relief to particular plaintiffs before the court in question. Universal relief is not a valid equity power under the Judiciary Act.

In particular, in the immediate post-colonial era, individuals brought suit against other individuals. And, like Justice Thomas before her (in his concurrence in Hawaii), she compares bills of peace to class actions.

Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lays out what class actions are, who may file them, and how to handle them. Rule 23(a) sets out the prerequisites of all class actions:

One or more members of a class may sue or be sued as representative parties on behalf of all members only if:

(1) the class is so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable;

(2) there are questions of law or fact common to the class;

(3) the claims or defenses of the representative parties are typical of the claims or defenses of the class; and

(4) the representative parties will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class.

Barrett (and her colleague Justice Kavanaugh, concurring) cite Rule 23(b)(2), which reads:

A class action may be maintained if Rule 23(a) is satisfied and if … the party opposing the class has acted or refused to act on grounds that apply generally to the class, so that final injunctive relief or corresponding declaratory relief is appropriate respecting the class as a whole.

In this case, the opposing party is President Trump, and his action – EO 14160 – applies generally to a hypothetical class. Indeed Justice Kavanaugh reminded the respondents that they can go back to their trial courts and seek class certification.

Dissenting opinions

Barrett astutely observed that the respondents were trying to work around this rule. So also did Justice Sotomayor, who breathlessly (in dissent) said,

The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.

In fact, the bulk of Sotomayor’s dissent is a defense, not of universal injunctions but of birthright citizenship itself. Neither Barrett nor either of the concurring Justices (Thomas and Kavanaugh) addressed that issue. The only matter before the Supreme Court in those cases was the idea of universal injunctions.

So why did Sotomayor (and Jackson) spend so much time defending birthright citizenship? Why did they boast that the administration did not seek a stay or vacatur of the injunctions as applied to particular pregnant women? Perhaps because they knew that a Rule 23 class will be inherently more difficult to certify. And perhaps because they know that the merits might not favor birthright citizenship nearly as much as they suppose.

Sotomayor doesn’t seem to realize how socialistic she sounds. She laments that children ultimately denied citizenship will lose “critical public services, like [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program] and Medicaid.” If that’s all that citizenship means to Justice Sotomayor, that’s all the more reason to question the wisdom of her appointment to the Court. Then she suggests American-born children would be stateless. Not so. Those children would be citizens or subjects of the nation-state of their mothers.

But here Sotomayor plumbs the depths of absurdity:

If allowed to take effect, the Order may even wrench newborns from the arms of parents lawfully in the United States, for it purports to strip citizenship from the children of parents legally present on a temporary basis… Those newborns could face deportation, even as their parents remain lawfully in the country.

No one has so alleged. All that would happen is that the children would have to go back when their parents’ visas have expired.

The Jackson dissent

Justice Jackson dismisses the analysis of English court rules in the Framing era as “a smokescreen.” All that matters to her is whether a federal court can “order the Executive to follow the law.” She insists that this is, and by right ought to be, the prerogative of any federal court at any level.

Here Jackson descends to a colloquialism totally unbecoming a judge:

As I understand the concern, in this clash over the respective powers of two coordinate branches of Government, the majority sees a power grab—but not by a presumably lawless Executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are . . . (wait for it) . . . the district courts.

Wait for it!? Social-media influencers use that expression. Judges and Justices do not – or did not until now.

In fact the usurpation of authority by lower courts lies at the heart of the matter before the Supreme Court. Again, the Institutionalists finally decided that they could no longer tolerate district courts acting like the Supreme Court they’re not.

Nor could the Institutionalists tolerate district courts bringing the entire national judiciary into disrepute. Barrett set a new record of tartness in chiding her colleague:

We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.

To demonstrate this, Barrett cites the very case that established the principle of judicial review. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803). Marbury had sought a writ of mandamus against James Madison – and the Court refused the request. They concluded that they hadn’t the authority so to act – and no Act of Congress could give them that authority. In other words, Barrett sent Jackson back, not merely to law school, but to high school, to re-learn civics.

The future of universal injunctions – and birthright citizenship

To repeat, universal injunctions have no future. No longer may judges issue injunctions out of their jurisdiction – not without first certifying an action-taking class. To do that, judges will have to take briefings and hold hearings on certification of classes, per Rule 23. (Note that Ben Weingarten of The Federalist observed that then-President Joe Biden also objected to universal injunctions. The shoe is clearly squeezing the other foot.)

Contrary to the breathless dissents on this partial stay, the question of birthright citizenship remains to decide. CNAV believes that the CASA entity will recruit and proceed to certify a class of persons born to non-citizen and non-permanent-lawful-resident parents. The various foundations in the George Soros financial empire will see to this.

The Babin Bill

As CNAV predicted, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) did introduce a bill to define specifically who is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” for purposes of citizenship by birth. His Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025 (H.R. 569) would set limits on birthright citizenship on lines similar to those on Trump’s EO 14160. His bill, now with 64 co-sponsors, is sitting in the Judiciary Committee. The list of co-sponsors reads like a Who’s Who of Republicans in the news for supporting Trump’s program. They include ten Judiciary Committee members and one freshman from Virginia (Rep. John J. McGuire of Virginia’s Fifth District).

This is the only sure method of revoking birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens. It would not overrule the famous Wong case, because both it and EO 14160 carve out exceptions for children of lawful permanent residents. But CNAV sees no reason why a bill to limit even these children to lawful permanent residency status of their own would be unconstitutional. The Wong court declared that Congress had failed to act. When Congress does act, the Institutionalists are more likely to recognize such an act as valid. They might not want to recognize EO 14160 as valid, because Presidents execute law but do not make it.

H.R. 569 is the real sleeper in this drama. The minute Alex Soros (George’s son) announces a Birthright Citizenship Legal Defense Fund, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) should put H.R. 569 on the House Judiciary Committee calendar.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2025/06/29/news/universal-injunctions-forbidden/

Video:

Executive Order 14160:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/

Trump v. CASA:

Application for Partial Stay of Injunction (Docket):

https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24a884.html

Transcript of oral argument:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2024/24a884_c07d.pdf

Opinion and order:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_new_5426.pdf

FRCP Rule 23 (class actions):

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_23

H.R. 569:

Tracking page:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr569

Co-sponsorship list:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr569/cosponsors

Declarations of Truth:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/

Earlier this week, the Space Exploration Company conducted yet another test-to-failure of its current signature development project, Starship. SpaceX expected to lose both stages of this two-stage rocket ship, but not so fast, and not this way. Specifically, the booster blew up, and the “ship” (second stage) burned up. Does that spell doom for Starship? Sorry to disappoint Elon Musk’s detractors, but no. Tests-to-failure are the only way to find out for certain what can go wrong, especially with a new rocket ship. But had SpaceX run its development project differently, they would be in a much better financial position. They would also be further along in overall development than they are today. They could even be helping the official American space program in ways they never gave themselves a chance to imagine.

What is Starship, and what does SpaceX want to accomplish?

Starship is, or SpaceX wants it to be, the heaviest space liner and space freighter ever built. Indeed it would be the first rocket ship to carry passengers or freight on a scale comparable to commercial aviation. Or military airlift, for that matter – because the U.S. military wants to use it to move troops and equipment halfway around the globe, before an enemy would even know what’s happening.

There’s just one catch: Starship isn’t ready, and won’t be ready for years yet. The reason it’s not ready is that SpaceX, under the obsessive-compulsive leadership of founder Elon Musk, is following a single track. That company wants a fully reusable rocket that its shipyards (now incorporated as an independent city!) can turn out orders of magnitude faster than Boeing or Airbus can turn out airliners and air freighters. But first they must make their rocket reusable. The booster they lost in the last test was on its second flight. But they haven’t achieved that with the second stage.

Why is SpaceX so obsessed and compelled with reuse, mass production, and rapid “cadence” (how often they launch their rockets)? Because Elon Musk has one dream above all, and is impatient to realize it. He wants to build a self-sustaining city on the planet Mars – not as a mining colony but as a second home for humanity. That project will require thousands of Starships carrying crew, equipment – and rocket fuel, for he wants to refuel in space.

The problem with the Starship program

SpaceX has a fundamental problem it didn’t always have. When they developed their current “workhorse” rockets – Falcon Nine and Falcon Heavy – they did offer “intermediate” services as soon as they could. Falcon Nine reuses its booster but not its second stage; Falcon Heavy has three boosters and can reuse at least two, if not all three. Falcon Nine especially has taken “market share” from nearly ever other rocket ship built. Its reusable booster lets it launch payloads at less than half the cost of its competitors.

Falcon Heavy was supposed to be retired by now; Musk hoped that Starship would take its place. But Musk knows he cannot even entrust his own payloads – Starlink® satellites – to Starship. In racing to make Starship re-usable, he has left it un-usable for any useful work! The perfect, in short, has become the enemy of the good.

The YouTube influencer “Everyday Astronaut,” in covering Integrated Flight Test Nine (the latest), pointed this out. Why, he asked, didn’t SpaceX develop an intermediate version of Starship that would reuse the booster but not the ship? They could have been putting his new, heavier Starlink® satellites into orbit by now, on a grand scale. They could also be lifting other, more ambitious payloads – modules for the VAST company’s new Haven space station. (Starship is more than twice as wide as a Haven module, even today.)

But even “Everyday Astronaut” didn’t think of everything.

What SpaceX should have done with the concept

SpaceX is, of course, running its own space program. Advantage: the company has its own goals and can pursue them, independently of often fickle government agencies. (Any organization whose headship changes hands once every eight years – or even four – is necessarily fickle.) Disadvantage: SpaceX takes on the onus of making a long-range plan, and making that plan adaptable. This they haven’t done. A vague vision of a city on Mars is not a long-term plan.

They have the bare outlines of a mission profile: lift a ship into orbit, refuel it, and send it to Mars. But even SpaceX admits that refueling a single ship for a Mars transit and landing will require ten launches of orbital “tankers.” They need “tankers” because they never thought to build a refueling station in orbit.

But consider an intermediate version of Starship with a second stage designed to carry payload but not return to Earth. Why not equip that stage with fuel and thrusters to steer it once it’s in orbit? Then the first such stage enters orbit, drops its payload, and stays in orbit. The next such stage will catch up to it and latch onto it, forming another, larger object. Other second stages do the same – creating a cluster of shells, already in orbit, waiting for the next step.

What next?

If experience with Falcon Nine and Heavy are any guide, SpaceX could launch over 200 of these second stages into orbit within five years. In that time, they would perfect the booster, which is much more valuable, with all its 33 rocket engines. More importantly, among the payloads would be the modules for a first-generation Haven space station. (VAST might even have made it larger, to fit more snugly inside a Starship second stage.)

Now the value of cooperation and collaboration becomes apparent. That new space station – or a second like it – would be the ideal construction shack for turning those 200 second stages into several much larger stations. Shipfitters could unfasten the engines and fit out those massive shells with new, interconnecting interiors. Then, after a few more heavy-lift missions, they could mount a number of ships on a giant wheel, which would spin for gravity. The wheel’s hub would provide docking, loading, and unloading services – or microgravity laboratories or factories.

Now SpaceX would have a complex, or a fleet, of stations providing Earth-normal gravity and workspace. At least one would become a scrapyard to turn millions of “space junk” objects into ballast, counterweights, or reusable metal. The rest would become a shipyard in space, to offer repair of existing satellites, or support further development of a reusable second stage.

Looking further ahead

The best immediate use of Starship with a reusable second stage would be as a suborbital space liner or freighter. Almost as important would be ferrying of passengers and freight – including fuels – into low Earth orbit. A proper space program needs permanent stations in low (or medium) Earth orbit and geostationary or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). Dedicated ships, deriving their design from the Starship second stage, would ferry passengers and freight to and from GEO, and deploy satellites at various orbital levels. Equally dedicated ships would clean up the “space junk” in a big operation to remove an ever-present hazard. An LEO or MEO station would be the perfect base for “orbital traffic control.” This function would protect cargo – and lives – in addition to keeping “space junk” to a minimum.

The next important program would be one for asteroid deflection and capture. Already NASA is tracking an asteroid longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall – Apophis. This rock will pass very close to Earth in 2029. Worse, Apophis will disappear in the Sun’s glare – and might come out of it to hit New York, or London! Had SpaceX followed this proposed program, President Trump’s vaunted Space Force would already have a base ready to divert Apophis.

Obviously the first reusable second stages could bring back those spare engines, removed from the original second stages, for refurbishment and reuse in new “ships.” Thus, out of sheer practicality, almost nothing need be lost.

The real Mars colony wagon

If SpaceX, or NASA, or a NASA/ESA/JAXA coalition, still wants to build a city on Mars, then it needs a better plan than anything anyone has suggested thus far. Sending thousands of Starships on Hohmann minimum-energy orbital transits to Mars will not accomplish the goal. Even as large a heavy lifter as Starship is not and can never be a space-borne Conestoga wagon. True, the late Wernher von Braun proposed a “wagon train to Mars” (and famously couched his proposal as a novel). But the correct metaphor for colonizing Mars is not the settlement of the American West, but the first Voyages of Discovery by Erik the Red, his son Leif, Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus), Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), Amerigo Vespucci, and the incomparable Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan).

So SpaceX should be collaborating with NASA to design a space-to-space colony wagon with nuclear thermal engines. Then they should build not only one, but a fleet of three, or preferably five. (Magellan started with five ships, of which one survived to return to Spain.) These ships would carry nuclear power plants, to power not only the new engines but also electromagnetic radiation shields. A space-to-space ship never lands, so those ships would carry Starships to serve as landing craft.

That Martian city would serve the new asteroid mining industry, plus a metallurgy industry to rival Pittsburgh. So Elon Musk’s dream would take shape – but the colonists would be there to work.

What can SpaceX do now?

SpaceX might seem to have wasted a prodigious amount of time, by not developing a heavy-lift capability along these lines. But if it starts now, then better late than never. Apophis is still on its way, and even if it doesn’t hit Earth in 2029, it could set up a collision for 2068. Nor is Apophis the only “near Earth asteroid” on record, by any means.

The Starship second stage is already at a point where it can achieve orbit and stay in orbit. Even if it can’t return to Earth, it could start carrying true payloads any time SpaceX wishes. The development program outlined here probably can’t divert Apophis by 2029 but could almost certainly divert it by 2032. Beyond that, it could lead to replacement space stations far sooner than currently envisioned – and cleaning up the “space junk” before it brings down every satellite in a cascade of collisions called the Kessler Syndrome. Along the way, the project could yield enough revenue to make it self-financing.

But without this kind of project, the perfect remains the enemy of the good. Now that Elon Musk has left his “Department of Government Efficiency” in other hands, and resumed full-time leadership of his companies, he has time to think about improving the image of SpaceX, while enabling it to do many more useful things.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2025/06/01/editorial/talk/spacex-starship-what-might/

Video:

VAST Company Home:

https://www.vastspace.com/

Article on Apophis by NASA:

https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/apophis/

Declarations of Truth:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/