THE EASY PATH GOES NOWHERE GOOD.

Yet we keep taking it anyway—picking efficiency over resilience, fast fixes over tough grit, and short-term wins over real progress. The cost? A creeping decay of the capabilities that propel us forward as a society.

Enter Per Aspera. We’re a new research group and media brand for people and organizations engaged in 'hard pursuits'—the tough, complex work that advances civilization.

We’re here because society’s biggest challenges need more than lone geniuses—they need a team, a culture, and a playbook. Our goal is to build a movement that celebrates the hard stuff, because that’s where the real breakthroughs happen. Building rockets, powering cities, reshaping industry, or just ready to jump in? Consider this your invitation to join a renaissance of builders who know that the stars only come through struggle.

This Manifesto lays out why these pursuits matter, what’s in the way, and how we beat it. We’re not here to just cheer from the sidelines—our goal is to accelerate (speed up progress) and persist (turn fragile momentum into lasting, durable change). 

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‘HARD PURSUITS’ FUEL OUR CORE DRIVES.

Deep down, we all yearn to explore, prosper, feel secure, and embrace the new. These aren’t vague notions—they’re the instincts that steer us in our personal lives and shape the world that we build.

• Exploration’s in our blood—it’s not just spacefarers, it’s treks through wild lands and our global $10 trillion tourism engine. 

• Our drive for prosperity has uprooted 3 billion since the ’50s, leaving behind ancestral villages for city lights and new borders.

• Security pushes us to guard what matters—from installing home security systems to patenting our ideas to insuring our most precisious possessions.

• And a craving for dynamism—a pull toward the new — is why we chase cutting-edge tools, bold cuisines, and avant-garde aesthetics.

Yet we seldom notice the backbone behind it all—the 'hard pursuits' working quietly out of sight and behind the scenes.

• Exploration requires accessible, abundant mobility, which demands relentless engineering—to produce ships that conquer oceans, jets that shred distance, and rockets that punch into space.

• Prosperity is built on the back of on brutally tough infrastructure—energy plants that never quit, networks that bind the globe, supply chains and medicine that don’t (or shouldn’t) snap under pressure.

• Security requires tireless vigilance—code that traps thieves, critical infrastructure that defies collapse, and tools that outpace what the world’s worst actors can throw at them.

• And dynamism demands raw creation—new ideas that upend the old, tech that rewrites physical limitations, and narratives that pull us towards something bigger.  

From the start, and damn sure now, these 'hard pursuits'—challenging, complex, and often thankless work—have helped turn our core desires into reality.

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'HARD PURSUITS,' NEGLECT, & DECAY.

Decades back, we dumped 'hard pursuits' for the seduction of easy profits and financial engineering. Wall Street embraced complex financial productization, expanding from a single ETF in 1993 to over 8,000 ETFs globally by 2024. We leveraged labor arbitrage through globalization, exporting approximately 3.4 million U.S. jobs to China between 2001 and 2017. And we pursued downsizing through mass layoffs, displacing nearly 30 million U.S. workers between 1994 and 2019.

The result of this shift was increasingly efficient corporate and national output on one hand, but 'hard pursuits' left on autopilot on the other. These strategies may have boosted quarterly earnings, but they siphoned talent and capital from the fundamental innovations that build civilizations.

The result isn't merely stagnation—it's active regression. To wit, consider the evidence:

Flight: Chuck Yeager’s era flew faster. Boeing 707s hit 600 mph in the ’60s. Today’s jets drag at 560 mph, because cost-cutting trumps speed. In the 70s and 80s, the Concorde flew at Mach 1.4, yet despite multiple attempts to revive supersonic flight, we've regressed.

• Making matters worse, the timeline for aircraft development has stretched dramatically. It takes us longer and costs more to roll out slower planes.

• What once took a few years now takes a decade, with costs ballooning into the billions.

  • The SR-71 took two years to get the first flight and four years to operation.

  • The B-21 took eight years to first flight and probably a decade, at half a billion dollars a plane.

Space: Apollo 17 left the moon in 1972; no one's gone past low Earth orbit since. The contrast between past and present space ambitions is stark—we went from concept to lunar landing in eight years during the 1960s, yet our current Artemis program has been in development since 2019 with no moon landing in sight. Meanwhile, the International Space Station reaches the end of its planned 25-year lifespan this year with no comprehensive plan for what comes next.

Mobility: Los Angeles commuters now waste 40 more hours in traffic annually than they did in 1982. Despite a century of automotive innovation, average urban speeds have actually decreased—Manhattan traffic moved at 11.5 mph in 1920, yet crawls at just 7.1 mph today.

• We've failed to advance beyond technologies pioneered in the early 20th century: the basic subway systems of New York and Boston haven't expanded meaningfully in decades, while China has built 26,000 miles of high-speed rail in just 15 years.

• Hyperloop concepts that promised 700 mph ground transportation remain largely theoretical after a decade of hype.

• Meanwhile, financial and environmental costs mount: traffic congestion alone costs the U.S. economy $190 billion annually in lost productivity and wasted fuel, while transportation remains the largest source of carbon emissions.

Energy: Blackouts have climbed 60% since 2000 while kilowatt-hour costs have doubled over the same stretch. Our grid, designed for a different era, now faces loads it was never engineered to handle—leaving us increasingly exposed as computing, AI, and electrification dramatically increase power demands. The vulnerabilities are systemic—from extreme weather to potential EMP attacks—yet modernization efforts remain sluggish. We’re faced with a troubling paradox: renewable generation costs have plummeted (solar down 90% since 2010), but these savings vanish because transmission and grid infrastructure costs climb 5-7% annually. Result? Cheaper energy production, higher consumer prices. While global competitors pursue next-generation nuclear and fusion at scale, the U.S. regulatory path remains prohibitively lengthy (though we see promising signs that the red tape is being rolled back here). The last major U.S. grid overhaul was in the 1970s, with current renewal rates suggesting a complete modernization would take over 50 years—assuming we started today. This is why we're so bullish on new paradigms—distributed energy resources, advanced storage solutions, and microgrids that can bypass our calcified infrastructure entirely.

And the list goes on…

• Medicine: Antibiotic discovery has slowed, with only two new classes introduced since 2000. Our pharmaceutical innovation model excels at creating profitable treatments but struggles with developing solutions for emerging threats and resistant infections.

• Infrastructure: Japan and China operate thousands of miles of high-speed rail while America has yet to complete a single line. Our bridges, tunnels, and roadways—once the envy of the world—now receive failing grades from engineering associations, with rehabilitation costs rising annually.

• Air Traffic Management: Our system was established around 1935 and hasn't fundamentally changed since. We still rely on thousands of human controllers using outdated technology to manage increasingly crowded skies, creating bottlenecks, delays, and preventable safety risks.

• The arts: Even in music, full bodies of work as albums have declined from a significant role to just 8.7% of total music output in 2024. The instant gratification economy has reached creative pursuits, fragmenting attention and prioritizing quick hits over sustained masterworks.

These examples aren't just historical footnotes—they represent missed opportunities that compound over time. Each regression creates cascading challenges for society and increases the gap we must overcome.

Today, we see signs of renewed interest and promissing progress in tackling these hard problems, but a critical question remains: do we have enough people with the right skills to meet the moment?

Because 'hard pursuits' don't just face a challenge of will or capital—they face a breadth and depth problem.

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‘HARD PURSUITS’ FACE A BREADTH PROBLEM.

A revival is brewing—reusable spacecraft, micro-reactors, factory homes, drones, generative AI, revived dire wolves and the like. We’re living in a time of wonders.

Call it deep tech’s comeback. We call it the deep tech renaissance—not because it’s flashy, but because it’s real. Except it’s not guaranteed.

Progress in these “hard pursuits” hangs by a thread—unevenly distributed, brittle, ready to snap. And the choke point isn’t just cash or supply chains—it’s people. No amount of funding or industrial policy papers over that.

Spaceflight, energy, housing, security, creation—these things require real work and breakthroughs, not just whiteboard sketches. They need breakthroughs turned into processes and systems that work: materials mined, parts forged, power delivered, data processed.

The manufacturing challenge is particularly acute. America depends on roughly 20,000 mom-and-pop machine shops where the average worker is 53-55 years old, and most aren't digitized. Even our newest manufacturing technologies face limitations—additive manufacturing cannot handle the very large parts needed for ships, buildings, and steel girders.

In semiconductors, the problem isn't primarily capital—as one CEO put it, "the problem isn't necessarily money. It's the fact that semiconductor companies have a revolving door sharing a narrow talent pool.

This requires a workforce, not just a few lone-wolf geniuses. And by 2030, we’re staring down a gap that could stall all progress…

The gap we’re facing by 2030:

• 20,000+ scientists in materials science, biotech, nanotechnology, and AI

• 221,000 mining professionals

• 2.1 million manufacturing workers

• 650,000 construction specialists

• 1.1 million clean energy positions

• 67,000 semiconductor manufacturing roles

These aren’t just random statistics—they’re the baseline we need to keep this moving. Ignore them, and the whole thing grinds down.

So, while a renaissance has indeed begun, its success depends on expanding far beyond a concentrated technical elite. An elite tech clique across a handful of zip codes cannot pull this off alone. The movement must grow broader, or it fails.

Ultimately, to strengthen our capacity and chances of success in the ‘hard pursuits’, we need a significantly greater breadth of talented, enthusiastic participation.

It takes a village. We need more people, and we need them fast.

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‘HARD PURSUITS’ FACE A DEPTH PROBLEM.

We’re already staring down a talent shortage. Worse still, we’re losing the playbook.

In recent years, we’ve suffered from a silent erosion of institutional knowledge—decades of hard-won wisdom has been trapped in silos or lost as veterans retire, leaving those tackling today's hardest problems with a fragmented foundation. (For more on this, stay tuned for our first Antimemo on Tribal Knowlege.)

We're living in the midst of a historic shift — 'hard pursuits' once exclusive to nation-states are now being taken on by private companies and individuals. They need specific skillsets, process knowledge, and technical know-how to succeed.

Lessons learned from past de-risking efforts remain largely inaccessible, kept either intentionally under lock-and-key or inadvertently trapped within institutional siloes.

Don’t get us wrong — necessity is the mother of innovation. Companies like SpaceX have built largely from scratch and worked around these constraints. Lacking access to knowledge amassed by agencies over decades, SpaceX still was able to achieve vertical landings and routine rocket booster reuse — concepts that NASA had explored but shelved due to budget constraints.

However, many taking on hard pursuits do not have the same timeline or capitalization abilities as SpaceX to prove that they can succeed. They are often forced to rediscover a known tech tree, reinventing what’s already been discovered and burning time and cash they don’t have.

The cost of pressing pause on 'hard pursuits' (and partially offshoring them( in recent decades was a significant erosion of tribal knowledge, made more acute by the ongoing retirement of professionals who were last involved before these efforts were halted. For example…

• The U.S. Coast Guard's 24-year hiatus in heavy icebreaker construction led to shipyard closures, engineering expertise atrophy, and industrial base erosion, severely hampering our current efforts to revitalize the polar fleet.

• Similarly, our space program is sturggling with continuity. In 1992, NASA had spent billions on Space Station Freedom with little hardware to show for it. The ISS, promised to have a 25-year lifetime, reaches the end of its planned life this November with no comprehensive succession plan in place. Private companies have space stations ready to go up, but the transition plan remains uncertain.

• Another instance is the decline of institutional expertise in advanced semiconductor fabrication as a result of offshoring, particularly in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which is crucial for producing smaller, more powerful, and energy-efficient chips. This could slow the revival of domestic semiconductor manufacturing for advanced electronics.

The funny thing about ‘hard pursuits’ is that they are truly hard – they are endeavors that create step changes in capabilities, rather than incremental progress, often times at great risk and uncertainty of success.

Fundamentally, we are crafting, and in many cases recrafting, the basic language and playbooks for such endeavors. To strengthen our collective capacity to succeed, we must equip those undertaking these pursuits with greater depth of understanding and knowledge base to populate these playbooks. 

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BREADTH AND DEPTH REQUIRE PEOPLE, WHO REQUIRE CULTURE AND COMMUNITY.

History will judge this renaissance by one metric: did we keep pushing?

We’ll be remembered by whether we extended exploration, elevated propserity, reinforced security, and ignited dynamism. We’ll be measured by how relentlessly we prioritized the “hard pursuits” that power these strengths—because hard pursuits can’t be Western society’s side hustle, they’ve got to be our way of life. These pursuits are relentless, complex as hell, the kind that chew up the faint-hearted and spit them out. They’re the crucibles that forge not just technology, but character.

But progress left on autopilot doesn’t advance—it retreats (entropy is one hell of a drug). To lock in gains and secure our future, we must simultaneously widen our ranks and deepen our collective expertise. While technical knowledge gaps present a serious challenge, they're not insurmountable—especially when we prioritize transferring wisdom across industry and between generations.

This challenge demands new approaches to knowledge sharing and community building. By mastering what we’ll call ‘the physics of explanation and persuasion,’ we can build bridges instead of barriers, with clarity that beckons thousands, then millions, into fields once reserved for specialists. We cannot gatekeep. As Feynman warned against "Cargo Cult Science," we must strip away jargon and mysticism that shrouds these hard domains, replacing them with lucid explanation and honest accessibility. Progress demands we forge a new vernacular—and Per Aspera intends to help shape this shared language.

In tech and finance circles, "atoms over bits" and reshoring production have become the new orthodoxy—one that we wholeheartedly embrace. The hardware renaissance and manufacturing repatriation represent America reclaiming not just supply chains, but sovereignty itself. Yet we must remember that factories without expertise are empty shells. The renaissance we seek isn't built on technologies or industrial policies alone—it's built on talent, tenacity, and accumulated wisdom.

Meanwhile, our competitors play the long game. While we chase quarters, they chart centuries. While we debate the next funding round, they execute 25-year plans. The contest isn't simply technological—it’s civilizational.

That’s why Per Aspera exists: to forge the culture, capture the wisdom, and ignite the movement that this moment demands. Per Aspera aims to create community, common culture, and a shared language that demystifies without diluting—one that makes hard pursuits more accessible without pretending they’re easy.

This isn't abstract idealism; it's tactical necessity:

• When we democratize technical fluency, we expand the talent pool.

• When we bridge knowledge gaps between generations, we speed up cyle times.

• When we build a common culture around hard pursuits, we sustain momentum through inevitable setbacks.

You, dear readers, will be the ones who achieve a legacy where exploration reaches further, prosperity lifts higher, security stands stronger, and dynamism burns brighter.

Hard pursuits require hard truths: the path is steep, the timeline long, the gratification delayed. The work demands not just your minds but your mettle: sweat, smarts, and spine in equal measure. But the alternative—surrender to stagnation, dependence, and decline—is an unthinkably bitter pill to swallow.

But as John F. Kennedy once said, we should ‘not pray for easy lives,’ but ‘pray to be stronger men [and women].’

The easy path goes nowhere. The hard way is the only way forward. Join us.