Nobody’s coming to save us. It’s Dan Goldin, Chief Historian &* Futurist of Per Aspera. After months of careful preparation, my co-founders—Ryan Duffy, Joy Shin, Jeff Crusey—and I welcome you to the inaugural edition of Per Aspera. Thanks for your patience. As you can see, we’ve poured our heart and soul into this, so this had to be done right.

We’ve created Per Aspera to champion the deep tech renaissance that’s quietly taking shape across America. Our mission: accelerate progress in the hard pursuits that truly matter—advanced manufacturing, energy systems, space technologies, and critical infrastructure underpinning our security and prosperity. And make that progress persist. We’re not just chronicling this movement as commentators; we’re strengthening it by connecting builders, preserving essential knowledge, and passing it forward. The challenges we face demand more than a small technical elite—we must build the cavalry ourselves.

Today, we’re sharing our foundational manifesto: “Pray Not for Easy Lives, But to Be Stronger.” This anti-memo frames the challenges we face after decades of strategic amnesia and charts our path forward. The easy way led to dependency. The hard way—the only way worth taking—leads back to technological sovereignty and the profound satisfaction of building things that matter.

Many of you have asked how you can collaborate with Per Aspera. Our ask in the next few weeks is to inundate us with feedback and criticism, so we can make it better week over week for everyone partaking in this incredible Renaissance. Through hardship, to the stars!

“Do Not Pray for Easy Lives, But to Be Stronger.” While Washington weighs industrial policy and boardrooms rediscover manufacturing, we’d like to focus on a more fundamental challenge: America has become a society that flinches from difficulty. This manifesto isn’t just analysis or a retrospective—it’s a battle plan, with a side of tough love.

Our history was written by generations who tackled tremendous challenges: spanning continents with railroads and interstate highways, electrifying rural communities, and reaching the Moon with slide rules and gumption. Today, despite unprecedented wealth and technology, we struggle with tasks our grandparents would have considered routine.

Deliberate Choices Led Us Here

By now, we all know the decline story. This didn’t just happen. We chose it:

• We fell in love with financial cuteness instead of engineering excellence

• We kept the design studios but shipped the factories overseas

• We let our master builders retire without passing on what they knew

The evidence is everywhere: planes flying slower than in the 1970s, bridges taking decades to build instead of years, and entire industries dependent on potential adversaries for critical components.

The 102-story Empire State Building rose in 410 days. Today? We’d spend longer than that just on the environmental impact statements.

A Renaissance of the Hard

This isn’t a funeral dirge—it’s a call to action.

We don’t wallow in decline narratives; we identify the hardest problems and move toward them with determination.

But here’s the signal: right now, the Renaissance critically needs two things. More breadth and more depth.

• What do we mean by breadth? The deep tech renaissance has begun—but the workforce gap is real, and it’s measured in the millions. If we’re serious about realizing our ambitions in aerospace, semiconductors, and energy, we need far more people with real talent, skill, and stamina. Today, most sectors are still cycling through the same small pool of experienced operators—a revolving door that can’t support meaningful scale. Without broadening that base, even the most promising efforts will struggle to move from prototype to production. This isn’t just a hiring problem—it’s a structural limitation on what the entire ecosystem can achieve.

  
  What you can do: Inspire others to join the Renaissance.

• What do we mean by depth? Depth means the ability to operate across layers: to ground decisions in basic physics, to integrate systems into architectures that work under real-world constraints, and to execute supply chains that actually deliver. It’s the difference between simulating a reactor and building one, between designing a chip and fabricating it at scale. True depth requires fluency in materials, tolerances, failure modes, and integration—not just abstract design. Without it, ideas remain theoretical. With it, they become infrastructure for the future.
  
  What you can do: go deep! Help others go deep!

"The future is winnable," the manifesto declares, "but only if we do the work." The work lies in expanding our breadth and deepening our depth. Tackling genuinely difficult challenges isn't just crucial for national security—it feeds our primal drives to explore, prosper, secure, and create.

At Per Aspera, we’re stubborn optimists to our core. And guess what? A renaissance is already underway—in labs, factories, and workshops across America. Deep tech is surging back. But the movement must grow broader, or it fails. We need a sweeping cultural shift that celebrates technical mastery, rewards long-term thinking, and recognizes that genuine progress comes only through difficulty.

The path of least resistance leads nowhere worth going. The hard path leads to sovereignty, resilience, and the profound satisfaction that comes only from building things that matter. Choose wisely.

OFF-CUFF

What makes Per Aspera different? We're not another group of armchair critics. We're builders, engineers, and operators who've spent decades solving real problems at NASA, in Silicon Valley, on manufacturing floors, and in the boardrooms where hard decisions get made.

This isn't theoretical. One of us (Dan Goldin) watched NASA struggle to recreate capabilities it once possessed. Another (Jeff Crusey) has seen promising startups falter for lack of basic manufacturing know-how. We've all witnessed the consequences of choosing quarterly results over generational capabilities.

We're here to identify the gaps in America's industrial capabilities, preserve essential knowledge before it vanishes, and forge connections between disparate pockets of excellence. Most importantly, we're here to give you specific, actionable guidance on playing your part in this renaissance—whether you're a founder, engineer, investor, policymaker, or student figuring out your path.

Up next…we’re introducing something new. For our deep tech community, we felt that offering clarity in the noise was important — it’s not always easy to differentiate company from company or problem from problem. So for our sponsorship section, rather than giving you a generic spiel, we’re introducing our next section called Teardown, a six-point breakdown of how our sponsors’ technologies work, why they matter, and what they signal for the future. First up: Divergent and their DAPS (Divergent Adaptive Production System) platform. They’re truly revolutionary, and we hope it’s clear why below!

The American industrial base has been hollowed out by long procurement cycles, fragile supply chains, and legacy manufacturing systems that can’t keep pace with modern demands. Divergent’s Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™) offers a radical alternative: an AI-driven, software-defined manufacturing platform that compresses development timelines from years to months. By eliminating fixed tooling, integrating generative design, parallelizing 3D printing, and automating robotic assembly, DAPS™ enables on-demand production of mission-critical systems—from autonomous drones to next-gen vehicles—while slashing part counts and costs. This isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about preserving and amplifying the industrial expertise that built this country, ensuring it not only doesn’t die out but also rapidly evolves. And at the helm of it all is Divergent’s powerhouse father-son duo, Kevin Czinger (Executive Chairman & Founder) and Lukas Czinger (CEO & Founder, featured above).

FEAT. “AMERICAN AGENCY”

Last December, we kicked off the Per Aspera community with a low-key gathering — “Toasts: American Agency” — at The Lodge at Torrey Pines in La Jolla. We chose the San Diego area, a biotech and defense powerhouse, because frankly, most of you are still sleeping on it.

Our mission was to bring together leaders (seasoned and rising) who reflected the American spectrum — across deep tech sectors, generations and regions across the US. Folks came with colleagues, spouses and even children (the youngest person must have been in high school!).

We came together for one defining idea: American Agency — our rigorous culture of grit, leadership and relentless capability to build what others deem impossible 🇺🇸💥🤘.

In a rare fireside chat, Neal Blue (Founder & CEO of General Atomics — the quiet San Diego powerhouse behind the Predator drone) sat down with Per Aspera’s own Dan Goldin. What followed was a series of champagne toasts from some of the heaviest hitters in deep tech, alongside the next generation of operators, to toast to the notion of American Agency.

Here are memorable quotes from each toast.

Neal Blue (General Atomics, Chairman & CEO). This is a toast to those of you who gathered here to commemorate and to dedicate yourselves to the development of entrepreneurship and individual initiative, which, indeed, are the characteristics which will preserve the republic which we hold so dear.

Gilman Louie (America’s Frontier Fund, Co-Founder & Managing Partner). If the United States 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. We are all builders here in this room, whether you're an engineer, an entrepreneur, a financier, or somebody who served in important roles in government. We don't just owe it to ourselves, but we owe it to the next generation.

Kevin Czinger (Divergent, Founder & Executive Chairman). On his team at Divergent: We didn’t say uncle to Chinese manufacturing. Instead, we flipped the script, and to me, riffing off you, Gilman, that’s what it’s about. Flipping the script, that’s American agency.

Grace Cherashore (Evans Hotel Group, Executive Chairwoman). I want to talk a little bit about trying to do something really different, how hard it can be, how many roadblocks get thrown in your way, sticking with it, maybe being a little too stupid to quit, but holding on to wanting to do something in a very different way.

Jeff Crusey (Deep Tech Investor, Co-Creator of Per Aspera*). American agency is the unique American flair for turning vision into reality, for striving relentlessly, for overcoming obstacles, not because it's easy, but because it's right. But here's where I want to challenge us, especially the investors in the room. Too often, we see ourselves as gatekeepers of capital, when we really should be partners in building. It's not enough to write checks and tweet about it later. We need more technical expertise in our ranks, investors who can think from first principles, who can truly engage with founders on their level and help them accelerate.

Jess Frazelle (Zoo Digital, Co-Founder & CEO). My favorite quote that I thought of when I first saw that I was giving a toast is from Walt Disney, “It's [kind of] fun to do the impossible.” And so, doing the impossible is hard, but everyone in this room seems to be doing it, so here's a toast to the builders, entrepreneurs, and makers, engineers, that are making the impossible possible.

Dan Goldin (9th NASA Administrator, Co-Creator of Per Aspera*). As a country, we have a choice to make. We could choose to be an innovative leader, or we could be a fast follower. America has distinguished itself by doing the hard things, and thinking through the problems, and led in innovation. You could go back through our history, and see how strong we've been.

Major (major!) thank you to our “Toasts: American Agency” sponsors: Divergent, CesiumAstro and Albedo.

UNTIL NEXT TIME…

That's a wrap on Edition 001.

Starting now, we'll be in your inbox every Monday morning with the signal amid the noise—spotlighting the technologies, ideas, and players driving the renaissance forward. Between newsletters, we'll be interviewing America's top builders, conducting original research, and working to cultivate this community of travelers on the hard path.

We'll be relentless in our pursuit of excellence, but we need your critical eye to get there. What resonated? What missed the mark? What should we be thinking, writing, and talking about in the months and years to come? Hit reply—we're reading every response.

This is just the beginning. Thanks for joining us.

See you next Monday,
Dan, Ryan, Jeff & Joy