“Through Difficulties”

Per Aspera — Latin for ‘through difficulties’ — is a new media platform for the people in the pursuit of the Next American Century. This pursuit is not for everyone. The work is hard, the timelines are long, and the scars go unnoticed. But our guess is that you’re a fellow masochist who — like us — is here because you know in your heart that American greatness can only be built through doing hard things. So, we created Per Aspera for you: a place to share what we know and what we don’t with each other, the playbooks, the hard truths, the signals and the all the open questions.

We’re practitioner-led vs. journalist-observed. And we don’t deal in absolutes: we reject the doomer’s eulogy that says America is finished and 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.

As such, our scope is the full spectrum of America’s technological, industrial and cultural infrastructure. Part of the founding credo of Per Aspera was to not draw walls between industries, disciplines, systems, generations, coasts or party lines. 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. Our only agenda is the pursuit of American greatness and we are, therefore, a hard pursuits tribe.