From the Editor
Fifteen months ago, the founders of Per Aspera were holed up on Valentine’s Day Weekend, putting the final touches on a manifesto. We named it after JFK’s riff on a much older Christian prayer — Pray Not for Easy Lives, But to Be Stronger— and (soft) published it Feb. 14, 2025.
Even back then, our central contention was nothing new:
America had spent forty years cruising on the path of least resistance, choosing abstraction over atoms, financial engineering over the real thing, bit-flipping over progress in the real world, and cultural complacency over a society that honored building, making, and doing hard things.
Pray tell, why bother?
Why jump into a space that was already getting noisy?
We couldn’t find anybody starting these conversations and trying to scale them beyond specific segments and silos… or building a brand for hard pursuits… or convening a wider coalition. No media team focused squarely on the ideas, research, war stories, cautionary tales, and useful playbooks that we wanted to consume.
What we were after was the point at which physics, engineering, capital intensity, obsessive drive, and a give-a-damn ownership mentality meet. This is the crossroads at which you’ll find the most consequential hard pursuits of our time, where strategic advantage is won or lost, and the Next American Century will be decided. (+ Allies! We see y’all 👀.)
Off the soapbox…
It is not enough to say: Houston, we have a problem. You need to be part of the solution. And to do that, a project in this space would need to be practitioner-led — created for, edited by, and guest-starring people closest to the work. No sitting nice and pretty in the cheap seats as an armchair critic.
And we had a specific, opinionated, systems-of-systems worldview, with some notable points of departure from the usual story: We had outsourced the middle of the value chain — stripping ourselves of what Dan calls the “meat of the sandwich” — and in so doing, slowly started suffocating a long tail of suppliers, shops, factories, and fabs. We convinced ourselves we could thrive as a nation that just designed and marketed. Without fabrication, sovereign supply chains, or embodied tribal knowledge… in this economy?! Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” warning deserved a harder reckoning than we as a nation had given it. And once you see the original sin, you can’t unsee it — across materials science, rare-earth processing, telecommunications, hypersonics, tool-and-die work… the list goes on, and on, and on.
Get in the game
So we decided we needed to create the thing ourselves. We resolved to not chase clicks, vanity metrics, or transient traffic (our name is Latin, for goodness’ sake!). In a world of empty calories, we wanted to provide nutrient-dense provisions, and words of encouragement, to those on the hard path. We wouldn’t dumb things down, cater to least-common-denominator formats, or get pulled into culture wars. These commitments produced a particular kind of research, writing, creative direction, publishing, and storytelling. (Get a few whiskeys in any one of us and that ‘storytelling’ will turn into wildly gesticulating, more passionate proclamations.)
Five unofficial principles
Peeling back the curtain, I want to share five principles that bind our work — or, at least, greatly shape what we’ve set out to do:
001 // It’s up to us: A few months left of launch, at Torrey Pines, we convened a small group of early leaders of ‘the movement’ — our founding community — to raise a glass to American agency. As Gilman Louie of America’s Frontier Fund said in his toast: “If the U.S. 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.” To which, moments later, Kevin Czinger of Divergent offered a fitting coda: “We didn’t say uncle to Chinese manufacturing. We flipped the script. That’s American agency.” These two toasts are the bedrock of PA’s belief system: the future is winnable, but only if we put in the work.
002 // Don’t deal in absolutes: We reject the doomer’s eulogy that says America is finished. 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.
003 // Hold the math next to the matter: In this house, we hold first-principles thinking, proficiency in the laws of physics, and unit economics fluency in equal regard. This space has more noise, snake oil, hand-waving, information asymmetry, and vibe-analysis than we can afford. You’ll get one or two but you cannot have the full enchilada: a political slogan without a model, or a model that ignores thermodynamics, or a science project without any credible commercialization curve. What we’re after are the best ideas at the intersection of all three.
004 // Go where the question takes you: When the answer to something we’re asking doesn’t exist yet, we go find it. For instance: curious how Americans actually felt about reindustrialization, we ran a national survey — twice — to see what 2,100 American adults thought. Nobody had thought to ask them! We also publish ideas, research, and data that some readers may not want to see. (Sometimes, what we publish is polarizing within the PA partnership). Across more than one in five of every weekly issue we’ve published, early and often, we’ve called out the rising unpopularity of datacenters, predicted it would reach a fever pitch, and pressed the financiers, industrialists, statesmen, and stewards of these projects to fix their messaging problem.
Our community challenges each other — and you all challenge us. You pushed back on Dan Goldin’s proposal that the Great Lakes corridor has the water, workforce, and infrastructure to bring copper smelting and refining home. Plenty in the VC community did not love the thesis that megafund dynamics might be sub-optimal for deep tech. And some of you did not care for our detailed insider’s look/breakdown of Palantir’s FDE model (although, funnily enough, one reason was because you wanted us to know that you had implemented FDE way before the PLTR did). Ohhh… the list goes on.
But at day’s end, we’re glued together by our willingness to be comfortable with uncomfortable ideas/challenges, and by our belief that the future of the country can only be built by pursuing hard things. How 🇺🇸 is that?!
005 // Specialization is for insects: Part of the founding credo of PA was to not draw walls between industries, disciplines, systems, generations, or coasts (see below for more 😅). 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. We are not for boomers or zoomers. We are a hard pursuits tribe.
🇺🇸 Thank you!!!
In closing, we just want to express our gratitude to you all for being here, whether you’ve been with us since 001 or just recently jumped on board. And for showing up every day with obsessive drive and endless psyche to pursue whatever hard problem it is that you’re working on.
It’s a great privilege and responsibility for us to build the proverbial rocket ship (or, for some of you, a literal one) with you, to convene y’all here each week, to start and scale the important (and, in moderation, fun/unserious) conversations, and — through hardships — to reach for the stars.
The wind is at our backs, folks, but the job’s not done. Per Aspera Ad Astra!
— Ryan Duffy, Editor in Chief
