If you want to understand the sheer thumos of the individuals involved in the space race between the US and the Soviets - Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is the adrenaline-inducing account.

It captures with sheer nerve the accounts of the individuals who pushed the frontiers of space, and what was possible.

In brilliant language, Tom Wolfe writes:

“A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”

These early astronauts were risk takers in a way you and I can’t comprehend.

In an interview¹ Buzz Aldrin once said:

“Those who risk their lives to accomplish great ends, who have a vision of something larger than themselves, lift all of our lives to a higher level. All too often we forget that there can be no meaningful success without the opportunity to fail.”

Astronauts as boundary pushers

In the early chapters of the Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe details the antics of Chuck Yeager, ace test pilot and the first person to break the sound barrier in level flight. When he was chosen to be the test pilot for the X-1, he kept pushing the envelope²:

“The only trouble they had with Yeager was in holding him back. On his first powered flight in the X-1 he immediately executed an unauthorized zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel, then stood the ship on its tail and went up to .85 Mach in a vertical climb, also unauthorized. On subsequent flights, at speeds between .85 Mach and .9 Mach, Yeager ran into most known airfoil problems—loss of elevator, aileron, and rudder control, heavy trim pressures, Dutch rolls, pitching and buffeting, the lot—yet was convinced, after edging over .9 Mach, that this would all get better, not worse, as you reached Mach 1.”

This dedication to the craft — to master the domain, to master technology and to probe at its depths — is something we should learn to embody.

Can it be a personality archetype? Maybe like Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehogs? Surely these hedgehogs are ‘roided up’ in a way that makes them have nerves of steel, a thirst for new frontiers.

Should great companies also have these Astronaut types in their midst? I’m curious what @honam’s thoughts are here - he once made a list of industry titan hedgehogs³ that fit my criteria too.

Today, ASML is one of those rare companies that possesses the authority to match those of early Astronauts. Their business model and their string of acquisitions tells me they are entirely focused on advancing the cutting edge of technical superiority in the realm of optical wizardry - the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography market.

Where Chuck Yeager and the X-1 team worked to break the sound barrier (Mach 1), Martin van den Brink and his team at ASML have pushed harder and harder into the unknown - until they could write with light⁴.

But is being an Astronaut enough?

Spies as polished chameleons

I think we must add another personality type into our discussion. The Spy.

Like the Astronauts, Spies are also ambitious - but they exhibit their ambition in a networked way.

Where Astronauts want to push deeper into uncharted domains, the Spy acts as a Panopticon — seeing from multiple angles. The spy is always scanning, always acutely aware of the smallest details: a situation, a gesture, a face, a passing comment.

In many ways the Spy archetype is the polar opposite of the Astronaut. As the Astronaut pushes deeper, the Spy expands wider.

In many ways, the Spy is a writer — making dynamic inquiries about the world. He’s asking questions that probe at second and third order thinking:

1. Are people out shopping in Beirut (a sign of the Lebanese economy’s health)?
2. What was intellectual life like on the streets of Damascus?
3. How were Iraqi refugees inside Syria settling in?⁵

Spies are relentless busybodies, information-voyeurs devoted to the trivial and grand. They form connections with myriad targets, hone them, grow with them, nurture them.

Astronauts + Spies

I think if you mix the two archetypes together — you get a potent combination that can weather storms, push boundaries and form connections in an evolving world.

The Rocketman, and the Networker - working in tandem.

These hyperfluent people possess a trait that @DStrachman terms “Friday Night Dyson Sphere”.

If anybody can build Dyson Spheres — it’s these people.

Endnotes