The contemporary flat Earth movement has its roots in 19th-century England, where Samuel Rowbotham’s writings and the formation of early societies in England and New York laid the foundation for organized belief.

Expansion in the US was driven by figures like William Carpenter and John Jasper, integrating religious themes and, later, conspiracy thinking that flourished in both Europe and America.

In the modern era, the internet has vastly expanded the movement’s reach, particularly amplifying activity in regions like the Arab world after statements by celebrities refueled local discussions .

Today, key organizations include the Flat Earth Society (US and UK), as well as local and language-specific groups, such as Arab-world social media collectives and regional Telegram communities.

International flat Earth conventions have been held in the US and UK, each attracting hundreds of attendees.

Numerous online forums and YouTube channels, often in multiple languages, provide hubs for debate and community-building, making the movement truly global .

The profile of a typical flat Earth adherent includes marked distrust of mainstream authorities, a lower level of scientific literacy, and higher engagement with online conspiracy-friendly communities.

Research and journalistic accounts also note that adherents often report lower formal education and seek belonging in groups that reinforce an anti-establishment identity; many are also drawn to related beliefs like vaccine skepticism or denial of space exploration .

While there is no record of large-scale violence linked to flat Earth belief, concerns remain about educational and social risks, particularly for children.

Exposure to flat Earth ideas may erode trust in scientific authorities, hinder critical thinking development, and foster detachment from mainstream education.

The contemporary flat Earth movement has its roots in 19th-century England, where Samuel Rowbotham’s writings and the formation of early societies in England and New York laid the foundation for organized belief.

Title:

Content: How did Muslim scholars refute the flat Earth theory a thousand years ago?
The flat earth is currently one of the most famous scientific myths widespread in the Arab world, and has private groups on social media met by supporters from all over, and in recent days has been controversial because of statements by the Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy.
There are two histories to this theory, not one; the first is ancient and the second is modern.
A number of Greek philosophers believed that the earth was flat, and the ancient Scandinavian and German peoples also believed that the earth was flat and surrounded by oceans, and the common belief in ancient China was that the earth was square and flat while the sky was spherical.
But it ’ s really surprising to know that early astronomers assumed its sphericity, and they were from almost every culture: Pythagoras, who lived about 2,500 years ago, proposed the sphericity of the Earth based on his observations of the moon during the eclipse.
Pythagorean's observations are still evidence of a refutation of the flat Earth theory: Pythagorean observed that the shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon during the eclipse is always round.
Regardless of the moon-facing part of the planet, eclipses occur everywhere in the world.
The idea of a lunar eclipse is simple: put a big lamp in the middle of your room and turn off the rest of the lights, stand at a distance of one meter from it, now turn around while you reach your hands in front of you with a tennis ball, when you give your back to the lamp and pass the tennis ball in the shadow extended in front of you because of your body, this is the eclipse.
To Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes, born 276 BC, was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth using a simple method involving the angle of the Sun at different locations.
Eratosthenes was astonished to read that the columns in the ancient Egyptian temples of Aswan on the afternoon of June 21 of each year did not leave a shadow under them, and the mystery of the wonder was that the columns in Alexandria left a shadow under them on the afternoon of the same day.
Eratosthenes came to the conclusion that the earth must be convex and not flat, otherwise the columns in Alexandria would appear shadowless, and then after reflection Eratosthenes came to the clever idea that we could measure the length of the shadow in Aswan which is zero, and its length in Alexandria, and then measure the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, and infer the circumference of the earth.
The story goes that he sent a man to measure the distance, so that with some simple geometry he could measure the circumference of the Earth, which he concluded was about 39,348 kilometers.
Eratosthenes' account was transferred to the Arabs from among the sciences they translated.
According to Carlo Nelino in his book "Astronomy: A History of the Arabs in the Middle Ages", the Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Abbasi (who ruled from 813 to 833 AD) asked two teams of astronomers to test these calculations and come up with the most accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference....
The safe astronomer.
The method adopted by the Arabs is to go out into a perfectly flat desert, and then rely on the inclination of the polar star in the sky.
The ancients realized that the position of stars in the sky is affected by your place on Earth, the further you travel south, the lower the polar star in the sky until it disappears completely after the equator, and the more you travel north, the higher the polar star sky until it became above your head in the North Pole, which means that the Earth is round, otherwise the position of stars in the sky changes with your place on it.
The height of the polar star (and all other stars) is measured in degrees, and it is like to put a protractor in front of your eyes, the horizon is at zero, and then look at the protractor from the side to find at what degree the polar star stands, and this is something you can do exactly as the ancients did, and now astronomical software is easily available.
Al-Ma'mun astronomers measured the height of the polar star, then moved north once and south once, until the amount of inclination of the polar star changes by one degree, and then measured the distance north and south, and this measured distance is one degree from the circumference of the Earth's circle, and it can know the rest of the circumference of the Earth, because the Earth is a ball, and like any ball, rotation around it requires 360 degrees.
The first team of Al-Ma ’ mun astronomers went out to the Sinjar desert, a small city in northwestern Iraq today, and the second team to the Palmyra desert in eastern Syria, and carried out the same experiments in both places. In the Sinjar desert, for example, the height of the polar star was about 35 degrees. south of the wedge site until the measurement dropped by a degree.
According to al-Ma ’ mun ’ s astronomers, the scale of one degree was about 56 parsecs and two-thirds parsecs, which Nalino calculated — according to Edward Kennedy of the American University of Beirut in a paper published in the Encyclopedia of the History of Arab Sciences — to be 111.8 kilometers, a value used by later researchers such as al-Biruni and al-Toussi.
Calculating the circumference of the Earth in this experiment, it turned out to be about 410,248 km, which was close to modern measurements (40075 km) in the most accurate way at the time.
Note that the difference between the two measurements is about 1,100 years, and the reason for the difference is not related to the same method but to the ellipse of the Earth, as the distance between the two latitudes increases slightly as we head north.
Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni
The second attempt was by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born in September 973 AD, who used the best and easiest formula to calculate the circumference of the Earth in his time.
The Al-Biruni method is based on triangulation, where the sunset is observed from the top of a high mountain overlooking flat ground to the horizon, the astrolabe measures the angle the sun descends relative to the observer on the top of the mountain, where the line connecting the observer on the top of the mountain and the horizon makes the sunset clock touch the planet Earth.
It is known that the tangent of a circle perpendicular to its diameter, and then we have a right-angled triangle at the horizon, and we can measure the radius of the Earth by knowing the height of the mountain, which is mathematically easy.
Currently, the same calculations can be applied by high school students, for example, in all countries of the Arab world, who have a good amount of trigonometry study.
In a study published in the International Journal of Sciences, an Italian team repeated al-Biruni ’ s experiment and concluded that its results for the radius of the Earth are equal to 3,928.77 English miles, which compares favorably, being 2% different, with the average reference radius at the measurement latitude, which is 3,847.80 miles.
Pakistani physicist Mazhar Mahmood Qureshi, in his book An Introduction to Muslim Contributions to Science and Technology, points out that al-Biruni ’ s experience in what is now Nandana Fort in the mountains of northern Pakistan is a typical example of the use of experimental scientific methods.
The most important book of al-Biruni astronomical is "The Law of Masoudi", in which al-Biruni collected all the astronomical problems of his time, and the way of al-Biruni was to present the origins of the matter and the views of the Indian, Greek and Arab astronomers and then weighted between them.
Modern history of flat earth
But at that point, you might ask yourself: if the sphericity of the Earth was obvious to Muslim scholars and their comrades in other parts of the world in ancient times, why did it come back?
In 1849, the English writer Samuel Rowbotham published a pamphlet entitled "Oil Astronomy" (from the Greek letter zeta, not oil), in which he defended the theory of the flat earth, and followed this with another entitled "The Instability of Modern Astronomy and its opposition to the Bible".
In 1883, Rowbotham founded oil societies in England and New York, shipping thousands of copies of his books to talk about flat earth.
Meanwhile, William Carpenter, a printer and native of Greenwich, England, supported Rowbotham and advocated his theory, learning it from John Jasper and preaching to more people than any cleric of his generation in the southern United States. Once.
From here the myth began to branch again in the United States, and then to Europe, and then to the Arab world and the rest of the world, but in this context it was mixed with conspiracy theories concerning secret groups trying to control the world by deluding people that the earth is round.
The proof of the sphericity of the earth is not new, and has a long history in which Muslim scholars have made an influential contribution, but because the “flat earth ” has been transformed from ignorance of the nature of science into a conspiracy theory it has been imported along with other famous theories into our Arab world.
Source: Al Jazeera + Websites

Expansion in the US was driven by figures like William Carpenter and John Jasper, integrating religious themes and, later, conspiracy thinking that flourished in both Europe and America.

In the modern era, the internet has vastly expanded the movement’s reach, particularly amplifying activity in regions like the Arab world after statements by celebrities refueled local discussions .

Title:

Content: Earth Day in its 47th anniversary.
Tamra, Galilee: The day of Tamra on March 30, 1976 was cloudy and cold, with light showers of rain.
I was there that morning, a few meters from the main street, where dozens of young people gathered on its sides, young people belonging to the Communist Party tried in vain to disperse them, arguing that the strike required staying in or around the houses and nothing more.
There were verbal altercations between the two groups, verbal altercations that did not prevent them from seeing the Egged buses return, as they came, empty of passengers, a clear indication of the universality of the commitment to the strike.
All of a sudden, the young people were whispering, and their numbers were growing.
At the time, we learned of bloody clashes between Palestinian youths and the Israeli police and army in the villages of Sakhnin and Arraba al-Batuf; clashes that resulted in the rise of martyrs.
Shortly afterwards, police cars and army garrisons appeared from the west, towards the entrance of the village, and the youths fled eastward towards the center of the village.
There, near the main mosque and the main cemetery, was the battle between the stones of the angry youths and the bullets of the mindless invading forces, forces like which the youths had never seen inside the village before, and the elders had not seen inside the village since 1948.
As news of the rise of the six martyrs continued, feelings of sadness and anger were heightened.
The sadness was overwhelming, and the anger was bright.
In the midst of the same day, we learned that we were facing an unprecedented event in the history of the Palestinians inside the occupied territories after the Nakba of 1948.
But we didn ’ t know at the time that there was a day or event that would make a difference in the history of all Palestinians.
Text and context: If the text is concerned with what happened on March 30, 1976, with its boring and not boring details, then the context means, on the other hand, what was the case before that day, the difference and bloody, without which, the context, what happened would not have happened, and what happened would not have acquired the special significance and significance.
In my view, there are four elements, sequential and interrelated, that together shape the context and implications of the first Earth Day.
These four elements are the following:
The October 1973 war repaid an insignificant amount of Arab national dignity that was shattered by that painful break in the wake of the 1967 aggression, a break that the Arab lost his confidence in himself, his leadership and his ability to overcome and respond to the challenge.
In this sense, the 1973 war was more of a victory over oneself than it was a victory over the other side.
Immediately after the 1973 war, the PLO ’ s star began to glow and shine.
At the Arab Summit in Rabat in 1974, the organization was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
This important Arab recognition was followed by Yasser Arafat ’ s speech at the UN General Assembly in New York in November of the same year.
Prior to the 1973 war, the National Front was formed in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, which after the war led large popular struggles in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which increased in frequency and expanded over the next few years.
These popular struggles, among other things, have alienated significant national figures beyond the borders of historic Palestine, which in turn triggered loud waves of popular anger in the territories occupied in 1967.
At the level of Palestinians in the interior, there are two important events in 1975, each of which has a direct and intimate relationship to Land Day: the first was the formation of a "Land Defense Committee", for the purpose of leading the fight against the sinful government policies, which aim to confiscate the lands of Palestinians in the interior in general, and the lands of Kafr Qassem village and the Sakhnin - Arrabeh - Deir Hanna triangle in particular.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning that the Land Defense Committee is the national body that made the bold and difficult decision regarding the Land Day strike, and it appealed to the Arab masses to abide by it and participate in it.
The second event, no less important than the first, was the victory of the Nazareth Front led by Tawfiq Zayyad in the municipal elections of the city of Nazareth in the autumn of 1975, a few months before Land Day.
Tawfiq Zayyad, as we all know, has an undeniable and active role to play in making that difference happen.
But the most important of all these context-related elements, individually or in combination, is the following: The first Earth Day is the achievement of the generation of young people of that time, our generation, the generation of those born after the Nakba of 1948, a generation of young Arabs who began to raise their head, respond to the challenge, and prepare to pay the price, all the price, even if the price is blood.
It was this new generation of Arab men and women who fought in the battles of October 1973, who raised the status and sacrifices of the PLO, who led Tawfiq Zayyad to the mayor of Nazareth, who secured the commitment to the strike on March 30, 1976, and who faced with his stones and his bare chest with the stray bullets of the occupation police and army.
This, of course, without underestimating the importance of the guiding and leadership role of the men and women of the previous generation.
Earthquake and aftershocks: At the level of Palestinians in the interior, Land Day was a social and political earthquake.
And like any earthquake, it had aftershocks.
Among these are the following:
After the first Land Day, the relationship between Palestinians inside Israel and the Jewish state is no longer the same as it was before.
After Land Day, Palestinians inside the country became less afraid of the influence of intelligence and other repressive authorities on the one hand, and more courageous in defending their rights and asserting their Palestinian national identity on the other.
Shortly after the first Land Day, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DPF) was established, which for the first time ran in the legislative elections under this name in 1977.
Since its establishment, it has been running for elections to the Arab local authorities under the new name.
After the first Land Day, the relationship between Palestinians inside Israel and the Palestinian national movement is no longer the same as it was before.
The Palestinians of the interior have become more integrated and linked to the Palestinian national movement, national goals and struggles.
The Palestinian national movement has also become more welcoming and embracing.
After the first Land Day, the “Sons of the Country ” movement in the Palestinian territories continued to harden its program, organization and national struggles.
I was among the participants and promoters of the first Earth Day strike, and I witnessed what happened on that unforgettable day (and what preceded and followed it).
I was a high school teacher in the village of Tamra, my country.
At the same time, I was a student at Haifa University.
I witnessed the unprecedented determination and enthusiasm of university students, my colleagues and high school students to respond to the call to strike, despite the many concerns and fears of the threat of sanctions waved by the ruling authority and its men.
Two days before Land Day, the head of the local council at the time, Sheikh Zaki Diab, came to the high school.
He came and threatened teachers and students with the consequences of promoting or participating in the strike.
Just as he did two days earlier, and for the same purpose, at the meeting of the heads of the Arab local authorities in Shafa Amr, at the end of which Tawfiq Ziad roared: “The people have decided to strike. ”
Paradoxically, instead of punishing teachers and students who participated in the strike in Tamra, Sheikh Zaki Dhiab himself was the first to be punished (Fatah al-Qaf), as his coalition partners removed him from his post immediately after Land Day.
The sheikh at the time, unfortunately, did not realize the difference between courage and recklessness.
He didn ’ t exactly understand the dangers of blasphemy against the current.
At the time, the popular trend was overwhelming.
Finally, before the end of March 1976, we knew that the Land Day strike and the clashes between Palestinian youth and the Israeli police and army, which resulted in the death of six martyrs, were unprecedented in the history of Palestinians inside Israel since the Nakba of 1948.
But we did not know at the time that we were facing a day and an event that made a difference in the history of the Palestinians inside and the Palestinians in general.
This is not surprising, as the different days and events are known after a period of time.
By special days and events we mean those after which the situation is seriously or radically different from what it was before.
By this we also mean that they are days and events with a heavy load of meanings, connotations and transformations.
In this regard, I say that after the first Land Day, the Palestinians inside the country became bolder and more courageous, more willing to sacrifice for the defense of rights, and more vocal and committed to his national identity and his Palestinian national commitment.
Finally, before the first Earth Day, the Earth was a rare living resource, but after it, it also became a national symbol, a symbol of survival, identity and national dignity.
That ’ s what it was after 47 years!
Source: Arab 48

Today, key organizations include the Flat Earth Society (US and UK), as well as local and language-specific groups, such as Arab-world social media collectives and regional Telegram communities.

International flat Earth conventions have been held in the US and UK, each attracting hundreds of attendees.

Numerous online forums and YouTube channels, often in multiple languages, provide hubs for debate and community-building, making the movement truly global .

Title:

Content: When it comes to space, failure isn't just an option — it's a requirement

Sometime next month, SpaceX will likely try to launch the largest rocketship ever flown, known as the Starship. If successful, this flight will herald a new space age, as humanity opens the solar system. This begs the question: Will it fail or will it succeed? And if it fails, what will it mean?

Anyone familiar with space movies, or who has visited a NASA gift shop, knows the phrase "Failure is not an option." Actually, it is. In truth, if one is to win at anything, failure is a requirement. We only learn by what we learn from making mistakes. That is if — and this is an important "if" — we accept the learning we gain from the failure and apply it to our future endeavors.

The exploration and development of space are no exceptions. Or rather, they highlight the rule.

Related: Spaceflight: Danger at every phase (infographic)

Generally speaking (and in my humble opinion) there are four types of failures when launching a rocket or rocketship.

  • 1. A new, untested tested technology or group of technologies fail.
  • 2. An incorrectly tested technology or group of technologies fail.
  • 3. Humans in the loop ignore rules or design criteria from their own plans or cut corners, usually for financial, performance or political reasons.
  • 4. Having had one of the three types of failures above, no learning has occurred, or learning did occur and was ignored, and they happen again.

While any "rapid unscheduled disassembly" (RUD as some engineers jokingly call a rocket explosion) is a problem, number 1 in my list is an expected part of the development of any new complex system. Sadly, and by far, it is the second, third and fourth failure categories that most often result in tragedy. The two most spectacular American instances of this were the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters. In both cases, the failures were predictable, if not specifically identifiable.

Like all NASA human spaceflight programs, the space shuttle program was a rock star show of enormous proportions and massive implications for the agency and the government. In both cases, the inconvenient truths of possible deadly mishaps or results were spotlighted before the accidents by members of the mission management teams. While the case of the Columbia disaster is more complex and nuanced, in the case of Challenger, clear warnings from savvy employees were ignored because the show had to go on, and, sadly, people died.

Due to fear of such high-profile failures, our space agency usually over-corrects, or perhaps more correctly, over-corrects for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, as every tiny malfunction, mishap and mistake becomes the fodder of media pundits and agenda-driven critics. Witness the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) — as it was rolled out to the launch pad, rolled back, rolled out and rolled back, as engineers worked to assure everything was perfect — even as the wait, the holds and the rollbacks themselves actually added potential risk to the system.

In the end, the politically designed contraption flew — successfully, on the Artemis 1 mission, but if this is to be the vehicle that opens the solar system, such fragility means none of us are going any time soon — if ever. It's all just too precious. Yes, I was one of those critics. I still am. And while an in-depth discussion of the disastrous pork program I've long called the Senate Launch Scam must wait for another time, it is clear that even as the space agency tries to rationalize one of the most expensive and complex rockets ever built, it is ironically hostage to its fear of failure. Failure made more likely by the very system that created the vehicle in the first place.

Related: The 10 greatest images from NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission

This is no one's fault. It is a result of a systemic fault created over time. Today, especially in the government, too much rides on every liftoff. The weight of fear of failure means that it will not be gravity that stops the human breakout into the universe, it will be bureaucracy, and a system that has gone off its tracks and rolled off the playing field into a swamp of its own making.

But it wasn't always that way. Starting after World War II, as missiles previously designed to kill people in wars and tested under the military's cloak of secrecy began to be employed in exploration, experts understood that, when testing new tech, failure wasn't just an option. It was the rule — until the cameras showed up.

A good example occurred in the late 1950s, as the massive global science project known as the International Geophysical Year (IGY) was getting underway. Launching shiny objects into space was an obvious yet new exploration arena, and those in charge adopted fairly pragmatic expectations. In the U.S., the National Academy of Sciences agreed that if only one of every six satellites in the program made it into space, it would be considered successful. Flying on the Air Force's Vanguard rocket, three of them did. Yet to many in Washington and the public, the program was considered a failure.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were driving hard, and while they had their own fair share of failures, some of them spectacular, the world would only hear of those that succeeded. To be clear, Soviet, Russian and Chinese space failures deserve their own essays and volumes, and in many cases make the causes and results of U.S. failures seem small by comparison. This is in some ways the point. When you allow the world to watch, and give taxpayers a veto based on what they see, the pressure to perform becomes a force of its own.

For example, under pressure from the Soviet Union's Sputnik surprise, from 1958 to 1960 NASA tried eight times to launch Pioneer satellites to the moon using early variations of the Atlas rocket. One probe was never launched. The others all failed. Only Pioneer 5 could be called a success.

Thus, NASA was born in the spotlight. And it was forced to either entertain the taxpayers for its funding or be dragged off the financial stage. Failure, even expected failure, even failure followed by success, became less and less of an option. It just didn't make for good TV, and bad TV shows get … well, they get canceled.

NASA's official history website is surprisingly frank in its assessment of this reality (italics mine):

"(The Atlas failures) made plain that success on space missions would be neither automatic nor cheap. There was a price to pay, and part of that price was the failure of some missions. This price NASA management would never find comfortable. The trouble with a philosophy of accepting a certain number of failures as normal and inevitable was that even 'learning failures' in an open program like NASA's, conducted under the watchful eye of a whole world, looked to the public and Congress like absolute failures. The press treated them as failures. It didn't matter that previous development projects like the V-2, Atlas, Thor, Polaris and almost any other major rocket development one could name, had had their share of unsuccessful early firings, and that this had been accepted as a necessary growing pain. Those difficulties had been hardly visible under the cloak of military secrecy. But space program difficulties were highly visible and distressing."

"Distressing." An understatement, to be sure. It became clear to supporters of NASA that, in many ways, our space program wasn't just about exploration or strategic victory over our communist opponents. It was entertainment. Thus, the show must go on. Whether it meant creating massively over-engineered systems, massively over-papered bureaucracies or both, NASA had to be damn sure that whenever the eyes of the world were on it, its people would deliver a Right Stuff performance.

Thanks to an incredible level of proficiency on the part of NASA's team, for the most part, this approach worked during the Apollo program. Yes, there were terrible disasters like the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three of the agency's top young astronauts. But that disaster happened during practice, and no one was watching. It slowed down the program, as NASA reviewed its mistakes, and made serious improvements in its systems and procedures. But had the fatal fire happened live on screen, the entire program would most likely have slipped years into the future as the various branches of the government each took their turn at reviewing how such heroes could have died — and quite possibly, given the horrible nature of their death in a burning capsule, it might have ended the entire program.

Related: NASA's 17 Apollo moon missions in pictures

What is remarkable about Apollo is that there were so few significant failures. Think about it. NASA went from almost zero spaceflight experience to humans on the moon in less than 10 years, with only three people dead in one major accident — which didn't occur during a mission. Yes, there were spacecraft failures and blow-ups, but history has already correctly rewarded the entire program with a well-deserved mark of excellence. Ever hear the term "Moon shot?"

Then, as I mentioned, came the shuttle program, with an entirely different system and an almost all-new management team, given the time lag between the end of Apollo in 1972 and the first flight of Columbia in 1981. Ironically, the space shuttle was supposed to be the system that would make human access to space safe and routine. It was almost the opposite. To get it funded, the original plan was compromised to save money and gain support. For example, as proposed to Congress, the shuttle system consisted of two totally reusable flyback systems that would take off vertically and land on runways, ready to fly again. As political sausage-making took over, however, this approach was replaced by the massive hydrogen and oxygen tanks and solid rocket boosters we are familiar with today.

As is usual when trying to win votes, political games took precedence over practicality. Worse, while trying to deal with the political compromises being forced on it to get the funding it needed for its dream ship, NASA layered even more bad choices into the mix. Here's one example of many cited in the many retrospective books on the disaster: To win votes from the then-powerful Utah congressional delegation, military intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) solid rocket manufacturer Morton Thiokol in Utah was chosen to manufacture solid rocket booster segments that had to fit perfectly together. These were then shipped to the Cape in Florida on their sides on train cars over hundreds of miles of railroads.

In the end, the shuttle was only partially reusable, and became so complex that the entire vehicle had to be torn apart and rebuilt between flights. It was, according even to NASA leadership, a recipe for disaster. After Challenger, former NASA Administrator Norm Augustine mentioned on a conference call his concern for a program based on "flying space shuttles in circles until another one falls out of the sky." And it did. And it was Columbia.

So now the shuttle program is gone. Frankly, this is a good thing, in spite of all the good it did to inspire a generation. I helped make it go away. It was too expensive and dangerous, and rather than helping open the space frontier, it was helping keep it closed. Once the quasi-military propaganda campaign to win the race to the moon was won by Apollo, our government should have switched to commercial fleets to take over basic shipping and people-carrying to and from space, just as we do in the rest of our economy. A group of us in the Space Frontier Foundation spent over a decade making that happen. Eventually, at least to and from the International Space Station, we won.

This begs the question: Are private space transportation systems safer? Are private operators more careful than government agency contractors? Good questions. The first answer is that no engineer or project manager ever wants anyone to get hurt — no matter who they work for. But systems don't care, and systems designed around an internal conflict between the need to break things to learn things, and not being able to break things because it doesn't look good, are inherently dangerous.

At the end of the day, blowing up very expensive hardware is not fun for anyone, government or commercial. Unfortunately, sometimes one has to blow up a few things to get things right, and the way our culture is wired, the private sector has more freedom to do so than NASA right now — at least the part of the sector with enough money to blow up stuff and replace it.

And so, here we are. In the coming weeks, Elon Musk, the man who has blown up more big rockets than anyone in the last 10 years, will try to fly the biggest rocketship of all time, the Starship. But, if you recall my opening list of why rockets blow up, Mr. Musk has focused on #1 — blowing up new and untested rockets to learn how to make them better. Better yet, he and his team are actually applying — rather than ignoring — their data to make the next rocketship safer! This is where he and other NewSpace companies have a distinct advantage over their government competitors. Their process is complete when they deliver a highly reliable, low-cost, reusable space transportation system that actually works.

A good way to spot a technology-edge crossing company that is a bad investment is one that does not have this built into their budget, either through overconfidence or naivete. A potentially successful company combines vision with pragmatic pessimism. They err on the side of expecting early failure, and their budget includes funding reserved to try again until they get it right. Thus, to these companies the optics of failures do not matter as much as the application of lessons learned by those failures. Be it satellite companies, government customers or, eventually, citizen space pioneers, there is no inherent conflict in the success metric for a private commercial space transportation provider. It delivers, or it does not. The market handles the rest.

And so, as critics and competitors wail at his failures, Elon has rolled out, blown up, rolled out and blown up half a dozen test vehicles to get to the point he and his SpaceX team are at today.

So what about Starship and the Super Heavy monster first stage on which it will ride? Well, we know Starship has been vetted, broken and vetted again, but Super Heavy has not. Yes, SpaceX has fired the engines many times. And in some cases, they have not worked perfectly, so engineeers made some tweaks and fired them again. But will they all work when needed? Will all of the myriad of systems work that are required in order to push that shiny but heavy-as-hell rocketship sitting on top of it all the way to a successful splashdown or landing? We shall see.

What we do know is that, if it doesn't work, two things will be true: 1. Unless there is some strange anomaly in its trajectory if it fails, no one will likely die. 2. If it does fail, you can bet SpaceX will find out what went wrong, fix it, roll out another one and fly it again. And from what I know of Elon, Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, who's running the Starship launch program) and the team at SpaceX, they will keep trying until they succeed. But they won't stop there. According to their plans, Starship, once proven, will be flown dozens, if not hundreds of times, carrying satellites and other commercial cargo into space before a single human life is put at risk in one of the hundreds of available seats they will screw into the floor once those flights prove the system is safe.

Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing transportation system

This is part of the genius of Musk and SpaceX's plan. They have created their first customer base in the form of their own Starlink internet satellites, which can launch in the thousands on Starship. These relatively tiny revenue-producing robotic phone lines in the sky will fund SpaceX's development program and safety certification. Their own products will pay for the development of their own product as that product makes those products cheaper to use and vice versa. (It's brilliant, but I don't want Elon to know that, lest it goes to his head.) Thus, Musk can get his transportation system operating by risking his own money, then transition to outside customers who want their missions flown at less risk and then, in the long run, drive the risk down so low it will make sense for those first brave human pioneers to climb aboard and head off to the moon and eventually Mars. (Not to oversimplify, as each of those destinations will require yet another series of capabilities and the development of new systems.)

Contrast this with the broken system at NASA. Having just flown a significantly delayed first flight of an empty spacecraft on Artemis 1, it will be nearly another two years before the next flight, Artemis 2, attempts to carry a crew around the moon in a redux of the flight of Apollo 8 over 55 years ago, using a system — the SLS rocket and Orion capsule — that is essentially the same as those developed 70 years ago. One might expect it to be cheaper and more reliable given its heritage, but no, the opposite is true. At an estimated $4 billion per flight, the SLS is so expensive and complex that it will only fly every couple of years. This pace assures a stale learning curve and the turnover of experienced team members during the program's lifetime. Meanwhile, with the cameras of the world (and, more importantly, U.S. taxpayers) on them, each crewed SLS flight becomes so precious, once again, that failure will not be an option — within a system that increases the probability that it will occur.

Meanwhile, Musk states that Starship will eventually cost just a couple of million dollars a flight. I know too many engineers to believe such a number, so let's make it 10 times as much, $20 million a flight. That's still massively cheaper than SLS. On top of this, Starship will be racking up dozens of flights a year carrying expendable mobile phone systems and other commercial and (interestingly) NASA payloads. Some may fail, technologies will be replaced and upgraded, but the flight teams will become even more honed — before the first human payload enters the airlock.

Hopefully, the SLS will become obsolete before it is called on to try to carry too many astronauts into space. This is for the simple and obvious reason that all the government paperwork in the world, all the covering of one's behind and all the going slow and being afraid of breaking anything will not make up for a broken system that has lost the ability to build things, break things and then build them better, something our government used to understand and seems to have unlearned.

So, when you watch the upcoming first test flight of Starship and Super Heavy, understand it is a test. It is not the Super Bowl or World Cup. It is practice for the Super Bowl. It is a rehearsal for the World Cup. If SpaceX fails, they will learn, just as the other new commercial spaceship companies are learning. If they succeed, they will also learn; soon enough, they will fail anyway. Yet the difference will be that the necessity of that failure is understood, the minds to learn from it are open to the knowledge it will provide, the risks next time will be mitigated, and the commitment to getting back up and trying again is built into the game plan.

The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner gets back up, learns from what they did wrong and does it again.

This is how we win the future.

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Founder of SpaceFund, Earthlight Foundation, Space Frontier Foundation and New Worlds Institute

Both a rebel and a respected leader, Rick is listed as one of the top 100 influential people in the space field. Called one of the world’s top space “visionaries,” Rick helped coin the term "NewSpace" and worked to create the new commercial space industry highlighted by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

A leading writer, speaker, and six-time Congressional witness, Rick helped start the first mission to find water on the Moon, signed the first ever commercial data purchase agreement with NASA, helped start NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, led the commercial takeover of the Russian Mir space station, signed the first private astronaut to fly to the space station, co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, and was a founding board member of the X-Prize.

As a result of his world-changing work, in 2015 he won the World Technology Award along with Craig Venter of the Human Genome project. He founded the SpaceFund venture capital company with 19 space companies in its portfolio and is a member of the US Space Force Doctrine Advisory Group.

Rick's The Space Revolution "radiopod" is featured on IHeart Radio Network's iRoc Space Radio and is available on most major podcast sites. He hosts the New Worlds Conference and the Space Cowboy Ball in Austin, Texas, and his non-profit EarthLight Foundation is creating an inclusive new movement to use space to protect the Earth and expand life into the cosmos.

The profile of a typical flat Earth adherent includes marked distrust of mainstream authorities, a lower level of scientific literacy, and higher engagement with online conspiracy-friendly communities.

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How do flat Earthers perceive themselves?

They believe they know a lot, though their knowledge is minimal

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Exposure to flat Earth ideas may erode trust in scientific authorities, hinder critical thinking development, and foster detachment from mainstream education.