SpaceX Can Drop Tungsten Telephone Poles from Orbit. Who Controls That Power?
Getting one kilogram to low Earth orbit cost $54,000 on the Space Shuttle. Falcon 9 brought it to roughly $2,500. Starship targets under $200. That 500x reduction is not a footnote to the SpaceX IPO story. It is the story.
Mike and Neal work through what that number actually unlocks. Orbital kinetic bombardment, the "rods from God" concept, has existed on paper for decades: tungsten telephone poles deorbited from a satellite platform, no explosives, traveling at Mach 10, with the penetrating force of a small nuclear weapon. The only thing that made it impractical was cost. Starship changes…
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