The billionaire’s toy box

Today’s VHNWI wants a PRSHLS. That’s Very High Net-Worth Individual and Partially Reuseable Super Heavy Lift System. Or, in the demotic, the rich want space rockets.

‘It’s not rocket science’, people say when describing the technique of making, say, an omelette — even if making an omelette requires a certain deftness of hand and nice judgment. So what is it? Rocket science is a mixture of ballistics, aeronautics, chemistry and computation, now cocktailed with extreme wealth, galactic obsessions and a faraway look in the eye.

Once, the prerogative of the rich was to assault the environment with fast cars, burning oil and cruelly crushing molecules of air as they progressed. Now, the billionaire’s toy box contains rockets, which add new semantic richness to the concept of gas-guzzling. Robber Barons used iron and coal; Space Barons use liquid nitrogen and aerospace-grade titanium.