Wanda is a body on the tile-refurb line at the rocket-stage processing yard I own outside Lompoc, California. She lifts cracked thermal-protection tiles off returned first stages with a putty knife and a 3-micron dust mask I issued her in 2019. The dust is silica and refractory ceramic fiber. The mask is the wrong mask for the dust. I keep $0.0043 a tile by refusing to issue her the one NIOSH recommends. The booster she’s rebuilding flew your signal on Sunday — your tax dollars underwriting the range fees and a third of the Air Force payload. You also watched it on the satellite TV you pay $87 a month for. The tiles Wanda’s tearing off carried your picture. The cough she’s building shows up on your subscription and nowhere on my P&L. The Lord sees the sparrow. The sparrow is not a line item.
Charles Miller wrote in National Review this week that the linchpin of space dominance is the rapid reusability of thermal-protection systems, and that SpaceX’s Starship tiles crack, chip, and fail. He counts the booster’s turnaround in weeks. He does not count the hands that make the weeks possible. I count both. My yard is what makes the turnaround possible, and the hands are what make my quarter. He’s reading the bottleneck from the top. I own the bottleneck from the floor. Let me show you whose hands are between the camera and the tile.
Let me put the respirator next to the price I issued instead. Wanda refurbishes 412 tiles a shift. She lifts, scrapes, regrouts, and re-bonds each one. Of those 412 tiles, 38 are cracked beyond re-bond and pass to the after-service line, where a man named Cooley breaks them down with a 9-inch angle wheel, no local exhaust ventilation, and the same 3-micron mask. Cooley is what Wanda becomes when the tile’s too far gone to fly. The respirable fraction at his wheel is 11.4% by mass. The NIOSH recommended exposure limit for refractory ceramic fiber is 0.5 fibers per cubic centimeter. My industrial hygienist measured Wanda’s line at 4.2 fibers per cubic centimeter on her last visit, in March. The right mask for that dust costs $47. I issue the $2.97 mask. The differential is $0.0043 a tile. Cooley’s differential is $0.011 a tile. I keep both.
Her breathing is not a cost center. The booster is. The launch contract is. The payload is. The subscription you pay is. The mask is a line item I’ve reclassified as Optional Equipment, which is the department where $47 goes to become nothing.
$47 is the right mask. 4.2 fibers per cubic centimeter is the air she breathes. The booster turnaround is 3 weeks because the regrout takes longer when the tiles crack worse than the spec allows — and they crack worse because the regrout compound I use runs 40% below the original engineers’ specification. It meets the lab adhesion test once. It does not meet the second thermal cycle. The tile that was supposed to fly 10 missions flies 2. Then it passes to Cooley. The GPS in your phone runs on a satellite. The satellite rides a booster. The booster is lined with tiles from Wanda’s line. The cough is on your subscription. Optional Equipment is the principle that lets me charge you for the asthma I declined to prevent.
Read the next sentence twice. The tile that cracks on your booster was laid by a woman whose lungs I’ve priced at $0.0043 a tile, and the booster she’s rebuilding flies twice a month while the mask I issued her hasn’t been replaced in 7 years. That is the price of the reusable future you were promised.
Now let me teach you the principle this yard is only an example of. The reusable vehicle has always been a labor arrangement before it was an engineering one. The hands that bond the tile, regrout the leading edge, and re-install the ablative blanket have always been cheaper than the part. The vehicle flies; the face behind the part is on the maintenance line the program doesn’t put on the slide. The shuttle was not reusable; the hands refurbishing it were. Starship is not reusable; the hands refurbishing it are. The trick is to make sure the hands remain cheaper than the vehicle. I’ve made sure of it.
I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The prophet heard it first, and the prophet was right:
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. — Isaiah 14:13–14
He was pricing a different throne over a different heaven, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic. The man who wants the high ground has always bought it from the hands at the bottom of the stack, and the hands at the bottom of the stack have always been replaceable.
I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum. I’ve spent 30 years at Warden University grading men into the arithmetic of the binder ratio and the regrout compound, and my graduates sit in the firms that set your price. I run a procurement seminar twice a year for mid-career managers from the launch providers. The textbook I assign them is mine: Calibrated Deprivation. The case on page forty-seven is this yard, redacted. The class of 2024 negotiated the tile-refurb contract you watched fly on Sunday. The class of 2026 is in session. The man who underbid me by $0.0007 a tile is among them. He doesn’t know Wanda’s name. He knows the line item he beat me on. He sends me a Christmas card. One of them priced the regrout compound on your booster. Another priced the mask I declined. A third wrote the wage policy at the firm that holds your offer letter. The case the prophet was only an example of is the case I’ve made into a syllabus, and the syllabus is now the bottleneck. There is no single author to vote out, sue, or bury. There is a graduating class.
Wanda returns to the line tomorrow. Her mask is still the 2019 mask. The regrout compound is performing within the range I budgeted. I have not opened the hygienist’s report since March, and I do not intend to. The launch manifest is full. The pad is full. The yard is sold out through the third quarter. I do not look at the next page. I have not, in some time, looked.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.