Recently, the White House issued an executive order to establish a United States Space Academy to be run by NASA. Below is a proposal for what the Space Academy could be — a new kind of educational institution built from the ground up around practical technology research and excruciatingly high standards instead of the traditional academic model. You might notice that it doesn’t particularly sound like a policy proposal; this is because I originally wrote it as a pitch for what Speculative Technologies could grow into. But the argument below – that the way to forge elite scientists and engineers is in the crucible of serious work – certainly applies to the Space Academy. More generally, the US and the world would be better off with a Hardcore Institute of Technology, whether or not it is the Space Academy. If you agree, please get in touch!
Instead of a traditional university, the Space Academy should be a Hardcore Institute of Technology to train the Navy Seals of science and engineering through serious technology research. Revolutionizing technical education won’t look like building yet another university; instead, it will look like an industrial research lab building new technologies that brings on journeymen and apprentices who it then forges into the world’s best scientists, technologists, and leaders through learning by doing. Creating this place is critical to building the future: science and technology are dominated by power laws where our capabilities are limited by how good the best people are; technical research and the researchers who do it are the seed corn of the tech industry and the future itself.
The quality of elite technical education in the US is abysmal. Even the best technical universities have fallen prey to broader trends in higher education: lower standards, suppressing weird adventurous cultures, less risk taking and experimentation, shifting focus from technical skills to brand certification, and an explosion of different institutional roles. In 2026, you can graduate from an Ivy League school with a technical degree without ever having taken a class in linear algebra. Even the quality of Caltech students (once a bar for brutally hard technical training) has fallen off a cliff. From personal experience running technical organizations, we can say confidently that there are now almost no schools in the US that carry the signal that “this person is a technical badass.”
We need to change this. If we (both the US and globally) are going to build an amazing future, we need obscenely hardcore scientists and technologists. Counterintuitively, the way to forge hardcore scientists and technologists is not to build yet another school. Instead, you start by building a research lab that is working on real, serious problems. Serious technical training needs to happen while doing serious work. Smart technical managers know this: work portfolios are starting to matter far more than credentials. Working on specific teams at certain companies is now a far better indicator of quality than any degree: a successful tour of duty at SpaceX has more signal than going to MIT. But SpaceX demands employees be maximally productive from day 1 – we need organizations with the same focus and rigor but with enough slack for people to learn and get up to speed.
Once the lab is up and running, we will bring in “journeymen” who have some training or experience, but are not yet masters of their craft. These folks would be the equivalent of grad students but with the explicit understanding that they are not students and this is not a degree-granting program: the deal is that they will get some slack for not knowing everything up front, they will work their butts off, and will become the most hardcore scientists and technologists the world has ever seen. A bit later we will bring in “apprentices.” These are high-school graduates or younger who love science, building, and are ready for a trial by fire. Again — no grades, no degree, and no accreditation; just experience and an incredible portfolio. These people would be the Navy Seals of science and engineering – you know that anybody who comes out of this place is the best of the best.
It’s worth reemphasizing this needs to primarily be a place devoted to doing serious work — when most people think about education, they think about schools and toy projects. Learning through serious work was part of Humboldt’s original idea behind the German University model, but has been lost over time. From personal experience, the thing that made the Caltech undergraduate education so unique was that it felt bolted on to a place primarily devoted to scientific research, not like the main purpose of the organization. We knew we weren’t the most important thing — we were there to learn from the people who were doing the important thing. Classes are still important for learning, but they would be directly in service of making journeymen and apprentices as amazing as they can be at doing science and technology, not as an end in and of themselves.
The Hardcore Institute of Technology should focus on pre-commercial space, materials, and manufacturing research for three reasons:
Few other domains are better proving grounds for learning to manipulate atoms, scale technologies, and do consequential work.
A lot of the most important research in these domains won’t be done at either companies or universities, so there is currently a huge institutional gap.
These are the crucial technologies for the future: from reindustrializing and fixing climate to abundance and going to the stars.
In order to keep the Institute deeply connected to the real-world needs of the increasingly-private Space Industry (and other parts of the technology ecosystem it will support) it should be created as a public-private partnership. In addition to the government, funding could come from: far-seeing philanthropists who want to unlock the future, transform technical education, and support the next generation of technical badasses; a consortium of companies that want to hire or fund extremely hardcore scientists and technologists; and research contracts with both large companies and startups that want to offload speculative work that’s beyond their core competencies without the overhead, IP obsessions, and bureaucracy that is the price of working with most modern universities. This work would also keep the organization and trainees tightly coupled to real problems and needs.
Bringing in revenue from multiple sources will also keep the Institute from being captured by any one set of incentives and help it walk a tightrope between serving today’s needs and the future’s possibilities.
The Institute should start fast and scrappy: quickly constructing a bare-bones building equipped with cutting-edge tools, hiring initial staff of program leads and technicians, identifying 3-8 initial programs, and then bringing on the initial classes of journeymen and apprentices. All within the first year.
The Space Academy/Hardcore Institute of Technology won’t be for most people. It will only appeal to people who want to be the best of the best and want to put in the work, and even then not all of them will make it through. But because it will be tuition-free, salaried, and focus purely on who can do the work, it will draw people from all sorts of backgrounds, not just the upper-middle class who have optimized their entire lives around getting into elite colleges.
No age or degree requirements, no gaming grades, no excuses. Just building and learning.
I agree that there is a need for specialized, project-oriented technical education for the space industry. This need is likely present for a multitude of industries. One example of such training can be seen at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. I worked at IIT in the '90's and saw the hands-on efforts of the mostly first-generation college going students, many of whom were completing their degrees in night programs, so they could work and gain technical experience during the day. Such renowned technologists such as Marty Cooper ('50/M.S.'57, inventor of the first hand-held cell phone) and Marc Hannah ('77, founder of Silicon Graphics, pioneered 3D rendering software) graduated from IIT.
In my experience, alumni and others will be compelled to philanthropically support technical, hands-on education. For decades there has been nostalgia for the hallowed halls of Bell Labs. Perhaps some of that technical and team-driven innovation magic can be implemented through the concepts for the Hardcore Institute of Technology that you outlined!