President Orders 1,000 Rocket Launches A Year By 2030, Beginning Whenever

WASHINGTON—The president signed a memorandum this week directing the country to reach 1,000 rocket launches a year by 2030, a target arrived at by writing down the number 1,000.

That comes to roughly three launches a day, every day, which would put a single country ahead of the launch rate of the entire rest of the planet combined. The current national rate is a fraction of it. The memorandum treats the gap as a matter of prioritization and streamlining, two words that have never, on their own, produced a rocket.

The document sets the figure and stops there. It does not say who will build the rockets, who will pay for them, what they will carry, or where they will come down. Agencies were instructed to make it happen. They were not told with what.

This is a recognizable way of governing, one in which the goal is the announcement and the logistics are a problem handed to someone with a smaller title. A thousand is a good number for the purpose because it is round, and round numbers photograph well behind a podium.

The launches are set to begin at an unspecified point before 2030. For now the program is airborne only in the sense that it is written on paper.