Let's Be Space Pirates!

Vicente Diño | Galleon Space

A few days ago, Philippine President Marcos announced that the island nation will build a spaceport and test-launch a rocket from Cagayan next year — a partnership with Perigee Aerospace, a Korean company.

Since then, the reactions online have mostly been the same joke in different outfits: look how small the rocket is, why are we doing this when we have real problems at home.

Fair enough. But let me tell you about another small, broke country on the edge of a continent it didn’t matter to.

In the 16th century, England was a poor island kingdom, dwarfed by France’s armies and Spain’s galleons — the biggest ships on the biggest empire the ocean had ever seen. Nobody in Madrid was losing sleep over England.

Then a handful of English privateers — in other words, pirates !!! — took their rinky-dink boats out into water that supposedly belonged to Spain and Portugal, with Queen Elizabeth quietly backing them from the shadows. It wasn’t a grand strategy. It was a small, scrappy, half-legal bet. Two centuries later, that bet became the British Empire.

So yes — the first Philippine rocket will be small. It definitely looks unimpressive next to a Falcon 9. That’s not the point. The point is that you don’t get a space program by skipping the small, embarrassing first step. You get one by taking it anyway.

We don’t need to win space on day one. We need to start plotting a course.

Maybe, somewhere down that course, we get to be space pirates too.

Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space — a newsletter covering the space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America | @GalleonSpace