“A Shortfall of Gravitas” You may have heard this expression before. It is the name given by Elon Musk to one of his drone ships in the Atlantic, whose home port at Cape Canaveral is less than a mile from our October C&I hotel. With any luck, we will be able to see it firsthand at Saturday’s fellowship breakfast. On its deck may rest a recovered Falcon-9 booster, just a couple of hundred yards across the channel from our venue, Grills Seafood Deck Portside. The droneship’s name originates from a series of science fiction books by author Iain M. Banks.
In Mr. Banks’ series of stories, there are several massive, city-sized drone ships (2-3 km in length) that are designed to prowl vast distances in the universe. The crew of A Shortfall of Gravitas is a single artificially intelligent hive mind that operates robotic handlers. The point the author makes is wry and subtle. While the vessel is one of the most powerful and intelligent ever made by man, instead of bearing a nauseating name reflecting ultimate power, it is given the more comfortable and intentionally self-deprecating name reflecting its actual shortfall of ultimate gravitas expressed by humans as well as in all of their creations. And why is that so?
Ask any South American general dictator-for-life. He does indeed walk around with a chest full of medals and is certainly imbued with a monumental sense of self-imposed gravitas, to be sure. But as history has shown many times, he is, in reality, only always one bullet away from the end of his “ruler for life” term – a frequent solution to excessive gravitas among aggrieved citizens with no food to feed their children.
Another well-known example is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s hijacking of the Hollywood phrase, “Failure is not an Option.” That slogan was never spoken by flight director Gene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission, but it was written into the movie script decades later. Unfortunately for its idealized gravitas, it has no connection with reality, engineering or otherwise, just like Hollywood. As a career NASA engineer, I find the phrase embarrassing – for the same reason I find any swaggering South American general dictator-for-life ridiculous and foolish.
Elon Musk pulled several of these threads together when he named his drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas. Musk has, in just a few years, reinvented space exploration. He accomplished this historic rabbit-out-of-his-hat by leveraging the real-world opposite of the “failure is not an option” process. Musk routinely deliberately drives his systems to failure as a part of his “iterative failure” design process. On 24 August 2024, a Falcon 9 collapsed after landing on A Shortfall of Gravitas. While a very mature design, SpaceX used that crash to make even more improvements to its space vehicle.
Among the fleet of his drone ships, six booster landings resulted in crashes (described by SpaceX as RUDs – Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly). But before the use of these ships, nine boosters were lost during the iterative failure engineering test campaign. In the current Starship test campaign, out of 10 flights, only two heavy boosters have been nominally recovered to use again – both returning to the launch tower to be caught by the “chopsticks.” Ten Starships and eight heavy boosters have been sacrificed so far just to learn 21st-century space technology quickly and effectively.
Meanwhile, over at NASA (following the “failure is not an option” process), no Space Launch System (SLS) vehicles have been lost to date. As a former Space Vehicle NASA Space Specialist, I can assure you with great confidence why this is so. Congress fully expects NASA to live up to its “failure is not an option” slogan. Therefore, NASA literally must “buy down” its ever-present risk at the cost of billions of dollars and huge chunks of time. (Recall that we are not talking about human spaceflight here, only spaceflight hardware.)
The Failure Is Not an Option Process: NASA began working on SLS in 2010. Today, each SLS launch costs the taxpayer $4.2 billion, while 95% of the vehicle is thrown away after each launch. NASA has launched two (2) SLS rockets in 15 years.
Iterative Failure Design Process: SpaceX’s first three launches ended in failure. Yet, since NASA started on SLS, SpaceX has successfully launched 540 missions and recovered 487 boosters. (Nearly all of the unrecovered boosters were purposefully expended to gain orbital mass). The mid-range cost of each Starship flight is estimated to be $5 million per mission – a 900-fold reduction of the cost for one SLS launch – and none of the flight hardware is wasted. The sheer power of the implementation of a shortfall of gravitas is astonishing, because failure is indeed not an option – it is a fundamental engineering process.
Fellow Knights and Dames, our forefathers lived this kind of life. They could not buy down risk to ensure a “failure is not an option” Hollywood fairy tale on their battlefields. And neither can we.
Each of us faces a daily reality of a shortfall of gravatas in our lives. Why? Because we are sinners saved only by God’s grace, for there is none who is righteous, none, as we live together in a fallen, error-driven world. (Ephesians 2:8-9, Romans 3:10-12)
Except for One… the One and only One Who does live an eternal life fully imbued with complete, unchallenged, and ultimate gravitas – our Jesus.
Therefore, what does this Captain of the Lord’s Army, Whom we serve with our lives, require from us? I am sure you already know the reply to this question, answered so plainly and forthrightly in scripture:
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
We are directed to live each day without a thought to our own gravitas, for we are each born with a steep shortfall, to be sure. Instead, we are to keep that shortfall in our thoughts and in our view always, for it humbly reminds each of us of Something – of Someone wonderful. For it is He Who changes our lives that are always lived in iterative failure; glaring examples of a daily propensity to crash in flaming RUDs. Each day, God supernaturally metamorphoses us into images of perfection via a borrowed gravitas.
Jesus came to solve that shortfall in our lives. Because in Him, “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13-14)
Today, we will never be able to boast about our own gravitas as we are each frequently reminded of our shortfalls. Instead, just as our Templar forefathers modeled so magnificently, we leave for the spiritual battlefields each day to “do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.”
By this, we may humbly assume access to Christ’s prefect gravitas as we simply kneel before the One Who created each of us, along with each countless star in a vast universe that has no limit. He is the same One Who formed His beloved peoples with loving hands for the purpose of communing with them daily for all eternity. After all, it is God Who also fashioned the vast river of eternal time on which we sail – a river that, just like our lives, has no end at all.