Science Quote by K. Eric Drexler

Drexler’s sentence is doing a quiet kind of world-building: it treats “inexpensive space transportation” and “industrial facilities in orbit” not as sci-fi wish-list items but as baseline infrastructure, like highways and ports. That rhetorical move matters. By anchoring his MIT work in the premise of lowered launch costs, he shifts the conversation away from spectacular one-off missions and toward an economy of scale: once access is cheap, the interesting question becomes what gets manufactured, assembled, and iterated above the atmosphere.

The intent is methodological as much as visionary. He’s framing his research as conditional engineering: assume a bottleneck disappears, then map the design space that opens up. The subtext is a critique of the old space paradigm, where cost and rarity force every project into bespoke heroics. Drexler’s “once we had” is a small phrase with a big wager inside it: that technological and organizational constraints are temporary, and that the real leverage lies in planning for the post-constraint era before it arrives.

Context sharpens the point. Drexler is associated with molecular nanotechnology and the broader late-20th-century futurist tradition that tried to make grand technological futures legible as engineering problems rather than fantasies. His phrasing, “various sorts of work,” is almost comically understated for the scale implied: orbital industry, space-based manufacturing, potentially self-reinforcing expansion. Understatement is strategy. It lets an audacious agenda pass as normal research continuity, the kind that can live inside an institution like MIT without sounding like a manifesto.