Ladies and gentlemen, I give you perhaps the greatest single piece of machinery ever built: the Saturn V rocket. Standing 111 meters (363 feet) tall and weighing a massive 3 million kilos (6.7 million pounds), this was the vehicle that took human beings from the earth to the moon.

Only it's not.

What you see here is not a Saturn V, but rather a replica -- one tenth the height of the real thing:

Just before 1 p.m. on Saturday April 25, a Saturn V rocket carried one more man into history. Steve Eves broke two world records Saturday, when his 1/10th scale model of the historic rocket built in his garage near Akron, Ohio lifted off from a field on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The 36-ft.-tall rocket was the largest amateur rocket ever launched and recovered successfully and at 1648 pounds, also the heaviest.

Eves' single-stage behemoth was powered by nine motors eight 13,000 Newton-second N-Class motors and a 77,000 Newton-second P-Class motor. (Five Newton-seconds is equivalent to about a pound of thrust.) All told, the array generated enough force to chuck a Volkswagen more than a half-mile and sent the Saturn V more than 4440 feet straight up. It was arguably the most audacious display of raw power ever generated by an amateur rocket. "I didn't start out to break records," the soft-spoken 50-year-old says. "I had just been working away, building it and then one day I realized no one's ever pulled this off before."

When SpaceshipOne made history a few years back, we noted that in a matter of a few decades, a feat that once only the wealthiest and most powerful governments on earth could accomplish -- a basic sub-orbital flight -- was now achievable by a committed and well-funded private group. And now here comes Steve Eves with an accomplishment that is, in some ways, even more extraordinary than SpaceShipOne. Eves has no government or corporate sponsors. He's just a guy. And while his Saturn V replica falls well short of making it into space -- much less taking a crew of three to the moon and back -- I think it is safe to say that it's a bigger and more powerful rocket than any in existence 80 years ago. In fact, 75 years ago, the cutting edge of rocket technology was Wernher von Braun's A2, puny in both height and weight compared to Eves' rocket, although the A2 did have a somewhat greater range -- but then it didn't have to push nearly the weight. If we look just at size, Eves' rocket is about 80% as long as a V2, which was the state of the art of rocketry until the post-war Americans and Russians started building the space programs pretty much on top of it.

The hand-off of technological capability from the wealthy and powerful to the average person is a familiar theme. By now, we're all pretty much used to hearing how there's more computing power in our cars (or coffee makers or washing machines) than was used on an Apollo spacecraft. In fact, the laptop I'm typing on right now probably has more computing power than was available to all of NASA during the Apollo program. We're used to this trope when it deals with computing power, and we're even pretty familiar with it when it comes to communication technology. One of the reasons the mainstream media is having so much trouble these days is that much of their ability to disseminate information has fallen into the hands of smaller, much leaner, organizations...and to individuals.

But when we get into the world of stuff, that's a whole different ball game. Or at least we expect it to be.

At the Speculist, we've written a lot lately about the end of scarcity. When we had Joseph Jackson on FastForward Radio a while back discussing what a world of true abundance might be like, one of the seemingly fanciful examples mentioned was the ability -- of anyone who is inspired to do so -- to construct their own full-size replica of the Titanic. (That's over and above having food, shelter, clothing for everyone on earth, of course.)

With that in mind, Eves' accomplishment begins to look like a signpost on the road to abundance. It's interesting to note that what he has done, he did without nanotechnology or a fab lab. Even without using any of the disruptive technologies that promise to utterly transform the way in which individuals are able to produce material goods, one man -- a skilled hobbyist, an amateur in the truest sense of the word -- is the technological equal of one of the greatest industrial powers on the planet 75 years earlier.

I'm not a fan of linear projections because they don't take into consideration the complex and reiterative way that change actually occurs. So let's not make a prediction; let's just ask a question. Even without the widespread implementation of disruptive materials technology, is it possible that the technological capability of a skilled and devoted individual will trail that of powerful nation-states by 75 years or so?

If so (keeping in mind that the real Saturn V is more than 40 years old), 35 years from now, Steve Eves or someone like him will have true Saturn V capability at his disposal. Moon missions will be the stuff of hobbyists, perhaps comparable to participation in extreme sports today.

And remember -- that's where we can expect to be if the really magical technology doesn't show up as expected. With widespread nano-replication technology, 35 years from now is indescribable: a future obscured by a singularity of material capability. Perhaps by then devoted individuals can each have their own space elevator or orbiting city or working replica of the Starship Enterprise -- without the warp drive, of course.

Or maybe with the warp drive. Who knows? A lot can happen in 35 years.

Via Geekpress.