We must have different ideas of dominating. I meant they find a payload size and excel at it .That does not mean they will take over the whole of the industry.

As for their society. I don’t care for it but their leaders have proven to be good allies for many years.
As for their religion. Well it does not so much look like a religion than a form of governance of its people. It contradicts itself in all aspects. It is not a religion of peace if read literally. Even their own scholars admit that their clerics need to be taught how to interpret each passage. And some interpret them very badly. Emily.

I wish them oblivion. The odds of them ever “dominating” the space launch industry are exactly zero. They are, at their core, tribal barbarians. Their long-term future chances of any significant role off-planet are about the same as those of the stone-age tribes of the Amazon basin – zip.

Jeff Wright,

We do have more easily-accessed oil deposits. Shale oil wells can be brought on-line in a matter of weeks. And the quality of the shale crude is better than the Arabian norm. Shale reserves keep increasing as better and better fracking technology continues to raise the amount that can be gotten from any given well.

We could be more self reliant, but part of me wants to sit on our reserves so as to more quickly drain their resources and hurry along their irrelevancy.

I quite agree. Islam has been aggressively expansionist since its inception. But, given that it arose as the personal project of perhaps the greatest grifter in the history of the planet – L. Ron Hubbard being a microscopic midget by comparison – and a man who was also a thief and a child molester as well as illiterate, its adherents, with similar proclivities, have never been more than minor nuisances when they have lacked money. Between the Age of Discovery that sidelined the Silk Road and the discovery of oceans of petroleum beneath Arabian sands, Islam was penurious and only bothersome to the rest of the world in relatively minor ways. That will be their fate once again as the oil money runs out.

I hope some oil money does go into this.
Winged spaceflight deserves a better champion than carny barker Branson.

The Middle East is already on the long-term backslopes of the curves for both petroleum supply, in terms of proven reserves, and demand. Both the exploration/extraction technology and the demand come mainly from places outside of Arabia and Iran. But the still-ongoing American shale revolution now means that a great deal of the needed supply is now also obtainable from a far less problematic place. This will do to the Middle East petro-economies what the Western invention of long-range oceanic shipbuilding and navigation technology did to the Silk Road a few centuries prior.

The political and international legal basis of the Middle Eastern “good times” of the last several decades have, in any case, also derived entirely from sources outside of the region. The Westphalian system of nation-statehood is of European origin and is, frankly, the only thing that has ever stood in the way of Westerners with both the need for, and means to obtain, petroleum simply exterminating Middle Eastern indigenes and taking it.

In return for this principled forbearance, said indigenes have used a non-trivial fraction of their royalties to spread both aggressively medieval sects of Islam and religiously-inspired terrorism worldwide. The Middle Eastern petro-states have also spent much of their income on conspicuous consumption and the hiring of armies of poorly-treated guest-workers from less fortunate nations to do their scut work while the native beneficiaries live lives that more resemble those of trustifarians than of normative Third-Worlders – which they otherwise are.

In the meantime, the ability to also import Western medical care as well as copious food from everywhere on the planet has allowed Middle Eastern populations to grow to where they now vastly exceed the natural carrying capacity of the generally wretched land their nations occupy.

We are not quite to the point where the music consequentially stops for the first time and some are left without seating, but the game of Middle Eastern musical chairs has very much begun.

A few of those with power and influence in this region of the world have noticed that there is at least one bridge out up ahead on the road that has been travelled for much of the past century and that continuing on as before is simply no longer an option. Thus, we have this latter-day attempt at a forced-march to genuine modernity – particularly in the smaller Gulf kingdoms and sheikdoms – instead of the purchased-with-a-platinum-card Potemkin simulacrum that has been seen as sufficient heretofore.

Perhaps this will work and perhaps it will not. I’m inclined toward the former alternative as I think the cultural baggage in that part of the world is simply too heavy to heave across the chasm separating the approaches of that broken bridge up ahead. Clinging to said baggage will render crossing equally impossible for most of the people themselves. The only way to reach that other side is to dump the dysfunctional past, get a good running start and leap for all one is worth. Even then, there will be no guarantees.