Trained Catholic exorcists in the US

It appears that as Americans have grown increasingly concerned with demonic possession, they have simultaneously become more interested in launching things into space, which suggests either that we are trying to escape something very specific, or that the universe has developed a sense of irony so finely calibrated it could only be the work of a cosmic accountant. Between 2005 and 2021, trained Catholic exorcists and commercial space launches moved together with the kind of synchronicity usually reserved for old married couples or conspiracy theorists with too much time. One wonders if Satan has simply been outsourced to low earth orbit.

The real explanation almost certainly lives in America's economic expansion during this period, which made both ecclesiastical infrastructure and commercial spaceflight simultaneously more viable as specialised pursuits. A rising GDP tends to create room for both the niche religious services and the venture-capital-funded moonshots that a poorer nation would have to choose between. Consider that in 2005, the US launched roughly one commercial space mission per year; by 2021, SpaceX alone was launching more than twenty times annually, a growth curve that mirrors, almost eerily, the intensification of training programs among American dioceses responding to perceived spiritual emergencies.

What we are witnessing is not evidence of demonic involvement in aerospace, but rather the curious fact that prosperity makes space for seemingly unrelated specialisms to flourish simultaneously. The correlation tells us something true about American abundance: we have enough resources to train people to fight invisible enemies while simultaneously sending rockets into the sky to search for new ones. Both trends simply reflect that we were rich enough to be very strange in many directions at once.