Below is the 17th entry in my yearly tradition of making (bad) predictions. While a smarter man would have admitted defeat long ago, it’s an exercise I enjoy despite being horrendous at it. So without further ado, here are some thoughts about the coming year.
- SpaceX will have 10-15 launches of its new Starship rocket by the end of the year, with at least one ship re-used.
SpaceX launched four test flights in 2024, and at this point the first stage has already landed successfully once, while the second stage is getting close. They have stated that they want to launch 25 flights in 2025, but 15 would still be an amazing accomplishment and is probably more within the realm of reality. It’s a great time to be alive if you’re a fan of space. - The Browns will trade back from the #2 overall pick in the 2025 NFL draft and won’t draft a quarterback with their first selection.
In my perfect world, Deion Sanders announces that his son won’t play for Cleveland, a bidding war breaks out between the Giants, Jets and Raiders for the #2 pick, and Cleveland ends up with Las Vegas’ #6 overall, their second and third rounders, and a 2026 second round pick. The Browns then draft a manimal with their first pick and take Jaxson Dart with one of their two second-rounders. He sits behind Kirk Cousins for a year, and we all live happily ever after. But it’s the Browns, so there’s an equally good chance that they draft a QB #2 and he goes on to easily break the rookie record by throwing more than 28 interceptions in his first season. - The Fantastic Four: First Steps will be a return to form for Marvel, and will gross over $1.2 billion worldwide and over $600 million domestically.
The folks at Marvel have been excited to do a Fantastic Four movie since forever, so they should be highly motivated not to screw this one up. In the past five years their movies have been a mess of too many characters, not enough focus on compelling stories, and a lack of cohesion between movies. With this movie set in the 1960s they won’t be tempted to pull in other characters, so the film should be focused on just the Fantastic Four and will tell a story that is worth going to a theater for. - A bubble in commercial real estate will seriously threaten the financial sector by the end of the year.
Since COVID, office buildings are operating at low occupancy rates, and with leases coming up for renewal companies are going to walk away, and some developers will then choose to default on their loans. Much like the subprime mortgage crisis in 2010, since the defaulted properties won’t have demand the banks will be left with properties worth less than the original loan amount, and there will be serious impacts on balance sheets. - Most of Trump’s cabinet nominees, including controversial picks like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, will be confirmed, but Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr will both be forced to withdraw.
As the Matt Gaetz nomination showed, Republican Senators aren’t going to support nominees that they have strong objections to, but they also don’t want to go on record against Trump, so if there really is resistance to Gabbard and RFK then their nominations will be delayed, allowing time for information like RFK’s fringe views on vaccines and diets, and Gabbard’s sympathetic views of Russia, to weaken their support. - While industrywide electric vehicle sales numbers will continue to climb, Tesla’s sales will fall both globally and domestically by at least 10-15% in 2025.
Tesla has pioneered a revolution in automobiles, demonstrating that electric cars are a superior solution to gasoline vehicles. However, in the last five years the Cybertruck design has been hugely divisive, Elon has made an annual unfulfilled promise that the cars will drive themselves by the end of the year, they have put a weird focus on humanoid robots, and meanwhile their car designs are getting long in the tooth. At the same time, the CEO’s newfound enthusiasm for a President-elect who calls climate change a hoax and chants “drill baby drill” at his rallies is not a good way to increase brand loyalty for a company whose mission is still supposedly to “advance the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. Tesla’s sales in 2024 disappointed despite lots of year-end incentives and a rush of people trying to take advantage of federal EV tax breaks, and 2025 may be another slow year for Tesla’s automotive division. - The number of active users on Bluesky will surpass Facebook’s Threads by the end of the year, but won’t (quite) overtake
TwitterX.
I used the pre-Elon Twitter as a way to get insights from authors, engineers, political scientists and others. Additionally, it was an amazing source of immediate news coverage – an obscure USGS scientist was always online if an earthquake occurred or a volcano erupted, and a former astronaut always weighed in when there was notable space news. Post-Elon most of the people I followed left Twitter, but in the past couple of months they are starting to show up on Bluesky and seem likely to bring their former Twitter followers with them. - 2025 will see the elimination of the debt ceiling.
I’m not confident in this prediction, but here’s my thinking: the debt ceiling has to be raised while Trump is President since the US isn’t going to cut a trillion dollars from the annual budget. There are a number of House Republicans who don’t ever want their names attached to a debt ceiling vote, so raising it has to be done with help from Democrats. That gives the Democrats leverage, and since Trump already floated the idea of getting rid of the debt ceiling altogether, Democrats will finally have an opportunity to remove a time bomb from the budget process. - Boeing will sell or spin off its space division.
Starliner was delayed several years and then had thruster issues that left two astronauts stranded on the space station for six months. SpaceX is getting the bulk of all launch contracts, and Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket will be operational soon. It’s not clear what Boeing’s sales pitch for space is anymore, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see their new CEO exit the business by selling off their space division to focus on airplanes and defense. - The new Superman movie will underperform, with earnings similar to the 2017 Justice League movie.
James Gunn seems to have his heart in the right place, but DC keeps prioritizing spectacle over story, and unless you’re James Cameron that isn’t a recipe for successful movies. The trailer for the new film seemed like it had a dozen different heroes and villains in it, which portends a movie aimed at setting up future films instead of telling a coherent story. The original Christopher Reeve film wasn’t beloved because of spectacle, it was beloved because it inspired us to imagine our world with Superman in it, but DC doesn’t seem to understand that fact. Hopefully I’m wrong about the new movie, because it would be great to be inspired by the Man of Steel once again. - The high-speed train between LA-ish and Las Vegas will start major construction and actually gain support from Republicans.
Brightline West is a private company planning to build a high-speed train from the outskirts of LA along the I-15 median for 218 miles to Las Vegas. They have received $3 billion in federal grants, and claim the project can be completed for less than $20 billion and be operational by 2028. The cost will be higher and the opening date will be missed, but given Republican support for private businesses, Trump’s love of building stuff, and the fact that this train mostly runs through red districts, I’m betting we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the coming years. - Lebron James will announce that he will retire after the 2025-2026 NBA season.
At 40 Lebron is still one of the best players in the NBA, but he’s also aware that he can’t play at a high level forever, and I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t want to go out with a whimper. If the Lakers somehow won the championship this year he’d probably retire after this season, but otherwise his current contract is through 2026, and he’ll likely want to announce his plans in advance so he can go out in front of sold-out arenas cheering for one of the top four players ever to play the game. And yeah, top four: Jordan #1, Wilt #2, Russell #3, Lebron #4. - The NASA Space Launch System (SLS) will be on the chopping block by the end of the year.
The first flight of NASA’s SLS rocket launched in 2022, but the second flight that will carry humans around the moon has been pushed back to 2026. With Elon Musk playing an outsized role in the Trump administration, a space entrepreneur nominated to head NASA, and Richard Shelby having retired in 2023, this very expensive and slow moving program will be at serious risk of cancellation by the end of the year. - American men will break the national records in the 800m, 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m.
Breaking four national records in one year is a tall ask, but what’s the fun in making safe predictions? Grant Fischer is the reigning record holder in the 5,000m and 10,000m and just won bronze medals in both events in Paris. Bryce Hoppel is the reigning 800m indoor world champion and American record holder. The 1500m record is likely the toughest of the four, but Americans won the bronze and gold medals in Paris with times that were only a fraction of a second from the record, so this year could very well see all four records rewritten. - The trend of billionaires buying media companies will continue with at least one huge purchase.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, and Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. Warner Brothers, and thus CNN, may soon be up for sale, and Elon Musk has suggested he would buy MSNBC, so with billionaires more and more interested in shaping media narratives, and with Trump likely to make it a difficult four years for journalists, this year may see another big sale.
And there they are, fifteen predictions about the new year. These took a shockingly long time to come up with, and they will almost certainly be embarrassingly wrong when revisited twelve months from now, but it’s a game I enjoy, and also a good annual affirmation that my talents are that of an engineer who focuses on solving immediate problems rather than trying to figure out what lies in the distant future.
Hope this is the year you defy the odds, Ryan!