Episode 39: Space Force Initiates a “Campaign of Learning” to Develop its Objective Force

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King 

SME: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova (MD) 

Lt Gen (Ret) Bill Liquori, Executive Partner at Elara Nova (BL) 

00:02 – 01:12 

This past spring the United States Space Force published two highly anticipated, forward-looking documents: Future Operating Environment 2040 and Objective Force 2040. When Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman unveiled these documents at this year’s Space Symposium, he declared the service’s intention for them was to “drive questions, not provide answers.” 

Now, the Space Force wants not only its guardians, but its international and industry partners to engage, debate and provide feedback on the ideas laid out in these two documents — in what can be deemed a ‘campaign of learning’ — to evaluate what the future space domain might look like and help define the Space Force’s future force design requirements needed to operate and succeed in a rapidly-evolving and unpredictable domain.  

Welcome to The Elara Edge. We have two guests today, here to share their perspective on how we got to this pivotal moment, the driving force behind these documents, and where the Space Force’s international and industry partners should go from here. 

First we have Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova and the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force.  

Mike, welcome to the show!

01:13 – 01:17 

(MD): Hey! Thank you, Scott. These are always great fun and hopefully of great use for our audience.  

01:18 – 01:33 

Yes, thank you, Mike. And then also joining us today is retired Lieutenant General Bill Liquori, an Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the first Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy, Plans, Programs and Analysis for the United States Space Force. 

Sir, welcome back to the show.  

01:34 – 01:44 

(BL): Hey, it’s great to be back, Scott. And it’s even better this time to be partnered up with Mike. He and I have done many partnering across our time in government, and we get to continue to do it in retired life. 

So this is good.  

01:45 – 01:57 

Great. Well, before we get into these two forward-looking documents, let’s take a look into how we got to this moment.   

Where did the need to look at the future operating environment in space – and make force design plans accordingly – first begin? 

01:58 – 04:40 

(MD): You know, if I had to put a stake in the ground of when this all started, Scott, I would pick April of 2015. Because in April of 2015, General Hyten, who was the Commander of Air Force Space Command at the time, where most of the military national security space activities happened.  

He went on 60 Minutes and he talked on that 60 Minutes program to the American public and to the world about the threats that were emerging out of near peer adversaries at the time, Russia and China, how important space was to the American military and American society and what the impact might be if those things collided. 

And it really brought into the public consciousness the place where we were at, which is now really needing to consider how to operate a national security space architecture in the face of a threat. So that kicked off this small group of people that went off and did a study. 

And in April of 2016, which coincidentally, is at the Space Symposium, ten years before the release of these documents, the 2026 version, they released something called the Space Enterprise Vision. And the Space Enterprise vision was a product of this small group of folks who thought about the threat and thought conceptually about how the military space architecture would need to evolve to continue to operate in the face of that threat. 

And that was really the start of what is a robust effort now, and has been increasingly robust across the previous decade. So the space enterprise vision set that tone. And really in the fall of 2018 was the first big programmatic change that really changed one of the legacy programs. And it was a missile warning in this case and changed it to a different architectures for the future to be more resilient to that threat. 

It was all based on how the architecture that is used to support the joint force, which is, you know, things like communications, position, navigation and timing, missile warning, how all those things that were being fielded would stand up to the counter space offensive threat that the adversaries were building. So that analysis then started to inform force design for the future. 

And in December of 2019, when the Space Force was formed after the president signed the National Defense Authorization Act, that force design activity became organizationally institutionalized. So there’s an organization called the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, and it’s got a partner organization called Space Security and Defense Program. And they became the center of doing the force design analysis for the new service. 

And one of the documents that you mentioned is first designed for 2040. In this document, then is really a compilation of the work they’ve been doing over the last several years in all the different mission areas that they describe.

04:41 – 07:56 

(BL): If I was to add anything to what Mike said, I mean, he captured it very well. These two documents could be described as a natural evolution of where we have been, but with an eye towards how different the environment is today versus if we go all the way back to when Mike talked about in 2015, the early force design work that the new service did. 

As the Space Force’s 5 and 8 on the staff. I had teams that were part of informing the inputs to those on the requirements side, and then certainly the budget teams that were working to build our first independent budgets used the analysis from those force designs to feed our early budgets. But I would say those early force designs were by mission area. We couldn’t do them all at once so the Chief of Space Operations prioritizes which ones to go after or our national leadership prioritizes some of those.  

But I would describe them as heavily hardware focused. In other words, what were the on-orbit and ground system capabilities required to deliver a certain mission area? I think what was unique in that era was that not only were we looking at capability and effects delivery in the mission areas, but also what is the cost to do that and what is the most resilient way to do that?  

These two new documents are now that forward looking natural evolution. They take a look at where will the threat and technology evolve? The objective divides it into three areas. Conceptually, General Saltzman talks about routinely. We have our fielded force. That’s all of the people in the hardware that are fielded today delivering capability on behalf of the nation. Then we have the programmed force, which is informed by the program objective memorandum that my old office develops now, and that’s where the president’s budget has said we will put money. But if you leave it at just that, that doesn’t meet all the requirements. 

And so these two documents combined together are helped to get us to that objective force. And that is, you know, the force that we need, we have the force that we have, we have the force that we’ve budgeted for, and then we have the force we need. That’s that objective force. And that’s kind of how he broke them out for purposes of moving forward with the service. 

The other thing that I think these documents do even better than we have done in the past, I mentioned the force designs by design, they were heavily hardware focused. What was the hardware both on orbit and on the ground, required to deliver these mission capabilities? General Saltzman, as the chief, and General Raymond before him and all of our senior leaders, even before a separate service, had to wrestle with, ‘Okay, those are the widgets, but it takes more than just widgets to deliver an actual effect to a warfighter or to the nation.’ 

What these documents do is really spell out, ‘Hey, it’s not just those widgets. They also focus on what is the infrastructure required to make those things successful? What is the staffing required? What is the test and training capability required to bring these to fruition?’ And so I think it’s a way for our second service chief as he benefits from what the first chief did to really tie all of these together in one place.

07:57 – 08:09 

General Saltzman openly solicited feedback from the Space Force’s international and industry partners. 

What will the process look like as the Space Force looks to incorporate the feedback it receives into future iterations of these documents? 

08:10 – 10:29 

(MD): Yeah, the Space Force, just in the last month or so, has made a move to institutionalize organizationally how they think about this future force in the way they’re going to do that is they’ve created something called the S9, which is the Force Design and Analysis group. It’s a directorate on the space staff. And what that S9 director is going to be made up of three parts is really sort of the life cycle of how you develop these force designs. 

And there’s already a group in the Space Force that thinks about lessons learned and military doctrine and concepts that are out in the future. And one example that comes up that I’ll just use to sort of illustrate the point is, what is the Space Force’s role as our nation and many nations head out to the moon? Should we be paying attention to the things that are happening there from a space domain awareness perspective? 

Is there a role to set up position, navigation and timing infrastructure out beyond the earth? Like can we have a GPS? Is there G.P.S. for the moon? So the concepts group thinks about these sort of big things and futuristic types of issues and make some recommendations, and maybe they’ll conclude that there’s a role for the Space Force. Maybe there’s not. 

But let’s presume they think there is a role. So now we start to think about what that role might look like. And it’s tested in war games and tabletop exercises. And that’s really the second part of this life cycle of the future force design. So is to do that experimentation. And before you’re spending a lot of money on it, you’re doing these tabletop exercises and games. 

Maybe you’re using computers and doing simulations to look at these different futures and different force structures, how they might help you satisfy the concept that you came up with. And then you get through that and then you’re at step three. So now we have a concept that we believe in and that we’ve tested through these war games. And now it goes to a force design activity in the Space War Fighting Analysis Center in the SWAC.  

And that’s really the third part of the lifecycle. And that’s to say what would that look like from a hardware perspective? What types of capabilities you need in space? What types of systems do you need on the ground? And once that’s complete, then we push it over to Bill’s old office and programing. And the programing folks then have to work the budget and put money in across the years to move towards the force that’s envisioned from the force design. 

So the S9 new organization on the space staff, made up of three subordinate activities that feed this life cycle of thinking about the future force. 

10:30 – 11:34 

(BL): Yeah, I think I would amplify the S9 certainly seems to be a likely place that will have a big hand in the assessment of how things are going, if you will. Specifically, in the intro to the documents, General Saltzman talks about how I’m paraphrasing. 

These aren’t the be all, end all answer, but they’re designed to posit what the future will look like and what the Space Force will need to succeed in that future. But ultimately, they’re designed to start a campaign of learning that the service will go through with its partners and others to truly shape what does that objective force look like? How does it modify over the years? 

Certainly the S9 team in those different sub elements will have a hand in that, but the entire service will have a hand in how is this going? Where do we need to evolve? As a matter of fact, there’s part of the document that specifically calls out for our planners, this is what you should be doing with this document. For our programmers, think about these things when you read the document for our capability deliverers and on and on and on.  

11:35 – 12:27 

(MD): And if I could amplify General Liquori’s amplification, these questions the document asked, and this campaign of learning and putting that out in the public for everybody to read and to see is not just for inside the service consumption. It’s also a signal there to the industrial base is going to have to create these things and the ability for industry to see what the service is thinking about, where they’re headed, and start to think themselves about where they want to put some research dollars, where they might want to involve capital markets, which of course is super prevalent now in the space industry, where they might need that capital come in and help create the capabilities that would achieve the concepts that are underpinning this. Look at the future in 2040. So those are super important questions that involve everyone that’s associated with bringing a future force to reality. It’s not just a service, it’s all the services. It’s a defense industrial base. It’s the capital markets and everything that goes into that. 

12:28 – 12:41 

Now, let’s dive deeper into each of these respective documents, starting with the Future Operating Environment 2040.  

What are your take-aways from this document? And how does the Space Force prioritize its needs based on the emerging threat environment in space? 

12:42 – 14:59 

(BL): I’ll start at the Future Operating Environment. Very well described. It’s designed to be forward looking out into 2040. But holy cow, what’s going to happen between now and then? I don’t think any of us has the exact crystal ball. And that’s kind of the challenge that every military service wrestles with is: how is the environment going to change for my specific domain?  

And the Space Force is no different. Our environment has been changing at a very rapid pace of late, and so that does make it a challenge. I think probably the most insightful line in the combination of the two documents, is in the intro that General Salzman wrote to the Future Operating Environment, and that was, “[t]he inability to predict the future does not relieve the Space Force of the requirement to plan for it.” 

I think that was a message to all of the people that will read this document to say, ‘If we wait for the future to be here, it’ll be too late and our government processes to be able to be prepared for it will be behind the power curve. right?’ 

So then you think of, ‘Well, gosh, there’s so many different things out there that could change between now and then. The threat continues to grow. Technology is changing. The political environment is changing.’ All of those things. And so what’s interesting here, they allude to it in the beginning of the document and it says that the service used this methodology where they looked at four alternative futures out there and had groups of people wrestle with each of those four alternatives and then go through and look at all the publicly available data that would inform the different elements of those alternatives. 

They tested the theories of each alternative, the limits of technology defined in each alternative, and then used that to identify trends both from a technology perspective as well as how the military may evolve. And then they workshopped each of those scenarios with a group of people. And those people included, as we were sort of talking about earlier military, civilian and commercial representatives, to get the full spectrum of how will the space domain evolve over time? And so I think that’s how the service has decided to tackle this uncertain future, but with an eye towards ‘Okay, we need to make some decisions now. What’s the best way to do that?’ 

15:00 – 16:22 

(MD): It’s interesting that in the document it talks about some of the future threats, you know, the machine learning and AI. There’s also a discussion about China having a 21,000 satellite constellation. Well, we talked about the history of where all this started. And ten years ago in the space enterprise vision and some of that early work, those two things were not part of the conversation. 

That was not on the threat picture. And so, you know, in ten years, it’s changed quite a bit. And then the next 15 years out to 2040, it’s going to change again in ways that you can’t predict. So what General Corey says is absolutely essential. And it’s why I think the Space Force has created this organization to really be able to think about the threats as they evolve and to make changes on a more frequent basis to the architecture that they field into the forces that they need to support that architecture. 

So, Scott, you asked about how do you begin to prioritize? And really, I think you have to prioritize with time. What’s the most pressing threat? What do we see right in the near-term future that we have to deal with? And that’s typically not a force design conversation, because the force designed by its nature, is supposed to be looking out into the future beyond the current 3 or 4 or five year time frame. 

But that is the lens you have to look at from the start, you know, what are the things coming up like? We’ve mentioned, like, I like large proliferated Leo constellations, and now we have to start bringing into these force design conversations. And so if we need to change the force structure or tactics or we have to shift where we’re investing our money. 

16:23 – 16:36 

Let’s turn to the Objective Force 2040, which was essentially presented as an answer to the Future Operating Environment 2040 document. 

What are some of the mission areas described here and are these mission areas an appropriate starting point at this point for the objective force? 

16:37 – 18:52 

(BL): Yeah, sure. I mean, I think the short answer is we’re doing missions today. Those are the missions that make sense to capture here as a starting point. So yes, but they’ve pinned them by the Space Force’s core and enabling functions.  

So the Space Force core functions of space control that has the mission areas of orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare and cyber warfare. Then we’ve got global mission operations which has satellite communications, space based sensing, and targeting, missile warning, missile tracking, navigation warfare.  

And then there are the access mission areas as well, like satellite control. The requirement to be able to talk to your satellite and get data from it. Lift obviously, to put any of our satellites in orbit. And then in order to do that lift, we’ve got to have a launch range that we can control. And so all of those fit in there.  

But then it also captures the enabling functions of intelligence, cyber operations, command and control and space domain awareness. So we’ve got quite the huge subset of missions that the service has got to tackle and I do think this is the right place to start.  

I think one of the things that stood out to me is not so much mission area by mission area, because who knows, in 2040 we may have additional mission areas, but in the objective force design document, I think one of the things that stood out to me are the actual design principles that cut across all of those mission areas, right? 

And so things like warfighters first, hybrid by design. That’s some of the work that the early predecessors did that guided us into this hybrid approach for many of the current force designs and that continues. It’ll be interoperable by design, integrating partner and the advantages of commercial. We’ll get to resilience in multiple ways. But one of those that’s called out specifically is by distribution. 

Competition is kind of the new norm – that was another one that’s in there. Also, I’d flag something that we’ve been talking about since the service stood up and we said we were going to be a digital service first. Well data as a warfighting advantage is that next natural evolution of a design principle here and then distributed command and control, modularity and cyber resilience fits right back into that digital by design as well. 

So I think those design principles called out that are cutting across all the mission areas – that stood out to me. 

18:53 – 21:08 

(MD): I would say that this hybrid architecture approach is key and it comes across in both documents, especially in the objective force document of how diversifying missions across different orbits and different constellations, bringing in partners, bringing in commercial. That is a significant shift. And it’s one that is not easy to do, right? 

When you’re talking about interoperability, which raises issues and concerns about cybersecurity and how do you connect different networks to each other? But that is a key force design principle going forward that the Space Force and everyone that supports it is going to have to figure out: the idea of hybrid architectures with interoperability and command and control across that hybrid nature. 

And the other important thing that comes across is that this new proliferated Leo constellations. I mean, this is something, again, ten years ago, we weren’t really thinking about. So one of the mission areas that’s talked about is space based sensing and targeting. And that’s kind of a new area for the Space Force. There was always some element of environmental monitoring. 

But now we’re talking about moving missions that typically had been done in the air domain up into the space domain. So airborne moving target indicators. You think Awacs is the air version of that ground moving target indicators and J stars. These are things that have been done in the air domain historically, but the air domain is also more and more at risk and difficult to operate in the face of all the threats that that they have to worry about, too. 

And so those missions are coming to space and those proliferated constellations do the things that are best served by being close to the Earth. And those things are new to the Space Force. So that’s going to be an interesting evolution to watch. And really, I think the focus in a lot of these areas as it moves from the conceptual into acquisition is the military component, right? 

So the understanding of the information is not necessarily flying the satellite, but understanding information, the use of that information for targeting in this case less important is the management and day to day operating of constellations and keeping them in the right place. That’s something that’s done in the commercial sector. It’s done in the military. But I see a more and more a connection between industrial partners with letting the commercial market do those types of things, fly the constellation while the military people sit on top of that and make the military decisions that are based on information coming out of the constellations. 

21:09 – 21:34 

Now, the Space Force has made a clear and concerted effort to incorporate commercial partners and capabilities into its architecture over the past several years, namely through efforts like the Commercial Space Strategy and the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve. 

So what does this hybrid architecture – made up of both government and commercial systems – look like in practice? And how does the service go about delegating which mission areas commercial partners can focus on first?

21:35 – 22:29 

(MD): Yeah. Good question. I think one of the most important things that you have to do is think about military essential functions. What are the things that have to be decided by military people, people that are in under a chain of command all the way up to the commander in chief, which is things like pulling a trigger. You never give a commercial provider the ability to pull the trigger on any kind of a weapon system. And that analogy fits here in space too. 

So what you’re going to do with that information, what decisions get made with that information. Those military essential functions have to be pieced out before implementing the things that you’re talking about of commercial can do some of this stuff. So commercial now provides a lot of information through electro-optical sensing and radio frequency spectrum sensing and that information is provided to the military and then military people decide what to do about that information.  

So it’s a well-worn path here. This is not something that is brand new. We just got to make sure we know where those bright lines are. And then aportion accordingly. 

22:30 – 23:54 

(BL): I would say my hope with the two documents, the forward looking nature of them and how they specifically speak to different partners, if you will, across the government and industry side of things, is that by publishing these and putting them out there and General Saltzman even talks about it in his introduction. 

He wants not only his guardians to wrestle with these ideas, debate these ideas, and argue these ideas. But he wants all those other audiences to do the same thing. And my hope would be that by publishing these, it enables those other partners external to the service, if you will, whether they be in government, in the joint force, in other parts of the executive branch, the legislative branch, commercial partners, allies, to wrestle with those things, so that ideally, when they come to engage with the service, they do it armed with the information that’s in these documents and knowing what the service is wrestling with, so that it’s earlier in our process that we begin to say, ‘Who’s got the best fit for this piece of a particular mission? How can we provide resilience or redundancy, or how can we be complementary? And I’ll do a piece of this mission and you do a piece of this mission.’ 

We’ve been getting better over the years, but I think by publishing these two documents and the level of details that are in them, it will enable us to do that even better and I think that’s required for success out in the 2040 timeframe. 

23:55 – 24:12 

Earlier we spoke to the forward-looking nature of these documents and how General Saltzman explicitly stated these documents are meant to, “drive questions, not provide answers.” 

What do you see as those major questions that these documents are driving towards? And what’s the value in posing questions, rather than just delivering answers? 

24:13 – 26:49 

(BL): Ultimately, the first one is written to define the environment, right? The second one is written to describe what is the force that we need. What is that objective force? So that’s the ultimate question it’s trying to answer.  

But as with many of the strategic level documents that both General Raymond and General Saltzman have published, again, the desire is that the workforce and our partners wrestle with the ideas, debate the ideas, because generally speaking, when you do that, you come out with a better answer than just a single person taking a look at something and saying, ‘Here’s the answer.’  

And I think the other thing General Saltzman wisely realizes is if he published a document that says ‘this is the answer.’ It was good for when he reviewed what he was doing when he wrote it. But then people just challenged the document. Well, he wrote a document so that that could happen and didn’t say, ‘This is the answer.’  

He does specifically call out some of the questions, like: What organizational constructs would best help the service deliver on these mission areas. It goes back to the point I was making earlier, that our force designs originally were highly focused on hardware and software, and now these documents recognize, ‘Hey, we’ve got to have organizational constructs that are going to be best set up for success in these mission areas.’ 

We talked about hybrid architectures. One of the questions that gets spelled out in here is: what are the hybrid ground architectures look like that give us our best set of resilience and how would we manage those? Is it a combination of government and industry architectures and who operates which parts of those?  

There’s another question on: how does the Space Force validate its readiness in each of these mission areas?The more diverse, the more hybrid a mission area becomes, the harder it becomes to define readiness. But that doesn’t relieve us from having to capture. Are we ready in this mission area in a contested environment? Or are we not? And so that’s a question that’s out there as the service continues to wrestle with these documents moving forward.  

And then the other one that is flagged in there specifically talks about what emerging concepts will offer the highest value opportunities for this service? This goes back to something Mike was alluding to earlier within that S9 directorate. And this idea of a concepts and technology arm of that organization, there’s probably a limitless number of concepts that people could come up with as they look at these documents and how the environment will unfold.  

Unfortunately, the budget is never limitless, so the service really needs to wrestle with, okay, if we have ten concepts out there that we’re tackling right now, which ones are going to be the most value added to our end user and to the nation when it comes to securing our nation’s interest?  

26:50 – 27:13 

(MD):Yeah. And by putting these questions out there in the public, you sort of unleash all of the think tanks and industry and practitioners in this environment who are going to have great ideas too, and who hopefully can pull those ideas into this campaign of learning and then the conceptualizing and the wargaming and the force designing or it it just becomes a flywheel and it just makes the answers that you get better and better. 

The more people that can provide input. 

27:13 – 27:24 

Now Mike, going back to the hybrid architecture approach that you talked about.  

Can you elaborate on the significance of having these types of conversations with commercial partners this early in the process? I mean, we’re talking 15 years in advance? 

27:25 – 28:28 

(MD): When you finally come to the point of wanting to apply taxpayer money against the problem, the more mature you’ve brought the concept and the technology, the better off you always are. And fielding a combat effective system. So as the industry thinks about what it means to be hybrid, what it means to be interoperable, there are technology things involved in that. 

There are policy things involved in that. There are things like intellectual property and business models that are involved with that. And those debates and conversations don’t get resolved overnight.  

And those debates and conversations don’t get resolved overnight. These are things that, again, you have to pressure test, debate and work through a number of different processes and then as the concepts mature, then you start feeling more confident that you can start to apply money against actually now building prototypes and building systems.  

So I think that’s an important aspect of this hybrid world is really understanding across all of those different vectors, the challenges that are involved in bringing dissimilar things together, things that are owned by other people together, you know, crossing international boundaries. This is all hard. 

28:29 – 30:07 

(BL): If I could build on what Mike was saying. So two groups of people that routinely engage with our Space Force, certainly at the senior levels, our allies and partners internationally and industry, and those conversations often start with on the Allied side, it’s, ‘Hey, if I could spend €1 more or one pick your currency more on a space capability that would help the United States and us together as an allied force be better. Where should we spend that money? That’s a question that comes up often. 

On the industry side. Hey, if I was going to spend some of my own internal dollars from the company, where would it be most beneficial to you as a service for me to do some research? Or what is the toughest problem you have as a service so that I know as an industry partner what capability to go build? 

Well, now there’s a set of documents that you can review before even going into those conversations, so that it starts that conversation in a more informed place and ideally gets us to the heart of the matter, which is, ‘Well, if we combine the Space Force capability with this particular allied capability, now we might really be somewhere, ‘Hey, let’s get some of our teams together and wargame this. Let’s get some of our teams together and explore this concept multilaterally. Or hey, let’s get a few industry partners together as we do this next force design, informed by the objective force and informed by the future operating environment. And see where the combined government industry solution can get us.’  

Does it put us in a better spot?  

30:08 – 30:32 

And Bill, you mentioned these documents get into some of the organizational steps the Space Force needs to employ to deliver on its mission.  

The Objective Force calls for the Space Force to double its personnel over the next ten years. But given the Space Force was originally designed to be intentionally lean and digital first from the beginning, is this doubling of personnel a contradiction of the founding vision for the Space Force? Or is that more of a natural evolution as the service matures? 

30:31 – 31:37  

(BL): I believe it’s absolutely a natural evolution of the force as it matures. There’s a lot of things that went into why that service was stood up as a lean service. I mean, I think for the foreseeable future, we’re still going to be the smallest service in the Department of War. But this idea that we need to double the force over the next decade is a natural evolution from the fact that of all the things that we talked about and all of the things that are posited in that future operating environment, there is going to continue to be increasing demand for space capabilities. 

There are going to be an increasing and more diverse number of threats, which means we’re going to need to have an increased amount of resilience and capability in those types of things.  

You don’t get those for free. And so there’s a natural evolution that we’ll need additional capabilities. We’ll need additional organizations to operate those capabilities, which will mean we’ll need additional personnel to be able to do that. We’ll need additional personnel to be able to train those capabilities. We’ll need additional personnel to be able to test those capabilities. So yeah, I look at it as a natural evolution.  

31:38 – 33:01 

(MD): And the country is asking the Space Force to do more than the country was asking the Space Force to do in December of 2019. There are new missions. 

 We’re talking about bringing airborne moving target indicator into space, ground moving target indications in the space. Golden Dome has a space based interceptor layer in space that has to be managed and operated.  

So a lot of new missions are coming to the Space Force. And sort of it at the base is also this counterspace mission, right? The ability to fend off adversary hostile actions and protect US assets and as that threat matures, that gets more complicated, that requires additional capability and additional force structure. 

So yes, absolutely. A natural evolution of what the country is asking the Space Force to do. And, you know, I’ll say it, you know, doubling the size of the Space Force still makes it the smallest service in the military, right? So it doesn’t relieve the service of doing things in manpower efficient ways. So there’s still absolutely an element of the digital piece, right?   

And so cyber is a huge part of this. The modeling and simulation, live virtual constructive training, the interoperable architectures and being able to design those in model-based ways before you actually start bending metal and committing big dollars. All those are still at the core of what the Space Force is doing. But the missions have expanded and therefore the personnel, resources and other resources have to expand. 

33:02 – 33:28 

There’s also the prevalent and well-known challenge of bureaucratic inertia that can bog down government agencies, including military services and the Department of War as a whole. 

So if the Space Force is actually able to scale and double in size over the next decade. How can General Saltzman, and his eventual successors leading the service, make sure they do so efficiently and effectively while also mitigating the risk of adding bureaucratic inertia and slowing down what the service can actually do? 

33:29 – 34:24 

(BL): That’s a great follow up question, Scott, because we talked about, ‘Hey, this service started as a lean service.’  

We still need to be a lean service. The Secretary at War has started a couple areas throughout the entire department that the Space Force has absolutely got to be a key piece of. And that’s acquisition transformation, transformation from the old JCIDS system. So requirements transformation. Those are all designed to get leaner, not just from the perspective of having less people do it and do it cheaper, but it’s about speed. 

The adversary is evolving their threat capabilities at incredible rates. We need to stay ahead of that. And the only way to do that in the 21st century and the threats that we face, is to be able to iterate on requirements faster, to iterate on capability delivery faster. And so we still need to be lean. But that doesn’t mean we have to stay at the levels that we were at when the service was founded. 

34:25 – 34:59 

(MD): Some of this is about empowering people in positions of leadership, too, right? And one example I’ll give is the Chief of Space Operations. That position has been named by the Department to be responsible for space requirements across all of the joint force. And so the CSO can break ties and make decisions on what’s going to happen to support the joint force from a space perspective. At some point somebody has to move that decision forward and in this case, the CSO has the ability to move space decisions forward in that role that’s been given to him by the Department.

35:00 – 35:24 

There was another recent announcement that will factor into how these documents move forward. The Department of the Air Force has submitted a record-setting budget request for the Space Force for Fiscal Year 2027 at a total of just over $71 billion — more than double what the service had in the prior year.  

What does that number, if fulfilled and appropriated by Congress, do for the Space Force in developing its objective force for the future?  

35:25 – 36:29 

(BL): As the former budget guy, I guess first I would start this answer with, I don’t think you will find a service chief or a service programmer that would ever say, ‘That’s all we need. Thank you.’  

Now, is that a great down payment on moving forward to where we need to go? Absolutely. And as the Space Force, very appreciative of that budget increase, whatever the final amount ends up being in the appropriations side.  

Absolutely. And then they know they have a responsibility to make the best use of that money going forward. But to the point Mike made earlier, the nation continues to ask the service to do more than it did originally, and I would anticipate that will continue.  

And therefore, in the future versions of these documents and the objective force that gets defined in the future, I would anticipate there will be a need for increased budget. Just like the Department of War’s budget has continued to increase over time based on the threats that are out there and the security that the nation requires.  

36:30 – 37:29 

(MD): I would say that the budget request is exactly that. It’s a budget request. So it’s the administration asking the Congress to appropriate this money.  

These two documents are key to that conversation. These two documents allow the Space Force and the Department of War to message to the Congress and to the appropriators what we’re facing in our space security arena, right? And the resources that are going to be required to really get ahead of the threat and stay preeminent in space security.  

So I think we can tie those two things together. These documents really sort of are laying out the challenges. And you can read it. There’s a couple hundred pages of material here, and you can see the challenges being faced and the decisions that have to be made, and the force structure that’s going to have to be created to achieve what the nation is asking the Space Force to do. 

So it’s absolutely a down payment [for] incorporating all these new missions and these threat challenges are going to require the Space Force to grow and they will have to grow and be sustained at some higher level than it is today. 

37:30 – 37:38 

What do you think is unique about the transparency underlying these documents? 

What does that do for facilitating engagement between the Space Force and its partners? Both in scope and in scale? 

37:39 – 38:29 

(MD): There’s a line at the end of the objective force document, I think that says that this set of documents need to now be sort of put into action. And I think that the conversation with international partners is a really important part of that. 

Combatant Commands, you know, live in geographic regions and are with their international partners all the time, but I think there’s an opportunity to make these international conversations more robust, more meaningful, more impactful that I hope the Space Force will grab on to and take that opportunity. Because there is, you know, with NATO committing additional resources to future space sovereign capabilities that they have or capabilities they can contribute to this coalition. 

We need to take them up on that and I would really encourage the Space Force to use these documents to have those conversations in a more robust way than they’ve been able to in the past.  

38:30 – 40:54 

(BL): Yeah, I guess my comment on the transparency, I think, like everything else with these documents, my guess is that was malice of forethought. It’s an acknowledgment that in today’s era, in the 21st century, there is far more information available than ever before. 

And so you combine that with – it was really only March of 2018 – is the first time that in an unclassified setting, we would talk about space and warfighting. Prior to that, prior to the publishing of the National Space Strategy in March of 2018, the conversation of space and warfighting had to happen in a classified setting. The challenge with that is it makes it hard for some of those that need to provide support to understand what it is actually that you need. 

Now, obviously, there are several members of Congress that are cleared, but the entire Congress isn’t. The general public obviously doesn’t all have a security clearance. But in 2018, we made the decision to say, ‘This has happened. We need to acknowledge it so that we can have a more fulsome discussion about the benefits that the nation gets from space, as well as the threats that are out there to contest that.’ 

And I think by publishing these documents to the level of detail that has been done, it’s a natural continuation of that, so that the support from the general public is there. So that all of our members of Congress understand the complete and comprehensive picture of exactly what our nation’s vital national interests in space are, as well as what are the threats that are out there to counter them? 

And therefore, what is the objective force we need to be able to succeed in that environment? As Mike alluded to, it’s infinitely easier to have conversations with allies if you’re in at least to start with in this unclassified setting.  

Industry – the same thing. Some of industry has clearances and some don’t. And so the starting point that I would imagine that the service wrestled with and said the compilation of information that we’ve captured here is unclassified, and we’ll move forward with that. And that will give us a very good baseline to start our conversations with.  

There will still be a need for classified systems, capabilities and conversations, and those will happen in the appropriate spaces. But these two unclassified documents give a great baseline to really move forward in this allied and partnered and hybrid fashion.

40:55 – 41:07 

So if you were to put yourself in the shoes of an executive at an industry partner or even a senior leader for an allied or partner nation — what are your takeaways from these documents and the messages and questions posed within them? How would you move forward from here?  

40:08 – 42:47 

(BL): Yeah, I think if I’m an allied, a senior leader that’s engaging with the Space Force in whatever forum that may be, if it’s an individual one on one meeting, if it’s a group forum. If it’s a series of workshops. 

I now have, at least again, as I described it, a really good baseline of how the United States Space Force thinks about the space environment and how it will evolve into 2040. And I also have a really good feel for what is the Space Force focused on in this objective force design on what they need to be successful in defining that objective force. 

So now if I’m an allied partner, I can take a look and I can say, ‘This is what they’re going after in the navwar area, or this is what they’re going after in the orbital warfare arena. What capabilities do I have that could either augment or help improve the resiliency, the redundancy, the ability to reconstitute those types of things?’ 

And so it’s: I’m not guessing any more about what I think the service is looking for, based on combing through every speech that’s given by every senior leader in the Space Force, they have now documented it for me in a baseline document, and I know they’re going to be updating it. So I have an opportunity to inform that. They specifically asked me to wrestle with the ideas and come forward with thoughts. 

So I just think it provides for a much more informed discussion. And I think you could make the same case for industry senior leaders as well. You’re much more informed going into the conversation so that it doesn’t start with two people across a table saying, so what do you need from me? What do you have to offer? It starts in a much further place down the road.

42:48 – 43:46 

(MD): If I’m the CEO of the startup, or mid tier or prime – it doesn’t matter, right? The document helps me to go to my investors, to my board of directors and to say, ‘Look at where the Space Force is headed.’ I need to put my company in front of that wave and here’s how we intend to do it.  

They’ve written down their challenges. They’ve written down their questions. We’ve got an answer to some of these questions. And we’re going to put some money against this. And then in the context of that document, in the context of the things that they said they need. Go back and talk to the Space Force about what it is we can provide. So many times, especially sort of in the tech world, they come up with a widget or a technology and say, ‘I have this technology, right?’ 

Well, okay, help me understand how you’re going to use that technology to solve one of my problems. Well, here’s the list of problems in these documents. And so you have a better chance of putting your solution in the context of something that solves a national security problem as you bring it forward and hope to get it adopted in some force design.

43:46 – 43:55 

Now that the Space Force has laid out this vision and looks ahead to iterate on the five, ten and fifteen year mark to 2040 — what does success look like for the objective force? 

43:56 – 44:58 

(MD): As I look back having been at the beginning of this ten years ago in 2016, I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing happen now. We’re starting to move in that direction. The things that we talked about in the Space Enterprise Vision, you can see being unfolded through some of the systems that are being deployed today, you see proliferated LEO architectures. You see  disaggregation of putting everything on one satellite that’s a fragile architecture. But breaking those functions up amongst a number of satellites, that’s more resilient, that’s happening.  

So some of these concepts and principles have begun, and that’s rewarding to see. Well, today, actually, you know, if I look up, I still basically see the same architecture we’ve had for a long time. But I think that is starting to move. It’s starting to pivot. 

And I think five years from now, if I can look up and see a more hybrid architecture, things that are dissimilar, things that are connected as we’ve talked about in this conversation. Solving that problem I think it gives us a step up in resiliency and capability and that’s one of the things I’ll be looking for five years on. 

44:59 – 46:08 

(BL): I would add ideally success means we continued this journey a few steps further. I don’t think any of us at the era that we were in the military space business was completely satisfied with where we were. And so these documents are a good indicator of continued progress, but success in the future years takes several forms. 

I think whoever the senior leaders of the Space Force are in 5 or 10 years from now, ideally, they’re enjoying more fulsome conversations with their allies and partner  and their industry counterparts.  

Ideally there will be some proposed answers to some of the questions that are posed in these documents. I say proposed because that’s the idea, right? Propose some answers, develop some concepts that go with those answers. Wargame them. Test them out. Maybe the first proposed answer isn’t the last one but ideally we’re moving forward and trying some things out.  

And then lastly I would say to the point of these documents being unclassified and out there for everyone. I believe success will be that our guardians continue to be more informed, more capable, and more recognized for what they do to secure the nation’s interests in, to and from space. 

46:09 – 46:22 

And where does Elara Nova factor into this?We have these documents that are now publicly released and available for the world to see.  

You’ve both already put yourselves in the shoes of international and industry leaders. So where does Elara Nova fit into this path forward? 

46:23 – 47:53 

(MD): Well our team at Elara Nova is chock-full of the leaders who have been involved in these conversations and debates and decisions since the conversation started a decade ago. I use as exhibit A my friend and colleague General Bill Liquori, who got his street cred as a weapons and tactics officer. Flew satellites for the intelligence community. Was responsible for space operations of basically the entire military space architecture. Helped write that National Security Space Strategy in 2018 from the White House and then was responsible for all the first independent budgets of a new military service. 

So these are the kind of people and people that have been in all of the six mission areas and the enabling functions and led those areas. Those are the people that we’ve surrounded ourselves with at Elara Nova and have all the scar tissue and the successes and the failures that they are ready to pass on to other people who are doing this work. 

And we continue to stay engaged in all aspects of this as we go about our work. You know, I’d say we’re all personally invested through our individual 20 or 30 or 40 year professional careers in the direction that the country is taking in space and how important it is for our security and our economy to get this right. 

So we can help our friends in the government. We can help strengthen and focus the industrial base, and we can help international partners contribute their own space capabilities, as we’ve talked about here today. And we can talk to the capital markets about where their investments ought to be focused to really be most impactful. So that’s how we founded Elara Nova that we can continue to contribute and we love doing that every day.

47:54 – 48:20 

(BL): Yeah, and all I would add is obviously the four co-founders, as they said, there’s a need for a space consultancy company and now even evolved beyond just space. They had the foresight to go out and find and hire a workforce that has an incredibly diverse skill set and set of experiences that certainly help inform the way forward, specifically with documents like these two as well as many others.

48:21 – 48:57 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

Space Force Initiates a “Campaign of Learning” to Develop its Objective Force

New Documents Offer Unique Transparency into the Space Force’s Needs

This past spring the United States Space Force published two highly anticipated, forward-looking documents: Future Operating Environment 2040 and Objective Force 2040. When Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman unveiled these documents at this year’s Space Symposium, he declared the service’s intention was for them to “drive questions, not provide answers.” As such, Guardians, the Joint Force and the Space Force’s international and industry partners were encouraged to engage, debate and provide feedback in a ‘campaign of learning’ to evaluate what the future space domain might look like and define the Space Force’s future force design requirements.  

“This campaign of learning is centered on transparency, where these documents are out in the public for everyone to read and see,” said Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova and former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force. “It signals to the defense industrial base what the service is thinking, which enables them to think strategically about applying research dollars and engaging capital markets to create the capabilities that the Space Force needs. Now industry can better present their product or service as a solution to the national security space problems that need to be addressed.”  

Force designs for any military service can be understood in three ways: its fielded force, its programmed force and its objective force.  

“Our fielded force includes all of the people, hardware and software that is delivering space capabilities on behalf of the nation,” said Bill Liquori, Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the first Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy, Plans, Programs, and Analysis for the United States Space Force. “Our programmed force accounts for what will be fielded through the program objective memorandum that outlines the next five fiscal years, in addition to the president’s budget. But together, these two force designs still don’t meet all of the Space Force’s future requirements, that’s why these two documents present the objective force that the Space Force will need to build toward for the future.” 

But in order to develop that objective force, the Space Force first needs to understand what the future operating environment might look like. That’s why these documents were released in tandem: so that the Space Force’s partners can not only understand what the operating environment is expected to look like, but also the steps the service is taking to organize itself to achieve its mission. 

“These documents present a baseline for how the Space Force thinks about the space environment and how the service will evolve into 2040,” Liquori said. “Our force designs traditionally focused on hardware and software, but it takes more than just capabilities to deliver a space effect on behalf of the nation. These documents recognize we need organizational constructs and hybrid architectures to enable future success across mission areas, which means the Space Force also needs the infrastructure – with the appropriate staffing, testing and training – to employ those capabilities successfully.”  

A Decade-Long Journey in a Rapidly Evolving Environment 

The public release of these documents can be traced back to over a decade ago and marks the latest iteration of how the Department of War is responding to a rapidly evolving space environment. 

“These documents reflect a compilation of actions that began with General John Hyten’s appearance on an April 2015 episode of 60 Minutes to speak to the American public about the emerging threat environment in space,” Dickey said. “A year later, the Air Force published a study called the ‘Space Enterprise Vision,’ which thought conceptually about the military space architecture that would be needed to operate in the face of the emerging threat. Then the Space Force was formed in December 2019, followed by the Space Warfighting Analysis Center in 2021 to develop its force design.” 

Both documents look ahead to 2040 on a 15-year time horizon. But the space domain is quickly evolving in unexpected ways, particularly as technologies advance. That’s why the Space Force has stood up a new SF/S9 Force Design and Analysis staff group to re-evaluate and update these projections on five-year intervals.   

“The S9 office will oversee the life cycle of these force designs in a three-step process,” Dickey said. “By bringing together some existing pockets of talent, they will first develop conceptual approaches to how the Space Force can solve operational challenges. Second, they’ll test those concepts in wargames, tabletop exercises and computer simulations to evaluate their potential effectiveness. Step three will see the Space Warfighting Analysis Center model and build a more specific set of technical capabilities that becomes the objective force design.” 

Regularly re-evaluating these documents will enable the Space Force to accommodate and address unexpected changes in the space domain. 

“The Future Operating Environment 2040 document explores the strategic arc of potential future military and geopolitical states but cannot predict specific threats and capabilities,” said Dickey. “For example,  AI and China’s deployment of a 21,000 satellite networking constellation weren’t in the Space Enterprise Vision that was published over ten years ago, which demonstrates how quickly space is changing in ways we can’t predict. So the Space Force created this new S9 office to make changes to the architecture and the forces they field on a more frequent basis.” 

Mission Area Expansion and Projected Budget Growth 

Both documents come at a time when the Department of the Air Force recently put forward a record-setting $71.1 billion budget request for the Space Force, while officials also call to double the service’s personnel by 2030. 

“These two documents allow the Space Force to signal to Congress what threats the country is facing in space and the budget request starts that conversation,” Dickey said. “The emerging threat environment will require new capabilities, so the FY27 budget – no matter how much will ultimately be appropriated – will be a down payment for incorporating all of these new mission areas that the Space Force will inevitably have to grow into.” 

While the Space Force was founded as an intentionally lean and digital first military service, its anticipated growth in personnel and resources reflects the growing demands being placed on the service.  

“The nation is asking the Space Force to do more than it was asked to do when it was founded in December of 2019,” Dickey said. “The Department is talking about tracking ground and airborne moving targets from space, a mission set largely accomplished in the air domain today.  Golden Dome will have a space-based interceptor layer in space that has to be managed and operated. As these mission areas expand, so too does the need for additional personnel and resources. At the same time, doubling the size of the Space Force doesn’t relieve the service of doing things in an efficient way.”  

Creating Opportunities for Proactive Partner Engagement 

In order to effectively deliver on these increasing demands and wide-ranging missions, the Space Force will need to leverage capabilities provided by its international and industry partners. That’s where these documents will play an integral role. 

“Two groups of people routinely engage with our Space Force at senior levels: international and industry partners,” Liquori said. “They often want to know what they should spend their money on to develop or acquire capabilities that will be most beneficial to the service. These documents will enable a more informed starting point for them to develop and test capabilities that will ultimately provide resiliency, redundancy and the ability to reconstitute the Space Force’s capabilities.” 

As the Space Force incorporates the feedback it receives from stakeholders across the national security space enterprise, the service is initiating this campaign of learning to facilitate better engagements moving forward.  

“These documents are a good indicator of the Space Force’s continued progress, but success in the future takes several forms,” Liquori said. “Success means whoever the senior leaders of the Space Force are in five or 10 years from now, will be enjoying more fulsome conversations with their allies and industry counterparts. Success means there might be some proposed answers to the questions posed in these documents that are then wargamed and tested out. But ultimately, success means that our guardians will continue to be more informed, more capable and more recognized for what they do to secure the nation’s interests in, to and from space.” 

This cross-functional collaboration, however, also requires the expertise and connections available to streamline the development of the Space Force’s future objective force. That’s where Elara Nova exists to help the Space Force and its international and industry partners achieve that end goal. 

“Elara Nova is full of the leaders who have been involved in these force design conversations, debates and decisions since these conversations started a decade ago,” Dickey said. “These are the people that have been enabling the core functions across key mission areas. They have all the scar tissue from the successes and failures of previous efforts, which is necessary to help the government, strengthen the industrial base, and empower our international partners to contribute their own space capabilities.” 

Elara Nova is a trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/  

NASA's CLPS Program Carries National Security Implications

Recent Lunar Landings Highlight Role of Commercial Companies in New Space Race

A single week in early March saw two commercial companies, Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace, land their respective spacecraft on the Moon’s surface to deliver scientific payloads on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The companies were contracted as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to facilitate rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services that both enable scientific exploration and commercial development of the Moon. These sequential landings demonstrate not only the substantial progress made by commercial space companies since the program’s inception in 2018, but also highlight the role commercial partners will serve in a new “space race” that carries both civil and national security implications. 

“We are in a new space race for natural resources, scientific knowledge and prestige,” said Lt Gen (Ret) Bill Liquori, Elara Nova partner and board member at Intuitive Machines. “Space has become central to our American way of war and our American way of life. This is evident in the National Space Strategy of 2018, which declared that unfettered access to and the freedom to operate in space was vital to advancing our national security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge – all key elements of this new space race.” 

The first space race, a key feature of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, led to significant national security, economic and scientific advancements. But in the decades since the Apollo program first placed American astronauts on the Moon, a commercial space industry has emerged as an alternative solution to returning astronauts to the lunar surface.  

“There is a unique opportunity for NASA to leverage commercial services for the CLPS program: innovative space companies, decreasing launch costs, growing interest from space investors and a recognition of the critical role space plays in the American way of life,” Liquori said, who also serves on advisory boards with the Space Force Association and True Anomaly. “So rather than deliver payloads through a traditional government approach or procurement, which is often slower and more expensive, this new approach enables NASA to achieve rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services from commercial space companies. Now, NASA gets the benefit of a cheaper commercial approach, and the companies get the benefit of receiving NASA contracts.” 

A Sequence of Lunar Landings 

The CLPS program first made history in February 2024, when Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus spacecraft became the first commercial lander to reach the lunar surface. While Odysseus’ sideways landing left a few mission objectives unfulfilled, its landing marked the first American presence on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program over 50 years ago. 

“Odysseus’ landing validated NASA’s decision to contract commercial space services and opened the door to what can be a thriving lunar economy,” Liquori said. “Odysseus not only landed farther south on the Moon than any other spacecraft in history, it also traveled over 600,000 miles and touched down within a mile of its intended target. The mission proved the commercial industry’s ability to transmit over 350 MB of scientific data from the Moon and the first deep space firing of a proprietary liquid methane / liquid oxygen engine. This achievement will be foundational to future Artemis missions that aim to return humans to the lunar surface.” 

Earlier this year, the CLPS program made headlines again when two more commercial landers successfully reached the lunar surface: Intuitive Machine’s Athena and Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, respectively. While each spacecraft achieved their missions to varying degrees of success, their landings validate the innovative capabilities and accelerating timelines available in a maturing commercial space market.   

“It’s important to understand that there were no commercial landers in development when Space Policy Directive One was signed back in 2017,” Liquori said, referring to a policy that re-focused NASA’s space exploration efforts to the Moon and beyond. “NASA approved the CLPS program a year later in 2018, and in less than five years we’ve got three commercial landings reaching the lunar surface. These achievements demonstrate the viability of NASA’s approach because commercial companies have proven they can move faster and cheaper than traditional government programs.” 

Varying Degrees of Success 

The CLPS program is currently designed to contract with 14 possible commercial space companies. To date, five of those companies have been awarded CLPS contracts. This approach affords NASA the flexibility to uniquely tailor the goals and objectives of each individual mission. 

“Firefly’s Blue Ghost landed near a volcanic feature on the near side of the Moon and performed 14 days of surface operations,” Liquori said. “It transmitted hundreds of gigabytes of data on the Moon’s regolith and geophysical characteristics, as well as the interaction of solar winds with Earth’s magnetic field. Meanwhile, Intuitive Machine’s Athena landed near the south pole and focused on the search for chemical elements that might exist in the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions.” 

While Athena, like Odysseus, experienced a compromised landing, Intuitive Machines was still able to prove basic instrument functions and collect half a gigabyte of data in 13 hours of lunar surface operations. But although some mission objectives remained incomplete, the lessons learned from both landings are being shared with government partners to better inform and prepare future efforts. 

“The Intuitive Machines team is already in the midst of a comprehensive hot wash that is driving toward understanding the root cause of these issues and addressing other areas for improvement on future missions,” Liqouri said. “The hot wash also includes external participants like NASA, the European Space Agency and the Jet Propulsion Lab. This collaborative approach not only builds an individual company’s knowledge, but it also broadens the commercial industry’s collective knowledge which will enable greater success in subsequent missions.” 

A Race for Lunar Resources 

However, it’s not just American commercial companies that are making lunar landing attempts ahead of greater ambitions. Adversaries like Russia and China have made their own individual lunar attempts and have future, joint ambitions for human presence on the lunar surface.  

“The Moon is a key piece of China’s overall space aspirations,” Liquori said. “In 2021, China announced plans for their International Lunar Research Station in a partnership with Russia, but they have also opened the program to other interested parties. The ILRS seeks to establish a robotic lunar base by the 2030s with an eventual human presence, as well.” 

China hopes to involve as many as 50 other countries in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project, with 10 countries having already signed on to participate. The ILRS stands in direct contrast to the United States’ Artemis program, which also seeks to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon.  

However, the Artemis program will be conducted in accordance with the broader Artemis Accords – a multilateral framework that establishes a common set of principles for international cooperation in civil space exploration. As of mid-May, the Artemis Accords has been signed by 55 countries and reaffirms space-faring nation’s compliance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.  

The Artemis Accords stems from the wide-ranging recognition that collaboration and cooperation with international partners is a prerequisite to preserving a peaceful space domain.  

“The United States can simply do more when international partners are involved, particularly through programs like the Artemis Accords and other multilateral forums,” Liquori said. “Inherent benefits include shared funding for technology development and academic research, as well as building an international consensus of like-minded partners that make it easier and oftentimes more effective to call out any irresponsible behavior from others in the space domain. No country can go it alone in space, and the right international partnerships often prove to be force multipliers.” 

But to date, only one country has signed both the Artemis Accords and declared their intentions to participate in ILRS: Thailand. This calls into question what ulterior motives, if any, exist for the ILRS. 

“Are China and Russia only interested in international scientific cooperation through ILRS, or are there some other goals that they might have for the Moon from a security perspective?” Liquori said. “China has already successfully completed robotic missions to the far side of the Moon and even returned lunar samples to Earth. Meanwhile, we currently don’t have an effective way to monitor activities on the far side of the Moon, so it’s important for us to pay attention to China’s progress and their lunar ambitions.” 

National Security Implications of Civil Space Programs 

That’s why the success of civil space programs, like CLPS, also carry national security implications for the United States Space Force. 

“There is an opportunity for the Space Force and others to leverage the CLPS program to improve our space domain awareness capabilities in and around the Moon,” Liquori said. “China and Russia are equally interested in potential lunar resources, and human history has proven that resource competition often leads to security concerns and requirements. So programs like CLPS offers the Space Force an affordable opportunity to host a sensor, or a communications or navigation payload through commercial services, without the expense of a traditional large acquisition program in the face of China’s sustained, steady and oftentimes opaque space ambitions.” 

Now, the new space race, like the previous Cold War-era space race before it, stands to benefit humanity beyond its national security implications.  

“The first space race was driven in part by the need to see beyond the Iron Curtain and understand what the Soviet Union was doing. Since then, we have realized great military and economic benefits from our space activities: there are few military operations that don’t involve space capabilities, and space systems like the Global Positioning System help us navigate to different places and provide an accurate timing source for banking transactions across the global economy.” 

A key, distinguishing factor for the new space race, however, is that success relies on the capabilities of the United States’ partners in the commercial space industry. But even commercial companies, like sovereign governments, require expertise to achieve their lunar ambitions. 

“Companies and government organizations cannot grow this level of expertise overnight,” Liquori said. “The Elara Nova team is a great choice to help augment government or industry teams with expertise across all space mission areas: strategy and policy development, market engagement, technology and capital investment, mergers and acquisitions, legal and regulatory issues, as well as inter-agency and intergovernmental cooperation. The co-founders recognized the need to coalesce a wide-ranging set of space expertise and experience that any government or organization can benefit from.” 

Elara Nova is a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/. 

Episode 26: NASA’s CLPS Program Carries National Security Implications

The Elara Edge Podcast

Host: Scott King 

SME: Lt Gen (Ret) Bill Liquori, partner at Elara Nova; board member at Intuitive Machines 

00:02 – 01:30 

A single week in early March saw two commercial companies, Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace, land their respective spacecraft on the Moon’s surface to deliver scientific payloads on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The companies were contracted as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS program, which aims to facilitate rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services that both enable scientific exploration and commercial development of the Moon.  

These sequential landings demonstrate not only the substantial progress made by commercial space companies since the CLPS program’s inception in 2018, but also highlights the role commercial partners will serve in a new “space race,” that carries both civil and national security implications. 

Welcome to “The Elara Edge,” I’m your host, Scott King. Here to discuss the recent achievements of NASA’s CLPS program – and the civil and national security implications it carries – is retired Lt General Bill Liquori, partner at Elara Nova. 

General Liquori previously served as the first Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy, Plans, Programs, and Analysis at the United States Space Force, and currently serves on several space-related advisory boards – including the Space Force Association, True Anomaly, and Intuitive Machines. 

Sir, welcome to the show! 

01:30 – 01:39 

Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I’ve been a fan from a distance of your previous podcasts you did with some of the other partners. So I’m excited to be a part of it.  

01:40 – 02:01 

Thank you, Sir. And we’re excited to have you on. 

So, as mentioned at the top, NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS, made headlines back in March when two commercial space companies placed landers on the moon. 

But first, for those in our audience who may not be familiar with the CLPS program – can you explain what it is and what objectives it’s setting out to achieve? 

02:02 – 03:21 

Yeah, sure. This is a great place to start. So let’s both agree that it’s much easier to say CLPS than Commercial Lunar Payload Services and we’ll do that from here on forward. But CLPS is designed to leverage the state of the U.S. commercial space industry, by contracting with multiple companies to deliver NASA science and technology experiments to the surface of the Moon.  

Rather than do a traditional government approach or procurement, which are often slower, more expensive. This approach enables NASA to achieve rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services from commercial companies. It’s an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract that currently includes 14 possible vendors. To date, NASA has awarded contracts to five of those companies, and there are more mission awards expected in the future.  

Ultimately, the robotic CLPS missions lay the groundwork for the planned Artemis missions to return humans to the surface of the moon. Another way to think about this is that these early robotic missions to the South Pole serve as some level of risk reduction before sending humans that far south on the lunar surface. 

Having said all that, I think it’s important to note that the technology and the cislunar procedures that are developed and the resources that are discovered by CLPS are supportive of far more than just the Artemis program itself.

03:22 – 03:45 

Now, before we get into this year’s lunar landings, I’d like to point out that this is not the first time commercial companies have landed on the moon. 

Back in February of 2024, Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus spacecraft became the first commercial lander to reach the lunar surface – and it, too, was part of this CLPS program. 

Can you speak to the significance of Odysseus’ lunar landing last year?  

03:46 – 05:27 

Yeah, exactly. So Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus landing happened in February of 2024 and had to have been one of the more exciting moments of my 30-plus years of space experience. Ultimately, it’s the confirmation of the capability and ingenuity of the space industry. It’s a validation of NASA’s decision to contract for commercial services and really the first step to opening the door for what can be a thriving lunar economy.  

For the first time since Apollo 17. So over 50 years, the United States returned to the moon and it was a commercial company leading the way – Intuitive Machines. If that wasn’t enough, the Odyssey spacecraft landed further south on the moon than any other spacecraft in history, which is a significant step toward the early Artemis missions like we discussed before. But IM’s first mission signified the commercial industry is ready to lead the way for NASA.  

A couple other things that I think are notable to point out. This first mission proved the commercial industry’s ability to land and transmit scientific data to and from the Moon. Odysseus transmitted over 350MB of data to many data hungry scientists at NASA.  

It also proved the commercial industry’s ability to travel over 600,000 miles, and land within a mile of its intended target. In this case, it was the Malapert A crater. Specific to Intuitive Machines, IM-1 actually validated a proprietary liquid methane-liquid oxygen propulsion system with a first-ever deep space firing and multiple restarts throughout the mission. 

And ultimately, IM-1 opened the door for a new commercial approach leveraging fixed price contracts, providing new economics and efficiency for government agencies like NASA and others.  

05:28 – 05:49 

This brings us to March of this year, 2025, when Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, and another Intuitive Machine’s spacecraft – Athena – landed on the moon within days of each other.  

And while each spacecraft and their respective missions experienced varying degrees of success, can you describe the purpose behind each of these landers and how their missions played out? 

05:50 – 08:33 

Absolutely. More exciting days earlier this year, for sure. The idea of having multiple CLPS vendors is that NASA can specialize the goals and the objectives for each individual mission. 

So NASA works with each company to designate a specific landing area, and then they also determine which specific experiments will fly and land on the individual CLPS missions. These landing areas range from the near side of the Moon to the far side, and the South Pole.  

So in the case of Firefly’s mission, the Blue Ghost Lander, it landed near a volcanic feature in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the Moon. The experiments focused on critical data about the Moon’s regolith, geophysical characteristics, and the interaction of solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field. Definitely an incredibly successful mission. With a successful landing. Performing 14 days of surface operations and transmitting over hundreds of gigabytes of data to NASA.  

Just a little while later, you get a second landing with Intuitive Machines’ second mission. Athena, in this case, was the lander. South pole was designated as the landing area. And ultimately, this was a precursor to future Artemis missions that will send humans to the South Pole. The experiments on Athena focused on a drill and a mass spectrometer to search for the presence of volatiles. The volatiles are chemical elements that exist in the permanently shadowed regions, that are located at the poles of the Moon. 

It also had a laser retro-reflector, a 4G communications network, multiple rovers, and a commercial data center. Unfortunately, after a near flawless 600,000 plus mile trip to the moon, we did run into some issues, accurately determining our altitude above the surface and the challenging lighting environment at the South Pole and Athena ended up on her side. 

But the operations team did a great job of, kind of maximizing the benefit. Even given that landing, they were able to scramble and manage our power and thermal subsystems on Athena and preserve about 13 hours of surface operations after the landing, which enabled NASA to prove that its drill worked, collect about a half a gigabyte of data from the spectrometer that scientists are reviewing right now, as well. 

And the Intuitive Machines team is already in the midst of a comprehensive hot wash. Driving toward root cause, for these issues and other areas for improvement on future missions. The cool part is the hot wash is not just internal to Intuitive Machines, but it also includes external participants from the European Space Agency, our own NASA, and the Jet Propulsion Lab, to make sure that we’ve got a good comprehensive look at what went on with IM-2 with an eye towards IM-3, four and beyond. 

08:34 – 08:50 

Now, Firefly’s Blue Ghost landed on the moon on March 2nd. Meanwhile, Intuitive Machine’s Athena landed just four days later on March 6th. 

What do these landings, and the fact that they happened within mere days of each other, demonstrate about the state of commercial space today?  

08:51 – 10:58 

Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. These first three successful landings, if I even include Intuitive Machines first landing in ‘24, they clearly demonstrate the viability of NASA’s approach to leveraging commercial space companies for delivery of experiments to the Moon. 

Commercial companies are proving they can move faster and cheaper than traditional government programs. If you think about it when Space Policy Directive One was signed back in 2017, directing a focus on the Moon and beyond. There were no landers in development at that time. NASA approved the CLPS program a year later in 2018, and less than five years later, we’ve got multiple companies and landers and three successful landings so far. 

Most of us who have ever worked on any government space programs know that’s a pretty impressive timeline and it’s only possible because of the ingenuity, the technology, and expertise of our commercial companies.  

I think it’s hard to argue against the fact that the U.S. commercial space industry is thriving and leading the way from a technology development perspective. Right now we’ve got the perfect storm of conditions for NASA to leverage this. We’ve got a combination of innovative space companies, decreasing launch costs, extremely interested space investors, and a recognition of the critical role space plays in the American way of life. 

NASA gets the benefit of [a] cheaper commercial approach, and the companies get the benefit of both NASA contracts and the ability to actually sell any remaining available space on the delivery vehicle to other government customers and an emerging commercial market. 

It’s important to note the information-sharing that’s going on between these companies. Obviously, any time you have multiple teams doing something, there’s some competitive nature to things. But really the engineering teams, the operators and the leadership of each of these companies are constantly looking for ways to share data from their individual missions. Lessons learned.  

All of it, with a goal of continuing to advance our collective capabilities and this ultimately puts NASA, the United States, and our Allies and partners in an even better strategic position. 

10:59 – 11:00 

So what’s next for the CLPS program? 

11:01 – 11:52 

Yeah, here I think the future’s bright. There’s much more still to accomplish. There’s at least five more CLPS missions that have already been awarded and are planned over the next 2 to 3 years. 

Intuitive Machines and Firefly both have two more missions to go, and a team led by Draper, has a lander currently scheduled for a mission in 2027. There’s also several additional CLPS awards anticipated in the coming years and interestingly enough, recently many of the companies currently involved with CLPS have engaged with NASA and Congress on the benefits of a follow-on CLPS program, maybe a 2.0. and what that might mean and how that might benefit the United States going forward.  

Ultimately, though, anything beyond the current CLPS, program and budget, those details will get decided after a NASA administrator is confirmed and NASA builds its future budgets.  

11:53 – 12:11 

Shortly after the release of this episode, a Japanese commercial space company called ispace will also be attempting its own lunar landing.  

And although this landing is not part of the CLPS program – can you share a little bit about this mission is and what it says about the commercial space opportunities that exist within international and Allied countries, as well?

12:12 – 14:10 

The first thing I’ll say is ‘Good luck to the ispace team.’ I think anybody involved with lunar landings at this point is rooting for each individual attempt and all hope to learn from the things that they learn on their mission. 

ispace has also had similar challenges, with their first landing attempt in ‘23. But they’re stepping up to the plate again. Like each of these companies wants to go do. Specific to this landing, the Resilience lander – it actually entered lunar orbit on May 6th. And they’re scheduled to land, as you said, shortly after this podcast airs. Although it’s not a CLPS mission, it similarly carries a series of science experiments. In their case, it includes a water electrolyzer, a food production experiment, and a deep space radiation monitor. 

I think any time we talk, any issue with space, whether it’s national security, science, commercial, it’s critical to talk about the importance of Allies and partners. Specific to CLPS missions, NASA mandates that the providers are U.S. companies, and then a majority of the lander manufacturing be done in the United States. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have international commercial cooperation. 

As an example, on the recent Intuitive Machines mission, Athena, a Japanese company Dymon partnered with Intuitive Machines to deliver a Japanese rover to the surface of the Moon. And although our landing didn’t enable the deployment of the rover, the company did confirm they could command the rover by turning on its wheels. Taking several photos from a camera on the rover and transmitting temperature data back to Earth.

Firefly, similarly has had some partnership, in their case, with the Israeli Aerospace Industries on lander design and ispace has a US subsidiary, who’s actually partnered with Draper on that mission that I mentioned earlier, scheduled with a launch in 2027. So there are still, even with the current CLPS restrictions, there’s still plenty of opportunity for international cooperation.

14:11 – 14:28 

And aside from CLPS, NASA is looking to commercial space partners for other civil space programs: including the Lunar Terrain Vehicle – or LTV – and the Near Space Network – NSN. 

Let’s start with the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program. Can you share the purpose behind this effort and its relevance to this conversation?  

14:29 – 15:41 

Yeah. This is a great thing for us to touch on. The Lunar Terrain Vehicle program is another case where NASA is seeking to leverage commercial industry to design and operate the next generation moon buggy as a commercial service. LTV will enable astronauts to explore, collect scientific samples and transport equipment [at] much greater distances than would be possible just on foot. 

This approach, much like CLPS, avoids a prolonged, expensive government procurement, and it leverages the state of commercial innovation. NASA plans to use the LTV, not only with astronauts, but also remotely during times where there are no astronauts present and, also interesting that, the LTV approach will allow commercial vendors to use the vehicle during downtimes in the NASA schedule, for commercial lunar surface activities that are unrelated to NASA requirements. 

The state of the program right now, there’s currently three commercial teams each developing feasibility studies and preliminary LTV designs that they’ll present to NASA. And ultimately, NASA will down-select to a specific provider or providers for a demonstration mission ahead of the ultimate Artemis requirements.

15:42 – 15:45 

And what about NASA’s Near Space Network or NSN? What is this program looking to achieve? 

16:01 – 17:18 

Yeah, sure. I think this pulls that similar thread of NASA leveraging commercial companies. Recently NASA awarded multiple commercial companies contracts for their Near Space Network services. Which ultimately seeks to augment NASA’s direct-to-Earth communication services. 

They want to leverage commercial providers to increase the capacity of many spacecraft to transmit data directly back to Earth ground stations. Intuitive Machines received multiple awards for cislunar and beyond cislunar direct-to-Earth services, as well as cislunar relay services. So relay in and around the Moon. SSC Space US, and Viasat also received awards for direct-to-Earth from low-Earth orbit, and a company called Kongsberg Satellite Services received multiple awards to support science missions in low-Earth orbit. 

Several of those awards will enable NASA to alleviate demand on their deep space network, and by leveraging commercial services for all of these commercial exploration programs, NASA is also supporting a cislunar space economy.  

And if you back up for a second from my view, the keys to this economy will be lunar access and delivery, like these landers that we’ve been talking about. And then commercial data services as the focus of this question. And then the previous question on LTV. There’s the commercial lunar infrastructure services that’ll be out there. All three pieces of those are critical to us driving a successful lunar economy. At the same time as supporting NASA’s scientific goals. 

17:19 – 17:25 

And Sir, can you elaborate on the challenge of building the communications infrastructure that’s needed to transfer all of this data to and from the Moon? 

17:26 – 18:42 

There’s a couple aspects here. The first one I would focus on is the existing, ground stations and, and receive networks that we have. Obviously, anytime NASA is doing something out in outer space, the end goal is to get the data back to Earth and so it requires communications networks that can reach very, very long distances. 

NASA, like other government agencies who are running ground networks. There’s an insatiable demand for data. And so, time is precious on the existing networks. So they’ve started down the path with this near space services network to be able to augment and increase capacity, if you will.  

The other thing to think about is, other than NASA’s deep space exploration probes and things of that nature. Most of the U.S. focus on space has been in the geocentric world obviously orbits, going around the Earth.  

There’s some differences in operating space systems when you get out to cislunar and beyond, you get into three body gravity issues that you have to deal with. And so each step of the way, operating new systems in cislunar and beyond, helps NASA and other space organizations understand the challenges of operating in a slightly different gravitational environment and so those are really important to us as we go forward. So a couple of different aspects to that question there.

18:43 – 18:55 

You’ve also used the term cislunar economy? From your perspective, how would you define the cislunar economy?

What are the types of commercial and economic opportunities that can be realized in the cislunar environment?

18:56 – 20:09 

Obviously CLPS’s primary focus is to get NASA science experiments and exploration to the surface of the Moon. The cool part is because they’re leveraging a commercial service, NASA has basically said these companies, to the extent that they have available, room and power on their landers, can market that remaining available. Swap, if you will, to commercial customers. 

So we’ve seen, even in just the early CLPS missions, we’ve seen customers like Nokia, wanting to establish their own early cellular networks in and around the Moon. We’ve seen other companies that are building rovers for their own purposes, contract commercially to be able to put things on the surface. 

There’s just a host of things, there will be interest from pharmaceutical companies who get benefits from potentially developing new pharmaceuticals in zero-G or even lower gravity environments then you can on Earth. 

So the future is kind of limitless on what other commercial interests there may be to put something on or develop something on the surface of the Moon and NASA’s commercial services programs enable this economy to develop and thrive. 

20:10 – 20:28 

Now, I’d like to place these programs and achievements into greater context. And that is that these commercial lunar landings are coming at a time when China is making significant advancements in their own lunar landings. 

What has China been able to achieve on the lunar surface? And what might their ambitions be for the Moon moving forward?

20:29 – 22:26 

Yeah, it’s a great question, especially from a strategic perspective. China is definitely interested in the Moon and strategic locations around the Moon. They are a key piece of China’s overall space aspirations. 

Which contribute from their perspective to national economic development, national defense and national prestige for great power competition. In 2021, China announced plans for what they called the International Lunar Research Station. In a partnership at that time with Russia, and they opened the program to other interested parties.  

And ultimately, it’s their alternative to our U.S.-led Artemis missions, seeking to establish a robotic lunar base by the 2030s with an eventual human presence as well. As precursors to this effort, China successfully completed multiple robotic missions to the Moon.  

Most recently, and you’re going to have to forgive my Chinese pronunciation here, but their Chang’e four spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon, and Chang’es five and six actually returned lunar samples to Earth. 

They’re making a steady cadence and progress on each of these missions leading to their ultimate goals. It’s probably also worth noting that, you know, right now we don’t really have an effective way to monitor activities on the far side of the Moon, such as Chang’e four and any others and so it’s worth it for us to be paying close attention to the Chinese progress. 

But they certainly have many more bigger plans. They’ve got at least two more robotic missions slated to launch in ‘26 and ‘28. And they’re also working on development of their Long March 10 rocket, which is specifically designed to support human lunar missions in the future. 

They also envision a constellation of navigation and communication satellites around the Moon. But ultimately, in summary, they’re making steady progress on a sustained effort for their lunar ambitions and the real question is: ‘Are they only interested in international scientific cooperation or some other goals that they may have from a security perspective?’

22:27 – 22:38 

Thank you, Sir. But it’s not just China. Russia, too, has also made a recent lunar landing attempt.  

Can you bring us up to speed on its Luna-25 spacecraft and how Russia’s lunar ambitions fit into this picture? 

22:39 – 23:26 

Yeah, you bet. As you mentioned, Russia also tried a recent lunar landing. Their Luna-25 spacecraft, actually, unfortunately for them, crashed into the surface of the Moon in 2023. 

The reports that I’ve seen at least indicates they lost control of the spacecraft as they were performing maneuvers, sort of at end game to get into position for the landing. It obviously further highlights the challenges of landing safely on the Moon. 

That being said, a few months after the failed landing attempt, Russia did announce that it’s got plans for its own human moon landings and a lunar base to assist in exploiting lunar resources – currently in the mid 2030s to 2040 timeframe. Time will tell, if their economic and space expertise will support these goals. 

23:27 – 23:35 

Can you elaborate what it is about the south pole of the Moon, and the far side of the Moon, specifically, that has captured the interest of the United States and its adversaries? 

23:36 – 25:14 

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So the South Pole, as we certainly have learned through two Intuitive Machines missions, is a unique environment. 

Many, many craters, at the South Pole. And there’s a lot of what I mentioned earlier, these permanently shadowed regions. The edges of these craters create shadows that, in many cases that have not ever seen the light of the sun, so that the temperature extremes in the South Pole are great. 

The lighting extremes are great, but what the scientists believe is that in these permanently shadowed regions, that we’ll find presence of water, and other elements and some of the goals of this are if we can find and harvest those resources in those areas, it may help with exploration beyond the Moon. 

Some of those elements would be critical to making fuel for future space missions. One of the most expensive things, or parts of a space mission, is the cost of breaking through Earth’s gravity, if you will, the launch itself. And if we can begin to produce fuel on the Moon with resources that are found and harvested there. 

Well, now you can start to change the equation of how far out you can do exploration and things of that nature.  

The far side is of great interest because there just bottom line hasn’t been that much activity on the far side. Also, a shadowed area, obviously. But, both from: ‘Hey, let’s find out what’s over there to the resources that might be there.‘ 

And I already mentioned China has a lander that they put on that side. Understanding what’s going on in a region that is not commonly seen or visited is critically important for many reasons. 

25:14 – 25:24 

So, why are both these advancements and ambitions, particularly as it relates to China and Russia’s International Lunar Research Station, concerning for the United States and its Allies?  

25:25 – 26:52 

You might get different answers here, but from my perspective, after 30 years working in the national security space sector, and partnering with NASA and other interagency space players during that time, as well as several more years since retirement working with commercial space companies. At the end of the day, I think we’re kind of in a new space race. 

In my mind, it’s a race for resources, knowledge and prestige. In 2017 and ‘18, I had the privilege to work on the National Security Council staff, and work with all of the interagency space organizations, developing the National Space Strategy, which the President signed in March of 2018. The driving factor for that strategy, as with all the other strategies developed during that time, was a U.S. vital national interest. 

And we collectively defined that for the space strategy as unfettered access to and the freedom to operate in space in order to advance our national security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge. So there’s kind of two pieces to that. There’s the we’ve got to have the unfettered access and ability to operate. But it’s not just that. We need that in order to advance those other goals. 

I realize I’m obviously biased, being a part of that effort and each successive administration gets an opportunity to chart a new course. But I still believe this vital national interest to be true. And these interests are, in my mind, an element of this new space race.

26:53 – 27:19 

Sir, you mentioned this idea that we’re in a new “space race.” The original space race goes back to the Cold War-era, when space activities were distinctly driven by the capabilities of sovereign governments, namely the United States and the Soviet Union  

But how has the overall space environment evolved to where we are now? When we find ourselves in this new space race, but now with commercial space companies driving these space activities, with the backing of sovereign governments? 

27:20 – 28:13 

I think maybe the way to describe this as you highlighted traditionally, we’ve had government state actors who are kind of leading the way in space, if you will. 

Everything sort of flipped on its head at this point. I mean, obviously, government space actors are still heavily involved and and all doing great things, but now we certainly have commercial companies that are providing critical services for the U.S. government to advance our goals, and even compete with Russia and China. But as I mentioned before, these companies are also establishing the basis for a commercial lunar economy. 

This emerging economy, just like the one on Earth, will be a key enabler for achieving more lofty goals across science, the broader economy, and even national security. Companies like Intuitive Machines and Firefly and a host of other commercial companies will all be key players in the U.S. success going forward.  

28:14 – 28:23 

We’re also no longer in a bi-polar world, with a broad number of space-faring nations. So what opportunities exist to collaborate with international partners in space? 

28:23 – 29:16 

Much like everything else we do in space, there’s a lot of room and need for international partnerships. We can just simply do more when international partners are involved. And these partnerships can come in all shapes and sizes: from shared funding, technology development and academic research, to complementary and mutually beneficial mission responsibilities, to like-minded policy development that comes from programs like Artemis and other multilateral forums that are out there. 

Another benefit of partnerships, is the goal of building like-minded partners that make it easier and oftentimes more effective to call out any irresponsible behavior from others in the space domain. My experience thus far is that no country can go it alone in space, regardless of which sector you’re talking about, and the right international partnerships often prove to be force multipliers as you’re working through it.

29:17 – 29:26 

Space is also a highly capital-intensive endeavor, particularly for commercial companies.  

So how do partnerships with the investment community factor into this conversation? 

29:27 – 30:33 

They are a critical piece of the puzzle, no doubt about it. As I mentioned earlier, you know, one of the keys to that we’re able to do this currently is that we have extremely interested investors. Whether those be individual investor investors that have large pocket books or investment companies that have access to resources. 

Not only are they interested in space and what it has to offer, but they see the benefits, and the return on investment, if you will.  

Even back when I was on active duty in my last couple of years, as we were asked to do speaking engagements, it was not just speaking to the government audiences. We had multiple engagements with investor conferences, with banking conferences and I know that continues to this day.  

I’ve even done some speaking after retirement at some of these conferences with an intent to ensure that this investment community realizes the benefits that are out there and what the return on investment possibilities are. And at the end of the day, I don’t think we would be as successful if we did not have that critical piece of investment dollars, going in from venture capital, private equity, and other banks.

30:34 – 30:53 

Thank you, Sir. Now, we started today’s conversation with CLPS, a civil space program under the purview of NASA.  

So CLPS is not explicitly a national security program. But due to the inherent dual-use nature of space technologies, what are some of the national security implications for civil space programs like CLPS? 

30:54 – 34:43 

This is a really important question. But I need to caveat upfront. I can’t speak for the Space Force anymore. I gave up that opportunity as I retired. But I can offer my perspective. 

I think this ties to if I go back to that vital national interest that I talked about earlier. Everyone that’s operating in the domain is doing it for one of three or the combination of all three: to improve your national security, your economic prosperity and your scientific knowledge. And the reality is, one space system can do all three of those things. And so there is this dual-use nature of the ability to maintain domain awareness. I’ll use it as an example. In this case, we’ve been focused on the Moon. 

So let’s talk about domain awareness in and around the Moon. Obviously, it will help, as we continue to explore the surface of the Moon. But as I mentioned, there’s resources up there on the Moon, and there will be competition for those resources, just like there has been in every other domain where resources exist. That domain awareness now also has national security implications as well.  

That’s just one example but, clearly, NASA started CLPS, as they do with all their missions, with an intent to advance space exploration, scientific knowledge, and resource utilization. The commercial companies are interested in the economic benefits associated with this, but they also each individually take great pride in contributing to larger U.S. goals.  

China and Russia, as we talked about, are equally interested in the potential resources and China seems to be having one success after another in their own march toward a lunar base, placing taikonauts on the Moon.  

Throughout human history when there’s been resource competition, eventually there are also security concerns and requirements. And it’s these security considerations where I think the Space Force will come into play. To date, there’s been little interest in involving the military in space efforts at the Moon and beyond. Multiple reasons for this. All of them – valid. There have been policy concerns of militarizing space. 

And really, the traditional geocentric orbits have been sufficient to meet the joint force needs. I think this will naturally change over time and is already beginning to change. But I also don’t think it needs to preclude the goodness of international scientific cooperation for the benefit of all mankind. 

When you talk about any organization. But let’s talk about the military and the Space Force here. I know all too well the challenges of building a Space Force budget capable of meeting all the requirements. The last job I had a big piece of that was to develop our budget. The fact that the Space Force gets less than 3% of the DOD budget makes this an even bigger challenge. 

What I foresee going forward, based on a lot of different factors, is an opportunity for the Space Force to increase its budget share, and the need to begin to improve our space domain awareness capabilities in and around the Moon, especially in the face of China’s sustained, steady and oftentimes opaque space ambitions.  

Programs like CLPS offer the national security space sector an affordable opportunity to maybe host a sensor, a communications or navigation payload, or even buy commercial services, without the expense of your traditional large acquisition program that would include bus development costs and that expensive launch cost.  

In my mind, this would be a good and affordable way to address the gaps we have currently around the Moon and the worst thing we could do as a nation is to wait for a crisis to develop in or around the Moon or beyond, and then realize that we need some capability up there. 

It’s a good way to remind folks that the dual-use and the multiple benefits we get from the program are big reasons why we, the United States, need to continue to show a leadership role in this area. 

34:44 – 34:51 

And Sir, can you speak to the risk of the United States ceding their traditional leadership role in space, to China or Russia? What do those implications look like? 

34:52 – 36:24 

We have gotten so much benefit as a nation since we jumped into space, back in the late 50s and early 60s. Not only have we gotten great, national security benefits. I mean, ultimately, let’s be honest, the reason we got into space in the beginning was to be able to see beyond the Iron Curtain, to understand what it was that the Soviet Union was doing and we have continued to get great military benefit from our space activities. 

I mean, at the end of the day, space is central to our American way of war and there are very few military operations that don’t involve the critical aspects that space brings to the fight. Having said that, space is also critical to our American way of life. The fact that we got into space ultimately led to things like the Global Positioning System, which everyone knows will help you navigate to different places. 

I think more and more people are understanding [that] there’s also an element of the accurate timing source that GPS provides. This is something the Space Force provides to the entire world for free. But it’s that accurate timing source that’s the backbone for trillions of dollars of international banking every year and enables you to pay for gas at the pump, all kinds of things that many Americans take for granted. 

Or certainly enjoy the benefits of, and so, where we go in the future, still to be determined what other benefits are out there. But if we don’t choose to be a part of this race and look to continue to lead the way from a U.S. perspective with our Allies and partners, we run the risk of losing out on some of the future benefits.

36:25 – 36:39 

Thank you, Sir. Now, you also currently serve as a partner with Elara Nova. So from this perspective, what opportunities exist for the consulting firm to support civil space programs that also carry national security space implications, like CLPS? 

36:40 – 37:53 

Yeah, let’s start here with kudos to our co-founders, who had the foresight and recognized the need for a space-focused consultancy, and the need to staff it with expertise across all space sectors, from national security, civil, commercial and Allied space. Clearly, companies and government organizations cannot grow this level of expertise overnight. 

But the co-founders reached out into all of those different pockets and gathered a group of experts that can provide a lot of benefit to organizations, both commercial and government. The Elara Nova team is a great choice to help augment government or industry teams, with expertise across all those space mission areas, with strategy and policy development, market engagement, technology and capital investment, mergers and acquisitions, legal and regulatory issues, as well as interagency and inter-governmental cooperation. 

When you look across the team of co-founders, senior advisers, partners, and the rest of the team at Elara Nova, it is an impressive, wide-ranging, set of expertise and experience that, again, any government or industry organization can benefit from. 

37:54 – 38:32 

This has been an episode of “The Elara Edge.” As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space and aeronautics domains, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at The Elara Edge.