Episode 40: From NASA to the Pentagon, Commercial Space Takes Center Stage in “Rocket Dreams"

The Elara Edge Podcast

Intro/Outro: Scott King, Strategic Communications Manager, Elara Nova (SK) 

Host: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner, Elara Nova (MD) 

SME: Christian Davenport, Author, Rocket Dreams (CD) 

00:02 – 01:30 

(SK): When the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after their record-setting mission around the moon – America was watching. Just over 27 million peopleacross the nation’s largest television networks tuned in to follow their re-entry.  While the Artemis II mission was a precursor to America’s actual return to landing on the moon – it was aptly timed for Christian Davenport’s new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, which chronicles the commercial dynamics and geopolitical tensions defining the modern day space race against China. 

Welcome to “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series of The Elara Edge podcast where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors join Elara Nova partners to discuss their published work covering today’s ever-evolving space environment. Founding Partner Mike Dickey, the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force, is returning to the host seat today.  

Mike will be joined by Christian Davenport, the former Washington Post reporter and author of the 2025 book Rocket Dreams. Together, they’ll discuss how Rocket Dreams continues the storyline from Christian’s 2018 book The Space Barons, which we previously covered in the inaugural episode of “The Elara Epilogues.” A link to that conversation will be in the show notes.  

And on one additional note for our audience, this podcast was recorded prior to the SpaceX IPO. 

Thank you for joining us and onto the show… 

01:31 – 01:34 

(MD): Okay. Christian first, welcome back to the Elara Edge. 

01:35 – 01:38 

(CD): Hey, it’s so good to be back. Thanks for having me back a second time. I really appreciate it.  

01:39 – 01:53 

(MD): Yeah, that first time was over a year ago. And we were talking about Space Barons, which was your first space book. And in this interim period, it’s been long enough for you to have written and released another book, Rocket Dreams. 

I think September of 2025. Is that about right?  

01:54 – 02:48 

(CD): Yeah, that’s right. Rocket Dreams came out late last year. It’s something of a sequel of sorts to The Space Barons. I mean, the Space Barons, as you might remember, covered the early days of the commercial space industry. Elon and SpaceX and Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson and Paul Allen and you know, Mike, after that book came out in 2018, I thought at some point there would be enough material for another book. 

I just didn’t realize it would be within seven years or so. I thought it would be at least a decade. But there’s so much going on in this little industry of ours, and it’s moving so quickly that I looked up, called my agent. I said, ‘Hey, I think we have enough here for another book, because so much has happened and Rocket Dreams came out – and it comes out right before the Artemis II mission. And it seems like before too long there might be enough material for a third, so we’ll see.

02:49 – 02:59 

(MD): No, that’s right, it is definitely a dynamic time in this business. It’s not your first series of books that you wrote. Your first book was not about space. Can you maybe tell? I think our audience would like to hear about what you did there. 

03:00 – 04:29 

(CD): Yeah. So that was a book called ‘As You Were: To War and Back with the Blackhawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard. And, you know, at the time, I was a metro reporter at the Washington Post after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I was watching citizen soldiers, you know, service members from the reserve component, you know, the guard and reserve being called up in extraordinary numbers. 

We’re talking about firefighters and police officers and teachers and paramedics. And I was watching this strain that was putting on local counties and municipalities having so much of their workforce deploy. And we have big Pentagon reporters who were covering that. And we had reporters who were embedded with the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne and some of the big Marine units. 

And I was looking at it and was curious about the reserve component. So I embedded in Iraq with a unit from Virginia, they were a Blackhawk unit, and then toward the end of their tour and then came home with them and wanted to be sort of the first reporter to embed on the home front and to watch them transition back from being – we were in Anbar province at al-Asad Air Base – and then you process out through Fort Dix in New Jersey, and then the next day you’re civilian again and you’re not at some big Army base like Fort Campbell. 

They’re just home and trying to resume their lives again after just leaving Iraq. And so I wrote about that experience, which it was very rewarding. I’m still in touch with a lot of those soldiers to this day. 

04:30 – 04:36 

(MD): Oh, I bet. I mean intensely personal and not an easy ‘I’ll just jump back in and do my day job right.’ 

It’s not an easy transition psychologically.  

04:37 – 05:29 

(CD): No. And I wanted to highlight that particular sacrifice. And then also one of the bigger themes is the role of the citizen soldier. I mean, that goes back to the Revolutionary War and the citizen-based militia and the National Guard being part of the country’s fabric. And, you know, the 29th Infantry Division, which is the unit I was embedded with, fell under the 29th ID. 

And those units stormed the beaches of Normandy at D-Day. And we got away with that because they didn’t call up the guard and reserve during Vietnam, which was already a very unpopular war. And they had the draft. And then we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, and without the draft, they kind of needed the guard and reserve component. And at the time, people remembering Vietnam was kind of like, hey, what’s going on? Why are we relying on these citizen soldiers so much? And the fact of the matter is that’s the way the founders actually created it. So it was done on purpose.

05:30 – 05:54 

(MD): Awesome. So then you go to the business desk, your financial desk at the post, right? And this is where you end up kind of getting into this space business. And so now you write Space Barons. You are a consulting producer on two TV shows, one of which won an Emmy. 

Congratulations on that. Not too many authors win Emmys. And then Rocket Dreams? So I personally am not a medical professional, but I think you have caught the space bug. So what gets you excited about this topic?

05:55 – 07:14 

(CD): It’s funny that, you know, I’ve covered the military. I had done a stint in covering politics and editing and the space thing really just grabbed me from the moment, the way it just does. 

And I use this quote, it’s a Jeff Bezos quote, and I use it with my kids. And I say, “You don’t pick your passions, your passions pick you. But you have to have your antenna up.” And, you know, I didn’t grow up a big space fan. I was born in 1973. So after the Apollo program, I don’t think I was riveted too much by the shuttle. 

Actually, my first space memory is Challenger exploding, and so I didn’t grow up a space nerd. But started watching what was happening in the commercial sector, and rockets that would fly to space and then fly back to Earth and land, and the space baron billionaires getting into it and the rivalries and just how NASA was changing and relying on these companies. 

And I thought, ‘You know, there’s something really here.’ And as a journalist, they say that old adage, ‘Follow the money.’ And I thought if the richest people in the world were putting their money into this, we should be paying attention to it. And it’s just really grown and expanded to the point where you have room for not just one book, The Space Barons, but now this other one, Rocket Dreams. 

And of course, others have written books as well. And we’ve seen, you know, a little bit of a boom in that, and it’s spreading now into national security space is something that’s become very, very important.  

07:15 – 08:06 

(MD): Yeah, no doubt this is where Elara Nova has at its roots is continuing to mature space security on a U.S. and a global scale. 

So if we go back to Space Barons and to our listeners who haven’t done their preparatory homework for this podcast, you should go back and listen to that podcast, in April last year, we talked about it. But Space Barons introduced us to four billionaires who all wanted in some way to drive a space agenda, really for their own reasons. 

Right? It wasn’t all the same. They all had their individual motivations. But now we get into Rocket Dreams, and it looks like it’s come down to a two person or two company race. Blue Origin and SpaceX, Bezos and Musk. And so 2018 is where the book starts. And there’s been sort of a lot of hype, but maybe not a tremendous amount of progress. 

So take us back to the start of the book and where we are at that point. And then what are some of the arcs in the story as you go through Rocket Dreams?

08:07 – 11:44 

(CD): Yeah, so I think the Space Barons, you know, which covered the early days of the commercial space industry and their interaction with NASA, I think it posed a question. 

The question was, you know, ‘is this sort of commercial paradigm for real?’ The public private partnerships that NASA was using — is this a viable industry? Is this going to have any kind of growth, or is it a flash in the pan? And the answer comes in Rocket Dreams and it’s clearly a yes. And you can see that manifested in the fact that you are putting astronauts on rockets and spacecraft that are owned and operated by the private sector and not by the government, then that’s a big deal. 

And NASA is obviously outsourcing human spaceflight to the commercial space sector. You’ve seen the growth of space tourism. We’ve seen a proliferation of the space industry beyond just the Space Barons. I mean, I focus on Blue Origin and SpaceX, but there’s a proliferation of that. And then third, what you see carrying through the theme of Rocket Dreams is, for the first time, NASA really having some momentum of building the Artemis program to return to the moon and having that program survive subsequent presidential administrations. 

And we haven’t had that since Apollo. We haven’t had a deep space human exploration campaign survive one administration to the next since the Apollo era. And so I tell a lot of that story here in Rocket Dreams. But yes, we revisit SpaceX and Blue Origin, aligning themselves to move forward with NASA on this moon program. And that’s where the story begins. 

It begins with the transition team. President Trump has just won the election, and he is meeting with various companies. And they’re telling them, ‘Hey, we want to go to the moon. And what can you do to help us go to the moon?’ And Blue Origin, which had been left behind SpaceX, had moved so far ahead and Jeff Bezos tells his team like, ‘Hey, we need to compete. 

Everything SpaceX goes after, we’re going to go after.’ And so as Blue Origin’s executives are meeting with the Trump transition team and they’re saying, ‘We want to go back to the moon,’ they say, ‘Okay, well, we’ve just landed our suborbital space tourism rocket, New Shepard, in the West Texas desert. And well, we can build something like that and land it on the moon. 

And the executives, they completely made it up. They did not have a moon program. They did not have a lunar lander. But they knew that Bezos and the leadership really wanted to align themselves with NASA and start winning government contracts, start bringing real revenue. So they make that pitch to NASA, and then they have to go back and tell their boss. 

At the time, it was Rob Meyerson, the president of Blue Origin, ‘Hey, you’re not going to believe what we just did. We just pitched NASA on a lunar lander.’ Rob calls Bezos and says, ‘You’re not going to believe what the guys just did.’ And Bezos loved it and went all in, even helping write the proposal for a lunar lander himself and then pitching it himself. 

And so you see that the lunar lander competition is sort of the central tension, I think, of the narrative, because of course, SpaceX bids on it as well. Everyone thought Blue Origin was going to win this contract, but they ended up losing it to SpaceX. But it really brings us to today, where now they’re opening it back up in this competition, and we’re seeing them compete. 

So the book really sets that up. And there of course, some subthemes about it with this space race with China and the role of NASA and others. But I think that’s sort of the general arc of the story. 

11:45 – 12:30 

(MD): So let’s pull on the NASA thread a little bit, because that culture has had to evolve a lot. And a lot of the agency’s energy in the human spaceflight program. They have people living and working in space on the International Space Station 24/7, 365 and getting resupply and crew back and forth, obviously, was their focus for many years. 

And now they find themselves sort of pushed by these companies instead of the government pulling and wanting to do things. These companies want to do things bigger. They want to do things faster. And so how do you see the evolution of the cultural piece of NASA and their willingness to embrace the private sector influence?  

There’s a great story in the book about the astronauts. They want a stick, they want to fly the spacecraft, and they don’t get a stick because it’s a private enterprise. So tell us about that.  

12:31 – 15:55 

(CD): Yeah. No. And that’s the story I was going to tell that here’s Elon and SpaceX trying to build a more futuristic spacecraft. And there’s no stick, which a lot of the astronauts that NASA has are former fighter jet pilots. 

They fly with the stick. Boeing, the other contractor that had the contract to fly humans to the ISS, their Starliner spacecraft had a stick. The lunar lander that Neil Armstrong piloted down to the lunar surface had a stick. And on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, there’s  mostly it’s done by touch screen. 

And the very first time the astronauts went to SpaceX headquarters to fly it in a simulator and they’re flying it on the touchscreen, it did not go well. I mean, the software, it was sort of the first generation, and it wasn’t working very well and all but one of the astronauts crashed in the simulator. They crashed into the ISS. 

So a little bit of an ego blow there. And they turn around and they’re complaining to Garrett Riesman, who is a former NASA astronaut who at the time was working at SpaceX, and they’re telling him, like, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work, and you got to get it better.’ But over time, the SpaceX engineers just kept working on the software, and they went to 2.0 and 3.0, 4.0 and took all the input from the astronauts, and it just got better over time. 

And the astronauts just got more comfortable flying that way. And it worked. I mean, because the whole idea is that you don’t have to have all the skills to fly on a fighter jet that everyday people should be going to space.  

The other story I’ll tell real quick about NASA and the relationship with particular space and the commercial space sector was here SpaceX is vying for the contract, a very prestigious contract, to fly NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station. And NASA goes to SpaceX and said ‘you’re going to dock your spacecraft on our space station, our $100 billion space station. They’re six people living there at any time. We don’t want you crashing into it. We want you to have a nice, soft park and docking. 

We built the docking system. We’ve tested it. It’s robust. It works. We’re going to give it to you for free. Just bolt it onto your spacecraft. And please use that.’  

And there’s a young engineer whose job at SpaceX was to review it. And he takes one look at it and it’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s actually not that great.’ It’s pretty heavy. 

There are these six mechanical arms. Each one has their own motor. Each one has their own software system. It’s heavy. You got six individual points of failure. He built something much simpler using springs. He actually used the springs in the prototype from the shocks of a mountain bike. And they called it the M(CD)ocker. And it’s pretty rudimentary and simple. 

And his boss loved it and immediately took it to Elon. And Elon studied it for a little bit, asked some questions. It was like, ‘Yeah, do this instead.’ And so now this poor young engineer has to turn around and tell NASA, ‘Yeah, hey, that docking system that you wanted us to use to dock to your space station. Yeah, we’re not going to use it. We’re going to reject it.’ And had to overcome their skepticism.  

And it was that more than skepticism. I mean, there I think their frustration and anger and say, ‘Why would you not do this? And you remember SpaceX had not yet even won the competition.’ And, ‘Oh, by the way,’ they were going up against Boeing, which was the big legacy contractor. But again, over time they were able to show that their system worked. It was reliable and won them over.

15:56 – 16:24 

(MD): So, at this time, the first NASA administrator that President Trump picks is Jim Bridenstine and you talk about him quite a bit, too, because, you know, he’s the first politician to take over the helm, and a lot of people had some concerns about that. 

But to your point about maintaining some sort of thread of continuity and being able to move forward and then being able to message in and tell the story about why this is important and then ultimately to embrace this continued move towards the commercial world. It seems like he had a real steadying influence there. Is that your outcome?  

16:25 – 18:19 

(CD): Yeah, he did and he was interesting for a couple of reasons, because, like me, his first memory of space was Challenger and imagine he’s the NASA administrator during the Commercial Crew program, where SpaceX now is at the point where they’re going to fly astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. So this is a very big moment. 

President Trump goes to the launch. Vice President Pence is there. The pressure is on and all Jim Bridenstine can think is ‘What happens if something goes wrong.’ And so for the first part, he actually goes out of his way to hold SpaceX and Elon Musk accountable and really is concerned about the parachutes. He’s concerned about problems they had with their abort system. 

They had a spacecraft blow up, and he ordered a safety review of SpaceX. And he did try to treat them with respect. but also to hold them accountable. And then with respect to the Artemis program: here, he knows that George W Bush says ‘We’re going to the moon.’ 

Obama comes in and says, ‘Oh yeah, the moon. We’ve been there, done that. We’re going to go to an asteroid. We’re going to go to Mars.’ And then Trump comes and says, ‘No, no, we’re going back to the moon’. And the metaphor he used was like Lucy and the football. That every time we get it, we pull the football away and there’s no momentum and we can never get a clear shot. 

So he wanted to create a program that, even if a Democrat was elected, would survive. And he did that by numerous reasons. But creating the Artemis Accords and bringing in international partners and making it so much harder for any other subsequent presidential administration to kill it, and really casting this as a space race between the United States and China. So there’s a geopolitical influence in there as well.  

18:20 – 18:52 

(MD): So the book also briefly introduces us to a new billionaire, Jared Isaacman, Shift4 and, you know, makes it his own pile of money and buys from SpaceX a couple of commercial astronaut missions. 

The first time that’s ever been done. Inspiration Four and then Polaris Dawn a few years later. And now we find that he’s a NASA administrator. So how does his presence on the scene influence all of this, to have him come from that sort of dynamic Silicon Valley type of world that the rest of the gang does and now be in charge of this government bureaucracy that’s taking us back to the moon? 

18:53 – 20:49 

(CD): Yeah. And I think you see, in some ways, a lot of similarities between Jim Bridenstine and Jared Isaacman. I mean, they’re both great speakers. They do a lot of interviews, a lot of media that are out there really telling the story of NASA, telling the story of Artemis, telling the story of the next space age, and just very good at that. 

But you may remember that it was a little bit of a rocky road for Jared at first because he was nominated, then because of his ties to SpaceX chartering those two private astronaut missions. He sort of was collateral damage when Trump and Elon had their breakup. And then he lost it and then he came back. But he’s had a huge impact. 

And, you know, I’m grateful for him. I joked to him a few months ago that what NASA has done was a great set up for the book because initially SpaceX won that moon lander competition, which is such a prominent scene and storyline in the book, and then they beat out Blue Origin. But then, because of concerns about SpaceX’s timeline with their vehicle Starship, they opened it back up so that the Blue Origin can compete, and it’s just sort of the book sets that up so perfectly, but I think he’s a great champion for NASA and has a lot of credibility and has been able to win over people on both sides of the aisle, which I think is really important now.  

And you see it that space has always been not just bipartisan but nonpartisan. And I thought it was very telling that from Trump. 1.0, into Biden. President Biden lay waste to so many of Trump’s programs and policies, except for two and then the Artemis program and the Space Force, because they were able to see the importance of those programs. 

And now they’ve continued, obviously, under President Trump again, and they’re putting an emphasis on getting Artemis. The dates have slipped, but has had some momentum in the sustained focus from the White House ever since the first Trump administration.

20:48 – 21:16 

(MD): So, Chris, I’m sure like you, I was glued to the TV during the Artemis launch and the landing and many hours in between as they swung by the moon and I was getting texts from family and friends that don’t pay attention to this stuff normally. 

And it’s obviously sparked excitement in the public about space, again. There is some attention span issues sometimes with the American public. Do we have staying power this time and will this help accelerate the efforts?

21:15 – 22:47 

(CD): No. It’s such a great question. And I would say, first off, that NASA was so smart in who they picked for the Artemis II crew. 

That was an all star crew. I mean, they’re all good on TV and they had their huge media tour and I thought their staying power actually did last a little bit and made a lot of sense. I think to have the first African-American go to the moon, the first woman, the first non-U.S. citizen, and they clearly just gelled as a unit. 

And I think we saw at a time that’s very politically divisive, you know, real unity there. But we saw during the Apollo program that after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the American public’s attention soon faded away. And this is not going to be followed up soon with a landing on the moon. We now know that the next mission will just be a docking of Orion, with one or both of the lunar landers in low-Earth orbit, and then that mission would be followed by a lunar landing in 2028. 

Hopefully, but maybe not, since it doesn’t look like the next mission will happen until the end of 2027. So that’s a lot of time. And the American public they do have a short attention span. And so I think Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, is going to have to really do everything he can not just to keep the American public engaged, but to keep Congress engaged, to keep it funded, and to talk about the significance of the program and the space race with China while months go on in between these very important missions. 

22:48 – 23:18 

(MD): So now I’m going to ask you to put on your crystal ball here a little bit and think about: the architecture now has a little bit of the old, and a little bit of the new. 

We’ve got the SLS, the Space Launch System, traditional government run program using technology from the space shuttle program and Orion, which which came out of the previous version before where we’re at now, coupled with Starship and New Glenn and the landers that we’ve been talking about – how do you see that unfolding over the next couple of years? 

Is there still going to be this two part solution, or are we going to go all one way or the other? 

23:19 – 24:55 

(CD): I think in the near term, there’s going to be a two part solution that they’re going to use SLS and Orion. But over time, I think there will be more of a shift toward commercial. I mean, particularly away from the SLS rocket, I could see Orion existing in some fashion, but as you mentioned SLS is built on 1970s technology. 

It uses the RS-25 engines, which were literally developed in the 1970s for the space shuttle. They’ve been upgraded and modified and modernized since then, but it’s a very expensive vehicle. It’s not reusable, but right now there’s not an alternative. I mean, Starship isn’t ready. New Glenn has flown just a few times, [but] has had problems in and of itself. 

But Jared Isaacman has said that when there are commercial alternatives that are less expensive, reusable, more efficient, that NASA would go toward those. So I think he’s made that pretty clear.  

Jim Bridenstine and this is a scene in Rocket Dreams at one point, tried to sideline the SLS. Senator Shelby, who’s a big champion because it’s headquartered out of Alabama, pulled him into his office after Jim tried to do that and gave him a dressing down and threatened his career basically if he tried to sideline the SLS. 

But now, SLS doesn’t quite have, you know, Senator Shelby’s not there. And you’ve seen, I think, a shift politically where everyone is on board, that we are really in a space race with China. We need to move fast. We need to use the resources that we have. Especially if they’re limited and do everything we can to beat China. 

24:56 – 25:22  

(MD): Now, let me put a pin in that. I want to come back to that point in a couple of minutes. But one or two more questions for you on this. If we go back into Space Barons, there was a metaphor throughout that book about the tortoise and the hare, right? Blue Origin was the tortoise to SpaceX’s hare. 

In terms of who is going slow and steady? Who’s going fast? Does that metaphor still hold? Is it coming closer together? We talked about the lunar lander being opened back up to both companies. Where are we there?  

25:23 – 26:51 

(CD): Yeah. I mean, I think it still holds in the sense that SpaceX is far, far ahead. But Blue Origin is catching up. 

SpaceX is launching the Falcon 9 once every two or three days. They’ve had enormous success with that. They’ve shown that reusability is for real. That’s not even sort of a new novel thing anymore. And now they’re moving on to Starship, which is a big, complicated vehicle. They’ve had some problems with it. They’re now in version three. They’re going to have to show rapid reusability where it lands back at the launch site, they’re going to have to show that the spacecraft can be refueled in orbit. 

They’re going to have to show that they can launch a fleet of tankers to be able to refuel it within a short amount of time, 24 to 48 hours. So we’ll see. And meanwhile, yes, Blue Origin’s had some success with New Glenn. They are set as early as this summer or later this year to land their Mark-1 lunar lander on the moon’s surface. 

There won’t be any people on it, but that will be a big deal. We’ll see how they do. But we need to see: can they get their launch cadence up? They just have an anomaly, a problem with their second stage engines. Can they fix that? Can they get back to flying? Can they fly the lunar lander and can it land on the moon? 

Those are all big steps and those are all big question marks. So we’ll see. But now NASA has specifically pit Blue Origin against SpaceX. Whichever one of you is ready, you know, with your lunar lander to fly astronauts to the moon, you get the honor of doing that. So we’ll see.

26:52 – 27:13 

(MD): So one more kind of look back to Space Barons, because there was a couple other billionaires in there, right? 

There’s Paul Allen and Suborbital Tourism. And then Richard Branson took over after Paul Allen unfortunately passed away. Robert Bigelow wanted to do hotels. So that tourism in these commercial space stations is not as prominent in Rocket Dreams, but is it still prominent in the reality of our space program?

27:14 – 28:55 

(CD): Yeah. So for the suborbital space tourism, we’ll see. Virgin Galactic has paused. They are building, a whole new vehicle that was more economically viable and make for a sustainable business to be able to fly more frequently, fly more passengers. 

They’ve yet to fly. It’s been a while. We’ll see how they do. A lot of people are skeptical of it, but we are seeing the commercial space stations having some momentum, and there’s incentive for them to move forward because the International Space Station has been up there for 26 years continuously. It’s not going to last forever. NASA says 2030 or maybe a little bit longer, and they’re going to need to be successors. 

So you see companies like Axiom Space or even Blue Origin or Vast. And others, Voyager, building these next generation space hotels, if you want to call them that. And I do think those will ultimately be successful because it’ll be a national priority. And if the United States doesn’t have a presence in low-Earth orbit, we would cede that to the only other country that has a space station in low-Earth orbit and that’s China. 

So there will be a national priority for that. I do wonder Blue Origin, which had been up until several months ago flying its New Shepard suborbital tourism vehicle with some real frequency, actually put a pause on that so that they could focus on New Glenn and on their deep space and lunar programs and ambitions, which I think tells you how serious they are about all of that. 

I think a lot of people hope they come back to New Shepard, because I think they still have a lot of people who have signed up to fly on that thing.

28:56 – 29:43 

(MD): So that’s the second time you sort of talked about China and that competition and the space age nationally, as you were going to cast in that light, right? For prestige and then economic and other reasons as a new space race. 

And so the U.S. government’s primary stated objective is to want to beat China to the moon. But the military component of that, there’s also something a lot closer to Earth, right? Is the ability of China to make their military more capable through the use of space, like the U.S. has, to be able to do precision and lethality and communication and all those things that have made the U.S. military so effective and lethal. 

So how do you see the private sector part of this then leaking into the military and how the national security sector is capitalizing on that or not?  

29:44 – 31:46 

(CD): This is a great question, and I think it’s a very important one and I think the significance can’t be overstated that right now, as there you are obviously familiar with the term space superiority. 

 And then in order to achieve that, the Space Force and the Pentagon are going to need to rely on the commercial space sector for the kinds of technologies that we need. And ten years ago, when I was writing The Space Barons, the big breakthrough, the big innovation in space was the reusable rockets having the rockets come back and land so they could fly again. 

I think now it’s satellites and spacecraft that can maneuver in space. And when the satellite goes up, it’s moving very fast, but it stays on a fixed orbit. So you know where it’s going to be in an hour or a day or three weeks from now. But if you have spacecraft that can maneuver and can be refueled and have the propellant to be able to do that, so they can essentially dodge and weave and hide and sneak up or go high, go low — that is significant. 

And that’s necessary for space superiority. And I think there are a lot of companies that are working on that. I think also just the weaponry that we’re seeing and yes, we’re using the ‘W’ word now. I think more in space you’re seeing Space Force officials use that, that we’re talking about weapons. And I think a lot of it was Earth to space: firing missiles, these anti-satellite tests, which obviously were problematic because they created a lot of debris. I think now you’re seeing maybe more subtle attacks, you know, using high energy microwaves or laser or other kind of spamming or spoofing and jamming sensors, you know, again, space to space. And that’s the real change that it used to be satellites in space for all their purpose to look down. 

And now they’re looking up or they’re staying in space so their whole mission is in space. And the question is, can the Space Force really leverage and incentivize? And to really be clear with industry, this is what we need. This is where we’re going this is what we need to focus on and to build is an open question. And Golden Dome will have a huge impact on that, I think.

31:47 – 32:09 

(MD): Well, that’s right, because the idea is to use a lot of that things that are being funded and capitalized in the private sector to bring into military. It’s probably not a perfect analogy, but where NASA on the civil side, had a culture that needed to shift and begin to adopt a sort of private sector approach. Space Force was kind of in that role on the military side, where do you see the service in the adoption of the things that you’re talking about?  

32:10 – 33:33 

(CD): Yeah, and that we saw that in the beginning of the Space Force that they said we got to start from scratch. We should be more nimble, be more efficient, and avoid the kind of government procurement debacles that Senator McCain used to turn into theater in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and they didn’t want to have those. 

And I think there’s been some success. There have been some frustrations, some people are concerned that they haven’t been as successful in working with commercial, but they say the right things. I know that the motive at least, is there. But one of the things that I point to that I think is significant is talked about that, some of the war gaming scenarios, and they’re doing four of them, I think, this year that are focused in large part on that threat that we heard about from a couple of years ago of Russia developing a space-based nuclear weapon and the Space Force wargaming that, but bringing in the commercial side and making them part of that so they could see what are the challenges, what are the threats, what is the adversary doing and what are the technologies and the capability that we need? 

You know, I also think of Even Rogers from True Anomaly Space, being in the Air Force and the Space Force, and realizing that nobody in the commercial sector was building what the Space Force ultimately would need, so leaves and starts a company in order to do that. So I think we’re beginning to sort of see that nexus there.

33:34 – 34:09 

(MD): Yeah, I agree that this military doesn’t get to stop doing other things that they were doing right, and shift gears. So there’s a lot of things that the Space Force has to cover down on. We’ll see if you don’t want to say that, you know, money’s the answer to everything, that is definitely not. But, you know, the big jump in the Space Force budget coming in fiscal 27. You know, ultimately, whatever Congress appropriates, but it’ll be a boost.  

Can they then start moving a little bit more aggressively into some of these new areas that they’ve been a little slow to do in my opinion. So again, another metaphor, is there a tortoise and the hare metaphor between the U.S. and China on on the military side, national security side? 

34:10 – 35:38 

(CD): ‘Yeah, as much as I hate to say it, it sounds like China is really moving fast and far ahead. I saw a presentation at the satellite conference that the Space Force’s Chief Lurch gave about the number of satellites they’re putting up. We’ve seen China do, docking and geostationary orbit, a possible refueling there with the satellite that. Oh, by the way, a couple of years ago grappled a dead Bieduo satellite and pulled it out of GEO and moved it into a graveyard orbit. 

He talked about China developing satellites that use stealth that can’t be seen. They’re lunar and cislunar ambitions and the proliferated architectures that they’re putting up. By the way, the moon program, maybe not specifically, for the U.S. side, not a military program. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a national security program. And they’re moving toward the South Pole, the moon, and in cislunar space, they’ve got a rover on Mars. 

They may be able to return samples from Mars before we can. All of which spans from the hard core national security side and combat-like operations to the diplomatic soft power things that if they’re on the moon and we’re not, they’ll attract our allies. If they’re bringing back samples from Mars, the scientists from other countries will want to be allied with them. And so we see a comprehensive space program that they have. And it’s, in my opinion, a real race and the stakes are very, very high.

35:39 – 36:20 

(MD): And so some of that is scientific, some of it’s economic and the security piece. Actually, General Saltzman, the chief of space operations, I just heard him talking and say that making a historical analogy that everywhere that economy has gone, right? The U.S. Navy, it ended up protecting lines of communication and making sure those things could happen in a reasonable, normative way instead of just county option. 

Okay, so you were a business desk writer at The Washington Post. Big business news coming up in that SpaceX is headed for an IPO. And the numbers are incredible, right? $1.82 trillion valuation coming out. So what impact do you think that might all have on all of this? I mean billions of dollars getting freed up that might go somewhere else. 

36:21 – 37:34 

(CD): Yeah, and it just shows the the evolution and just the SpaceX is one of the biggest stories of American entrepreneurship of the last 100 years, moving from just being building rockets and spacecraft to a constellation of 10,000 satellites to now talking about orbital data centers and compute and working with artificial intelligence and xAI. You know, so, again, not just a rocket company, but an artificial intelligence company and internet provider, all of these things driving that. 

And I remember the old adage from it was only really like ten years ago when nobody wanted to invest in space, or the only people investing in space were just sort of hobbyists or very passionate people. And the saying, of course, was ‘the quickest way to become a millionaire in the space sector was to start out as a billionaire.’ 

And we’re seeing them drive enormous growth and attention – as to whether what are the downstream effects of that? Who can replicate it? We’ll see. SpaceX has shown that it is singular in a lot of ways, and that its success has not been able to be repeated. So yeah, it’s a fascinating time and then we’ll see what the stock does once it goes public. 

I mean, if there’ll be a spike or a drop or if it sustains over time.

37:35 – 37:46 

(MD): Do you think that the investor, the institutional, retail investors will rush to that stock, or will there be sort of a rising of all boats as people come to the space sector and pay more attention? 

37:47 – 38:37 

(CD): I do believe in the rising of all boats in that. I also think that as SpaceX has become so dominant from the U.S. government’s perspective, and this is NASA and the Pentagon. And the Pentagon, of course, has a much, much bigger budget, that there is a real desire for alternatives – that we cannot place all of our eggs into the SpaceX basket, and that we need New Glenn to work. 

We need Neutron from Rocket Lab. We need Stoke Space to stand up and all of these other companies to come to fruition. And SpaceX is just like I call it SpaceX University where they’ve graduated so many engineers who then go off and start their own companies or go to work for other companies and bring some of that SpaceX secret sauce with them and it’s proliferating. So I do think it’s the tide rises all boats.

38:38 – 38:51 

(MD): So we’ve already established that I am not a medical professional, but I think I know the answer to this question. Has the writing of these books and your TV shows, has that immunized you from the space bug or do you still got it? And if you got it, what are you doing next?  

38:52 – 40:04 

(CD): Yeah, no, I still have it. I am trying to broaden my horizons a little bit. I think it’s the Elon-Jeff stuff, which was sort of a theme of space barons or rocket teams. I’m moving on. I took a buyout from the Washington Post, as I know you know, but was able to stay on through the end of last year to finish a story about the Space Force and national security space. 

 And I’m really interested in delving into that deeply. I just don’t think the American public fully understands what the Space Force does, the importance of it, the great service that it does for our nation, the threats we are facing in space and the fact that this – it’s not new, it did not all of a sudden appeared in 2019 when President Trump created the Space Force. 

There’s a long history and I think it’s only going to accelerate in the years forward. I mean, you mentioned the huge increase that the Space Force budget is getting. I think there is going to be an acceleration of the threats, the proliferation of spacecraft, our reliance on them. And then, as you said, that next frontier, if we’re going to the moon or into cislunar space, we’re bringing American assets and the American economy and American values that the United States is always going to defend, and it will always defend all of that in any new frontiers. What it’s always done. 

40:05 – 40:46 

(MD): This allows me to close with and this is the origin story of Eara Nova, right? Those of us who were in this national security space world for decades and have been through all the changes and all the threats, as you rightfully talk about and when, when we are here to try to to help companies, to help the financial markets, to really all come together and continue to accelerate our capabilities and our ability to protect the nation and to be a leader on the global stage in space and the space economy. 

So I really appreciate you as an author and having read your books, they are very engaging and really easy reads because of the storytelling that you obviously from this podcast are so good at. Thank you for coming on the podcast again. We look forward to the next time we can do this. And I’ll leave you with the last word. 

40:47 – 41:12 

(CD): And I would just say that in the past couple of years, I think what you’ve done at Elara Nova is incredibly important. It’s a great service to the American industry, to the Pentagon and to the nation as a whole. I don’t think I was fully aware of that. Even a couple of years ago when you started out on this journey. 

And now that I am, you realize just how significant it is. So I would just turn back to you and say thank you for everything that you’re doing. It’s a great service and we’re grateful. 

41:13 – 41:53 

(SK): This has been an episode of “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series of “The Elara Edge” podcast. 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. 

From NASA to the Pentagon, Commercial Space Takes Center Stage in “Rocket Dreams”

New Book Explores the Commercial Dynamics and Geopolitical Tensions of the Modern Day Space Race 

America was watching when NASA’s Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after their record-setting mission around the moon. An estimated 27.17 million people across six of the nation’s largest television networks tuned in to follow Artemis II’s return to Earth, while another 650,000 followed along on NASA’s YouTube livestream. The Artemis II mission was a precursor to America’s actual return to landing on the moon, but it was aptly timed for Christian Davenport’s new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, which chronicles the commercial dynamics and geopolitical tensions defining the modern day space race against China. 

“The central tension of the narrative is the lunar lander competition for NASA’s Artemis program,” Davenport said. “Initially, SpaceX won the lunar lander competition when they beat out Blue Origin. But because of concerns over delays with SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, NASA reopened [the competition]. Now, the next Artemis mission will test the docking mechanism of one or both of the lunar landers in low-Earth orbit in 2027, before an eventual lunar landing in 2028.”  

This evolving commercial space dynamic follows Davenport’s 2018 book The Space Barons, which recounts the emerging ambitions of America’s commercial space sector backed by billionaires like SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. 

“Space Barons posed the question on whether the public-private partnership between commercial space companies and NASA was actually viable,” Davenport said. “The answer in Rocket Dreams is clearly a ‘Yes.’ Astronauts are now being put on rockets and spacecraft that are owned and operated not by the U.S. government, but the private sector. That’s a big deal.” 

Bridenstine and NASA’s Artemis Program 

A key figure in Rocket Dreams is Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator from the first Trump administration, who was tasked with overseeing NASA’s Commercial Crew program just as SpaceX was preparing to fly astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. 

“Bridenstine’s first memory of space was the Challenger explosion, so he goes out of his way to hold SpaceX accountable over their parachutes, abort systems, etc.,” Davenport said. “At the same time, SpaceX was developing its Dragon spacecraft to dock on the International Space Station. But the ISS’s docking mechanism had six mechanical arms, each with their own motor and software system that essentially created six potential points of failure. SpaceX rejected that legacy design in favor of their own that used springs from a motor bike, while having to overcome NASA’s skepticism in the process.” 

The Artemis program was originally designed to deliver NASA astronauts and their Orion spacecraft to the moon through the Space Launch System (SLS), which is an expendable, single-use rocket. But this intention was counter to the emerging re-usable rockets the commercial industry was developing, namely SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. 

These re-usable rockets created an opportunity for NASA to leverage commercial solutions in their ambitious return to the moon. 

“At one point, Bridenstine even tried to sideline the SLS until Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama [intervened],” Davenport said. “But now, there’s widespread recognition that we need to move fast and use the resources we have to beat China back to the moon. So while the near-term solution is to use both SLS and reusable rockets, [current NASA administrator] Jared Isaacman has said that when commercial alternatives are less expensive, reusable and more efficient, that NASA would go toward those and away from SLS.”  

Ensuring the Continuity of Artemis 

The success of the recent Artemis II mission was only possible, in part, by the actions Bridenstine took to insulate the NASA program from the political whims of changing presidential administrations.  

“George W. Bush said we’re going to the moon, only for Barack Obama to switch gears to focus on an asteroid or Mars,” Davenport said. “When Trump came in and returned focus to the moon, Bridenstine wanted to create a program that would survive [a change of administrations]. So he created the Artemis Accords and brought in international partners by casting this program as a key tenet in the space race between the United States and China.” 

Similarly, the United States Space Force has also received bipartisan support through recent administration changes since its inception during the first Trump administration.  

“Two of President Trump’s policies that President Biden continued were the Artemis program and the Space Force, because he recognized their importance,” Davenport said. “China also has ambitions for cislunar space, the lunar South Pole and Mars, all of which have national security implications. They have already demonstrated docking maneuvers and even potentially refueling in geostationary orbit, years after they already grappled a defunct Biedou satellite and moved it to a graveyard orbit. ” 

The Space Force and Commercial Engagement 

Likewise, the emerging Chinese threat in space and the opportunity to leverage innovative solutions from the commercial space industry has captured the attention of the Space Force. 

“In order to achieve space superiority, the Space Force needs to rely on the commercial space sector for the kinds of technologies that we need: reusable rockets, maneuverable satellites, on-orbit refueling,” Davenport said. “Space Force officials are now openly talking about weapons in space, [ranging from] anti-satellite tests to more subtle attacks like jamming and spoofing. All of those capabilities are necessary for space superiority and a lot of companies are currently working on that.” 

That’s why the Space Force has been engaging its commercial partners publicly, particularly through published documents like the 2024 Commercial Space Strategy. 

“From the beginning, the Space Force has aimed to be more nimble, efficient and avoid the government procurement debacles that Senator McCain used to turn into theater in the Senate Armed Services Committee,” Davenport said. “The motivation to incorporate commercial partners is there. One significant action they’ve taken is bringing [industry] into war-gaming scenarios, like the one focused on Russia’s development of a space-based nuclear weapon, so they can better understand the challenges and threats.” 

Despite the emerging relevance of potential solutions and capabilities provided by commercial space companies, questions still remain. 

“SpaceX is launching the Falcon Nine once every two or three days, showing that reusability is real,” Davenport said. “But they’re also going to have to show that [Starship] can be launched and refueled in orbit, which will require a fleet of tankers. Meanwhile, Blue Origin is also set to land their uncrewed Mark 1 lunar lander on the moon later this year. But while Blue Origin has had some success with its New Glenn rocket, can they resolve its recent second stage engine anomaly and get their launch cadence up?” 

The success of U.S. ambitions in space, for both NASA and the Space Force, will be contingent in part on their commercial partners. But the implications for national security space will be a narrative that Davenport intends to pursue in his next project. 

 “The American public doesn’t fully understand the Space Force and its importance in facing the rising threats from China, Russia and others,” Davenport said. “But the national security space problem isn’t new, either. It didn’t suddenly appear when President Trump created the Space Force in 2019, there’s a long history that goes back decades and that’s only going to accelerate in the years ahead.” 

Translating Public Interest into Financial Backing 

So while space captivated the American public’s attention for the ten-days of Artemis II, the responsibility now falls on the leaders of NASA and the Space Force alike to translate that public interest into sustainable financial backing for their mission-critical space programs.  

“We saw the American public’s attention fade away after the Apollo 11 moon landing,” Davenport said. “After the Artemis II mission, NASA has momentum behind a return to the moon for the first time since those Apollo missions. So NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is going to have to keep not only the American public engaged, but also Congress engaged to fund the new space race against China.” 

The dual-use potential of commercial space systems seems to have captured the attention of the investor community. SpaceX is seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation for its initial public offering (IPO) later this year, one that some estimates suggest could raise $75 billion. 

“SpaceX is one of the biggest stories of American entrepreneurship of the last 100 years, moving from building rockets to [operating] a constellation of 10,000 internet satellites,” Davenport said. “Now they’re looking ahead to orbital data centers and artificial intelligence. But the Pentagon also has a real desire for alternatives in the space launch market – they need New Glenn to work, Neutron from Rocket Lab, Stoke Space to stand up, all of these companies and their capabilities need to come to fruition. The need is proliferating, so the potential for greater investments is a rising tide that can lift all boats.” 

However, it remains to be seen if the growing public interest will likewise be met with financial backing from the U.S. government. While the Space Force has put forward a record-setting budget proposal of $71.1 billion for FY2027, how much will be appropriated from Congress remains to be seen. 

NASA, on the other hand, is looking at an $18.8 billion budget — a 23% reduction from the prior year despite a renewed emphasis on human exploration through programs like Artemis. 

“The United States is always going to defend its values and assets in any new frontier,” Davenport said. “But even with a huge increase in the Space Force budget, threats in space will only accelerate with the proliferation of spacecraft and our reliance on them. If the United States doesn’t have a presence in low-Earth orbit, cislunar space or the moon, we would cede all of that to China.  

Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage. Learn more at elaranova.com 

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/  

The Rise of Commercial Space in Christian Davenport’s “The Space Barons”

Washington Post Reporter to Release New Book, “Rocket Dreams,” in 2025

Christian Davenport, a space industry and NASA reporter for The Washington Post, has announced a forthcoming book: “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race.” The new book, set to be released in the fall of 2025, picks up where his previous book “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos,” concluded seven years ago. While his journalism career began as a metropolitan reporter and editor covering local politics in Washington, D.C., it was Davenport’s experience as an embedded reporter in Iraq and Kuwait that enabled him to recognize a unique story idea that led to writing “The Space Barons,” during a 2014 press conference. 

“I was assigned to cover the military-industrial complex when, in 2014, Elon Musk held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce he was filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon, specifically the Air Force, for the right to compete for national security launch contracts,” Christian Davenport said. “But Musk started the press conference by talking about building a re-usable launch vehicle that would bring the booster back by catching it. I wrote the story about the lawsuit, but during my research into SpaceX’s efforts to develop reusable rockets I found that Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin were trying to do that, too.” 

At the time, the idea of a re-usable launch vehicle that would return to Earth was unproven. But Davenport took to heart an old journalism mantra that harkens back to Watergate: “Follow the money.” 

“If the richest people in the world are investing their money in space exploration and advancing state of the art launch technology, then we should be paying more attention to that,” Davenport said. “So I interviewed Elon, Jeff, as well as Richard Branson and Paul Allen, for ‘The Space Barons.’ But while each of them approached their space companies with very different mindsets, there is a common thread through all of them: to lower the cost of access to space.” 

A Starting Point for Commercial Space 

The billionaires’ ambitions were diverse: Musk wanted to colonize Mars, Bezos wanted to reduce human impact on the Earth and Branson licensed technology from Allen’s StarShipOne to establish suborbital tourism. Each of them self-funded their space company’s efforts to varying degrees, but it was Allen’s original aspirations to win the Ansari X prize that today is viewed as a catalyzing moment for commercial space. 

“The Ansari X Prize was a contest to see if a commercial venture can send a vehicle to the edge of space and back – twice – without government money,” Davenport said. “When Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, the famous inventor and aerospace engineer, came up with SpaceShipOne and won the Ansari X Prize, it was heralded at the time as a breakthrough moment for commercial space. But while it showed it could be done, we don’t have regular people going to the edge of space like originally envisioned.” 

Davenport’s “The Space Barons” also takes readers inside a 2006 Valentine’s Day conference where the billionaires gathered together to brainstorm how to move the commercial space industry forward.  

“Back then, it would have been fair to look at these space barons and say, ‘Commercial space is never going to happen,’” Davenport said. “Space is such an expensive and difficult proposition that requires immense expertise. So there were a lot of skeptics who thought space was always going to be an exclusively government enterprise. Yet, over time, the space barons persisted.” 

The motives behind the Valentine’s Day conference meeting have clear repercussions that still resonate today. 

“In a sense, they posed a question: ‘Is there a commercial space industry?’” Davenport said. “Well, the next book, Rocket Dreams, answers that question with a resounding ‘Yes,’ because anytime you put human beings in a commercially owned and operated rocket is a big deal. Today, we’re seeing a proliferation of a space market and a space economy beyond just the billionaires.”  

The Government’s Role in Commercial Space Growth 

A key shift in making today’s space market possible, however, was the actions government agencies made to facilitate the commercial space industry’s growth.  

“There was a willingness from the government, from NASA and the Pentagon, to outsource some tasks and space missions to the private sector,” Davenport said. “Today, that outsourcing seems routine, but that was a revolutionary change to trust the private sector with vital space missions that had always been part of the national enterprise. That was a significant paradigm shift that enabled the space industry to take off.”  

It took key government figures like NASA’s Mike Griffin or DARPA’s Tony Tether and Steve Walker to advocate for the government to embrace what was – at the time – a budding space industry.  

“In the context of the time, there were two space shuttle disasters and the end of the space shuttle program, which meant the United States government would rely solely on Russia to get our astronauts to the International Space Station,” Davenport said. “So government officials began thinking about doing something radically different to access space. It started with industry partners flying cargo and supplies to the International Space Station before flying astronauts – but it was an incremental approach that developed over time.” 

The Modern Commercial Space Industry 

Today, that once-emerging commercial space market has established itself as a projected $1.8 trillion space industry by 2035. As such, government agencies will be looking more and more to their commercial partners for a variety of space missions. 

“We’re seeing the space enterprise understand that if the commercial sector can fly astronauts to the space station, then maybe they should be the ones who land astronauts on the moon and build uncrewed spacecraft for scouting missions,” Davenport said. “The government can also get investors involved to help subsidize the cost of these missions. However, the commercial sector works by experimenting to move faster, which means at times they’re going to fail. So it will be interesting to see what the government tolerance level is for that.” 

The balance of success and failure can perhaps be described by two recent commercial space endeavors funded by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. In early March, Firefly Aerospace landed their Blue Ghost spacecraft for a successful two-week mission, but Intuitive Machines’ Athena spacecraft had an imperfect landing that left much of its mission goals unfulfilled. 

“It’s a balance of how much risk are we willing to take, because whether it’s astronauts on-board or even the cargo and supplies needed to service those astronauts – the government requires success,” Davenport said. “Even SpaceX has recently had problems with its Falcon-9, Dragon and Starship spacecraft. So while we often celebrate the success of American innovation, some of these setbacks call into question how much government oversight there should be.”  

A New Space Race 

The government has a vested interest in the success of commercial space companies, primarily because the United States has once again found itself in a modern-day space race. 

“China has shown amazing progress for moon landings, as they are the first country to go to and bring samples back from the far side of the moon,” Davenport said. “They have a space station in low-Earth orbit and have operated a rover on Mars. But what many people don’t realize is there are no longer American flags on the moon. The flags from the Apollo era have been bleached white by the radiation and vacuum environment, meanwhile China has planted two flags: one made out of composite material specifically designed for space and another made with in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technology so it can withstand the harsh space environment.” 

In “The Space Barons,” Davenport catalogued how the commercial space industry rose up to meet today’s space race needs by delineating the book in three sections: Impossible, Improbable, Inevitable. But now that the commercial space industry is well on its way, “Rocket Dreams” will showcase how these companies will reach their destinations and achieve their goals in the modern space race. 

“‘Impossible, Improbable, and Inevitable,’ encompass the narrative of ‘The Space Barons,’ but also the journey of space exploration in the commercial space sector,” Davenport said. “This next book, ‘Rocket Dreams,’ takes a more symbolic approach to its three sections: on the ground, on-orbit, and to the moon and beyond. The book ends more on ideas, because there’s a lot of questions being asked and certainly progress that is being made, but these unpredictable variables are what makes it an exciting time to be a part of the space industry.” 

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 24: The Rise of Commercial Space in Christian Davenport’s “The Space Barons”

The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security

Intro/Outro: Scott King (SK) 

Host: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force (MD) 

SME: Christian Davenport, reporter at Washington Post; author of “The Space Barons” (CD) 

00:02 – 01:23 

(SK) Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King, and we have a new, special edition series to present to you today: “The Elara Epilogues,” where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors will join Elara Nova partners to discuss their published work covering today’s ever-evolving space environment. 

Founding Partner Mike Dickey, former chief architect of the United States Space Force, will be your host today. And joining Mike as our inaugural guest is Christian Davenport, space industry and NASA reporter for The Washington Post. 

Together, they’ll be discussing Christian’s 2018 book: “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.” The Space Barons catalogues the rise of today’s commercial space industry, through the lens of the billionaires who founded – and funded – their own space companies at its outset. 

But the conversation won’t stop there, as Christian shares with us a few teasers from his forthcoming book: “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race.” The new book, “Rocket Dreams,” is set to be released in the fall of 2025 and picks back up where “The Space Barons” concluded seven years ago.  

With that, thank you for joining us and onto the show… 

01:24 – 02:09 

(MD) Christian, first. Thank you so much for coming on Elara Edge Expert Insights on Space Security. Our audience is primarily those who have a keen interest in the security and economic aspects of space, and certainly the role that the new space industry plays, [it] continues to be an important and a fascinating topic for a number of reasons that I hope we’re going to discuss today. I’m sure we will.  

And you wrote the book on this: Space Barons, and it captures those very early days of this new order. And we appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about the early days. Also I understand, spoiler alert that you might have a new book coming up, and I hope we can also use this time to talk about that and to bring Space Barons into current context seven years on, as we await the new release.  

02:10 – 02:33 

(CD) Yeah, Mike, thanks so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure. I’ve been following, you know, what you guys have been up to over there, and it’s just such a fascinating time, which has, you know, kind of what led me to write the books. But, you know, as I say, I’ve got one of the best beats in all of journalism. 

I just wish the news would slow down a little bit because there’s so much going on. But yeah, no, it’s a real pleasure to be here and I’m looking forward to the conversation. 

02:33 – 02:44 

(MD) Fantastic. Well, let’s rewind the tape and go back to the very beginning and what prompted you to write the book Space Barons and put it down in book form? 

You’re a newspaper journalist by trade?  

02:45 – 04:40 

(CD) Yeah, so I’ve been doing a lot of things at The Washington Post. I was a metro reporter. I covered local politics. I went into editing and was covering the military for a long time, [I] was embedded in Iraq and in Kuwait and was then assigned to a beat on the business desk to cover the military-industrial complex as it were. 

And in the 2014 timeframe, along came a guy named Elon Musk, who held a press conference at the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C., to announce he was going to file a lawsuit against the Pentagon, specifically against the Air Force, for the right to be able to compete for national security launch contracts. 

And I remember going to that press conference and thinking, ‘Who the heck is this guy? What is SpaceX? And why would you be dumb enough to file a lawsuit against the government agency that you want to get contracts from?’ And anyway, he started the press conference by talking about bringing back the Falcon-9 booster and trying to catch it. 

And in those days, they were trying to build the reusable vehicle. But by bringing it back to hover it over water at a specific spot in the ocean, and I’ll confess, Mike, I had no idea what he was talking about. But I thought it was really, really interesting and I ended up writing the story about the lawsuit, but ended up doing some research into SpaceX, into reusable rockets, and saw then, of course, that Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin was trying to do that. 

And you know, one of the key mantras in journalism is ‘Follow the money,’ right? That goes back to Watergate. And I said, ‘Well, if some of the richest people in the world are investing their money in space exploration and advancing the state of the art and the technology, maybe we should be paying more attention to that.’ 

And so that’s when I sort of decided I need to start covering this, so that’s how it came about. 

04:41 – 04:54 

(MD) Yeah, fascinating. How did you go about writing? I mean, those are pretty unique individuals. We’re going to talk about some of the other individuals in the book.  

Did they all give you access? Or, you know, how did you go about your research and your interviews and did everybody want to talk to you? 

04:55 – 07:15 

(CD) Yeah. For the first book, “The Space Barons,” I did interview Elon and Jeff and Richard Branson and Paul Allen at the time. I think it was one of Paul Allen’s last interviews before he died. But I did, and it wasn’t easy with Jeff, in particular. 

You know, I work at The Washington Post. He owns The Washington Post. I think a lot of people thought that, ‘Oh, he would get access because of that – with his ownership.’ In fact, we treat him the way we treat everybody else and he’s a very difficult person. 

He doesn’t do a lot of interviews. Blue Origin is very secretive, particularly then. So it took months upon months to get Jeff to sit down with me. In fact, and I tell this story in the book, what I ended up doing was I did a lot of research into Jeff and his fascination with space. I mean, he says now, ‘Space is the most important work I’m doing.’ 

And he’s focusing all of his efforts on Blue Origin, his space company. But at the time, he was still the CEO of Amazon. And people didn’t even really know anything about Blue Origin. But I knew that space was one of his key passions, from his very early childhood days and the time that he spent with his grandfather. 

And his grandfather – as it turns out, was working for the Atomic Energy Commission in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and was one of the first employees ever over at ARPA, the predecessor to DARPA and he helped stand up that agency.  

And I do believe that Jeff’s passion for space and his desire to have his companies AWS and Blue Origin serve in the national interest and to work alongside the government and the Pentagon comes from his grandfather.  

Anyway, in my research about Jeff and his grandfather I had come across a press release, from I believe it was 1961 or 1962 when his grandfather left ARPA to go back to the Atomic Energy Commission and the press release even had a picture of Jeff’s grandfather on it. And anyway, he was in Washington, D.C., at some convention, and I kind of buttonholed him. 

And I showed him the press release, which he had never seen. And I said, you know, ‘I’m doing this research. I’m working on this book. I’ve been trying to interview you. Here’s the level of research I’m doing. I’m just trying to impress you.’ And then he finally relented to do it. So that’s the story of how I got that interview, but it took months to get it.

07:16 – 07:42 

(MD) Each of those early space entrepreneurs or early space barons had their own dreams and wishes and vision for what they wanted to do. Elon and a multi-planetary species. Bezos and saving the planet. Robert Bigelow wanted space hotels. Richard Branson wanted suborbital tourism. Andy Beal wanted a commercial heavy lift rocket. All of those things ended in very different ways.  

So what is it about either the timing or those individuals, you think, that led to those different outcomes?

  07:43 – 09:58 

(CD) Yeah, and it’s interesting. And they do come at it with very different approaches and very different mindsets. But there is a common thread through all of them. And that is to lower the cost of the access to space. I think there was a concern among all of them that the technology in space had not kept up with the advancements in technology that we had seen in computing power, you know, with the internet. 

And we saw so many different aspects of our society make these giant leaps forward that they were witness to and not only witness to, but that each of these quote unquote, “Space Barons” is to a certain degree, helped progress, and that we’re part of that. Whether it’s with Amazon or Tesla or what have you. They’re part of this technology movement and wanting it to move forward. 

But space is so difficult that it requires an enormous amount of capital upfront, which is one part of it. Elon famously funded SpaceX the first four launches with $100 million of his own money. Jeff was self-funding Blue Origin, actually, even to a large extent up until now. And so you needed that immense capital to come in because the barrier to entry is just so high when it comes to space. 

As Jeff says, ‘I could start an internet company because the phone companies had put down the cables that became the internet. There was an invention called the Postal Service that allowed me to deliver books to people’s homes. There was this invention called the credit card so that I could take their money.’ That infrastructure was in place. That’s not necessarily true in space, so I think what they’re trying to do is build the infrastructure.   

The other key part of it is, it was a willingness from the government, from NASA and the Pentagon to say, ‘You know what? We can outsource some of these missions to the private sector.’ 

And today, you know, I think we look at that and it’s routine. But back then that was something of a revolutionary change to allow the private sector to step in, in this way and trust them with vital missions that had always been part of the national enterprise that now were being taken over by the private sector and that is a significant paradigm shift that allowed this industry to take off. 

09:59 – 10:30 

(MD) Yeah, I definitely want to come back to that and spend a couple of minutes in a little bit, because as we get beyond “The Space Barons” book and probably into the field of your new endeavor, that becomes more and more important as we come to 2025. 

But back on the individuals. So there’s this sort of rivalry, either explicit-implicit, I’m not sure. But everybody sees some of these individuals as in a rivalry.  

Do you think that the rivalry is driving some of their behavior, or is it just that they have these overlapping passions that just end up sort of creating a rivalry? 

10:31 – 11:51 

(CD) I do think there is a rivalry and there has been between all of them. These are fierce competitors who have gone into various industries, whether it’s Amazon and taking on booksellers like Barnes and Noble or moving into retail to take on Target and Walmart and K-Mart. Elon with Tesla taking on Detroit. They’re fierce competitors.  

What we’ve seen, however, is a domination of SpaceX lapping Blue Origin. And Elon has said this, that he lamented the fact that for a long time he didn’t have a clear rival and was goading Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin to move faster. 

And he was urging Jeff to forget about Amazon. You know, ‘Amazon is set. You need to be focusing on Blue Origin,’ knowing that in the end, that would make SpaceX better to have some competition. I truly believe that. And I think that SpaceX’s success has been something of a roadmap for Blue Origin and for many other companies. 

That A: you can be successful. And B: Here’s one way to do it. There’s a lot of argument now that SpaceX has maybe gotten too successful, too big, and is there really a broad commercial space industry or is there just SpaceX? That’s sort of an interesting dynamic, but I do think in any business like this, there is real, real competition.

11:52 – 12:08 

(MD) Your book takes us inside a Valentine’s Day 2006 conference, where some of these eventual Space Barons got together and started talking about what the commercial space industry might look like.  

What are the kinds of things that they were dealing with, and how on-track do you think they were? Now, looking back on that and talking about the right things?  

12:09 – 13:48 

(CD) Yeah, you know, if you look back on it now, you can say like, ‘Oh, well, weren’t they prescient? And they saw this coming.’ Because we do have something of a commercial space industry. I mean, I think if the space barons, in a sense, posed a question, I mean: ‘Is there this commercial space industry?’ And I think the next book that I’m working on sort of answers it with a resounding “Yes,” because anytime you put human beings in a commercially owned and operated rocket could say, “Yeah, that’s a big deal.” 

You have a proliferation of a real market and a real space economy beyond just the billionaires that to some extent is self-sustaining. Businesses win, businesses some lose. They come and go and there’s some continuity of purpose with government being able to rely on them. That’s looking at it through the prism of today.  

If you went back to then, I think it’s fair to look at them and say, “You guys are nuts. This is never going to happen. Space is so expensive. It’s so difficult. It requires such expertise. I mean, getting a rocket to orbit is such an immensely difficult proposition. To think you can do it is – you’re either wildly arrogant or you’re just incredibly ignorant because you have no idea what you don’t know.” And yet, over time, they persisted. 

So I think you go back and you look at that. And there had been previous efforts to build a commercial space industry to move the technology forward. That had all failed. And I think there are a lot of skeptics who say, ‘You’re never going to do this, this is always going to be a national enterprise and it’s just sort of the one thing the government has to do and has to do exclusively.’ And now we’re seeing obviously that change.

13:49 – 14:21 

(MD) You talk about this public-private kind of relationship. Was there people on the government side that you would also highlight that allowed these kinds of things to happen, that were also prescient in: ‘Look, we need to start investing in some of these companies?’ 

And I think of people like Steve Walker at DARPA who gave SpaceX some money to do those first four launches. And then you’ve got, of course, all the NASA input, which has been huge. But Mike Griffin as the administrator has thrown his weight against it. The different program managers – who are the government people that you would put in this periphery of the space barons? 

14:22 – 16:34 

(CD) Yeah, and you named a few of them. I mean, you know, DARPA looking for innovative technologies, funding SpaceX early on and giving them some seed money. And there were people within NASA these – when I talked to Elon about it, when I interviewed him for “The Space Barons” there were sort of these rebels inside the alliance who was like, ‘You know what? We need to place a bet, at least. Not saying we should turn anything over to the commercial sector, but maybe we give them some seed money to see if they can make it.’ 

And if, you know, you go back again, put yourself in that context in that time where you have two disasters with the space shuttle and the sort of idea that the space shuttle is coming to an end, and we’re not going to have any way, the United States government, NASA, is not going to have any way to fly humans anywhere. 

And in fact, we’re going to turn that capability over to Russia. This country that we defeated in the Cold War space race to the moon is now going to be flying our astronauts, which nothing symbolizes the concerns about the lack and the complacency in the government enterprise in moving the technology forward, than the fact that NASA couldn’t fly astronauts. 

And so I think you saw people within the government saying, ‘We have to try to do something different, even radically different.’ And sort of a step-by-step approach, starting with, “Okay, is it possible that they could fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station? Is that even something we could consider?” And you sort of see that beginning to come up in the Bush administration. 

At the time, you know, you mentioned Mike Griffin. There was this idea like, “Okay, maybe we’ll place a few bets to see if they can do that, but there’s no way we’re going to let them fly astronauts.” I mean, there was sort of a red line there.  

Then you see the commercial sector starting to fly cargo and supplies. It’s working. Obama comes in, there’s no space shuttle. We’re paying Russia $70-80 million a seat for rides to the International Space Station and then they’re saying, “Well, maybe we can do that.” 

So it’s not something that happened overnight. It was sort of an incremental approach that took place over time and I do think there were individuals within the agencies who saw that happening. And then, of course, companies like SpaceX were proving that they could do it and overcoming enormous skepticism to gain their trust.  

16:35 – 17:00 

(MD) So one of the earliest bits of seed money, and maybe you can’t even call it that, but it was the Ansari X Prize and Peter Diamandis, you know, kind of had that concept to create this prize and you can explain it for our listeners.  

But do you think that was necessary? Important? Useful? And would there be room for another X Prize of some sort, do you think, to continue it? It was supposed to be an accelerant for the industry. Do you think it did that?  

17:01 – 18:45 

(CD) Well, so that’s such a great question. So the Ansari X Prize is this contest to see if a commercial venture, [with] no government money can send a vehicle to the edge of space and back and do it twice. 

And there were, you know, a lot of stipulations about weight, mass and that sort of thing and it was successful. Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, the famous inventor, aerospace engineer, came up with SpaceShipOne and they won the Ansari X Prize and I think it was heralded as a moment, as a breakthrough, that, “Yes, this can be done.” 

If you go to the Air and Space Museum – you can see this winged space plane that looked like it had no business flying in the air or, you know, it looked like a paraglider. And yet here it was, going to the edge of space and back on these really hair-raising rides that I think recalled bold, ambitious, swashbuckling days of early aviation. 

I mean, these were incredibly dangerous and risky and edge of your seat, pushing the frontier, pushing the technology. And they did it. But did it touch off a greater revolution? I think the answer to that at the time is: “Not really.” It showed it could be done, but even today, we don’t have a lot of regular people going to the edge of space like they envisioned. 

We do have space tourism. We do have Virgin Galactic, which is Richard Branson bought the rights from Paul Allen and started Virgin Galactic, which has gone through many iterations and is going through another one now and isn’t really flying. Blue Origin is flying, but the cadence isn’t very fast. They’ve done a number of space flights, but they’re not flying people on a regular basis. It’s enormously expensive. 

So it didn’t touch off that revolution that I think a lot of people had hoped it could, but I don’t think it was a complete waste. It did show that it could be done, and in that sense helped pave the way for where we are today.  

18:46 – 19:41 

(MD) So I kind of want to zoom out now and just talk more about some of the things we’re already touching on the economic relationships between the government and these commercial companies. And I’ll go back to my generation considers the Apollo Era was the golden age of space and it was all about the competition, as you already brought up between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on putting a man in space and then putting a man on the surface of the moon. 

And you talk about in the book how the resolution of that competition in the favor of the U.S. ended up driving some complacency, at least on the side of the U.S. government.  

Now, it doesn’t feel like we’re in a complacent age, right? There’s just a ton of activity going on, in fact, two commercial companies put landers on the moon and so with that competition in mind: between governments, between companies. You know, what are the parallels and the differences between then and now in how we’re innovating in space?

19:42 – 21:54 

(CD) Now, that’s a great question. And here’s one of the things that just jumps out at me, Mike, because I do believe we are in a space race, as we were during the Cold War – really against China. 

China has shown amazing progress. Four for four [on] moon landings. First country to go to the far side of the moon. First country to retrieve samples from the far side of the moon. They have a space station in low-Earth orbit. They’ve operated a rover on Mars and one of the things people don’t realize is there are flags on the moon, and they’re not American flags. 

They’re Chinese flags. And I say that because obviously during the Apollo era, we planted flags on the moon, but they have been bleached white, according to NASA scientists, by the radiation environment, by the harsh environment of space and being in that vacuum, that they’re essentially reduced, maybe even to tatters, but certainly not recognizable as American flags today. 

China has now planted flags. One made out of a composite material designed specifically to withstand the harsh environment of space and to last for years, if not decades. The second flag they put up on the moon during the far side sample return mission, was actually done using an ISRU-like technique, In-Situ Resource Utilization, where you use the resources of the moon. 

And they were able to take a form of volcanic rock basalt, which is, you see a lot of on the moon. They use samples, obviously from Earth, melt it to lava and using that lava extract out these very, very thin threads, let it cool down and then weave the threads into a Chinese flag. 

That, again, is an ISRU technology and is designed to withstand the harsh environment of space. But here’s the thing. At least from where I’m sitting, and I may turn the tables and ask you this: to the American public, I think during the Cold War, we all knew we were in a space race with the Soviet Union. We all knew about Sputnik. We all knew about Kennedy’s charge.  

It just doesn’t seem to me that it resonates that we’re in this great power competition with China in space and it’s not just civil space, but clearly national security space. And I’m just sort of curious from your perspective, you know, why isn’t it resonating and what are the stakes for that? 

21:55 – 24:29 

(MD) Well, I mean, you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t get the kind of publicity that it got. There’s a million other things that the populations are worried about, now. It’s not really that bipolar world, it’s more multipolar and all the complexities that come with that.  

And the other thing is that a lot of the things that we do in space are information, right? It’s ones and zeros. You don’t see it all the time and where Elara Nova sits – our wheelhouse is the national security business and we understand probably more so than the general public of just how integrated space is into everyday life and the danger that comes with anyone who wants to interfere with those activities in space would interfere with everyday life. 

It would readily become apparent if things started to happen in space that were against our interests, and because of some of the things that have been going on that we’ve been talking about: the lowering the barrier of entry, technologies are getting smaller, you can put better things in smaller packages. It’s really allowed lots of countries now to become space-faring countries. 

China has obviously had the most resources to put to bear here, and they’ve created the ability to interfere with the things that the U.S. will do in space for the civil economy and for national security. So we worry a lot about our forces who are deployed all around the world suddenly being exposed to vulnerabilities that the Chinese can create by nefarious action in space. 

And really, that’s why, the first Trump administration created a United States Space Force is to begin to address that competition in the national security arena to make sure that we could continue to do what we need to do in space, and that if the day comes, we could disrupt what others might try to do to us in space that will affect, again, not only our forces, but all of the economy, not just for the U.S., but around the world.  

The interesting thing with China is because they’re doing so much in space, they’re also becoming somewhat dependent on that domain. And you hope there’s a bit of an understanding that we really don’t want to do something in space because it’s going to affect everybody equally. Now, more equally than probably in the past. 

So let’s go back to this idea of investing, putting investments in space. And you talked about [the] Commercial Orbital Transportation System – 2006. And now NASA has really upped their game, right? There’s commercial payload services, commercial cargo, commercial LEO destinations. They’re talking about doing a Mars return with commercial ideas.  

NASA is kind of all in here. 

Is that good? Is that bad? Is it tilting this the economics of the market at all in ways that we should pay attention to?

24:30 – 27:22 

(CD) Yeah, no. It’s such a fascinating evolution, and it shows the depth of this conversation that takes us from those early days of COTS and cargo delivery and then saying, “Okay, they can do that. Maybe they can fly astronauts to the space station. Okay, well, maybe they can fly astronauts to the space station. Maybe the commercial sector – they should be the ones who build the spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon and to build the uncrewed spacecraft to do the scouting missions under the Eclipse program to go to the moon. And maybe they should even build the spacesuits that the astronauts are going to wear on the moon.” 

And so you’re seeing the enterprise go, and it’s allowed, I think, of what Thomas Zurbuchen, who was the head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate when Eclipse was born, saying ‘The commercial sector can move faster. NASA will make a relatively small investment. They can maybe get other businesses investing in them, wanting to do science, wanting to send payloads to the lunar surface that help subsidize the cost that allows NASA to quote ‘Take shots on goal.’”  

But some of those are going to miss. And you think of a national mission, and you’re going to put in a lot of work and a lot of costs and a lot of time to make sure that it works.  

Well, that’s not the way the commercial sector works. They’re going to move faster, they’re going to experiment, and they’re going to fail and you have to wonder if they fail. What is the tolerance for that?  

And we’ve now seen a company like Astrobotic didn’t quite reach the lunar surface. Intuitive Machines got there a year ago, first successful landing since the end of the Apollo era of an American spacecraft. First commercial spacecraft to reach the lunar surface. But it wasn’t a perfect landing. A leg broke. It ended up on its side. They tried again earlier this year. Again, it looks like they went into a crater. Maybe they toppled over. [They] were able to operate for a little bit. I mean, they reached the surface but [it] wasn’t perfect. So there is a trade-off there and that might be okay with experimenting on an uncrewed vehicle. 

But when you talk about astronauts on-board, or if you even talk about the cargo and supplies that have to go up and service those astronauts, you need success. And you need that to be reliable. And you know, even SpaceX, which is the leader in all of this, recently has had some problems with the Falcon-9, even some concerns about Dragon recently. Starship, the last two flights, the ship has come apart and you know there’s no emergency abort system with Starship the way there is with the Falcon-9 and Dragon. 

So I think people look at this success and they want to cheer it and, “Rah rah, way to go, American innovation.” But there have been some setbacks, and you are wondering what the appetite and what the right balance is supposed to be between government and between the private sector, and what sort of oversight should there be? And I’m sure there are a lot of people a lot smarter than me who can figure that out. For sure.

27:22 – 27:44 

(MD) Yeah, and I think you’re right. It’s those challenges are interspersed with successes, right? So Firefly got their [system] upright? They’ll get a whole lunar day of science and so that’s a win.  

So it’s a balance, as you rightfully say, of how much risk are we willing to take? How much failure is fine because you’re failing forward and you’re continuing to make progress, right? 

27:45 – 28:11 

(CD) Right, and let’s be clear. I mean, those failures, we use the term failure. But failure is actually a very positive term, particularly if you learn something and you get better and that you’re failing in a test environment, in a real world environment, in the vacuum in space, and you’re going to learn about the technology and the engineering in ways you just cannot learn when you’re on the ground doing simulations and so they will get better.  They have gotten better, and they’ve shown enormous progress. 

28:12 – 29:15 

(MD) You know, I’ll say on the national security side, it’s been a little bit slower on the uptake in terms of the big investments in commercial. You mentioned launch services? Got it. That one’s pretty well set just because of the frequency and now it’s very reliable.  

But it’s been nascent in other areas. You know everybody the Department of Defense talked about wanting to harness more commercial, but you know the remit for national security is you can’t fail in ways that are going to have catastrophic implications for either our forces or our objectives overseas and domestically. 

So it’s been a little bit my opinion, Mike’s opinion, has been a little bit tepid. I think actually, the leader here is the National Reconnaissance Office, who have been buying some of the commercial imagery and other types of products from space companies.  

The Space Force has some, again some of their own nascent ideas about how to bring commercial in. But the level of investment isn’t like what NASA has in terms of really sending a signal to the market that says, ‘If you build it, we will buy it.’ And we’re kind of not there yet. So I think that debate on the national security side is going to continue to unfold. 

29:16 – 29:32 

(CD) Yeah. Well, actually I’m curious about that. And if I could turn the tables just one more time, I’m curious why you think that is? Is it because the culture at the Pentagon is just more entrenched, that there weren’t those like, quote unquote, “rebels” that we saw at NASA early on, or it’s just a bigger bureaucracy. 

I mean, why do you think it hasn’t taken hold that way?  

29:33 – 31:42 

(MD) It’s certainly the culture is a huge part of it. And the culture being a couple of things: one is the requirements that the government has are a lot of times not tightly aligned with commercial market objectives, right? So the Department of Defense needs things that don’t have its own commercial markets. So maybe we have to do those things ourselves, is what the question is. 

And this idea of control when things are really getting bad, when countries are fighting with each other, when potentially economies are colliding with each other, right? In a big conflict like that, will the commercial companies still stand by their contract? I’ve seen no indication that that wouldn’t be the case, but those are some of the control issues. When you’re with the military, you want control on all parts of your system.  

Now we do other things with commercial within the Department of Defense – that we buy vehicles that come off of commercial product lines. We buy services in a lot of places but the closer you get to the actual combat itself, it just gets a little more dicey from a cultural perspective of how much you want to have within your own control, and how much you want to have in a contractual relationship with another entity? 

Certainly, the industry builds everything that the military has, so it’s really about that contractual relationship and who ends up owning and operating the end product at the end? So I think there’ll be more, but I don’t think it’s going to be as robust as some of the civil activities that we see going on.  

So, Christian, let’s talk about where the money come from. The Space Barons had money, right? They created companies, became billionaires and then were allowed to channel that money into their space dreams. Then you went into a world where a lot of these smaller companies tried to come in and be part of this market. 

They were mostly venture capital funded, so they were probably giving up a bunch of equity in the company for single millions and tens of millions of dollars. We went through this unfortunate period in 2021 of SPACs that were really more about the bankers making money for the bankers and not doing well by the companies. 

That sort of flushed out now and now we’re seeing a maturation in those capital markets where becoming more private equity, institutional investors and even now, banks getting into debt financing for companies that have good revenue. So how do you see that as part of this overall space economy and moving forward? 

31:43 – 33:00 

(CD) Yeah, I mean, I think early on it was that old adage, you know, the quickest way to become a millionaire in a space business was to start out as a billionaire. 

And you did see a lot of ebbs and flows. And it has matured. And that’s in large part because they see the way the government, NASA and to a lesser degree, the Pentagon, is investing in these companies and relying on them and providing a real service so that there is sort of a backbone for these companies. 

And, you know, there’s that other leg of the stool that the companies have shown the capabilities to be able to do it, which gives, I think, the markets a lot more confidence. I mean, I think initially, you know, space investment was for hobbyists, it was for enthusiasts. Now it’s become much more mainstream. Is it still incredibly risky? Yeah, I think it is. 

But I think it’s the upsides can be really high, particularly if the Pentagon gets involved, and particularly if these companies can dramatically lower the cost of access to space. And then you begin seeing what Jeff Bezos calls the ‘unleashing of an economic dynamism,’ like what he saw with the internet that allowed companies like Amazon to flourish, that there’s going to be a next wave of space companies building on top of the infrastructure that’s already there to do things like in-space resource utilization, mining, those sorts of things. 

33:01 – 33:38 

(MD) Let’s dig a little bit into the infrastructure piece. I mean, you’re right. Jeff Bezos has his story about: Amazon worked because the internet existed, because there were roads to everyone’s houses, there was a Postal Service that he could ship through, a payment system where people could sit on the couch and pay for merchandise. So now, if you think of infrastructure in the area of space, certainly launch, that’s got to be first. You have to have launch to be able to get to orbit. But there are probably other things that will help further unleash the space economy.  

What do you think those items are, and what kind of services could commercial market bring to create infrastructure that then all of a sudden makes it easy for everybody else?

33:39 – 35:45 

(CD) Yeah. I mean, I think and I’m guilty of this. A lot of us in the space press corps, we focus on launch. We focus on the rockets, we focus on the astronauts and we focus on the billionaires, too. But there’s a whole subset of issues that don’t get enough attention that are vital. 

And those are the technologies that we’re going to need to create a self-sustaining economy in space and a permanent presence in space. That’s power generation, transportation, habitation, mining, all of those technologies: solar cells, nuclear power, being able to get around. And I don’t think we see a lot of government investment into that and I don’t know that even we see a lot of private sector investment. 

And that, I think could be a hiccup at some point down the road. I mean, I think Blue Origin is focusing on that perhaps more than others. I mean, there is a story in the new book, “Rocket Dreams,” I actually visited. They have a secret laboratory outside of Los Angeles where they’re working to melt the lunar regolith, the moon dirt, and turn it into solar cells. If that technology can be achieved, that would really be amazing and help unleash all the other sorts of things that you see in space and have those technologies. 

The other one, from a civil point of view, is, I think, back to a time where I visited General Purdy when he was at the 45th Space Wing down in Cape Canaveral. And he said something to me that always resonated with me. And that was, for the first 50 or 60 years of the space age, we were focused on getting to space, perfecting the way of building the rockets and the spacecraft that could get us to orbit. 

Now, for the most part, that’s a soft problem, and what we’re focusing on now is being able to get through space, being able to change orbits, to move around, to go from one place to another, to point A to point B, service satellites, do reconnaissance, do all sorts of things in space that are very difficult, but that I think opens up a lot of possibilities, as well. 

And when he said that, the light bulb kind of went off in my head to sort of think about where we’re going in the future and what are the technologies that are going to be needed going forward. 

35:46 – 36:31 

(MD) Even the infrastructure we have in orbit today that allows you to communicate to the Earth and, and navigate because GPS signals are floating through space. But you get out to the moon. You don’t even have those basic things. So the companies were talking about Astrobotics, Intuitive Machines, Firefly, have to bring their own infrastructure to communicate all the way back to Earth. You know, that adds weight, and it takes away from the things that they’d really like to be doing on the surface of the moon. 

So yeah, having a communications infrastructure, navigation and timing infrastructure around the moon. All that could unleash that particular part of the space economy too, so really fascinating to think about. I’d add one more – regulatory environment for doing commerce in space, right? 

And having space hotels and doing all the other things. That’s going to have to advance quite a bit, too. I don’t know if you had thoughts there? 

36:32 – 37:07 

(CD) Yeah. I mean, I always look back. There’s a law passed in 2015 signed by President Obama that gives companies the right to the resources they mine on the moon or other celestial bodies, which I thought was an interesting breakthrough. It will be interesting when that’s tested. 

And then you talk about the regulatory regime, too. I mean, I immediately started thinking about space debris and just all of the stuff that’s up in space, too, that it’s space is vast, a lot of real estate up there, but it’s increasingly becoming congested. But I do think in a lot of ways the technology is outpacing the regulation. 

37:08 – 38:04 

(MD) The individuals we’re talking about have for 20 years, you know, decades have been sort of focused on what their end objective was, be that Bezos or Musk, Richard Branson, I mean, they’ve all been just plugging away for 20 years making this thing happen. 

The government, talk about the government again, isn’t quite as good as staying the course. So President Obama in 2008 canceled the Constellation program. And that was kind of one of the things that said, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to push more money forward into the commercial market to help get our work done without that government-owned and operated program.” 

We seem to be maybe at that point, again, with Artemis, lots of money going into Artemis, long schedules that seemingly are always delayed. 

You know, what would be the implications of making changes to that? And compare that alongside with these space barons who have been taking the long view for decades and slowly getting to where they want to be. Not as fast as they’ve talked about or wanted to in the beginning, but they’re getting there.  

38:05 – 40:21 

(CD) Yeah. I mean, so it’s a great question again, and I think it depends on sort of the context: and when you cancel Constellation, you know, there was this glimmer of hope that the commercial sector would be there, would be able to fill in the gaps and maybe take over. Now, fast forward to where we are today, and you see that. You see the Falcon-9 launching what? You know, 100 times last year, going from well over a hundred times this year. 

You know, Blue Origin finally got New Glenn off the ground. ULA with Vulcan flying. You’re seeing [from] a launch perspective, a lot more advancements. Starship had a couple of recent setbacks, but on the other hand, they’re now catching the booster with some frequency. So a lot of people have been concerned about today’s Constellation would be, right, the Space Launch System rocket, potentially Orion, which NASA has invested many billions of dollars in. Together they’ve flown one time.  

The GAO has said the cost is about $2 billion per launch. SLS is not a reusable rocket, relies on the RS-25 engines, which were used during the Space Shuttle [and] developed in the 1970s. But today you could see if SLS went away, and I do think people are starting to come around to the fact that SLS’ days may be numbered, I don’t think it’s going to be canceled tomorrow. 

I think they’ve already built it and paid for a number of these rockets. So you could see the Artemis II mission to launch a crew around the Moon on the Orion, potentially even Artemis III going on SLS in the ‘26-’27 timeframe. Then by then do you have some of these alternatives online, and not just online, but online in a way that they are, as we talked about earlier, safe, reliable?  

[You can] really can put humans on, have proven themselves. You have complete control over them, complete faith in them. You know, I think we might be closer to that. I mean, I thought it was eye-opening when someone like Scott Pace, who was the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President Trump in the first administration and a long proponent of SLS, said something to the effect of, ‘We need an off-ramp for SLS.’ When even he is saying something. I think maybe the writing is on the wall to a certain extent there.

40:22 – 41:13 

(MD) Yeah, just even if the means change, staying committed to the ends, you know, ends, ways and means I think is important. And NASA’s just been kind of jerked around back and forth over the years as administrations change and budgets change. 

But I think having a goal and if we’re able to bring in other technologies and commercial actors to help achieve that goal – that’s great. But maybe we should stick to the goal and be in it for the long term.  

So I’m going to give you a softball question here in “Space Barons,” you structured space barons in – there are three sections of the book. 

And you had a one word title for each section. And they were “Impossible, Improbable, and Inevitable.”  

So they seem to be three great words, you know, how did you come up with that? And now I’m looking forward to the new book. And what is the era between 2018 and 2025? What’s one or two words you’d use to describe the recent history?

41:14 – 43:31 

(CD) Yeah, I’m glad you caught on to that. I do think those three words encompass the narrative of the book, but also the journey of space exploration in the commercial space sector. Like, it’s never going to happen. Well, maybe it will. And yeah, it’s happening. And as I said earlier, “The Space Barons,” I think, poses this question like, ‘Is this really going to happen? Is it really inevitable?’ And this book, the next one, Rocket Dreams, answers that with, “Yes.” And you’re sort of seeing it take over.  

And so the new book is also broken up into three sections that sort of gets to that in a symbolic way: Earth, and then going to orbit and then going to the moon and beyond. That, you’re sort of on the ground, and then you’re going with people and extending this public-private partnership to low-Earth orbit with COTS, with astronauts, and then applying that with Artemis, building the landers and spacecraft that are going to go to the moon and beyond. 

There’s a lot of questions now: Are we going to the moon? Are we going to Mars? And these books have to sort of end on ideas, not events. And here I am trying to finish up a book that’s going to come out later this fall and position it for there, and where are we going to be? And in some ways the destination, while important, doesn’t matter as much as the means of ascent. 

And what I mean by that is the technologies that we have to be able to get to the moon, to get to low-Earth orbit or to get to Mars. And if we have a New Glenn, if we have Dragon, if we have Starship, if we have Neutron from Rocket Lab, if we have Vulcan, and we have Firefly and Astrobotic and all these companies, Intuitive Machines, building these technologies, then it’s like, are we going to the moon or Mars or low-Earth orbit? 

And then the answer becomes, “Yes, yes we are.” And we can go to all of those because we’ve built technologies that can go to all those. So that’s sort of the structure that I’m building here is building on that platform that we saw at the end of Space Barons, building through to go to low-Earth orbit and extending that out to the moon and to beyond, and not just on a civil space program, too. 

We tend to be so focused on big rockets and astronauts and all of that. But I think the national security space enterprise is incredibly important, as well. And you’re seeing much more of that as we’ve obviously talked about.  

43:32 – 44:28 

(MD) I’m struck by the fact that we’ve been talking here for about an hour now. And we don’t have real solid answers, right? We have questions and observations and certainly progress. And frankly, that’s probably what makes this business so exciting is there’s continued forward motion. Every once in a while, a backward step, but a really exciting time to be part of the space industry to be, I’m sure from your end, writing about the space industry and being in the middle of it in that way. 

Christian, it’s been a really fun conversation on a topic that continues to inspire and fascinate so many people. And it’s not only those of us who are close to the industry, but this whole new generation of space enthusiasts, who I expect they’re going to continue to make the impossible, inevitable. And I, for one, am excited to get my own copy of “Rocket Dreams,” as soon as it comes out. I hope you’ll come back on the Elara Edge to talk about it. 

And let me thank you again for coming on. And please, you take the last word.  

44:29 – 44:44 

(CD) Well, thanks for having me. It’s a real honor. I’d absolutely come back to talk about “Rocket Dreams.” And it’s fun to follow, you know, all of the work that you all are doing there. And I’m going to be calling you when I put my hat on for my day job at The Washington Post, for sure. But again, it’s a real privilege and an honor. So thank you.

44:45 – 45:29 

(SK) This has been the inaugural episode of “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series presented by “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space 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.