NASA

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”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A Sequence of Lunar Landings

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

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

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

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

Varying Degrees of Success

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

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

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

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

A Race for Lunar Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Security Implications of Civil Space Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Scott King

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

00:02 – 01:30

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

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

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

Sir, welcome to the show!

01:30 – 01:39

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

01:40 – 02:01

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

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

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

02:02 – 03:21

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

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

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

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

03:22 – 03:45

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

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

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

03:46 – 05:27

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

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

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

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

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

05:28 – 05:49

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

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

05:50 – 08:33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

08:34 – 08:50

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

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

08:51 – 10:58

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:59 – 11:00

So what’s next for the CLPS program?

11:01 – 11:52

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

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

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

11:53 – 12:11

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

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

12:12 – 14:10

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

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

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

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

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

14:11 – 14:28

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

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

14:29 – 15:41

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

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

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

15:42 – 15:45

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

16:01 – 17:18

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

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

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

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

17:19 – 17:25

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

17:26 – 18:42

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

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

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

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

18:43 – 18:55

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

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

18:56 – 20:09

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

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

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

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

20:10 – 20:28

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

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

20:29 – 22:26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22:27 – 22:38

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

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

22:39 – 23:26

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

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

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

23:27 – 23:35

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

23:36 – 25:14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25:14 – 25:24

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

25:25 – 26:52

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

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

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

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

26:53 – 27:19

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

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

27:20 – 28:13

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

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

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

28:14 – 28:23

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

28:23 – 29:16

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

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

29:17 – 29:26

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

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

29:27 – 30:33

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

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

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

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

30:34 – 30:53

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

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

30:54 – 34:43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

34:44 – 34:51

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

34:52 – 36:24

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

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

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

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

36:25 – 36:39

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

36:40 – 37:53

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

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

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

37:54 – 38:32

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