The Changing Dynamics of Outer Space Competition with Dr. Matt Jenkins

All very kind words. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak. As a graduate of the school, of course I'm passionate about the mission here. Particularly of note, my topic here today is really a leaping stone, a building block of my research, which if you're a student here or you know anything about the program, is all about national security. I tended to focus on space policy issues unique to this school, but the school was always very gracious in providing me the resources I needed to be successful. So to the Chancellor and to the Dean, thank you so much for the opportunity to come back to school — and parking is a lot nicer when it's reserved, so I do appreciate that as well.

So I did want to talk a little bit about myself if I'm allowed to do that, but first I'll frame what we're doing today. I want to talk about space concepts, I want to talk about some of the enabling concepts that make space different if you will. There's not a test, but we'll talk about some of the classical orbital challenges that we face in operating in space. I want to kind of frame my talk today on historical frameworks — of yesterday, what we're doing today, and where we see it going tomorrow.

A little bit about me — as Dr. Robins already said, I graduated here in '23. I had the unique experience of doing all three years in the CIR regiment, so I didn't spend a lot of time here at the school. Most of my classes were online, but it was great. Post-graduation, I was invited to go be a postdoc fellow at Georgetown where I continue to do research on space policy challenges. Some interesting publications coming out in the journal Astropolitics, and I do have a chapter coming out in the upcoming book titled The Militarization and Weaponization of Space. Always happy to talk about that later on.

In total, I've been doing this for 18 years. What's unique about me is I've been building it and designing it — built communication systems, imagery systems, SIGINT systems, and EO sensors and satellites. I've launched any number of them. In this array of photos here, spent a lot of time in clean rooms looking as dab and dabber as I could to deliver these capabilities.

I spent my summer right after graduation — I graduated on the 13th of May, I got married on the 14th of May, that's to my wife Katie, and then I left for the summer to go to Florida to work on a launch. Picture down in the bottom right. So very intimately involved in this still to this day, and I'm passionate about the missions that I've worked. But what I really do get passionate about more than that is these policy issues that don't have answers. In space, there's any number of them — it's a new domain from a popularity perspective, but it's always been a geopolitical challenge to work through some of the dynamics.

Things we face in space — I list a couple of them there. Those were predominantly what I focused on in my research. Norms of behavior — how do we define what normal looks like, and how do we begin to ascertain differences and ways in which a country, a state government, might respond to those challenges. Obviously that comes with international law, but more uniquely there isn't much to be said in international law that is specific enough to be of great use today. And obviously there's some purpose to that, but nonetheless, big questions, and I found that to be an incredibly rewarding research area.

Some enabling concepts — I like to talk about space, I like to geek out about space. I will keep it at a high level. There are any number of satellites. I drew an illustration here from NOAA just for the purposes of helping people conceptualize. There are really big satellites, the sizes of buses and sizes of trucks that weigh thousands and thousands of pounds, all the way down to very, very small things the size of a watermelon, which is able to be launched very quickly and very light. And most of them are actually CubeSat-like things they push off the space station routinely.

But all of these things operate in a space domain which consists of a number of orbits. I won't bore you — suffice to say there's really far-away orbits and there's really close orbits, and we use those orbits for different mission areas of different import. The lower orbits we tend to use for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. The higher orbits that have the longer periodicity over a given area, we use for communications. So if you have XM Radio, or you used to have DirectTV before streaming, those are all in GEO. If you've ever seen a picture on Google Earth, they're from satellites. And we're all enabling technologies that we use today.

But each of those orbits creates unique challenges. The United States, along with other countries, operates in most of those orbits. I've listed them there on the right. So those set the framework for where we're competing and how we're competing, and I kind of want to spiral down a little deeper from there, but I'll leave the astrodynamics at this level.

All right, how many satellites are in orbit? Well, you can see the data on the bottom of this chart is the end of 2022, but nonetheless there were, as of the end of December 2022, 6,718 satellites. That's hard to believe. The graphic animation to the right shows you those — is a reel of those satellites in orbit, and you can see the different orbits I showed you on the last chart actually popping out because of the relative motion of vehicles in those orbits.

Of more import, the United States maintains the predominant number of those satellites by a wide margin. So Russia and China each have a number of space programs, other countries have space programs. I broke it down to some of those orbits I listed on the last chart. Most of these satellites are in low Earth orbit, again used for ISR and other types of missions. There are a number in MEO, and then there are a lot in GEO, and there's some others out there in elliptical orbits which serve very specific purposes.

Breaking down the United States percentages: of the 4,529 that there are out in space — 26% are civil. You can think of those as commercial, government, research, civil missions like NOAA. Commercial missions — you see 3,996. Government — 26. And Military — 247. A quick preface, and maybe people know in the audience: the commercial number is driven largely by one company. Who is it? You could say it — SpaceX. It's almost exclusively SpaceX and their LEO constellation Starlink. As of the making of this chart, they had over 3,000 vehicles in orbit.

They circle the globe in LEO, providing that contiguous internet coverage for the world, creating unique challenges for policymakers and space operators like myself. As we try to launch through that cloud of satellites — let's say you have an hour-long launch window — we tend to lose anywhere from three-quarters of that launch window to almost all of it because there are constant conjunctions with these Starlink satellites. That is only going to get worse, and we'll talk a little bit about that in the subsequent charts. But it's a big problem today and it's getting worse.

Of the number of objects we routinely track in orbit, the 6,700 represent the operational satellites. 29,000 different pieces of debris and/or satellites are circling the Earth as we speak, and those are 10 centimeters and bigger — that's all we have the ability to track. Based on what we know on events that occur in space, I've listed them there: objects greater than a centimeter but less than 10 centimeters — 670,000. And objects less than a millimeter — 170 million objects.

This creates unique challenges for the space environment. Ships cruising along the ocean don't typically have to dodge a bunch of ships. Aircraft, much the same, don't typically have to dodge aircraft — unless you put one in front of it on purpose. But in space, these assets continue to loiter. There is no plan, and there is no law, quite frankly, today that dictates you got to get rid of all this stuff in LEO. There are standards, best practices, but there's nothing directing it that I think is wholly sufficient to address the problem. As you see, it's nonlinear — there's massive amounts of debris. And if you listen to the space community, you'll hear very regularly of conjunctions or things hitting each other in space.

Uncontrolled objects, decommissioned objects — each of those collisions creates more debris, and of course all those pieces still stay in orbit, therefore precipitating the challenge even further. So that's our SAT stat sheet. So let's talk about the topic for the conversation.

I created some charts here and I want to talk about space competition mainly. And so when you think of space competition, it's hard to understand what is meant by space competition. Are we talking about pod races in a galaxy far away a long time ago? Are we talking about the moon race? Are we talking about something else? It's difficult for us to really understand. And so the truth is, competition in space has always been a matter of human existence since humans reached for the cosmos. It has always been at the core of space exploration and space utilization.

Of course, the competition naturally implies there are winners and losers. But what does it mean to win? What does winning look like? These are questions that don't necessarily have answers in a MAC sense, but they inform the study. And of course the last question: who can compete in space? Is it just states? Is it governments? Is it institutions? Is it billionaires? Who's driving the competition in space? I think there's teams, there's alliances, but I also would like to say that this is all the backdrop of space competition that's changing today, and this is the struggle that we wrestle with.

So how do you define space competition? Well, I think it's useful to start pulling from definitions that we understand and we know. And so I provided one as any good briefing would do, and I've highlighted some key elements that I think are important for the purposes of our conversation. So reading the definition for you real quick: two entities or more, they invoke technological, economic, political, and social resources to achieve some given objective — and naturally, of course, that's in space.

Talk about entities — that is by definition vague. Entities could be states, they could be companies, they could be universities, they could be billionaires. You got Jeff Bezos and Branson and Elon Musk all there riding their rockets to space with their own unique objectives that are not state objectives. They could be in cooperations and cohorts. The inlay on the right there is SpaceShipOne, which was the Ansari X Prize — they gave $10 million to any private company that could create a vehicle that would go to space, come back, and be reused twice within two weeks. That's the vehicle, the one that was sponsored by a billionaire, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.

The other piece to take note is it's all built on technology. You can look at SpaceShipOne and it looks like a flying saucer, some abstract thing — it has wings, it has a lifting body, but more importantly, it's a unique design that's novel. Something that's very specific to space is it's almost exclusively built on high-tech things. High-tech is the foundation of space, and that creates challenges for people who want to participate if they don't have particularly high-tech infrastructures or governments. But it also is a way for countries to showcase their technological prowess.

I don't think I have to harp too hard, but economic is a huge piece in this particular definition. Getting to space isn't cheap, and we'll talk a little bit about that later, but it is by far the biggest barrier to participation in space competition in the world today — it's just so egregious expensive to put anything into space. And then garnering the finances to do it — whether it's from your state government, whether it's from voters who pay their taxes, whether it's from the board who just agrees to fund your mission — there's a large part of that that's political, right? You have to go advocate, you have to go lobbying, you have to gain the consensus of the people and the body that would fund your research and or your missions to space.

That then brings to the last piece, which is social, and I like to put it here as space-minded. For the purposes of what we understand and know, if anyone read Mahan — Mahan has these principles, he likes to say you have to have a sea-minded people. You have to have a people who are dispositioned to love the sea, want to be in the sea and a part of the sea. That is no different from space, really. I think what's unique about space is countries who have a space-minded people tend to be the countries that succeed the most in space. They have the space infrastructure, they have a will to go to space, they have a space economy, they have a space industry, and just as importantly, they have people who are predispositioned, who have a proclivity to want to do things in space — explore the cosmos, explore the universe.

So I think those are the key elements that I wanted to harp on. So I'm going to move on to — so who can compete? Right? We saw on the last slide there's billionaires that can compete, and of course the definition that I provided highlights that historically space competition has been confined to these large and expensive government programs.

And I think that historically speaking, they've all been dual-use, military-civil programs aimed at national prestige or national defense. And I think that there's these early space implements leveraged those things. But we know the first space race served as a proxy — it was really demonstrating the military, the technological, and the economic and moral superiority in a battle of hearts and minds for the world. If you think about it, just post-World War II, you have the two superpowers trying to prove why their particular model is better than the other. That's the same backdrop for the Cold War, and it absolutely extended into space.

The graphics to the right I think do a really good job at highlighting what that — the people, the prestige, moral superiority that was garnered, or at least tried to be imparted on the people. And I've got one for each, of course — one for the Soviet Union and one for the United States — to try and highlight that.

But today we do see a different dynamic. There are new entrants — non-governmental organizations, small states with space programs, and even consortiums working together to deliver space-enabled capabilities that are both fascinating and unique by yesterday's standards. All these new concepts, you know, were unheard of — there was no such thing as any of them. And that leaves us with the question: why? Why are these new things happening, and why didn't they happen before? I think to answer that question, you have to dig deeper into understanding the original space race.

So this is the ultimate question, right: when did the space competition actually begin? Some people would argue that the space competition began at Potsdam in 1945. If you're familiar with Potsdam, you've got the Soviet Union, you've got the United States, and Churchill of course — they're trying to negotiate a post-World War II reconstruction concept for Germany and what winners get. And as so doing, you have the conversation here listed where Roosevelt leans over and says, 'Hey, we've got this — we tested this new weapon, unusually destructive force.' Of course we know now he's talking about Trinity. Of course the Soviets knew that's exactly what he was talking about — he had no idea at the time. But nonetheless, a moral and absolutely existential reason for a space competition starts to take shape.

Other people would argue that the space race started in 1946 when the United States let a contract to Convair to go research and come up with ideas to develop the first ICBM. How do we deliver missiles far, far away? And then the noteworthy piece is this contract's in 1946. 1951, the United States lets the first contract to actually build an ICBM, and it isn't for another six years before they actually fly an ICBM. So you're talking late into the 1950s to actually successfully test the missile. So I don't think that's particularly — but interestingly enough, the Soviets are tracking it. Soviets know all about it and they're watching the United States create increasingly more space-capable systems to deliver weapons to Soviet soil, and they certainly take note.

Others of course would argue that in 1950, maybe with the International Geophysical Year. So 1950, a group of scientists met in Silver Spring and they said, 'Hey, you know what would be a great idea? We need to go study the upper atmosphere in outer space. We need to get the whole international scientific community behind us to go do this.' And there's this time between 1 July 1957 and 31 December 1958 where the entire solar system has this intense activity — we're able to forecast it, we understand the radiation belts are particularly active, and we want to go study that.

So this became known as the International Geophysical Year, also abbreviated IGY, and I'll use it from there. But in 16 April 1954, in Rome, in a conference — one of these conferences with these working groups — the Soviets are there, and the United States lets out that they're working on this artificial satellite. 'We're going to launch this artificial satellite during the IGY to go study space.' And the Russians, of course — this was Project Vanguard — the Russians take note of this and they say, 'Hey, you know what? We can do this too.'

July 1955, United States announces formally and publicly that they're going to do this — they're going to go out and they're going to launch this satellite and they're going to go study the Van Allen radiation belts and some of the elements out in space. So the whole world takes note of this. And the Soviets, of course, they — less than a week later — come up and they say, 'Well, challenge accepted. We're on, we're in, and we're going to beat you to it.' So this is the first time you hear, right, the Soviet challenge. And their official reply is: 'We intend to launch the first artificial satellite into space with a satellite of our own.' And now that's the first time you actually hear 'first,' right? Now we know what we're doing — Soviets want to get a satellite in space first, and the United States of course is tracking to try and do the same thing.

So we look at the definition we provided before — we see that there's a competition, we see that there's an objective in space, we see who the entities are, we know they're pulling the entire weight of their respective governments into it, and they're going to go full speed. So obviously we know who won that particular challenge. It would be the Soviet Union with Project Sputnik. Sputnik launches, right, 1957, October 4th — Sputnik launches. And while I wasn't alive, I think I could speak for most Americans when I say it scared a lot of people. And it wasn't until early 1958 the United States were actually able to put a satellite in orbit. So the space race has begun.

So let's talk about early perceptions. Regardless of which theory you think started the space race, regardless of which school of thought you want to jump into, let's just say — hey, no kidding, wherever it started, the first shot fired heard around the world was Sputnik. Okay, cool. So let's talk about it. In the early years of it, there's little doubt in the public's mind that the Soviet Union is kicking American butt. The technological achievement of Sputnik may not have actually been the most powerful piece of Sputnik, right? The most powerful piece of Sputnik was the psychological impact that the satellite had with the increasingly tense backdrop of the Cold War.

Between the United States and the Soviets, they had just proven that they were not only as good as us in technological achievements, but in public mind and interpretation, perhaps even better. With the first launch of their satellite — Sputnik was launched on a converted Russian ICBM — the Americans felt that they were behind and getting worse with each successive achievement enumerated here. The Soviets were trumpeting their superiority over both the American democratic mindset as well as our technology.

The Soviets would follow Sputnik with a lot of other firsts. The first mammal in orbit was a stray dog from Moscow named Laika — they picked a stray dog because they thought, 'Hey, what better animal could survive cold and craziness than a stray dog in Moscow?' It was launched in November 1957. The US would match that feat when it launched a monkey named Gordo, December of 1958 — so over a year later. The Soviets were the first to launch a human in space in April 1961 — Yuri Gagarin, obviously. The United States did the same thing a month after that. So they keep beating us to it, and with each one of these successes they keep trumpeting how their model and their governance is better than ours.

The Soviets would also go on to put the first woman in space in 1963. The United States would not do that until 1983, which is unfortunate. When Sally Ride flew on board the Space Shuttle in 1983, becoming the first American woman in space. The challenge for Americans, of course, was twofold. First, to the United States government, for the sake of firsts were not particularly important, but each launch served a purpose to build to something bigger, to something better. And the second problem the United States faced was that the US had — to this point, a lot of what we were trying to do in space was classified. It might sound familiar, right? Classified.

It obviously greatly stunted the public perception of American progress. But worth noting: the world's first reconnaissance satellite was launched in 1960, but as a CIA program, it was obviously not widely trumpeted for the purposes of its mission. And with the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960, these space reconnaissance systems became increasingly more important to the United States from a national policy perspective and also from a national security classification perspective — not to kind of show our hand to the world. The United States knew they needed these sensors on orbit because they no longer could just fly along the edge of the Soviet Union and take pictures of the missiles.

And so each of these things hampered the world's — the US's perception. American perception is that, well, clearly the Soviets are technologically superior and they're winning this race and the US is behind and it's getting worse. But each of the things that the United States was doing — whether it be Project Vanguard, whether it be the CORONA mission, whether it be Explorer One — they're incrementally working to get more reliable electronics, better computers, miniaturization, all in an effort to be better, right? Not necessarily first, but again, technologically superior.

So the Soviets jumped out to this lead in the '50s — they achieved much of what you would call firsts in that decade. But I would be remiss if I failed to note that the subsequent history has shown that the technology was not nearly on par with the American program. Sputnik was a transponder that launched and just beeped — it did nothing else. They of course got increasingly more complicated. But the first US launch, Explorer One, had scientific experiments that were designed to study space and improve human knowledge of the environment with which our globe is blanketed.

So as the race progressed, Soviets continued to have new first achievements. They closed out the '50s with the first spacewalk, the first lunar flyby, and the first Luna landing of a probe. But by the 1960s, we see this first dramatic shift in American progress and gaining momentum.

So whether you follow space intently or not, few of us could say we are not familiar with the Rice speech by Kennedy in 1962. President Kennedy challenges America to put a man on the moon and return him safely before the end of the decade. I cannot do it nearly as well as he did, but it was the challenge to the American people to do it. But to do it, the United States had to start perfecting a lot of things that we hadn't yet done.

So the United States perfected rendezvous and proximity operations with Gemini. We would launch a vehicle, we launched another one, we would rendezvous, we would connect, we prove out the technology it would take to get to the moon. By the end of the decade, the United States put the first humans on the moon using the technology and improving it. The things we learned on Gemini, we applied to Apollo. Apollo goes out and Apollo 11 lands on the moon, and the first space race concludes with the planting of the American flag there.

So the first flag, of course, was not an afterthought, right? Though some people might suggest that it was, but it was a very real, deliberate action taken — not by NASA, but by Congress. Of course, one of the few times Congress could get something done. NASA's Congressional budget request in 1969 was modified by Congress to actually direct that the United States flag be placed on the moon. And so it was. But your random trivia question for the day: what color is the United States flag on the moon today? It's white. The radiation has absolutely taken any color that would have been in the flag out of it, and now there's a white flag on the moon. So I'm not sure how to interpret that, but it's interesting.

All right, so how do we want to summarize the first space race? Well, we know the first space race ended when we landed on the moon. Walter McDougall provides a uniquely appropriate definition — I think it fits here really well. He defines the first space race as a technocracy: the institutionalization of technological change for state purposes, the state-funded and state-managed research and development. If you look at all of those achievements that we just walked through, there's little doubt that that definition fits very well. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had two focuses — their civil and their military programs were well-funded, government-run, and almost predominantly military-led.

These programs were designed to show the flag and rally the people in what was, in trade, a security dilemma between the Soviet Union's model and the United States model. This security dilemma was unequivocally existential — it was the Cold War had presented the situation to be this nuclear Armageddon, and it was this two-world...

Views dueling world views between communism and democracy, as only the two remaining superpowers in the world could do post-World War II. They're jockeying for global influence, and almost all of these technological achievements were military in nature — from missiles to electronics to reconnaissance satellites and more — as both states intermingled military and civil applications to the point where it was near impossible to distinguish. There are a lot of metrics we try to use to quantify the first space race, and I think we do this a bit for our own psychological benefit. But even if the United States wasn't the first, there was always the 'yeah but ours is better' or 'yeah we had more.' These statistics, when evaluated at a macro level, should certainly help illuminate the point that the United States in almost every category dominated the first space race.

So this first space race is over, right? And you've got this L that comes about. There are certainly other firsts following the moon landing. The Soviet Union launches Mir and they occupy it on orbit, the first space station. The United States pivots to what they think will be a cheaper alternative to Apollo and they start the Space Shuttle program. And you may have heard of it, but it's not around anymore. The United States also launched arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time, which is Hubble, and it continues to this day to explore the origins of the universe.

However, 1991 would go on to prove pivotal not just for global geopolitics but also for space. The Soviet Union's collapse left what remained as Russia in a severely economically constrained environment. As a result, unilateral space efforts on the part of Russia was no longer an option. So you see the world, and predominantly the United States as the only remaining superpower and the only remaining space power, turn to international cooperation for the first time in space. This cooperation with the world shows the United States as its benevolent heg that we know it as in history, and nothing embodies that spirit quite like the International Space Station.

Today there are 15 countries and five international space agencies that have all contributed people, money, or parts to this International Space Station, and it stands as perhaps one of the most politically complicated, scientifically amazing achievements of all time. However, hard times soon fell upon the United States too. We launched the Space Station's two first pieces in 1998. Two years later, our focus shifts dramatically away from space. 2001 happens, and the United States decides — the world decides for the United States, I should say — that our attention is needed elsewhere as we're on a war footing kicked into full gear.

Americans were no longer a space-minded people to the extent that they had been and the extent that it had enabled our previous successes. It's fair to say that the United States space program never regained its shine to the same degree that it had enjoyed previously. With the Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, the shuttle was put on a glide slope to retire and flew its last mission in 2011. Since that time, there's been no American-developed and run space program that has carried Americans into space.

Certainly would draw your attention to the SpaceX missions and the other missions that were commercial in nature — they started carrying Americans back into space. But what we understood to be the government-run R&D technocracy of the first space race is gone, and that ended with the shuttle. But while we're fighting our wars, the world sees the birth of a new space power. Come to China: on 15 October 2003, it became just the third nation to independently launch humans into space. Chinese astronauts were called taikonauts, for the record.

Less than a decade later, China launched its first space station into orbit in September 2011. In 2013, it became the third country to land a probe on the moon and study the lunar surface. And then in 2016, China launched its second space station. As some of you may track today, they've subsequently launched a third space station, and that is the one that remains in orbit and is operational. In every category that you might try to measure what a space power is, China is there. You fast-forward today, it has the second largest number of satellites in orbit, it has a robust astronaut program, and they continue to invest and innovate at a pace that no country can match.

China leverages a unique blend and integration of civilian and military programs, not unlike those of the United States and the Soviet Union, to deliver these commercial capabilities rapidly. But this shouldn't be news to anyone — China does this in pretty much every domain that it operates in, and space again is really just a backdrop for their geopolitical global activities.

So the landscape of great states competing in space — until recently, right, you got China now as one of those space countries — it was really well defined. We thought we understood how it was working. And the Chinese space power emergence followed the same model that the United States and the Soviet Union had followed, which is this dual-use, government-funded and researched and led programs.

And then an unexpected thing happened — and I say unexpected, maybe it's better to just say it was unprecedented — and that's the emergence of private space companies. So these companies became the newest entity in space competition. Funded by billionaire private citizens like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, these companies had a new model: we need to make money. Naturally, trying to make money means spending less money. And for the first time in the history of space systems, cost to launch things into space began to decline in a rather substantial way.

Historically speaking, the cost to launch anything into orbit, a pound of anything, is $10,000. Today SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is doing it for $3,000 a pound, which is a lot less than anything the United States government ever built. So what this means should be rather obvious and quickly: this lower cost to entry means more countries can participate, and it also gave rise to the commercial space market, something that didn't really take off before 2000. But this lower cost is the first trend that demonstratively shows how space competition is changing.

Today I want to use this graphic real quick, and it really should visually portray what I'm trying to say. 1966, space powers — you see just a handful. Fast forward to 2022, there are 77 nations with space programs. 16 of them have an ability to launch their own space capabilities, which is to say that most of them were buying that launch cheaper somewhere else. Today's space environment is expansive, and while the majority of these space programs are not on the same scale as NASA or the European Space Agency, the decreased costs to access space has allowed non-traditional actors to launch objects into space.

It's created a new commercial market that is absolutely thriving — for one second, excuse me — the commercial satellite industry is absolutely booming. In 2020, the commercial market accounted for 73% of all space activity. The graphic on the right shows you that in 2022, that hasn't really changed. A substantial amount of money is being generated in the commercial space market.

And all of this means that new trends have applied to everyone in the world, not just space powers. These have — what I would like to categorically say — other trends, which is a global reliance on space-enabled technology. That's our third trend. Let's take a moment. While a lot of the inlays are of course creature comforts, the point I want to make is that in 2023, there is a global reliance on space-enabled technology like never before in the world.

Everything from the way we do banking, the way air traffic control operates, precision timing, integrated control networks, navigation, the internet, and of course the streaming services — they all rely on some shape or form of a space capability that remains largely hidden to most of us. But for the first time in the world, space competition doesn't just impact the states competing — it's now a global problem. And the way in which we compete in space impacts everyone who uses space-enabled technologies in the global economy.

The last trend I do want to talk about today is what I'm going to call a global space economy frenzy. This didn't exist in the first space race, but it's here now. It's the imagery of a concept known as space economic utilization. This concept acknowledges that there's money to be made by harvesting the precious metals and critical gaseous elements necessary for human existence that exist in space. Of course, that means someone's got to go get it, and someone has to extract it. And today, there's no shortage of people, countries, and companies with plans to do just that.

As evidenced by these graphics, the projection of the potential revenues make the US federal deficit look like pennies. The graphic on the left is in quintillion — just as a frame of reference, that's 18 zeros. Whether you believe that the capability for the United States or any country in our lifetime exists to go harvest these resources, it has nonetheless provided an economic incentive for countries and companies to develop the technology and the capabilities to go out and get these — which is creating what I would like to categorize as the second space race.

So what does it mean? There's another space race, okay, there's two. How do we define winning? How do we define what the competition looks like, or any of the same questions we asked the first time? So let's just say — certainly it's not a technocracy like it was before, but instead this new space race is defined by James Moltz as a neocracy. Right? This is organization based on private-public partnerships, distributed architectures, rapid innovation, and the use of commercial and allied partnerships.

So you fast-forward to today, and the United States is focused on commercial, on alliances, and commercial utilization programs. Space programs are funded by venture capital and not necessarily the government. Entrepreneurs are running these programs and not the government. And the military adaptation of commercial programs exists today where it didn't exist before. Military requirements are for the first time in our history being met by commercial capabilities. There's commercial satellite imaging, there's commercial SIGINT, there's commercial RF.

And it's creating new models where the United States doesn't have to spend all its money on space capabilities that would have otherwise been onerously expensive in the past. China is focusing on rapid innovation and they too are focusing on alliances. The International Lunar Research Station is the idea of a base on the moon to do just what we talked about — to harvest the resources on the South Pole, the water, the gas, and other things they need to create a long-standing presence in space.

China is focused on ISAM technologies — that's in-situ assembly and manufacturing. That's building things in space. Like I said, it's really expensive to get things into space, so if we could find a way to build them in space, it's cheaper. And in a way that's unique to China — and again not unique to anyone who's been studying it — they are leveraging their full economy to do it in a way that we can't do it.

There are new — there are other contestants, of course. Russia is not to be left out. Russia has a great space program. India — don't have to tell you about their recent achievement, it's spectacular. Landing on the South Pole. And these private entities with ambition to go to Mars and beyond, creating new challenges and new seams for countries and states to compete.

So breaking it down one last time: coalition actors is the new form of space competition. You have the Artemis Accords, the United States and China's ILRS. Russia and China signed new agreements to cooperate in space and create synergies there. And instead of one country going out alone, there's all these non-binding agreements that are starting to surface between friends — so go at it with your friends.

Another concept, of course, the proliferated architectures like we talked about before. Now this deterrence-by-denial strategy is emerging in space, where the United States and other countries are buying into the fact that if I launch a thousand satellites, you can't hit them all. Defense in depth. And for the first time, like I mentioned on the last chart, competition is increasingly economic. It's not just military — there's of course still a military element, but it's all about space economic utilization and exploitation.

The world realizes now the global dependence on space, which creates perhaps an incentive not to be reckless in space — that has yet to be seen. And there are now new private entities operating in space, pursuing their own galactic objectives in a way that we wouldn't have imagined before. These new actors create new challenges for governments. There's no space law, if you will, to deal with private citizens doing things in space. And so time will tell how that plays out for the United States or anyone really.

So in summary: the first space race was state versus state, communism versus democracy, and it was for government use only — if you worked in government, it's a good joke. But there have been a number of trends that have pushed us into a new era. We've had globalization, commercialization, a new dependence on space capabilities, and a space economy valuation driving a desire to go out into space and take those resources, whether for government use or private profit.

Which puts us to our second space race, where we have companies and states — the political ideology is less important at this point, economics is more important. Space is for all people, we do space tourism now, and the extracting of those space resources is the idea. And most countries tend to think the best way to do that is through teamwork and coalitions and alliances, as opposed to what we might have originally thought of in just the first space race. And so with that, I'd like to conclude my briefing and say, are there any questions?

Yeah, so the first question is harder to answer than the second. I think you can both be excited about the technological achievements the United States and other countries are making. You mentioned the asteroid landing — just recently OSIRIS-REx just flew back, right? The mission landed and here for the first time we have our view into the history of the galaxy. But it is certainly muddied down by knowing that that's all about money and it's all about trying to fund other things.

And I don't have a good answer on that one. I would simply say that the understanding that the scientific prowess it takes any country to achieve something of that nature is still rewarding in itself, whether we make money off it or not. The United States' ability to go out and bounce off of an asteroid and back billions of miles and return a sample and just stare into the history of the cosmos is without a question — gives me chill just talking about it. It's amazing, right? But for sheriffing, that's the million-dollar question.

As we continue to fill more things in space and as more countries and private companies go out into space, you know, who's the broker, right? I would submit that China's ILRS initiative — they read the Outer Space Treaty and they understand they can't own the moon, but they also understand they can defend their right to protect their people on the moon. And this lunar research station is their first ploy, their first play, to put things on the moon to drive the need for a defense of people on the moon.

That would drive perhaps a more military defense-minded concept. The UN certainly isn't going to answer that question. The United States wrestles with it — we certainly have our best practices that we're trying to lay out. But that is unplowed ground right now, and I think space law in itself struggles in its infancy to really wrap their head around who's liable for what, how does that work. And yeah, there's no good answer for that either. But there are space lawyers and they're trying to wrestle with the question, whether it's through the COPUOS or the other agreements with the UN or other bodies.

Just trying to define standards — normal behavior in space, right and wrong in space — not because anyone has any jurisdiction to enforce it, but if everyone knows what normal is supposed to be, it's easier as a body of people to shame people who don't follow the rules. And that's kind of where we're at, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's huge, right? Not the least of which is the missile technology it takes to put something there. But in the same backdrop where you have the competition with Pakistan, you have competition with China and other factors in the region. The landing of a probe on the moon — maybe not necessarily the point, but India is certainly trying to prove itself on a global stage that it is a competent and appropriate space actor, looking to take more of that regional leadership role in space that China enjoys almost exclusively today.

But the landing on the South Pole is something we haven't done, right? Again, there's resources — the scientific community believes that resources can be extracted off of the South Pole. So putting something there and better understanding it from a scientific perspective is useful. But from a geopolitical perspective, it absolutely is a show of force in the ability of the government to field this launcher that put it there — which is incredible — to its own organic launch capability. It doesn't have to go elsewhere, can do it all themselves, and they have the technological prowess not just to launch it but to put it on the moon safely.

I guarantee Pakistan took note, I guarantee China took note, just as we did here today. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, I'll start by saying there are new commercial companies who are trying to show that gap. They recognize that gap exists. There's a company in DC right now called True Anomaly — True Anomaly is a company that's going to launch space-based sensors, and their only mission is to keep track of stuff out in space. The success and the viability of those models absolutely depends on the government's willingness to support it. And I think I can certainly tell you, in the last five or ten years, the United States has been much more open to buying what they can and building what they must.

We have absolutely got to stop trying to think we need to build it all and rely on the commercial industrial base we've built in this country to deliver those capabilities. True Anomaly is just an example — there are other examples out there. But the commercial model is starting to be born, and I do believe it will be successful in the long run.

Yep, the International Lunar Research Station is the ILRS. It's a Chinese-led initiative to build an outpost on the moon for research purposes — that's the macro-level answer to that question. Certainly hard to know what exactly they'll use it for, but noteworthy. There are countries who are signatories to both the Artemis Accords and the ILRS — not necessarily US versus them kind of thing. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. There are two new signatories in the last month to the ILRS agreement who are going to help sponsor and fund the research that it takes to put a station on the moon. That's the first question.

The second question is supposed to be my next lecture when you invite me back — about the weaponization and militarization of space. But suffice to say, the Chinese ASAT test absolutely rocked the world. We, the United States, had tested ASATs for years and were absolutely the worst offender of it back in the early days. But you didn't know what you didn't know back then — so testing a nuclear bomb in space was just science, right? But we learned a lot and we said, 'Hey, that's a bad idea, let's stop doing that,' in the 80s. That's the last time we tried it.

And China comes along in the early 2000s and shoots down a satellite the likes of which we've never seen. The debris continues to be in orbit and it will be for thousands of years. So every time we're flying around, we're trying to track this debris — it's a unique challenge. But the United States, within very short succession, did the exact same thing to prove a point: which is, even though we aren't testing it now, we still retain the capability at our discretion to intercept anything we want to intercept. So keep trying, knock yourself out.

So that would be the Burnt Frost project, if you haven't researched it — it's pretty cool. We took a missile off of the USS Lake Erie and we shot down a satellite. But what we did, trying to be responsible space stewards, I would certainly say, is we brought it down in its orbit and hit it at low altitude so when it started to come apart it went back into the atmosphere and burned up.

India, and Russia to some extent too — every other country who's done it is doing it all for the same reason, right? We're all trying to prove to each other that we all have these same capabilities to hold each other at risk, so that ideally nobody uses them. That would be the right answer, just like other types of capabilities we've done in the United States. So the United States absolutely has the capabilities, China has them, Russia has them, India has them.

And so then you get to the real question of what's the value of those weapons, right? And I think that's another conversation. But I would certainly offer to you that the use of anti-satellite weapons is a terrible idea. And the United States signed a ban agreement that we wouldn't test ASAT weapons destructively. Right? What does that mean? Well, we're still going to launch ASAT weapons, we're still going to prove to the world that we have these capabilities — we're just not going to hit anything when we do it. So you do these flybys.

The rest of the world — we'll see if other countries say yeah that's a great idea. There are people who have signed that moratorium. There are also countries that haven't. But China, trying to get the world's attention — they were left off the stage in the nuclear talks in the early days and they were not going to be denied a seat at that table for space weapons. And they now play a huge role in those conversations, in treaty discussions that are going on. Again, that's a whole other lecture — we'd love to have it. But those capabilities are out there, and the United States among other countries possesses them, and it's demonstrated.

I'll just say this: you need a lot of power for a laser, and so you can't put one in space. There's nothing that generates enough power to do it today. But we certainly know that other countries are experimenting with that.

Yeah, that's a great question. It doesn't all just burn up, right? Physics is cruel — that stuff's not coming back anytime soon. It's going to be there for thousands of years. There's a huge conversation right now. Astroscale is a company you could look into — there are companies out there who want to go get it. They want to take it down, they want to make space safe for all, because there's a business model there.

The problem is, the Outer Space Treaty says if you launch it, you own it, and nobody can touch it. So the political challenge, of course, that these countries is going to face is: how do you get the permission to go clean it up? Because even if it's a broken rocket from the 1960s that just tumbles through space, it still belongs to the launching state. You would be breaking international law if you touched it. That is a challenge we haven't answered yet.

United States companies — and the United States — Astroscale is a Japanese company, but these companies see that this is a big problem and we want to fix it. But there's no political impetus by any country that launched those to say, 'Sure, you can go touch our stuff,' right? That's not going to happen. So what I think might be the best we could hope for is the commercial companies buy into this concept. They all agree that there's a best practice and a standard for which they should adhere. These become norms, and when you launch it, you have an agreement with these companies to come bring it back down when you're done.

But state governments like old satellites or those — they're not going to, they're never going to get there. Unfortunately.

Yeah, I think the short answer is: science is a NASA mission that we absolutely have to continue doing. Understand the origins of the universe — like James Webb, right? Holy mackerel, what an achievement. 150-some-odd deployments, thousands and thousands of miles, and it all had to go right. And it's an incredible achievement for NASA, and they should be very proud of that. But where we get stuck — you talk about Jeff Bezos, I don't roll my eyes if anybody goes to space, full stop.

But the role of NASA — this is not rocket science, right? — should be to continue to innovate scientifically and create new advances in science and technology that are going to help us as a people. And as we go into space, we start thinking about space colonization and other types of things, NASA absolutely plays a role there. I think the challenge with the commercial market is there's a lot of stuff the commercial market can do faster, cheaper, and better. And Artemis is just another example, right? And they're going to maybe cancel Artemis, right? It's overrun, 10 years behind schedule — like these types of things, we get in these spirals where we try to focus on something we don't need to focus on.

No reason we need to build Artemis other than we want to have the US government-built launcher. But Falcon Heavy is good — obviously it has some challenges with orbits and GEO and blah blah. But you know, if you let the commercial industry innovate and do their thing with the promise that there's a market for it and the government customer, I think they'll surprise us all. I really do believe it. Psyche is a good example, right? SpaceX, Falcon Heavy, going where — long way away. Yeah, that's a good example. Good question.