The DownLink Podcast

This week the U.S. Air Force celebrated its birthday, marking 75 years since it gained its hard-won independence from the U.S. Army. This independence remains not only about who is in command of who, but perhaps more importantly it is also about identity and culture. What lessons can the newest branch of the military, the U.S. Space Force, take from the Air Force experience to launch itself into an independent trajectory? To get the answers, Laura Winter is joined by Michael Hankins, Curator for U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps post-World War II Aviation, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Brian Laslie, Command Historian and Associate Professor Department of History, United States Air Force Academy; and M.V. “Coyote” Smith, Associate Professor, Strategic Space Studies, Department of Space Power, United States Air Force Air Command and Staff College.

What should be the vision of the next and second U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations be for the future of the U.S. military’s newest service branch? U.S. senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee this week asked just that of the nominee for the job, Lt. Gen. Chance “Salty” Saltzman. The only recent and comparable American experience is that of General Hoyt Vandenberg, the second Air Force Chief of Staff since that service branch was formed out of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1947. Vandenberg’s vision for the U.S. Air Force endures to this day. To discuss the opportunities and the challenges, Laura Winter is joined by M.V. “Coyote” Smith and Brent Ziarnick, both of whom are associate professors of space power at the Air Command and Staff College, at Maxwell Air Force Base; Mir Sadat who is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security; and Stephen Melvin, who has been involved military space operations in a variety of roles inside and outside of the government for years.

The Pentagon on Friday released a readout of a close-hold classified meeting of the Defense Policy Board that illustrates a growing concern that China and Russia are likely developing weapons systems for the space domain that “could impact U.S. deterrence and strategic stability” and a need to develop options to counter those systems. And that’s in addition to the release of multiple defense policies on space and the Biden Administration’s second convening of the National Space Policy Board. To unpack all of these developments, Laura Winter is joined by Peter Garretson, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, coauthor of “Scramble for the Skies The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space”, and the host of AFPC’s Space Strategy Podcast; and Christopher Stone who is a senior fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and the author of “Reversing the Tao: A Framework for Credible Space Deterrence”.

While NASA tests its Space Launch System to usher in a new age of human space exploration, testing whether Space-Based Solar Power can deliver an era of net-zero electricity, affordably, to the U.S. consumer energy market is being left up to the commercial sector. Laura Winter speaks with Ed Tate, Co-Founder and CTO of Virtus Solis, whose journey to SBSP started at General Motors, where he worked on the EV-1, the first mass-produced electric vehicle.

Now pushed back to Friday, NASA is billing the $4.1b Artemis I mission launch, a test of the Space Launch System and the crew-rated Orion capsule, as the beginning of a new chapter of U.S.-led human space exploration and sustained presence on the moon. Putting the warm and fuzzy excitement aside, Laura Winter explores the geostrategic and economic implications with Namrata Goswami, an independent scholar on space policy and great power politics and co-author of the book “Scramble for the Skies”; Chris Quilty, a pioneer of Wall Street analysis of the commercial space sector and founder of Quilty Analytics: and Chris Stott, “a Manx-Born American", who is a serial space entrepreneur, and the Chairman & CEO, Lonestar Data Holdings.

The European Space Agency’s Director General Josef Aschbacher this week announced on LinkedIn that the agency will “propose a Space-Based Solar Power preparatory programme to Member States called #SOLARIS.” That means Europe is getting primed to move forward with its own proprietary SBSP program, independently. Put another way, this is not going to be another exercise in admiring the problem. Laura Winter speaks with Sanjay Vijendran, ESA’s Mars Exploration Strategy Team Leader and Future Mars Studies (MarsX Team) Coordinator, and the lead for the agency’s Space-Based Solar Power efforts; John Mankins, a former NASA physicist, now President of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions, who designed the Solar Power Satellite concept, Alpha - Mark 3; and Peter Garretson, an American Foreign Policy Council Senior Fellow, coauthor of “Scramble for the Skies The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space”. To get a grounding in just what Space-Based Solar Power is, please go here first: https://defaeroreport.com/2022/08/15/the-downlink-aug-14-22-space-based-solar-power-and-the-u-k-s-bet-that-science-fiction-may-become-science-fact/

Is this sci-fi? Or could there be a space-based solution to securing reliable, renewable, and affordable energy and stop making awkward trips and payments to the petro-dollar-funded authoritarians, like that guy in the Kremlin? This week Laura Winter explores Space-Based Solar Power, or SBSP, with Martin Soltau, Co-Chair of Britain’s Space Energy Initiative and Frazer-Nash Business Manager; and Peter Garretson, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, coauthor of “Scramble for the Skies The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space”, and the host of AFPC’s Space Strategy Podcast.

Will norms of space behavior be enough to protect the $469 billion-dollar and growing space economy, the government-funded exploration and science programs, and the critical defense assets in orbit? Perhaps what’s needed is a bit stronger and binding. Like rules. Laura Winter speaks with Kevin O’Connell, the former Director of the Office of Space Commerce at the U.S. Department of Commerce, under the Trump Administration; Mir Sadat, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and an Adjunct Scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute; and Julia Siegel, the assistant director of the Forward Defense practice in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Together they discuss Sadat and Seigel’s policy paper, “Space traffic management: Time for action”, which you can read here: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/space-traffic-management-time-for-action/.

Sure. It’s easy to simply pin Russia’s announcement that it is quitting the International Space Station as a natural result of President Vladamir Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine. Yet, Russia’s reduced space industrial base, Putin’s ambitions, and a series of sackings and demotions illustrate a more complicated political and security picture in the space domain. To read the tea leaves, Laura Winter speaks with the head of the Rand Corporation’s Space Enterprise Initiative, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Bruce McClintock, a former U.S. Defense Attaché to Russia, who was also a special assistant to the commander of Air Force Space Command; Jan Osburg, a RAND Corporation senior aerospace engineer, with experience in designing inhabited space systems; and Christopher Stone who is a senior fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and the author of “Reversing the Tao: A Framework for Credible Space Deterrence”.

Space companies bring high-paying high-tech jobs and create revenue for local businesses, and municipal and state governments. They can lessen the brain drain from rural localities. Thing is, it’s got to be the right fit - the right business plan for the right community - or the business may not even break ground, let alone launch. Laura Winter speaks with U.S. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia’s 8th congressional district; Christie Mastric a staff reporter with the Mining Journal, the newspaper of record in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and Ryan McDevitt, CEO of Vermont’s Benchmark Space Systems.