The DownLink Podcast

The Biden Administration’s FY 2023 budget request dropped this last week, with $24.5 billion for the U.S. Space Force. Laura Winter hosts a discussion with Charles Beames, who before becoming, the chairman of the board for York Space Systems and the SmallSat Alliance, was a Pentagon insider responsible for all space and intelligence acquisitions; 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"; 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 Russia’s state-owned space corporation Roscosmos is hunting for customers, there’s anecdotal evidence that some in the commercial space industry outside of the country are seeing a bump in sales related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Laura Winter speaks with Matt Desch, the CEO of the U.S.-headquartered mobile satellite communications company Iridium, and with Hans Steiner the CTO of the European satellite signal monitoring and geolocation service provider Atos as well as the company’s Director of Global Sales Eias Daka.

It almost slipped under the radar… The U.S. Space Force Space Training And Readiness Command, or STARCOM, released its planning doctrine, the foundation of how to plan the execution and leveraging of spacepower. This is the first space warfighting doctrine in roughly 18 months since the new branch released its inaugural doctrine, "Space Power". Laura Winter’s guest is Christopher Stone, a senior fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Stone breaks it down, showing where he believes this fundamental guidance succeeds and where some re-engineering is required.

Resistance against the Russian war in Ukraine comes in many forms, such as just remaining at work and refusing to leave. In this episode, Laura Winter speaks with two former heads of the State Space Agency of Ukraine, Volodymyr Usov and Lyubomyr Sabadosh, and their colleague Liliya Shevchuk, the director of the country’s Space Initiatives Center. But first, Winter speaks with Homer Hickam, a retired NASA aerospace engineer and a New York Times best-selling book author, who wrote a Washington Post opinion piece, published on March 9, with the headline “Our space partnership with Russia can’t go on.”

How is the space sector reacting to Russia’s war in Ukraine and mitigating against an uptick in cyber threats to space systems? Laura Winter speaks with Dan Dumbacher, Executive Director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or AIAA; and with Frank Backes, Senior Vice president of Kratos Federal Space and Board Chair of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or Space ISAC; Sam Visner, Technical Fellow at the Mitre Corporation and Vice Chair of the Space ISAC; and the organization’s Executive Director Erin Miller.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has kicked off financial and technical sanctions targetting Russian space programs, a threatening Twitter storm from the head of Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos, and de-coupling or cooperative scientific space programs. Laura Winter speaks with Malcolm Davis, a senior policy analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute focusing on space policy, security, strategy, and capability development; and with Pavel Luzin, a U.S.-Russia relations, international security, and space expert and lecturer in Russia.

Balloons as big as a football stadium provide the Department of Defense with suborbital services, such as payload hosting and persistent ultra-high quality and high definition earth observation data. Is it enough for a business? Is this a little-known opportunity? Laura Winter speaks with Ryan Hartman, CEO of World View.

If you think sanctions to counter Russian aggression have not and will not make a difference, look at what is Russia’s clearest exemplification of its global power status, its space programs. Laura Winter speaks with space and international security expert, lecturer, and author Pavel Luzin, and Air Force Brig. Gen. (ret.) Bruce McClintock, of the Rand Corporation’s Space Enterprise Initiative, about the effects of sanctions on Russia’s space ambitions now, and the possibility of more.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence released its much-anticipated inaugural space policy paper “Defence Space Strategy: Operationalising the Space Domain”. The U.K., the No. 1 ally of the United States, is a member of the European Space Agency and a signatory to the U.S. -led Artemis Accords. To understand Britain’s space security ambitions, Laura Winter speaks with Bleddyn Bowen, a space warfare expert at the University of Leicester, and the author of the book, “War In Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics”, and with Juliana Suess, the Royal United Services Institute space security policy lead.

When the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday outlined what forces the Russian military has amassed along Ukraine’s eastern borders, it included electronic warfare. EW is arguably Russia’s answer to the U.S.’s satellite-based communications, command, and control as well as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance superiority. Leading Russian military analysts have observed that the West undervalues and misunderstands Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities. Laura Winter speaks with Michael Kofman, the Research Program Director for the Center for Naval Analyses’s Russia Studies Program, and frequent author of articles on Russia and its military for War on the Rocks.