The DownLink Podcast

This week on The DownLink, Laura Winter speaks with Iridium Communications, Inc. CEO Matt Desch to discuss what he hopes will remain a rare story - the hypersonic bust-up of his company’s satellite in orbit. Many who serve the defense policy-making ecosystem, here in the United States and within multinational organizations are coming to better appreciate the fragile nature of the near-earth space environment. Nevertheless, debris and junk orbiting the earth at hypersonic speeds feels somewhat academic, even with last month’s Russian anti-satellite missile test. Putting the Russia-Ukraine crisis to the side, but not completely out of view, Desch tells the story of the Iridium-33 and gives us his take on what policy-makers, leaders, and space operators need to do to preserve our freedom of action - a.k.a the ability to project power over the horizon - in low earth orbit.

This week U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris convened the Biden Administration’s inaugural National Space Council meeting. It had three agenda items: STEM education, to create the future space-based workforce; using space-based assets and the data they produce to combat climate change; and space-based security, which at present has precious few rules or norms governing behavior. Also, this week, the U.S. Department of Defense shared that it had completed its Global Posture Review, but didn’t include space in its report, which has raised more than a few eyebrows. To unpack the week's events, Laura Winter speaks with Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation, Daniel Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Sarah Mineiro, a true space and defense policy nerd, who is an adjunct fellow with the Center for a New American Security.

In this episode of The DownLink podcast, Laura Winter is shedding light on satellite communications over the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s called laser communication or optical wireless communication. DARPA, the Space Development Agency, the United States Space Force are already working with the commercial sector to develop and deploy laser satellite communication. What makes this recently recognized technology so special is that by all accounts it’s near impossible to jam, spoof, intercept, or even detect. Laura speaks with Bridgecom CEO Barry Matsumori, who is a veteran of Qualcomm, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic, about how optical wireless works to defeat adversaries. In the episode’s second half she speaks with a laser communications pioneer, David Czajkowski, the co-founder and CEO of Space Micro. Space Micro has been in the news this week because Venture Space Holdings announced earlier this week that it is acquiring a majority stake in Czajkowski’s company.

This week’s episode take a closer look at Monday’s Russian anti-satellite missile test and the debris field it caused, which forced the seven astronauts and cosmonauts on board the International Space Station to take cover. Jamie Shea, who after three decades with NATO, and having served as that organization’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, says he does not believe the ASAT test is a coincidence, but part of an effort to keep the Allies on the back foot as tensions rise on Eastern Europe’s border with Russia. Daniel Dumbacher, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’s Executive Director and U.K. Amb. Aidan Liddle discuss their efforts to codify norms of behavior and what’s at stake if governments do not agree to a set of rules for space.

This week on The DownLinK, we’re looking at U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s four-day trip to Paris. She had a number of events, but what we’re interested in is her discussion with French President Emanuel Macron, very specifically the portion of their chat at the Élysée that covered cooperation in space. There were three key developments. To unpack these developments, Laura Winter spoke to Xavier Pasco, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research; Dimitrios Stroikos, from the London School of Economics; and Todd Harrison, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. They are space and defense experts from both sides of the Atlantic.

This episode is about infrastructure, a subject, no doubt, that you have probably been hearing a whole lot about these past few days, especially if you are in the United States. That’s because the U.S. Congress is getting set to vote on two multi-trillion-dollar bills, one of which is called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The success of that feat depends on whether the lawmakers can actually reach an agreement. What’s kind of funny though, is that there is another infrastructure debate going on in this town, and it’s about space infrastructure - that’s both the assets on orbit and on the ground. Laura Winter explores the question of whether the Department of Homeland Security should designate space systems a critical infrastructure sector with Ron Keen a cybersecurity expert with the Department of Homeland Security’s National Risk Management Center; Samuel Visner, a technical fellow at the Mitre Corporation, which bills him as its in-house global thought leader in national security, cybersecurity, and space systems security; and John Doyon, the executive vice president of the Intelligence National Security Alliance. Visner also spoke at this week’s Aspen Security Forum and is a key author of a white paper titled “Designating the U.S. Space Sector as Critical Infrastructure,” which INSA published this week.

The U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley not only confirmed that the U.S. intelligence community, and therefore the Department of Defense and the U.S. administration believe that China test-launched a new hypersonic weapons system sometime in late July, he said it was close to a Sputnik moment. To understand better what Gen.Milley is saying, I spoke with one of the most knowledgeable hypersonics and hypersonic weapons systems experts and aeronautics engineers, the former DoD’s former Director of Defense, Research and Engineering, Mark Lewis. He’s now the Executive Director, Emerging Technologies Institute at the National Defense Industrial Association. Later Sarah Mineiro from the Center for a New American Security and Kaitlyn Johnson from the Center for Strategic and International Studies discuss their take on Milley’s statements, and what the U.S. Space Force is doing to coordinate with the defense and space industries and to also work with Congress on getting the funding to meet current and future threats and challenges.

What the heck did China send up into orbit? The Financial Times says China launched a hypersonic glide vehicle carrying a fractional orbital bombardment system into orbit in the July-August time-frame and shocked the U.S. intelligence community. If true, this development could make it much easier for the peer competitor to threaten the U.S. homeland. Everyone can agree that China launched a rocket, but beyond that, it gets murky, very fast, like faster than five times the speed of sound. Laura Winter interviews space policy, emerging technologies, and China military modernization expert Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and Todd Harrison, Director of the Center for Security and International Studies Aerospace Security Project.

This is the first episode… Or just episode zero in podcasting parlance. Episode zero is usually used just for sending out an RSS ping to all of the podcast platforms, like Soundcloud, to let those platforms know there are more episodes on the way. It can be long or short, but episode zero doesn’t get much love and attention. If you are a bit nerdy like me, I actually listen to them. So for this episode-zero - Transmission #000 - I’d like to get some ideas and some questions about space, the space business, and how it all relates to defense, up on the mental white-board for you. I got some help from Jeff Hill, the chairman of Satellite, one of the largest - if not the largest - must-attend annual space industry conferences here in the United States. I hope you enjoy the conversation. And thank you for listening, Laura P.S.: You can find Jeff Hill’s podcast “On Orbit” here: https://soundcloud.com/user-903466448