0118-Deep-Space-20251004
Historically, in the United States, space has, famously, if not perhaps notoriously, been considered a bipartisan domain. Space was used to unite and unify the nation during the Cold War, exhibit A, JFK's speech at Rice University, and space has always enjoyed support from all political parties. However, is that changing now? Is space becoming much more politically fraught? This is T-minus Deep Space. I'm Maria Varmazis. My guest today is Kevin Kelly. Now, Kevin knows the ins and outs of the politics of space in the United States as he is a former Senate appropriation staffer who oversaw funding for NASA, the NSF, and 25 other agencies. Now, he's a partner at ACTIM, where he advises some of the most influential players in science and defense. His career has spanned everything, from nuclear technology and climate systems to the tools that we use to monitor near-Earth threats. And with me today, he shares his thesis on why space is becoming more political and what this means for all of us. I'm Kevin Kelly. I am a partner at ACTIM, which is a strategic consulting firm, and I'm based in their Washington office and have been involved in the space program now. For the better part of almost 40 years, really from the time that I went with Congresswoman and then Senator Mikulski from the House to the Senate, and she got on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and after just two years in the Senate, she became the chairman of the subcommittee that oversaw NASA and 26 other federal agencies. And she put this 30-year-old young kid who was just finishing his law degree at Georgetown at night in charge of that subcommittee, in charge of, you know, 90-some billion dollars. And so that was me. And I had to learn the space program, and it was a very dynamic period with, because it was just after the return to flight of the space shuttle after the Challenger accident had just occurred a few months before Senator Mikulski became chairman. We were in the middle of a big debate about the International Space Station, Hubble, which had been scheduled to launch the shuttle flight after Challenger had been in cold storage for that long period of time, nearly four years. And there were lots of issues there. And then we finally got it off the ground in 1990. And lo and behold, probably three months after the launch, which took several times before NASA could get it off, I got a call, I got the first call, it's out of NASA to talk about the spherical aberration on the mirror that they had unwittingly agreed to accept a mirror that didn't meet the scientific specifications on Hubble. So it was very blurry, which led to a whole crisis that we had to go back and investigate. And thereafter, we ended up financing what Senator Mikulski joked about was the most expensive contact lens in the history of optical science, which was the co-star fix for the Hubble Space Telescope. And obviously it was serviced five times after that. But the point here is it gave me a great introduction to NASA and to the space program that I used. And then I left government in the mid 1990s. My first wife and I had just adopted the first of our two children from the former Soviet Union. And so I had to go out and make more money. And I got into this and I've been representing interest in the space business for literally almost the last 30 years continuously. I greatly appreciate you joining me, but also that you're going to be sharing your perspective and your expertise today. The premise of sort of the conversation that we were going to have, the top line was why space is now political. And you are definitely the perfect person to walk me through some of this. Because when I was looking at that sort of top line, my first thinking was has space not always been political? What obviously the moment has changed. But I mean, certainly you were in that apparatus for quite a long time. Tell me a bit about your thoughts on sort of just that thesis statement to begin with and where we are in this moment in time specifically and how things have changed. Right. Well, the Sputnik incident in the late 50s obviously served as the catalyst to kind of get the United States into the space race, so to speak, very dramatically and of course with the race to the moon and through the Apollo program and all that went with it. Because of the perception that in the domain of space, there would be great theaters of control, national prestige. And obviously the race to the moon was the centerpiece of it. I remember that as an 11 year old boy trying to stay awake at home as Armstrong got on the moon. What's different today fundamentally and has changed dramatically over the years is that we have so much of our life that we take for granted everything from GPS to communications to so many other things, our streaming services, all of these things that have a direct component for space. The fact is that they are all part of that infrastructure and threats to that increasingly from potentially hostile forces or natural forces. And I'll talk about some of those as well. Really shape the whole nature of it so that if you don't, if you aren't in space and constantly advancing your understanding of it and for the United States protecting the assets we have there, you've put yourself at great risk. For example, in the 1850s, this is about the natural phenomenon. We'll talk about the strategic phenomenon in a minute. In the 1850s, there was a direct hit from a coronal mass ejection, one of these big solar storms that came off the surface of the sun that was a direct hit on the earth. And it destroyed effectively the internet of the 1850s, which is the telegraph, and they had to rewire the entire telegraph from London to New Delhi. Today, the reinsurance industry suggests that if we in fact got hit by one of those direct storms, and we've had a few near misses even within the last decade, that it would cost the equivalent of like $2 trillion in terms of damage because it would effectively fry the grid for a large portion of the Northern Hemisphere. Now, okay, what does that matter? Okay, because don't we have some way to protect us or predict that? It turns out today that in the overall thoughts on our space weather system that is managed by NOAA with some support from NASA and the Defense Department, we have, it takes about 48 hours usually for a solar storm if it were to come off the surface of the moon to reach the earth. How many minutes do you think we have in warning time today for that? We have 48 minutes. Yeah. So the point is that forget about, we against the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians or the North Koreans, all of which are real and imminent domain threats to our heritage and space and our strategic interests. But even the natural phenomenon, we are extremely vulnerable because we have not put in place the constellation of observations, both in space and on the ground, that combined will improve our warning times and improve the predictive analytics that help us anticipate, will that storm hit us or not? And there's only a couple places in the federal government where that actually, that work is done. Some of it is in NOAA, but most of the fundamental sciences in it are done in NASA in a field called heliophysics, which I'm very involved in representing people that do that. And then also with assets that are on the ground that are largely managed by the National Science Foundation. And so, you know, it's a combination of those things, but it's like, wow, space is important for that. From a political standpoint today, you know, you've seen a whole set of change that's gone on within the last 10 years, right? President Trump in his first administration created the Space Force and he said, well, why did they do that? And you know, it's interesting if you listen to some of the people that were really the co-authors legislatively of that whole formulation, their kind of analysis is, if you look at the Air Force, which is a great military service, great heritage, they built over a long period of time, starting back in the late 60s and then through the 2000s, a big set of elegant, exquisite satellites that we use for communications, for tracking enemy threats and missile defense, as well as in assets for what we call the National Technical Means to spy on our adversaries. But what they discovered was that they had built this heritage and then some of our adversaries had weapons, even from Earth, that they could actually take out these satellites. And all of a sudden they said, oh my goodness, we have built this elegant network of dozens of these satellites and they're incredibly vulnerable. And you know, because the Air Force is more about, you know, the Air Force is about planes and the things that go with them and missiles on the ground as opposed to space-based assets. And so now with the creation of the Space Force, it's designed to deal with those strategic threats and to deal with the concept today of what we would call dynamic space operations, where it's been widely reported and testified to in Congress that a country like the Chinese today are now developing a way by which they can undertake dogfights with satellites. But now we know that we have adversaries who are doing that with satellites. And that puts us in a specially vulnerable position. So the country has changed in a long way. And now because of this, go back to this interconnectivity, as a country, if you lose communications or you lose situational awareness from our space-based assets, you are, you know, fighting a war with one hand tied behind your back. And look no further than the conflict between Russia and Ukraine for that kind of activity. And why is the military studying that theater of operations so carefully? Because they know that, you know, if we have a conflict in that part of the world, again, which I hope we never would, or with the Chinese, that you would probably have a situation where we would not have command of the skies, we would not have air superiority, and we would not have command of communication. So, you know, you're looking at how do you adapt to that and move towards these asymmetric ways of fighting war. But it's largely dependent because most of our assets, unlike what they were, you know, when my father was in World War II or even in Korea or even in large portions of the Vietnam conflict, we now rely upon space-based assets to give intelligence surveillance reconnaissance against our adversaries and allow our forces to have a much greater force projection than the other might have and with smaller numbers. And, you know, but they can be just as lethal and just as effective. So, it's a huge thing. And now that we have multiple state actors involved and with the Chinese committed to a focus on space superiority to us, both in low-worth orbit and then out at the moon in the Sizz-Lunar environment, there's a big challenge there. Indeed. And as you're describing this landscape that we have been in the last 10 years especially, I think to more recently, the last year or so, where I know we cover on T-minus daily headlines about funding, you know, news from the executive, news from the Hill, and even as someone who just looks at this all every day, and I find it quite confusing when I hear both the national priorities about the very real threats that are going on in space and the national needs that we have in space, followed by either funding cuts or just unknown, uncertain funding situations and a lot of confusion. So, I'm just curious, your take on how Congress is looking at all of this and not that you have a crystal ball, but it is a confusing situation, I think, for a lot of people right now. It is. It's very dynamic and it's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of risk that goes with that. And the question is, do our leaders have a plan in place that over the next five or 10 years, we'll build out an architecture, a space-based architecture, both on the civil side and the national security side, relying upon commercial industry largely, you know, for the evolution of that. Do they have a plan that will actually work and succeed in position in the United States? Let's take them in two different domains. Because, you know, the Apollo model was government operated, government-owned contractor operated, you know, for the systems and then a very, very heavy micromanagement by civil servants. And that has dramatically changed, right? The space force isn't that big. NASA, as you know, has undergone severe reductions in the number of civil servants that manage key programs. And so, there is, and this is a big push of the Trump administration, although it's not their initial heritage. This goes all the way back really to, I would say, the Bush administration, Bush 43 pushing this, this kind of, you know, more reliance upon private sector industry. And that can be a good thing. It can be not so good thing because if it's, we don't have the kind of accountability and the hidden nature of it. But on the space force side, I mean, it's still a relatively young agency. And it has, you know, it has many plans. It has a series of architectures. And, you know, that you begin to see like with the layer one, tranche one, comsat, like the transport layer for communications that they're just beginning to deploy here. There has been a big shift, right? I mean, where, you know, in the old days, like I said, there was a set of series of elegant government-owned assets that were very large. You know, I won't say they were the Death Star or Battlestar Galactica, but they were very large and they were extremely expensive. And you didn't do them all that often, right? I mean, you know, we talk about the Hubble Space Telescope, it's a great telescope. It's seen many things. It's helped, you know, helped us understand the history of the universe is 13.7 billion years of age. But, you know, there were a lot of other Hubble telescopes, I'm not saying anything that's a surprise, that didn't look out, they looked down. And so, you know, that heritage. But now what we're going to is this notion of, instead of having a few big assets in space to go to this disaggregated, you know, a constellation of many smaller satellites, that if we were to lose a few, you could replace them because they were less expensive for the purposes that you were doing. You still need some of those big assets, obviously, for key particular things in our strategic heritage. But the point is that we've changed that concept of operations. And that's pretty dramatic. But again, the Space Force doesn't know exactly today how it will position all these assets to give us the total level of security to protect us from these new and really very dangerous lethal capabilities that we see being developed by our adversaries, and for which we're going to need to have a response. Because if there's a theater of engagement, you know, whether somebody invades portions of Europe, or whether they invade Taiwan or other strategic allies of the United States, the first thing that those hostile forces are going to try and do is take out our space assets to cut off our visibility and our communications to be able to respond. Because so many of those systems we operate today are dependent upon those space-based signals to either provide intelligence or to help track assets from hostile places or to help us ourselves respond. So that's a really big challenge for us now. The Congress has given the Space Force a significant amount of money. You know, the Space Force today, their budget, even under the proposal from the Trump administration, which would cut the budget in FY26, although there was a big supplemental done through the reconciliation bill, it's still a larger budget today than NASA has, and NASA's ever had. Not by a lot, but by a couple billion dollars. But what the Space Force has to convince the Congress they're going to do over the ensuing, you know, five years is put in place this level of protection and defense, and then to some degree, be ready when it's necessary if they have to play offense. And that's, of course, something where we don't hope we ever have to do. But they have to be prepared to protect our interests and not to be, you know, just kind of waiting for something to happen. And I think that's depending upon who you talk to on the civil side, we're engaged in another race to the surface of the moon. It's not clear whether China will get there, although a lot of people think they will get there by 2030. I think on the part of the NASA, with the architecture that they've got in place today and all the systems that have to work to make it work, I don't think we're going to be there by 2030. And that's not news. People have testified to that in Congress in the last couple of weeks. And I think they're right. But that doesn't mean we still can't beat the Chinese to the moon with a robotic infrastructure. And you're going to see, I think, in the coming months, people begin to try and get NASA to pivot to that, to flip the architecture and not be dependent upon these human systems, human-rated systems that are very far off from actually being ready for prime time and to make those dates. But it's a very precarious period. And what I'm concerned about is that we not lose the bipartisan heritage that has been the strength of the space program, both on the national security side and on the civil side, that has gone on since the space program was begun in the Eisenhower administration. And that worries me greatly. And I think space should be a uniting thing for us, whether we're trying to protect the planet, or whether we're trying to protect ourselves from hostile foreign forces, or whether we're trying to understand better how we got here and are we alone in the universe, which of course is one of the great unanswered questions that scientists have been trying to figure out for centuries now. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully we got a little closer with the recent Mars, maybe a little closer with the recent Mars announcement from NASA. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. So it's a big maybe. We'll be right back. You did mention appropriations. And that is something I also wanted to ask you about about throwing that all into the mix here. It is a lot to keep track of. And I'm just thinking again, as somebody who tries to keep on top of it every day, it is monumentally confusing. It's just as someone who's just really not a political wonk. It's just trying to figure out where the money is going. And as you mentioned at the top of our interview, what the opportunities are there, especially in the commercial sector, because I think a lot of people are trying to figure that out now with, while it feels like sand shifting under the feet a little bit, any thoughts on that? Sure. Look, I think all of the agencies are trying to find the right balance on this. And I take the mission that NOAA provides. And I think one of the things that is going to be a challenge is, okay, setting in line what are the inherently governmental things that need to be done so that we have assets that are, essentially they might be run by contractors, but they're managed writ large by the government that are complimented, maybe significantly by commercial sector providers of data. And how do you get that so you don't lose the technical precision and the data that's needed for forecasting and the things that go with that, which are so critical, right? Some of those things, there's no business case to be building instruments at the level of sophistication we need for weather forecasting to track those severe weather storms coming over from Asia down through Alaska and that influence so much of our weather or for off of the Pacific or for hurricanes that matter. And so I think it's going to be a balancing thing there. In the NASA world, the fight really, I think, the administration proposed deep cuts that if they went through would essentially put the space science enterprise, which has been at the heart of NASA's, one of NASA's prime missions by its statute when it was created by Congress, it would essentially kill off most of the space science program. It would cut it by half, but it's going out of business strategy, right? Because people won't go into it. And ironically, some of the things NASA's studying in both Earth science and then that whole area in space, weather and heliophysics, some of the measurements they're doing are critical for new national security priorities of the administration. What's the one that is mentioned, most often involving space, but golden dome. So I think that's going to be a big tension here. I think there is a question about whether Artemis and the human, Artemis 3, which is to get humans to the surface of the moon, I think there's a real question about the transparency of all the various parts of it that people need to figure out whether or not where each of the vendors is and can they really provide what's necessary to get people on the moon? Because it's not an Apollo approach to surface on the moon. The whole approach on Artemis is much more, I'll say, exotic in terms of getting out there. It's not an equatorial orbit. It's an elliptical orbit. It creates, to get the fuel there, because we all know an Apollo 11, what was the big fear at the very end that they were going to run out of fuel and they would have to abort. They were within seconds of that, right? And so having the fuel, and now that we're much further out with the capsule or the vehicle that transports the astronauts from Earth to the Cis Lunar environment, is so much further from the surface of the moon, you need a lot more fuel to get down there, which requires, in this case, SpaceX to actually have a whole series of launches consecutively, dozens of launches potentially, certainly more than 10, and many more potentially, that they will have to put the fuel into orbit and then get out to the moon and make sure we have a lander that can actually get to the surface. And all of that, people don't have the confidence that they're ready to go on that. And so there will be some big debates about that in Congress this fall. I think the future of the science program is less in doubt, although there is a significant difference between the House and Senate on science. And I think that that's going to have to be reconciled. And clearly, my expectation and hope is that they will go much closer to the Senate, which is not a lot more money. It's actually a freeze at the enacted level that was in the last budget, the full budget that was passed by Congress in the Biden administration. But it provides that continuity that we need in all of the disciplines we do. And there are some exciting things coming up. The Roman telescope will launch here maybe sometime next year. It will create the great three-part harmony between Hubble and Webb and Roman. We have the new Vera Rubin Observatory that's now online in Chile, which again is giving us so many targets. But the crazy thing is, why would we create all these assets in order for other people outside the United States to be the ones to find the great discoveries? It makes no sense. So we need a cohesive strategy that is bipartisan, that is funded appropriately, not excessively. I don't think anybody wants to throw money at problems. I think that's a mistake. And when I was on the Appropriations Committee for Senator Mikulski, we had an adage for the quiet guardians of the federal purse. And it was designed to be tough. I mean, if you go back and look at our record, we were tough on NASA in the sense that we were supportive, but we always wanted them to justify things and not to overpromise and under budget, which is what has unfortunately been one of the things that they've been criticized for. But I do think what we need is some bipartisan consensus on both the national security side as well as on the civil side to say, okay, these are going to be the things that we collectively invest in for the good of the planet, for the good of our strategic interests and our national security. And we're going to agree to that so that over the next 10 years, we can realize these objectives and be the leaders in the free world to execute against that. As I'm hearing what you're laying out and also just thinking about the moment in time that we have been in, it truly is sort of an existential moment for I think both the civil, especially the civil sector of the space industry and what we broadly call a space industry. And so much is still being sussed out. And it's just very, very hard to figure out how things are going to be paid for with all these grand ambitions, but it is definitely a watch this space situation, because there's really no great answers at this moment. But Kevin, I greatly appreciate your perspective. It's something that I know a lot of us have all been trying to get some cohesive thought around. And it's extremely difficult, especially right now. But your perspective and your expertise have definitely helped me understand a lot of these things quite a bit better. So I just wanted to thank you for that, Kevin. And I want to make sure that I give you an opportunity with any wrap up thoughts that you want to leave our audience with and give you that chance. The seeds of American ingenuity are there across the board. I mean, for all the criticism that you look at SpaceX, I mean, what they've done with Launch Cadens with the Falcon 9 is remarkable. And people thought that they would never be able to do it. So I mean, hats off to them. I think overalliance on any one entity, I think that's going to be one of the major tensions is how you create a suite of actors that can provide the industrial based critical elements for our space needs, whether it's civil, commercial or national security. I do think the seeds of that are, you can see that in NASA's CLIPS program, right? The commercial lunar payload services. And I do a lot of work with intuitive machines. And they are one of a handful of companies that are showing you that for a fraction of the price that you do on these cost plus contracts with the legacy OEMs, you can actually do a dramatic amount. But that's no surprise. I mean, when we first talked about, there's a guy that is long since retired, former head of the space department space sector at the applied physics lab, which I've worked with for many years. His name was Tom Kermigius. And he came to center in the early nineties and he said, you know, we can actually, you know, there was a big series of reports about the planetary program at NASA and how over how expensive it was and everything was behind schedule and over budget. And he said, you should give us a chance in this and we should create a new program that caps the cost still does world class science. And that was called the discovery program. And by golly, APL won the first one, which was an asteroid rendezvous mission. They came in and they did it and they actually returned money to the government and people didn't believe they could do it. And we've had a heritage of those in both the discovery program, new frontiers that are science driven, but are less expensive than kind of the historic flagship missions. You'll always need to do some flagship missions, but the seeds of innovation are there in America. And we are learning. I mean, the habitable world's observatory, which will come after James Webb and come after Roman, will learn from the heritage of theirs so that we don't repeat the mistakes of that. But we've got to rely upon ourselves, but there has to be consistency in the funding and in the commitment to bring us together in a nonpartisan way, because that's the only way first and foremost that over time you'll attract the talent that we need in industry and government to actually face these big challenges and these big threats. And that's what worries me the most is that, you know, we'll, we'll fail to meet that moment. And I hope and believe that we have leaders in Congress and within the administration and with the industry at large, that we can somehow find a way to come together, meet these challenges and, you know, and lower the temperature of the partisan nature of things. I think space could be a good way of creating a great bridge to help because it's in space, there's more that unites us than divides us. That's T-Minus Deep Space brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app, or you can send us an email, thespace@n2k.com. We are proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
