Modern day space comps – how this space race will be won.
Shutterstock – Dragon Claws
Every human expansion into a new domain follows the same pattern. The headlines belong to the explorers. The enduring fortunes — and the fate of nations — belong to those who build the infrastructure.
Though sparked by the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, America’s westward expansion and transformation into an economic juggernaut had little to do with gold. Those miners captured the young country’s imagination. But the companies that built the railroads, laid the telegraph lines and connected a continent created enduring wealth for themselves and for America. They transformed a frontier into an economy.
Space is entering a similar era. For decades, we measured success by launches, satellite deployments and scientific discoveries. Those were only the prologue. The wealth of the space economy will not be defined by reaching orbit or returning to the moon. It will be defined by building the infrastructure that allows governments, businesses and eventually millions of people to operate there at scale. That shift is already underway.
The Space Force has accomplished something remarkable. In a few years, it transformed what was once a small Air Force command into a military service with enormous strategic influence. More importantly, its leaders have fundamentally changed how war planners think about space. Satellites are no longer viewed merely as providers of communications, surveillance and navigation. They have become essential warfighting infrastructure enabling virtually every military operation. A similar transformation has taken place in the commercial world.
Telecommunications satellites and GPS were only the beginning. Today, direct-to-device communications, proliferated constellations, orbital data centers and autonomous satellite operations are moving critical parts of our digital infrastructure into space. The orbital economy is no longer speculative. It is becoming foundational to the global economy.
The entrepreneurs reshaping space are focused not just on individual spacecraft, but on the services that make every spacecraft more capable. They are building orbital logistics networks, inter-satellite communications, autonomous constellations and lunar transportation systems. New technologies are already emerging that allow satellites to operate longer, maneuver farther and accomplish missions once considered impossible.
One example is Starcatcher, founded by Andrew Rush. Rather than building another satellite application, the company is pursuing something more fundamental: an orbital power grid. After the Miami Space Summit, I spoke with Rush about his vision for “power abundance in orbit.” “Power availability is the limiting factor for space now, not the cost of launch as it once was,” he told me. Fresh off Starcatcher’s Series A raise, Rush is ready to demonstrate how the company will collect solar energy and deliver electrical power to customer satellites through directed energy transmission. If he succeeds, the implications will extend far beyond power generation.
Retired Lieutenant General John Shaw, one of the country’s most influential space strategists, has long argued that freedom of maneuver will become a defining advantage in future space operations. Ready access to electrical power, he told me, would significantly expand that freedom. “Satellites could maneuver more aggressively and operate higher-power sensors longer,” he said. Engineers, he added, could optimize spacecraft for reduced platform profiles, rather than maximizing solar array size or battery capacity – opening possibilities for entirely new platform architectures designed to work together. In short, infrastructure changes architecture.
This is how technological revolutions mature. The internet began transforming our lives when fiber optic networks, cloud computing and global data centers emerged. Aviation reshaped commerce only after airports, maintenance networks and air traffic control took hold. Railroads changed America because they connected everything else.
Space is reaching the same inflection point — and it demands a fundamental rethinking of government’s role. For much of the Space Age, government agencies designed nearly every major space system. That made sense when space was limited to a handful of national programs. Today, thousands of entrepreneurs backed by private capital are competing to solve problems government could never have solved.
Government’s responsibility is no longer simply to build space systems. It is to cultivate the conditions that allow an entire space economy to flourish. That means encouraging private investment, enforcing antitrust laws, maintaining competitive markets and procuring commercial capabilities over building its own.
Winning in space will require more than launching rockets or deploying satellites. It will require building the infrastructure that allows other businesses, technologies and military capabilities to follow. Explorers get naming rights. Civilizations are built by those who get infrastructure right.
America has the opportunity to build the infrastructure that defines the next century of economic and strategic power. The question is whether we recognize that the real space race was never about who gets there first — it was always about who builds what lasts.
Leave a comment