The Rise of Commercial Space in Christian Davenport’s “The Space Barons”

Welcome to the inaugural episode of a new, special edition series: "The Elara Epilogues," where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors will join Elara Nova partners to discuss their published work covering today’s ever-evolving space environment. 

In today's episode, Founding Partner Mike Dickey, former chief architect of the United States Space Force is joined by Christian Davenport, space industry and NASA reporter for The Washington Post. Together, they’ll discuss Christian’s 2018 book: “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.” "The Space Barons" catalogues the rise of today’s commercial space industry, through the lens of the billionaires who founded - and funded - their own space companies at its outset.

But the conversation won’t stop there, as Christian shares a few teasers from his forthcoming book: “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race.” The new book, “Rocket Dreams,” is set to be released in the fall of 2025 and picks back up where “The Space Barons” concluded seven years ago.

"The Elara Epilogues," is presented by "The Elara Edge" Expert Insights on Space Security."

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

Transcript

Intro/Outro: Scott King (SK) 

Host: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force (MD) 

SME: Christian Davenport, reporter at Washington Post; author of “The Space Barons” (CD) 

00:02 - 01:23 

(SK) Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King, and we have a new, special edition series to present to you today: “The Elara Epilogues,” where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors will join Elara Nova partners to discuss their published work covering today’s ever-evolving space environment. 

Founding Partner Mike Dickey, former chief architect of the United States Space Force, will be your host today. And joining Mike as our inaugural guest is Christian Davenport, space industry and NASA reporter for The Washington Post. 

Together, they’ll be discussing Christian’s 2018 book: “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.”The Space Barons catalogues the rise of today’s commercial space industry, through the lens of the billionaires who founded - and funded - their own space companies at its outset. 

But the conversation won’t stop there, as Christian shares with us a few teasers from his forthcoming book: “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race.” The new book, “Rocket Dreams,” is set to be released in the fall of 2025 and picks back up where “The Space Barons” concluded seven years ago.  

With that, thank you for joining us and onto the show… 

01:24 - 02:09 

(MD) Christian, first. Thank you so much for coming on Elara Edge Expert Insights on Space Security. Our audience is primarily those who have a keen interest in the security and economic aspects of space, and certainly the role that the new space industry plays, [it] continues to be an important and a fascinating topic for a number of reasons that I hope we're going to discuss today. I'm sure we will.  

And you wrote the book on this: Space Barons, and it captures those very early days of this new order. And we appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about the early days. Also I understand, spoiler alert that you might have a new book coming up, and I hope we can also use this time to talk about that and to bring Space Barons into current context seven years on, as we await the new release.  

02:10 - 02:33 

(CD) Yeah, Mike, thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. I've been following, you know, what you guys have been up to over there, and it's just such a fascinating time, which has, you know, kind of what led me to write the books. But, you know, as I say, I've got one of the best beats in all of journalism. 

I just wish the news would slow down a little bit because there's so much going on. But yeah, no, it's a real pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to the conversation. 

02:33 - 02:44 

(MD) Fantastic. Well, let's rewind the tape and go back to the very beginning and what prompted you to write the book Space Barons and put it down in book form? 

You're a newspaper journalist by trade?  

02:45 - 04:40 

(CD) Yeah, so I've been doing a lot of things at The Washington Post. I was a metro reporter. I covered local politics. I went into editing and was covering the military for a long time, [I] was embedded in Iraq and in Kuwait and was then assigned to a beat on the business desk to cover the military-industrial complex as it were. 

And in the 2014 timeframe, along came a guy named Elon Musk, who held a press conference at the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C., to announce he was going to file a lawsuit against the Pentagon, specifically against the Air Force, for the right to be able to compete for national security launch contracts. 

And I remember going to that press conference and thinking, ‘Who the heck is this guy? What is SpaceX? And why would you be dumb enough to file a lawsuit against the government agency that you want to get contracts from?’ And anyway, he started the press conference by talking about bringing back the Falcon-9 booster and trying to catch it. 

And in those days, they were trying to build the reusable vehicle. But by bringing it back to hover it over water at a specific spot in the ocean, and I'll confess, Mike, I had no idea what he was talking about. But I thought it was really, really interesting and I ended up writing the story about the lawsuit, but ended up doing some research into SpaceX, into reusable rockets, and saw then, of course, that Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin was trying to do that. 

And you know, one of the key mantras in journalism is ‘Follow the money,’ right? That goes back to Watergate. And I said, ‘Well, if some of the richest people in the world are investing their money in space exploration and advancing the state of the art and the technology, maybe we should be paying more attention to that.’ 

And so that's when I sort of decided I need to start covering this, so that's how it came about. 

04:41 - 04:54 

(MD) Yeah, fascinating. How did you go about writing? I mean, those are pretty unique individuals. We're going to talk about some of the other individuals in the book.  

Did they all give you access? Or, you know, how did you go about your research and your interviews and did everybody want to talk to you? 

04:55 - 07:15 

(CD) Yeah. For the first book, “The Space Barons,” I did interview Elon and Jeff and Richard Branson and Paul Allen at the time. I think it was one of Paul Allen's last interviews before he died. But I did, and it wasn't easy with Jeff, in particular. 

You know, I work at The Washington Post. He owns The Washington Post. I think a lot of people thought that, ‘Oh, he would get access because of that - with his ownership.’ In fact, we treat him the way we treat everybody else and he's a very difficult person. 

He doesn't do a lot of interviews. Blue Origin is very secretive, particularly then. So it took months upon months to get Jeff to sit down with me. In fact, and I tell this story in the book, what I ended up doing was I did a lot of research into Jeff and his fascination with space. I mean, he says now, ‘Space is the most important work I'm doing.’ 

And he's focusing all of his efforts on Blue Origin, his space company. But at the time, he was still the CEO of Amazon. And people didn't even really know anything about Blue Origin. But I knew that space was one of his key passions, from his very early childhood days and the time that he spent with his grandfather. 

And his grandfather - as it turns out, was working for the Atomic Energy Commission in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and was one of the first employees ever over at ARPA, the predecessor to DARPA and he helped stand up that agency.  

And I do believe that Jeff's passion for space and his desire to have his companies AWS and Blue Origin serve in the national interest and to work alongside the government and the Pentagon comes from his grandfather.  

Anyway, in my research about Jeff and his grandfather I had come across a press release, from I believe it was 1961 or 1962 when his grandfather left ARPA to go back to the Atomic Energy Commission and the press release even had a picture of Jeff's grandfather on it. And anyway, he was in Washington, D.C., at some convention, and I kind of buttonholed him. 

And I showed him the press release, which he had never seen. And I said, you know, ‘I'm doing this research. I'm working on this book. I've been trying to interview you. Here's the level of research I'm doing. I'm just trying to impress you.’ And then he finally relented to do it. So that's the story of how I got that interview, but it took months to get it.

07:16 - 07:42 

(MD) Each of those early space entrepreneurs or early space barons had their own dreams and wishes and vision for what they wanted to do. Elon and a multi-planetary species. Bezos and saving the planet. Robert Bigelow wanted space hotels. Richard Branson wanted suborbital tourism. Andy Beal wanted a commercial heavy lift rocket. All of those things ended in very different ways.  

So what is it about either the timing or those individuals, you think, that led to those different outcomes?

  07:43 - 09:58 

(CD) Yeah, and it's interesting. And they do come at it with very different approaches and very different mindsets. But there is a common thread through all of them. And that is to lower the cost of the access to space. I think there was a concern among all of them that the technology in space had not kept up with the advancements in technology that we had seen in computing power, you know, with the internet. 

And we saw so many different aspects of our society make these giant leaps forward that they were witness to and not only witness to, but that each of these quote unquote, “Space Barons” is to a certain degree, helped progress, and that we're part of that. Whether it's with Amazon or Tesla or what have you. They're part of this technology movement and wanting it to move forward. 

But space is so difficult that it requires an enormous amount of capital upfront, which is one part of it. Elon famously funded SpaceX the first four launches with $100 million of his own money. Jeff was self-funding Blue Origin, actually, even to a large extent up until now. And so you needed that immense capital to come in because the barrier to entry is just so high when it comes to space. 

As Jeff says, ‘I could start an internet company because the phone companies had put down the cables that became the internet. There was an invention called the Postal Service that allowed me to deliver books to people's homes. There was this invention called the credit card so that I could take their money.’ That infrastructure was in place. That's not necessarily true in space, so I think what they're trying to do is build the infrastructure.   

The other key part of it is, it was a willingness from the government, from NASA and the Pentagon to say, ‘You know what? We can outsource some of these missions to the private sector.’ 

And today, you know, I think we look at that and it's routine. But back then that was something of a revolutionary change to allow the private sector to step in, in this way and trust them with vital missions that had always been part of the national enterprise that now were being taken over by the private sector and that is a significant paradigm shift that allowed this industry to take off. 

09:59 - 10:30 

(MD) Yeah, I definitely want to come back to that and spend a couple of minutes in a little bit, because as we get beyond “The Space Barons” book and probably into the field of your new endeavor, that becomes more and more important as we come to 2025. 

But back on the individuals. So there's this sort of rivalry, either explicit-implicit, I'm not sure. But everybody sees some of these individuals as in a rivalry.  

Do you think that the rivalry is driving some of their behavior, or is it just that they have these overlapping passions that just end up sort of creating a rivalry? 

10:31 - 11:51 

(CD) I do think there is a rivalry and there has been between all of them. These are fierce competitors who have gone into various industries, whether it's Amazon and taking on booksellers like Barnes and Noble or moving into retail to take on Target and Walmart and K-Mart. Elon with Tesla taking on Detroit. They're fierce competitors.  

What we've seen, however, is a domination of SpaceX lapping Blue Origin. And Elon has said this, that he lamented the fact that for a long time he didn't have a clear rival and was goading Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin to move faster. 

And he was urging Jeff to forget about Amazon. You know, ‘Amazon is set. You need to be focusing on Blue Origin,’ knowing that in the end, that would make SpaceX better to have some competition. I truly believe that. And I think that SpaceX’s success has been something of a roadmap for Blue Origin and for many other companies. 

That A: you can be successful. And B: Here's one way to do it. There's a lot of argument now that SpaceX has maybe gotten too successful, too big, and is there really a broad commercial space industry or is there just SpaceX? That's sort of an interesting dynamic, but I do think in any business like this, there is real, real competition.

11:52 - 12:08 

(MD) Your book takes us inside a Valentine's Day 2006 conference, where some of these eventual Space Barons got together and started talking about what the commercial space industry might look like.  

What are the kinds of things that they were dealing with, and how on-track do you think they were? Now, looking back on that and talking about the right things?  

12:09 - 13:48 

(CD) Yeah, you know, if you look back on it now, you can say like, ‘Oh, well, weren't they prescient? And they saw this coming.’ Because we do have something of a commercial space industry. I mean, I think if the space barons, in a sense, posed a question, I mean: ‘Is there this commercial space industry?’ And I think the next book that I'm working on sort of answers it with a resounding “Yes,” because anytime you put human beings in a commercially owned and operated rocket could say, “Yeah, that's a big deal.” 

You have a proliferation of a real market and a real space economy beyond just the billionaires that to some extent is self-sustaining. Businesses win, businesses some lose. They come and go and there's some continuity of purpose with government being able to rely on them. That's looking at it through the prism of today.  

If you went back to then, I think it's fair to look at them and say, “You guys are nuts. This is never going to happen. Space is so expensive. It's so difficult. It requires such expertise. I mean, getting a rocket to orbit is such an immensely difficult proposition. To think you can do it is - you're either wildly arrogant or you're just incredibly ignorant because you have no idea what you don't know.” And yet, over time, they persisted. 

So I think you go back and you look at that. And there had been previous efforts to build a commercial space industry to move the technology forward. That had all failed. And I think there are a lot of skeptics who say, ‘You're never going to do this, this is always going to be a national enterprise and it's just sort of the one thing the government has to do and has to do exclusively.’ And now we're seeing obviously that change.

13:49 - 14:21 

(MD) You talk about this public-private kind of relationship. Was there people on the government side that you would also highlight that allowed these kinds of things to happen, that were also prescient in: ‘Look, we need to start investing in some of these companies?’ 

And I think of people like Steve Walker at DARPA who gave SpaceX some money to do those first four launches. And then you've got, of course, all the NASA input, which has been huge. But Mike Griffin as the administrator has thrown his weight against it. The different program managers - who are the government people that you would put in this periphery of the space barons? 

14:22 - 16:34 

(CD) Yeah, and you named a few of them. I mean, you know, DARPA looking for innovative technologies, funding SpaceX early on and giving them some seed money. And there were people within NASA these - when I talked to Elon about it, when I interviewed him for “The Space Barons” there were sort of these rebels inside the alliance who was like, ‘You know what? We need to place a bet, at least. Not saying we should turn anything over to the commercial sector, but maybe we give them some seed money to see if they can make it.’ 

And if, you know, you go back again, put yourself in that context in that time where you have two disasters with the space shuttle and the sort of idea that the space shuttle is coming to an end, and we're not going to have any way, the United States government, NASA, is not going to have any way to fly humans anywhere. 

And in fact, we're going to turn that capability over to Russia. This country that we defeated in the Cold War space race to the moon is now going to be flying our astronauts, which nothing symbolizes the concerns about the lack and the complacency in the government enterprise in moving the technology forward, than the fact that NASA couldn't fly astronauts. 

And so I think you saw people within the government saying, ‘We have to try to do something different, even radically different.’ And sort of a step-by-step approach, starting with, “Okay, is it possible that they could fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station? Is that even something we could consider?” And you sort of see that beginning to come up in the Bush administration. 

At the time, you know, you mentioned Mike Griffin. There was this idea like, “Okay, maybe we'll place a few bets to see if they can do that, but there's no way we're going to let them fly astronauts.” I mean, there was sort of a red line there.  

Then you see the commercial sector starting to fly cargo and supplies. It's working. Obama comes in, there's no space shuttle. We're paying Russia $70-80 million a seat for rides to the International Space Station and then they're saying, “Well, maybe we can do that.” 

So it's not something that happened overnight. It was sort of an incremental approach that took place over time and I do think there were individuals within the agencies who saw that happening. And then, of course, companies like SpaceX were proving that they could do it and overcoming enormous skepticism to gain their trust.  

16:35 - 17:00 

(MD) So one of the earliest bits of seed money, and maybe you can't even call it that, but it was the Ansari X Prize and Peter Diamandis, you know, kind of had that concept to create this prize and you can explain it for our listeners.  

But do you think that was necessary? Important? Useful? And would there be room for another X Prize of some sort, do you think, to continue it? It was supposed to be an accelerant for the industry. Do you think it did that?  

17:01 - 18:45 

(CD) Well, so that's such a great question. So the Ansari X Prize is this contest to see if a commercial venture, [with] no government money can send a vehicle to the edge of space and back and do it twice. 

And there were, you know, a lot of stipulations about weight, mass and that sort of thing and it was successful. Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, the famous inventor, aerospace engineer, came up with SpaceShipOne and they won the Ansari X Prize and I think it was heralded as a moment, as a breakthrough, that, “Yes, this can be done.” 

If you go to the Air and Space Museum - you can see this winged space plane that looked like it had no business flying in the air or, you know, it looked like a paraglider. And yet here it was, going to the edge of space and back on these really hair-raising rides that I think recalled bold, ambitious, swashbuckling days of early aviation. 

I mean, these were incredibly dangerous and risky and edge of your seat, pushing the frontier, pushing the technology. And they did it. But did it touch off a greater revolution? I think the answer to that at the time is: “Not really.” It showed it could be done, but even today, we don't have a lot of regular people going to the edge of space like they envisioned. 

We do have space tourism. We do have Virgin Galactic, which is Richard Branson bought the rights from Paul Allen and started Virgin Galactic, which has gone through many iterations and is going through another one now and isn't really flying. Blue Origin is flying, but the cadence isn't very fast. They've done a number of space flights, but they're not flying people on a regular basis. It's enormously expensive. 

So it didn't touch off that revolution that I think a lot of people had hoped it could, but I don't think it was a complete waste. It did show that it could be done, and in that sense helped pave the way for where we are today.  

18:46 – 19:41 

(MD) So I kind of want to zoom out now and just talk more about some of the things we're already touching on the economic relationships between the government and these commercial companies. And I'll go back to my generation considers the Apollo Era was the golden age of space and it was all about the competition, as you already brought up between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on putting a man in space and then putting a man on the surface of the moon. 

And you talk about in the book how the resolution of that competition in the favor of the U.S. ended up driving some complacency, at least on the side of the U.S. government.  

Now, it doesn't feel like we're in a complacent age, right? There's just a ton of activity going on, in fact, two commercial companies put landers on the moon and so with that competition in mind: between governments, between companies. You know, what are the parallels and the differences between then and now in how we’re innovating in space?

19:42 – 21:54 

(CD) Now, that's a great question. And here's one of the things that just jumps out at me, Mike, because I do believe we are in a space race, as we were during the Cold War - really against China. 

China has shown amazing progress. Four for four [on] moon landings. First country to go to the far side of the moon. First country to retrieve samples from the far side of the moon. They have a space station in low-Earth orbit. They've operated a rover on Mars and one of the things people don't realize is there are flags on the moon, and they're not American flags. 

They're Chinese flags. And I say that because obviously during the Apollo era, we planted flags on the moon, but they have been bleached white, according to NASA scientists, by the radiation environment, by the harsh environment of space and being in that vacuum, that they're essentially reduced, maybe even to tatters, but certainly not recognizable as American flags today. 

China has now planted flags. One made out of a composite material designed specifically to withstand the harsh environment of space and to last for years, if not decades. The second flag they put up on the moon during the far side sample return mission, was actually done using an ISRU-like technique, In-Situ Resource Utilization, where you use the resources of the moon. 

And they were able to take a form of volcanic rock basalt, which is, you see a lot of on the moon. They use samples, obviously from Earth, melt it to lava and using that lava extract out these very, very thin threads, let it cool down and then weave the threads into a Chinese flag. 

That, again, is an ISRU technology and is designed to withstand the harsh environment of space. But here's the thing. At least from where I'm sitting, and I may turn the tables and ask you this: to the American public, I think during the Cold War, we all knew we were in a space race with the Soviet Union. We all knew about Sputnik. We all knew about Kennedy's charge.  

It just doesn't seem to me that it resonates that we're in this great power competition with China in space and it's not just civil space, but clearly national security space. And I’m just sort of curious from your perspective, you know, why isn't it resonating and what are the stakes for that? 

21:55 - 24:29 

(MD) Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. It doesn't get the kind of publicity that it got. There's a million other things that the populations are worried about, now. It's not really that bipolar world, it’s more multipolar and all the complexities that come with that.  

And the other thing is that a lot of the things that we do in space are information, right? It's ones and zeros. You don't see it all the time and where Elara Nova sits - our wheelhouse is the national security business and we understand probably more so than the general public of just how integrated space is into everyday life and the danger that comes with anyone who wants to interfere with those activities in space would interfere with everyday life. 

It would readily become apparent if things started to happen in space that were against our interests, and because of some of the things that have been going on that we've been talking about: the lowering the barrier of entry, technologies are getting smaller, you can put better things in smaller packages. It's really allowed lots of countries now to become space-faring countries. 

China has obviously had the most resources to put to bear here, and they've created the ability to interfere with the things that the U.S. will do in space for the civil economy and for national security. So we worry a lot about our forces who are deployed all around the world suddenly being exposed to vulnerabilities that the Chinese can create by nefarious action in space. 

And really, that's why, the first Trump administration created a United States Space Force is to begin to address that competition in the national security arena to make sure that we could continue to do what we need to do in space, and that if the day comes, we could disrupt what others might try to do to us in space that will affect, again, not only our forces, but all of the economy, not just for the U.S., but around the world.  

The interesting thing with China is because they're doing so much in space, they're also becoming somewhat dependent on that domain. And you hope there's a bit of an understanding that we really don't want to do something in space because it's going to affect everybody equally. Now, more equally than probably in the past. 

So let's go back to this idea of investing, putting investments in space. And you talked about [the] Commercial Orbital Transportation System - 2006. And now NASA has really upped their game, right? There's commercial payload services, commercial cargo, commercial LEO destinations. They're talking about doing a Mars return with commercial ideas.  

NASA is kind of all in here. 

Is that good? Is that bad? Is it tilting this the economics of the market at all in ways that we should pay attention to?

24:30 – 27:22 

(CD) Yeah, no. It's such a fascinating evolution, and it shows the depth of this conversation that takes us from those early days of COTS and cargo delivery and then saying, “Okay, they can do that. Maybe they can fly astronauts to the space station. Okay, well, maybe they can fly astronauts to the space station. Maybe the commercial sector - they should be the ones who build the spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon and to build the uncrewed spacecraft to do the scouting missions under the Eclipse program to go to the moon. And maybe they should even build the spacesuits that the astronauts are going to wear on the moon.” 

And so you're seeing the enterprise go, and it's allowed, I think, of what Thomas Zurbuchen, who was the head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate when Eclipse was born, saying ‘The commercial sector can move faster. NASA will make a relatively small investment. They can maybe get other businesses investing in them, wanting to do science, wanting to send payloads to the lunar surface that help subsidize the cost that allows NASA to quote ‘Take shots on goal.’”  

But some of those are going to miss. And you think of a national mission, and you're going to put in a lot of work and a lot of costs and a lot of time to make sure that it works.  

Well, that's not the way the commercial sector works. They're going to move faster, they're going to experiment, and they're going to fail and you have to wonder if they fail. What is the tolerance for that?  

And we've now seen a company like Astrobotic didn't quite reach the lunar surface. Intuitive Machines got there a year ago, first successful landing since the end of the Apollo era of an American spacecraft. First commercial spacecraft to reach the lunar surface. But it wasn't a perfect landing. A leg broke. It ended up on its side. They tried again earlier this year. Again, it looks like they went into a crater. Maybe they toppled over. [They] were able to operate for a little bit. I mean, they reached the surface but [it] wasn't perfect. So there is a trade-off there and that might be okay with experimenting on an uncrewed vehicle. 

But when you talk about astronauts on-board, or if you even talk about the cargo and supplies that have to go up and service those astronauts, you need success. And you need that to be reliable. And you know, even SpaceX, which is the leader in all of this, recently has had some problems with the Falcon-9, even some concerns about Dragon recently. Starship, the last two flights, the ship has come apart and you know there's no emergency abort system with Starship the way there is with the Falcon-9 and Dragon. 

So I think people look at this success and they want to cheer it and, “Rah rah, way to go, American innovation.” But there have been some setbacks, and you are wondering what the appetite and what the right balance is supposed to be between government and between the private sector, and what sort of oversight should there be? And I'm sure there are a lot of people a lot smarter than me who can figure that out. For sure.

27:22 – 27:44 

(MD) Yeah, and I think you're right. It's those challenges are interspersed with successes, right? So Firefly got their [system] upright? They'll get a whole lunar day of science and so that's a win.  

So it's a balance, as you rightfully say, of how much risk are we willing to take? How much failure is fine because you're failing forward and you're continuing to make progress, right? 

27:45 – 28:11 

(CD) Right, and let's be clear. I mean, those failures, we use the term failure. But failure is actually a very positive term, particularly if you learn something and you get better and that you're failing in a test environment, in a real world environment, in the vacuum in space, and you're going to learn about the technology and the engineering in ways you just cannot learn when you're on the ground doing simulations and so they will get better.  They have gotten better, and they've shown enormous progress. 

28:12 – 29:15 

(MD) You know, I'll say on the national security side, it's been a little bit slower on the uptake in terms of the big investments in commercial. You mentioned launch services? Got it. That one's pretty well set just because of the frequency and now it's very reliable.  

But it's been nascent in other areas. You know everybody the Department of Defense talked about wanting to harness more commercial, but you know the remit for national security is you can't fail in ways that are going to have catastrophic implications for either our forces or our objectives overseas and domestically. 

So it's been a little bit my opinion, Mike’s opinion, has been a little bit tepid. I think actually, the leader here is the National Reconnaissance Office, who have been buying some of the commercial imagery and other types of products from space companies.  

The Space Force has some, again some of their own nascent ideas about how to bring commercial in. But the level of investment isn't like what NASA has in terms of really sending a signal to the market that says, ‘If you build it, we will buy it.’ And we're kind of not there yet. So I think that debate on the national security side is going to continue to unfold. 

29:16 – 29:32 

(CD) Yeah. Well, actually I'm curious about that. And if I could turn the tables just one more time, I'm curious why you think that is? Is it because the culture at the Pentagon is just more entrenched, that there weren't those like, quote unquote, “rebels” that we saw at NASA early on, or it's just a bigger bureaucracy. 

I mean, why do you think it hasn't taken hold that way?  

29:33 – 31:42 

(MD) It's certainly the culture is a huge part of it. And the culture being a couple of things: one is the requirements that the government has are a lot of times not tightly aligned with commercial market objectives, right? So the Department of Defense needs things that don't have its own commercial markets. So maybe we have to do those things ourselves, is what the question is. 

And this idea of control when things are really getting bad, when countries are fighting with each other, when potentially economies are colliding with each other, right? In a big conflict like that, will the commercial companies still stand by their contract? I’ve seen no indication that that wouldn't be the case, but those are some of the control issues. When you're with the military, you want control on all parts of your system.  

Now we do other things with commercial within the Department of Defense - that we buy vehicles that come off of commercial product lines. We buy services in a lot of places but the closer you get to the actual combat itself, it just gets a little more dicey from a cultural perspective of how much you want to have within your own control, and how much you want to have in a contractual relationship with another entity? 

Certainly, the industry builds everything that the military has, so it's really about that contractual relationship and who ends up owning and operating the end product at the end? So I think there'll be more, but I don't think it's going to be as robust as some of the civil activities that we see going on.  

So, Christian, let's talk about where the money come from. The Space Barons had money, right? They created companies, became billionaires and then were allowed to channel that money into their space dreams. Then you went into a world where a lot of these smaller companies tried to come in and be part of this market. 

They were mostly venture capital funded, so they were probably giving up a bunch of equity in the company for single millions and tens of millions of dollars. We went through this unfortunate period in 2021 of SPACs that were really more about the bankers making money for the bankers and not doing well by the companies. 

That sort of flushed out now and now we're seeing a maturation in those capital markets where becoming more private equity, institutional investors and even now, banks getting into debt financing for companies that have good revenue. So how do you see that as part of this overall space economy and moving forward? 

31:43 – 33:00 

(CD) Yeah, I mean, I think early on it was that old adage, you know, the quickest way to become a millionaire in a space business was to start out as a billionaire. 

And you did see a lot of ebbs and flows. And it has matured. And that's in large part because they see the way the government, NASA and to a lesser degree, the Pentagon, is investing in these companies and relying on them and providing a real service so that there is sort of a backbone for these companies. 

And, you know, there's that other leg of the stool that the companies have shown the capabilities to be able to do it, which gives, I think, the markets a lot more confidence. I mean, I think initially, you know, space investment was for hobbyists, it was for enthusiasts. Now it's become much more mainstream. Is it still incredibly risky? Yeah, I think it is. 

But I think it's the upsides can be really high, particularly if the Pentagon gets involved, and particularly if these companies can dramatically lower the cost of access to space. And then you begin seeing what Jeff Bezos calls the ‘unleashing of an economic dynamism,’ like what he saw with the internet that allowed companies like Amazon to flourish, that there's going to be a next wave of space companies building on top of the infrastructure that's already there to do things like in-space resource utilization, mining, those sorts of things. 

33:01 - 33:38 

(MD) Let’s dig a little bit into the infrastructure piece. I mean, you’re right. Jeff Bezos has his story about: Amazon worked because the internet existed, because there were roads to everyone’s houses, there was a Postal Service that he could ship through, a payment system where people could sit on the couch and pay for merchandise. So now, if you think of infrastructure in the area of space, certainly launch, that's got to be first. You have to have launch to be able to get to orbit. But there are probably other things that will help further unleash the space economy.  

What do you think those items are, and what kind of services could commercial market bring to create infrastructure that then all of a sudden makes it easy for everybody else?

33:39 - 35:45 

(CD) Yeah. I mean, I think and I'm guilty of this. A lot of us in the space press corps, we focus on launch. We focus on the rockets, we focus on the astronauts and we focus on the billionaires, too. But there's a whole subset of issues that don't get enough attention that are vital. 

And those are the technologies that we're going to need to create a self-sustaining economy in space and a permanent presence in space. That's power generation, transportation, habitation, mining, all of those technologies: solar cells, nuclear power, being able to get around. And I don't think we see a lot of government investment into that and I don't know that even we see a lot of private sector investment. 

And that, I think could be a hiccup at some point down the road. I mean, I think Blue Origin is focusing on that perhaps more than others. I mean, there is a story in the new book, “Rocket Dreams,” I actually visited. They have a secret laboratory outside of Los Angeles where they're working to melt the lunar regolith, the moon dirt, and turn it into solar cells. If that technology can be achieved, that would really be amazing and help unleash all the other sorts of things that you see in space and have those technologies. 

The other one, from a civil point of view, is, I think, back to a time where I visited General Purdy when he was at the 45th Space Wing down in Cape Canaveral. And he said something to me that always resonated with me. And that was, for the first 50 or 60 years of the space age, we were focused on getting to space, perfecting the way of building the rockets and the spacecraft that could get us to orbit. 

Now, for the most part, that's a soft problem, and what we're focusing on now is being able to get through space, being able to change orbits, to move around, to go from one place to another, to point A to point B, service satellites, do reconnaissance, do all sorts of things in space that are very difficult, but that I think opens up a lot of possibilities, as well. 

And when he said that, the light bulb kind of went off in my head to sort of think about where we're going in the future and what are the technologies that are going to be needed going forward. 

35:46 - 36:31 

(MD) Even the infrastructure we have in orbit today that allows you to communicate to the Earth and, and navigate because GPS signals are floating through space. But you get out to the moon. You don't even have those basic things. So the companies were talking about Astrobotics, Intuitive Machines, Firefly, have to bring their own infrastructure to communicate all the way back to Earth. You know, that adds weight, and it takes away from the things that they'd really like to be doing on the surface of the moon. 

So yeah, having a communications infrastructure, navigation and timing infrastructure around the moon. All that could unleash that particular part of the space economy too, so really fascinating to think about. I’d add one more - regulatory environment for doing commerce in space, right? 

And having space hotels and doing all the other things. That's going to have to advance quite a bit, too. I don’t know if you had thoughts there? 

36:32 – 37:07 

(CD) Yeah. I mean, I always look back. There's a law passed in 2015 signed by President Obama that gives companies the right to the resources they mine on the moon or other celestial bodies, which I thought was an interesting breakthrough. It will be interesting when that's tested. 

And then you talk about the regulatory regime, too. I mean, I immediately started thinking about space debris and just all of the stuff that's up in space, too, that it's space is vast, a lot of real estate up there, but it's increasingly becoming congested. But I do think in a lot of ways the technology is outpacing the regulation. 

37:08 – 38:04 

(MD) The individuals we're talking about have for 20 years, you know, decades have been sort of focused on what their end objective was, be that Bezos or Musk, Richard Branson, I mean, they've all been just plugging away for 20 years making this thing happen. 

The government, talk about the government again, isn't quite as good as staying the course. So President Obama in 2008 canceled the Constellation program. And that was kind of one of the things that said, “Well, I guess we're going to have to push more money forward into the commercial market to help get our work done without that government-owned and operated program.” 

We seem to be maybe at that point, again, with Artemis, lots of money going into Artemis, long schedules that seemingly are always delayed. 

You know, what would be the implications of making changes to that? And compare that alongside with these space barons who have been taking the long view for decades and slowly getting to where they want to be. Not as fast as they've talked about or wanted to in the beginning, but they're getting there.  

38:05 - 40:21 

(CD) Yeah. I mean, so it's a great question again, and I think it depends on sort of the context: and when you cancel Constellation, you know, there was this glimmer of hope that the commercial sector would be there, would be able to fill in the gaps and maybe take over. Now, fast forward to where we are today, and you see that. You see the Falcon-9 launching what? You know, 100 times last year, going from well over a hundred times this year. 

You know, Blue Origin finally got New Glenn off the ground. ULA with Vulcan flying. You're seeing [from] a launch perspective, a lot more advancements. Starship had a couple of recent setbacks, but on the other hand, they're now catching the booster with some frequency. So a lot of people have been concerned about today's Constellation would be, right, the Space Launch System rocket, potentially Orion, which NASA has invested many billions of dollars in. Together they’ve flown one time.  

The GAO has said the cost is about $2 billion per launch. SLS is not a reusable rocket, relies on the RS-25 engines, which were used during the Space Shuttle [and] developed in the 1970s. But today you could see if SLS went away, and I do think people are starting to come around to the fact that SLS’ days may be numbered, I don't think it's going to be canceled tomorrow. 

I think they've already built it and paid for a number of these rockets. So you could see the Artemis II mission to launch a crew around the Moon on the Orion, potentially even Artemis III going on SLS in the ‘26-’27 timeframe. Then by then do you have some of these alternatives online, and not just online, but online in a way that they are, as we talked about earlier, safe, reliable?  

[You can] really can put humans on, have proven themselves. You have complete control over them, complete faith in them. You know, I think we might be closer to that. I mean, I thought it was eye-opening when someone like Scott Pace, who was the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President Trump in the first administration and a long proponent of SLS, said something to the effect of, ‘We need an off-ramp for SLS.’ When even he is saying something. I think maybe the writing is on the wall to a certain extent there.

40:22 – 41:13 

(MD) Yeah, just even if the means change, staying committed to the ends, you know, ends, ways and means I think is important. And NASA’s just been kind of jerked around back and forth over the years as administrations change and budgets change. 

But I think having a goal and if we're able to bring in other technologies and commercial actors to help achieve that goal - that's great. But maybe we should stick to the goal and be in it for the long term.  

So I'm going to give you a softball question here in “Space Barons,” you structured space barons in - there are three sections of the book. 

And you had a one word title for each section. And they were “Impossible, Improbable, and Inevitable.”  

So they seem to be three great words, you know, how did you come up with that? And now I'm looking forward to the new book. And what is the era between 2018 and 2025? What's one or two words you'd use to describe the recent history?

41:14 - 43:31 

(CD) Yeah, I'm glad you caught on to that. I do think those three words encompass the narrative of the book, but also the journey of space exploration in the commercial space sector. Like, it's never going to happen. Well, maybe it will. And yeah, it's happening. And as I said earlier, “The Space Barons,” I think, poses this question like, ‘Is this really going to happen? Is it really inevitable?’ And this book, the next one, Rocket Dreams, answers that with, “Yes.” And you're sort of seeing it take over.  

And so the new book is also broken up into three sections that sort of gets to that in a symbolic way: Earth, and then going to orbit and then going to the moon and beyond. That, you're sort of on the ground, and then you're going with people and extending this public-private partnership to low-Earth orbit with COTS, with astronauts, and then applying that with Artemis, building the landers and spacecraft that are going to go to the moon and beyond. 

There's a lot of questions now: Are we going to the moon? Are we going to Mars? And these books have to sort of end on ideas, not events. And here I am trying to finish up a book that's going to come out later this fall and position it for there, and where are we going to be? And in some ways the destination, while important, doesn't matter as much as the means of ascent. 

And what I mean by that is the technologies that we have to be able to get to the moon, to get to low-Earth orbit or to get to Mars. And if we have a New Glenn, if we have Dragon, if we have Starship, if we have Neutron from Rocket Lab, if we have Vulcan, and we have Firefly and Astrobotic and all these companies, Intuitive Machines, building these technologies, then it's like, are we going to the moon or Mars or low-Earth orbit? 

And then the answer becomes, “Yes, yes we are.” And we can go to all of those because we've built technologies that can go to all those. So that’s sort of the structure that I'm building here is building on that platform that we saw at the end of Space Barons, building through to go to low-Earth orbit and extending that out to the moon and to beyond, and not just on a civil space program, too. 

We tend to be so focused on big rockets and astronauts and all of that. But I think the national security space enterprise is incredibly important, as well. And you're seeing much more of that as we've obviously talked about.  

43:32 - 44:28 

(MD) I'm struck by the fact that we've been talking here for about an hour now. And we don't have real solid answers, right? We have questions and observations and certainly progress. And frankly, that's probably what makes this business so exciting is there's continued forward motion. Every once in a while, a backward step, but a really exciting time to be part of the space industry to be, I'm sure from your end, writing about the space industry and being in the middle of it in that way. 

Christian, it's been a really fun conversation on a topic that continues to inspire and fascinate so many people. And it's not only those of us who are close to the industry, but this whole new generation of space enthusiasts, who I expect they're going to continue to make the impossible, inevitable. And I, for one, am excited to get my own copy of “Rocket Dreams,” as soon as it comes out. I hope you'll come back on the Elara Edge to talk about it. 

And let me thank you again for coming on. And please, you take the last word.  

44:29 - 44:44 

(CD) Well, thanks for having me. It's a real honor. I’d absolutely come back to talk about “Rocket Dreams.” And it's fun to follow, you know, all of the work that you all are doing there. And I'm going to be calling you when I put my hat on for my day job at The Washington Post, for sure. But again, it's a real privilege and an honor. So thank you.

44:45 - 45:29 

(SK) This has been the inaugural episode of “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series presented by “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.