From NASA to the Pentagon, Commercial Space Takes Center Stage in “Rocket Dreams"

Welcome back to another episode of "The Elara Epilogues," a special edition series by "The Elara Edge" podcast, where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors 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 once again joined by Christian Davenport, the former staff writer for The Washington Post and current CBS News Contributor. Together, they'll discuss Christian's 2025 book Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race. The book catalogues the commercial dynamics and geopolitical tensions underpinning the modern day space race to return to the moon. 

Christian was previously on the show to discuss his 2018 book The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, which explored the foundation of today's commercial space industry through the lens of the billionaires who founded - and funded - their own space companies at its outset. You can listen to that conversation, held in April 2024, here.

"The Elara Edge" is hosted and produced by Scott King of Elara Nova. 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, Strategic Communications Manager, Elara Nova (SK) 

Host: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner, Elara Nova (MD) 

SME: Christian Davenport, Author, Rocket Dreams (CD) 

00:02 - 01:30 

(SK): When the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after their record-setting mission around the moon - America was watching. Just over 27 million peopleacross the nation’s largest television networks tuned in to follow their re-entry.  While the Artemis II mission was a precursor to America’s actual return to landing on the moon – it was aptly timed for Christian Davenport’s new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, which chronicles the commercial dynamics and geopolitical tensions defining the modern day space race against China. 

Welcome to “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series of The Elara Edge podcast where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors join Elara Nova partners to discuss their published work covering today’s ever-evolving space environment. Founding Partner Mike Dickey, the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force, is returning to the host seat today.  

Mike will be joined by Christian Davenport, the former Washington Post reporter and author of the 2025 book Rocket Dreams. Together, they’ll discuss how Rocket Dreams continues the storyline from Christian’s 2018 book The Space Barons, which we previously covered in the inaugural episode of “The Elara Epilogues.” A link to that conversation will be in the show notes.  

And on one additional note for our audience, this podcast was recorded prior to the SpaceX IPO. 

Thank you for joining us and onto the show… 

01:31 - 01:34 

(MD): Okay. Christian first, welcome back to the Elara Edge. 

01:35 - 01:38 

(CD): Hey, it's so good to be back. Thanks for having me back a second time. I really appreciate it.  

01:39 - 01:53 

(MD): Yeah, that first time was over a year ago. And we were talking about Space Barons, which was your first space book. And in this interim period, it's been long enough for you to have written and released another book, Rocket Dreams. 

I think September of 2025. Is that about right?  

01:54 - 02:48 

(CD): Yeah, that's right. Rocket Dreams came out late last year. It's something of a sequel of sorts to The Space Barons. I mean, the Space Barons, as you might remember, covered the early days of the commercial space industry. Elon and SpaceX and Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson and Paul Allen and you know, Mike, after that book came out in 2018, I thought at some point there would be enough material for another book. 

I just didn't realize it would be within seven years or so. I thought it would be at least a decade. But there's so much going on in this little industry of ours, and it's moving so quickly that I looked up, called my agent. I said, ‘Hey, I think we have enough here for another book, because so much has happened and Rocket Dreams came out - and it comes out right before the Artemis II mission. And it seems like before too long there might be enough material for a third, so we'll see.

02:49 - 02:59 

(MD): No, that's right, it is definitely a dynamic time in this business. It's not your first series of books that you wrote. Your first book was not about space. Can you maybe tell? I think our audience would like to hear about what you did there. 

03:00 - 04:29 

(CD): Yeah. So that was a book called ‘As You Were: To War and Back with the Blackhawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard. And, you know, at the time, I was a metro reporter at the Washington Post after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I was watching citizen soldiers, you know, service members from the reserve component, you know, the guard and reserve being called up in extraordinary numbers. 

We're talking about firefighters and police officers and teachers and paramedics. And I was watching this strain that was putting on local counties and municipalities having so much of their workforce deploy. And we have big Pentagon reporters who were covering that. And we had reporters who were embedded with the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne and some of the big Marine units. 

And I was looking at it and was curious about the reserve component. So I embedded in Iraq with a unit from Virginia, they were a Blackhawk unit, and then toward the end of their tour and then came home with them and wanted to be sort of the first reporter to embed on the home front and to watch them transition back from being - we were in Anbar province at al-Asad Air Base - and then you process out through Fort Dix in New Jersey, and then the next day you're civilian again and you're not at some big Army base like Fort Campbell. 

They're just home and trying to resume their lives again after just leaving Iraq. And so I wrote about that experience, which it was very rewarding. I'm still in touch with a lot of those soldiers to this day. 

04:30 - 04:36 

(MD): Oh, I bet. I mean intensely personal and not an easy ‘I'll just jump back in and do my day job right.’ 

It's not an easy transition psychologically.  

04:37 - 05:29 

(CD): No. And I wanted to highlight that particular sacrifice. And then also one of the bigger themes is the role of the citizen soldier. I mean, that goes back to the Revolutionary War and the citizen-based militia and the National Guard being part of the country's fabric. And, you know, the 29th Infantry Division, which is the unit I was embedded with, fell under the 29th ID. 

And those units stormed the beaches of Normandy at D-Day. And we got away with that because they didn't call up the guard and reserve during Vietnam, which was already a very unpopular war. And they had the draft. And then we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, and without the draft, they kind of needed the guard and reserve component. And at the time, people remembering Vietnam was kind of like, hey, what's going on? Why are we relying on these citizen soldiers so much? And the fact of the matter is that's the way the founders actually created it. So it was done on purpose.

05:30 - 05:54 

(MD): Awesome. So then you go to the business desk, your financial desk at the post, right? And this is where you end up kind of getting into this space business. And so now you write Space Barons. You are a consulting producer on two TV shows, one of which won an Emmy. 

Congratulations on that. Not too many authors win Emmys. And then Rocket Dreams? So I personally am not a medical professional, but I think you have caught the space bug. So what gets you excited about this topic?

05:55 - 07:14 

(CD): It's funny that, you know, I've covered the military. I had done a stint in covering politics and editing and the space thing really just grabbed me from the moment, the way it just does. 

And I use this quote, it's a Jeff Bezos quote, and I use it with my kids. And I say, “You don't pick your passions, your passions pick you. But you have to have your antenna up.” And, you know, I didn't grow up a big space fan. I was born in 1973. So after the Apollo program, I don't think I was riveted too much by the shuttle. 

Actually, my first space memory is Challenger exploding, and so I didn't grow up a space nerd. But started watching what was happening in the commercial sector, and rockets that would fly to space and then fly back to Earth and land, and the space baron billionaires getting into it and the rivalries and just how NASA was changing and relying on these companies. 

And I thought, ‘You know, there's something really here.’ And as a journalist, they say that old adage, ‘Follow the money.’ And I thought if the richest people in the world were putting their money into this, we should be paying attention to it. And it's just really grown and expanded to the point where you have room for not just one book, The Space Barons, but now this other one, Rocket Dreams. 

And of course, others have written books as well. And we've seen, you know, a little bit of a boom in that, and it's spreading now into national security space is something that's become very, very important.  

07:15 - 08:06 

(MD): Yeah, no doubt this is where Elara Nova has at its roots is continuing to mature space security on a U.S. and a global scale. 

So if we go back to Space Barons and to our listeners who haven't done their preparatory homework for this podcast, you should go back and listen to that podcast, in April last year, we talked about it. But Space Barons introduced us to four billionaires who all wanted in some way to drive a space agenda, really for their own reasons. 

Right? It wasn't all the same. They all had their individual motivations. But now we get into Rocket Dreams, and it looks like it's come down to a two person or two company race. Blue Origin and SpaceX, Bezos and Musk. And so 2018 is where the book starts. And there's been sort of a lot of hype, but maybe not a tremendous amount of progress. 

So take us back to the start of the book and where we are at that point. And then what are some of the arcs in the story as you go through Rocket Dreams?

08:07 - 11:44 

(CD): Yeah, so I think the Space Barons, you know, which covered the early days of the commercial space industry and their interaction with NASA, I think it posed a question. 

The question was, you know, ‘is this sort of commercial paradigm for real?’ The public private partnerships that NASA was using — is this a viable industry? Is this going to have any kind of growth, or is it a flash in the pan? And the answer comes in Rocket Dreams and it's clearly a yes. And you can see that manifested in the fact that you are putting astronauts on rockets and spacecraft that are owned and operated by the private sector and not by the government, then that's a big deal. 

And NASA is obviously outsourcing human spaceflight to the commercial space sector. You've seen the growth of space tourism. We've seen a proliferation of the space industry beyond just the Space Barons. I mean, I focus on Blue Origin and SpaceX, but there's a proliferation of that. And then third, what you see carrying through the theme of Rocket Dreams is, for the first time, NASA really having some momentum of building the Artemis program to return to the moon and having that program survive subsequent presidential administrations. 

And we haven't had that since Apollo. We haven't had a deep space human exploration campaign survive one administration to the next since the Apollo era. And so I tell a lot of that story here in Rocket Dreams. But yes, we revisit SpaceX and Blue Origin, aligning themselves to move forward with NASA on this moon program. And that's where the story begins. 

It begins with the transition team. President Trump has just won the election, and he is meeting with various companies. And they're telling them, ‘Hey, we want to go to the moon. And what can you do to help us go to the moon?’ And Blue Origin, which had been left behind SpaceX, had moved so far ahead and Jeff Bezos tells his team like, ‘Hey, we need to compete. 

Everything SpaceX goes after, we're going to go after.’ And so as Blue Origin's executives are meeting with the Trump transition team and they're saying, ‘We want to go back to the moon,’ they say, ‘Okay, well, we've just landed our suborbital space tourism rocket, New Shepard, in the West Texas desert. And well, we can build something like that and land it on the moon. 

And the executives, they completely made it up. They did not have a moon program. They did not have a lunar lander. But they knew that Bezos and the leadership really wanted to align themselves with NASA and start winning government contracts, start bringing real revenue. So they make that pitch to NASA, and then they have to go back and tell their boss. 

At the time, it was Rob Meyerson, the president of Blue Origin, ‘Hey, you're not going to believe what we just did. We just pitched NASA on a lunar lander.’ Rob calls Bezos and says, ‘You're not going to believe what the guys just did.’ And Bezos loved it and went all in, even helping write the proposal for a lunar lander himself and then pitching it himself. 

And so you see that the lunar lander competition is sort of the central tension, I think, of the narrative, because of course, SpaceX bids on it as well. Everyone thought Blue Origin was going to win this contract, but they ended up losing it to SpaceX. But it really brings us to today, where now they're opening it back up in this competition, and we're seeing them compete. 

So the book really sets that up. And there of course, some subthemes about it with this space race with China and the role of NASA and others. But I think that's sort of the general arc of the story. 

11:45 - 12:30 

(MD): So let's pull on the NASA thread a little bit, because that culture has had to evolve a lot. And a lot of the agency's energy in the human spaceflight program. They have people living and working in space on the International Space Station 24/7, 365 and getting resupply and crew back and forth, obviously, was their focus for many years. 

And now they find themselves sort of pushed by these companies instead of the government pulling and wanting to do things. These companies want to do things bigger. They want to do things faster. And so how do you see the evolution of the cultural piece of NASA and their willingness to embrace the private sector influence?  

There's a great story in the book about the astronauts. They want a stick, they want to fly the spacecraft, and they don't get a stick because it's a private enterprise. So tell us about that.  

12:31 - 15:55 

(CD): Yeah. No. And that's the story I was going to tell that here's Elon and SpaceX trying to build a more futuristic spacecraft. And there's no stick, which a lot of the astronauts that NASA has are former fighter jet pilots. 

They fly with the stick. Boeing, the other contractor that had the contract to fly humans to the ISS, their Starliner spacecraft had a stick. The lunar lander that Neil Armstrong piloted down to the lunar surface had a stick. And on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, there's  mostly it's done by touch screen. 

And the very first time the astronauts went to SpaceX headquarters to fly it in a simulator and they're flying it on the touchscreen, it did not go well. I mean, the software, it was sort of the first generation, and it wasn't working very well and all but one of the astronauts crashed in the simulator. They crashed into the ISS. 

So a little bit of an ego blow there. And they turn around and they're complaining to Garrett Riesman, who is a former NASA astronaut who at the time was working at SpaceX, and they're telling him, like, ‘Hey, this doesn't work, and you got to get it better.’ But over time, the SpaceX engineers just kept working on the software, and they went to 2.0 and 3.0, 4.0 and took all the input from the astronauts, and it just got better over time. 

And the astronauts just got more comfortable flying that way. And it worked. I mean, because the whole idea is that you don't have to have all the skills to fly on a fighter jet that everyday people should be going to space.  

The other story I'll tell real quick about NASA and the relationship with particular space and the commercial space sector was here SpaceX is vying for the contract, a very prestigious contract, to fly NASA's astronauts to the International Space Station. And NASA goes to SpaceX and said ‘you're going to dock your spacecraft on our space station, our $100 billion space station. They're six people living there at any time. We don't want you crashing into it. We want you to have a nice, soft park and docking. 

We built the docking system. We've tested it. It's robust. It works. We're going to give it to you for free. Just bolt it onto your spacecraft. And please use that.’  

And there's a young engineer whose job at SpaceX was to review it. And he takes one look at it and it's like, ‘Yeah, it's actually not that great.’ It's pretty heavy. 

There are these six mechanical arms. Each one has their own motor. Each one has their own software system. It's heavy. You got six individual points of failure. He built something much simpler using springs. He actually used the springs in the prototype from the shocks of a mountain bike. And they called it the M(CD)ocker. And it's pretty rudimentary and simple. 

And his boss loved it and immediately took it to Elon. And Elon studied it for a little bit, asked some questions. It was like, ‘Yeah, do this instead.’ And so now this poor young engineer has to turn around and tell NASA, ‘Yeah, hey, that docking system that you wanted us to use to dock to your space station. Yeah, we're not going to use it. We're going to reject it.’ And had to overcome their skepticism.  

And it was that more than skepticism. I mean, there I think their frustration and anger and say, ‘Why would you not do this? And you remember SpaceX had not yet even won the competition.’ And, ‘Oh, by the way,’ they were going up against Boeing, which was the big legacy contractor. But again, over time they were able to show that their system worked. It was reliable and won them over.

15:56 - 16:24 

(MD): So, at this time, the first NASA administrator that President Trump picks is Jim Bridenstine and you talk about him quite a bit, too, because, you know, he's the first politician to take over the helm, and a lot of people had some concerns about that. 

But to your point about maintaining some sort of thread of continuity and being able to move forward and then being able to message in and tell the story about why this is important and then ultimately to embrace this continued move towards the commercial world. It seems like he had a real steadying influence there. Is that your outcome?  

16:25 - 18:19 

(CD): Yeah, he did and he was interesting for a couple of reasons, because, like me, his first memory of space was Challenger and imagine he's the NASA administrator during the Commercial Crew program, where SpaceX now is at the point where they're going to fly astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. So this is a very big moment. 

President Trump goes to the launch. Vice President Pence is there. The pressure is on and all Jim Bridenstine can think is ‘What happens if something goes wrong.’ And so for the first part, he actually goes out of his way to hold SpaceX and Elon Musk accountable and really is concerned about the parachutes. He’s concerned about problems they had with their abort system. 

They had a spacecraft blow up, and he ordered a safety review of SpaceX. And he did try to treat them with respect. but also to hold them accountable. And then with respect to the Artemis program: here, he knows that George W Bush says ‘We're going to the moon.’ 

Obama comes in and says, ‘Oh yeah, the moon. We've been there, done that. We're going to go to an asteroid. We're going to go to Mars.’ And then Trump comes and says, ‘No, no, we're going back to the moon’. And the metaphor he used was like Lucy and the football. That every time we get it, we pull the football away and there's no momentum and we can never get a clear shot. 

So he wanted to create a program that, even if a Democrat was elected, would survive. And he did that by numerous reasons. But creating the Artemis Accords and bringing in international partners and making it so much harder for any other subsequent presidential administration to kill it, and really casting this as a space race between the United States and China. So there's a geopolitical influence in there as well.  

18:20 - 18:52 

(MD): So the book also briefly introduces us to a new billionaire, Jared Isaacman, Shift4 and, you know, makes it his own pile of money and buys from SpaceX a couple of commercial astronaut missions. 

The first time that's ever been done. Inspiration Four and then Polaris Dawn a few years later. And now we find that he's a NASA administrator. So how does his presence on the scene influence all of this, to have him come from that sort of dynamic Silicon Valley type of world that the rest of the gang does and now be in charge of this government bureaucracy that's taking us back to the moon? 

18:53 - 20:49 

(CD): Yeah. And I think you see, in some ways, a lot of similarities between Jim Bridenstine and Jared Isaacman. I mean, they're both great speakers. They do a lot of interviews, a lot of media that are out there really telling the story of NASA, telling the story of Artemis, telling the story of the next space age, and just very good at that. 

But you may remember that it was a little bit of a rocky road for Jared at first because he was nominated, then because of his ties to SpaceX chartering those two private astronaut missions. He sort of was collateral damage when Trump and Elon had their breakup. And then he lost it and then he came back. But he's had a huge impact. 

And, you know, I'm grateful for him. I joked to him a few months ago that what NASA has done was a great set up for the book because initially SpaceX won that moon lander competition, which is such a prominent scene and storyline in the book, and then they beat out Blue Origin. But then, because of concerns about SpaceX's timeline with their vehicle Starship, they opened it back up so that the Blue Origin can compete, and it's just sort of the book sets that up so perfectly, but I think he's a great champion for NASA and has a lot of credibility and has been able to win over people on both sides of the aisle, which I think is really important now.  

And you see it that space has always been not just bipartisan but nonpartisan. And I thought it was very telling that from Trump. 1.0, into Biden. President Biden lay waste to so many of Trump's programs and policies, except for two and then the Artemis program and the Space Force, because they were able to see the importance of those programs. 

And now they've continued, obviously, under President Trump again, and they're putting an emphasis on getting Artemis. The dates have slipped, but has had some momentum in the sustained focus from the White House ever since the first Trump administration.

20:48 - 21:16 

(MD): So, Chris, I'm sure like you, I was glued to the TV during the Artemis launch and the landing and many hours in between as they swung by the moon and I was getting texts from family and friends that don't pay attention to this stuff normally. 

And it's obviously sparked excitement in the public about space, again. There is some attention span issues sometimes with the American public. Do we have staying power this time and will this help accelerate the efforts?

21:15 - 22:47 

(CD): No. It's such a great question. And I would say, first off, that NASA was so smart in who they picked for the Artemis II crew. 

That was an all star crew. I mean, they're all good on TV and they had their huge media tour and I thought their staying power actually did last a little bit and made a lot of sense. I think to have the first African-American go to the moon, the first woman, the first non-U.S. citizen, and they clearly just gelled as a unit. 

And I think we saw at a time that's very politically divisive, you know, real unity there. But we saw during the Apollo program that after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the American public's attention soon faded away. And this is not going to be followed up soon with a landing on the moon. We now know that the next mission will just be a docking of Orion, with one or both of the lunar landers in low-Earth orbit, and then that mission would be followed by a lunar landing in 2028. 

Hopefully, but maybe not, since it doesn't look like the next mission will happen until the end of 2027. So that's a lot of time. And the American public they do have a short attention span. And so I think Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, is going to have to really do everything he can not just to keep the American public engaged, but to keep Congress engaged, to keep it funded, and to talk about the significance of the program and the space race with China while months go on in between these very important missions. 

22:48 - 23:18 

(MD): So now I'm going to ask you to put on your crystal ball here a little bit and think about: the architecture now has a little bit of the old, and a little bit of the new. 

We've got the SLS, the Space Launch System, traditional government run program using technology from the space shuttle program and Orion, which which came out of the previous version before where we're at now, coupled with Starship and New Glenn and the landers that we've been talking about - how do you see that unfolding over the next couple of years? 

Is there still going to be this two part solution, or are we going to go all one way or the other? 

23:19 - 24:55 

(CD): I think in the near term, there's going to be a two part solution that they're going to use SLS and Orion. But over time, I think there will be more of a shift toward commercial. I mean, particularly away from the SLS rocket, I could see Orion existing in some fashion, but as you mentioned SLS is built on 1970s technology. 

It uses the RS-25 engines, which were literally developed in the 1970s for the space shuttle. They've been upgraded and modified and modernized since then, but it's a very expensive vehicle. It's not reusable, but right now there's not an alternative. I mean, Starship isn't ready. New Glenn has flown just a few times, [but] has had problems in and of itself. 

But Jared Isaacman has said that when there are commercial alternatives that are less expensive, reusable, more efficient, that NASA would go toward those. So I think he's made that pretty clear.  

Jim Bridenstine and this is a scene in Rocket Dreams at one point, tried to sideline the SLS. Senator Shelby, who's a big champion because it's headquartered out of Alabama, pulled him into his office after Jim tried to do that and gave him a dressing down and threatened his career basically if he tried to sideline the SLS. 

But now, SLS doesn't quite have, you know, Senator Shelby's not there. And you've seen, I think, a shift politically where everyone is on board, that we are really in a space race with China. We need to move fast. We need to use the resources that we have. Especially if they're limited and do everything we can to beat China. 

24:56 - 25:22  

(MD): Now, let me put a pin in that. I want to come back to that point in a couple of minutes. But one or two more questions for you on this. If we go back into Space Barons, there was a metaphor throughout that book about the tortoise and the hare, right? Blue Origin was the tortoise to SpaceX’s hare. 

In terms of who is going slow and steady? Who's going fast? Does that metaphor still hold? Is it coming closer together? We talked about the lunar lander being opened back up to both companies. Where are we there?  

25:23 - 26:51 

(CD): Yeah. I mean, I think it still holds in the sense that SpaceX is far, far ahead. But Blue Origin is catching up. 

SpaceX is launching the Falcon 9 once every two or three days. They've had enormous success with that. They've shown that reusability is for real. That's not even sort of a new novel thing anymore. And now they're moving on to Starship, which is a big, complicated vehicle. They've had some problems with it. They're now in version three. They're going to have to show rapid reusability where it lands back at the launch site, they're going to have to show that the spacecraft can be refueled in orbit. 

They're going to have to show that they can launch a fleet of tankers to be able to refuel it within a short amount of time, 24 to 48 hours. So we'll see. And meanwhile, yes, Blue Origin's had some success with New Glenn. They are set as early as this summer or later this year to land their Mark-1 lunar lander on the moon's surface. 

There won't be any people on it, but that will be a big deal. We'll see how they do. But we need to see: can they get their launch cadence up? They just have an anomaly, a problem with their second stage engines. Can they fix that? Can they get back to flying? Can they fly the lunar lander and can it land on the moon? 

Those are all big steps and those are all big question marks. So we'll see. But now NASA has specifically pit Blue Origin against SpaceX. Whichever one of you is ready, you know, with your lunar lander to fly astronauts to the moon, you get the honor of doing that. So we'll see.

26:52 - 27:13 

(MD): So one more kind of look back to Space Barons, because there was a couple other billionaires in there, right? 

There's Paul Allen and Suborbital Tourism. And then Richard Branson took over after Paul Allen unfortunately passed away. Robert Bigelow wanted to do hotels. So that tourism in these commercial space stations is not as prominent in Rocket Dreams, but is it still prominent in the reality of our space program?

27:14 - 28:55 

(CD): Yeah. So for the suborbital space tourism, we'll see. Virgin Galactic has paused. They are building, a whole new vehicle that was more economically viable and make for a sustainable business to be able to fly more frequently, fly more passengers. 

They've yet to fly. It's been a while. We'll see how they do. A lot of people are skeptical of it, but we are seeing the commercial space stations having some momentum, and there's incentive for them to move forward because the International Space Station has been up there for 26 years continuously. It's not going to last forever. NASA says 2030 or maybe a little bit longer, and they're going to need to be successors. 

So you see companies like Axiom Space or even Blue Origin or Vast. And others, Voyager, building these next generation space hotels, if you want to call them that. And I do think those will ultimately be successful because it'll be a national priority. And if the United States doesn't have a presence in low-Earth orbit, we would cede that to the only other country that has a space station in low-Earth orbit and that's China. 

So there will be a national priority for that. I do wonder Blue Origin, which had been up until several months ago flying its New Shepard suborbital tourism vehicle with some real frequency, actually put a pause on that so that they could focus on New Glenn and on their deep space and lunar programs and ambitions, which I think tells you how serious they are about all of that. 

I think a lot of people hope they come back to New Shepard, because I think they still have a lot of people who have signed up to fly on that thing.

28:56 - 29:43 

(MD): So that's the second time you sort of talked about China and that competition and the space age nationally, as you were going to cast in that light, right? For prestige and then economic and other reasons as a new space race. 

And so the U.S. government's primary stated objective is to want to beat China to the moon. But the military component of that, there's also something a lot closer to Earth, right? Is the ability of China to make their military more capable through the use of space, like the U.S. has, to be able to do precision and lethality and communication and all those things that have made the U.S. military so effective and lethal. 

So how do you see the private sector part of this then leaking into the military and how the national security sector is capitalizing on that or not?  

29:44 - 31:46 

(CD): This is a great question, and I think it's a very important one and I think the significance can't be overstated that right now, as there you are obviously familiar with the term space superiority. 

 And then in order to achieve that, the Space Force and the Pentagon are going to need to rely on the commercial space sector for the kinds of technologies that we need. And ten years ago, when I was writing The Space Barons, the big breakthrough, the big innovation in space was the reusable rockets having the rockets come back and land so they could fly again. 

I think now it's satellites and spacecraft that can maneuver in space. And when the satellite goes up, it's moving very fast, but it stays on a fixed orbit. So you know where it's going to be in an hour or a day or three weeks from now. But if you have spacecraft that can maneuver and can be refueled and have the propellant to be able to do that, so they can essentially dodge and weave and hide and sneak up or go high, go low — that is significant. 

And that's necessary for space superiority. And I think there are a lot of companies that are working on that. I think also just the weaponry that we're seeing and yes, we're using the ‘W’ word now. I think more in space you're seeing Space Force officials use that, that we're talking about weapons. And I think a lot of it was Earth to space: firing missiles, these anti-satellite tests, which obviously were problematic because they created a lot of debris. I think now you're seeing maybe more subtle attacks, you know, using high energy microwaves or laser or other kind of spamming or spoofing and jamming sensors, you know, again, space to space. And that's the real change that it used to be satellites in space for all their purpose to look down. 

And now they're looking up or they're staying in space so their whole mission is in space. And the question is, can the Space Force really leverage and incentivize? And to really be clear with industry, this is what we need. This is where we're going this is what we need to focus on and to build is an open question. And Golden Dome will have a huge impact on that, I think.

31:47 - 32:09 

(MD): Well, that's right, because the idea is to use a lot of that things that are being funded and capitalized in the private sector to bring into military. It’s probably not a perfect analogy, but where NASA on the civil side, had a culture that needed to shift and begin to adopt a sort of private sector approach. Space Force was kind of in that role on the military side, where do you see the service in the adoption of the things that you're talking about?  

32:10 - 33:33 

(CD): Yeah, and that we saw that in the beginning of the Space Force that they said we got to start from scratch. We should be more nimble, be more efficient, and avoid the kind of government procurement debacles that Senator McCain used to turn into theater in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and they didn't want to have those. 

And I think there's been some success. There have been some frustrations, some people are concerned that they haven't been as successful in working with commercial, but they say the right things. I know that the motive at least, is there. But one of the things that I point to that I think is significant is talked about that, some of the war gaming scenarios, and they're doing four of them, I think, this year that are focused in large part on that threat that we heard about from a couple of years ago of Russia developing a space-based nuclear weapon and the Space Force wargaming that, but bringing in the commercial side and making them part of that so they could see what are the challenges, what are the threats, what is the adversary doing and what are the technologies and the capability that we need?

You know, I also think of Even Rogers from True Anomaly Space, being in the Air Force and the Space Force, and realizing that nobody in the commercial sector was building what the Space Force ultimately would need, so leaves and starts a company in order to do that. So I think we're beginning to sort of see that nexus there.

33:34 - 34:09 

(MD): Yeah, I agree that this military doesn't get to stop doing other things that they were doing right, and shift gears. So there's a lot of things that the Space Force has to cover down on. We'll see if you don't want to say that, you know, money's the answer to everything, that is definitely not. But, you know, the big jump in the Space Force budget coming in fiscal 27. You know, ultimately, whatever Congress appropriates, but it'll be a boost.  

Can they then start moving a little bit more aggressively into some of these new areas that they've been a little slow to do in my opinion. So again, another metaphor, is there a tortoise and the hare metaphor between the U.S. and China on on the military side, national security side? 

34:10 - 35:38 

(CD): ‘Yeah, as much as I hate to say it, it sounds like China is really moving fast and far ahead. I saw a presentation at the satellite conference that the Space Force's Chief Lurch gave about the number of satellites they're putting up. We've seen China do, docking and geostationary orbit, a possible refueling there with the satellite that. Oh, by the way, a couple of years ago grappled a dead Bieduo satellite and pulled it out of GEO and moved it into a graveyard orbit. 

He talked about China developing satellites that use stealth that can't be seen. They're lunar and cislunar ambitions and the proliferated architectures that they're putting up. By the way, the moon program, maybe not specifically, for the U.S. side, not a military program. But that doesn't mean it's not a national security program. And they're moving toward the South Pole, the moon, and in cislunar space, they've got a rover on Mars. 

They may be able to return samples from Mars before we can. All of which spans from the hard core national security side and combat-like operations to the diplomatic soft power things that if they're on the moon and we're not, they'll attract our allies. If they're bringing back samples from Mars, the scientists from other countries will want to be allied with them. And so we see a comprehensive space program that they have. And it's, in my opinion, a real race and the stakes are very, very high.

35:39 - 36:20 

(MD): And so some of that is scientific, some of it's economic and the security piece. Actually, General Saltzman, the chief of space operations, I just heard him talking and say that making a historical analogy that everywhere that economy has gone, right? The U.S. Navy, it ended up protecting lines of communication and making sure those things could happen in a reasonable, normative way instead of just county option. 

Okay, so you were a business desk writer at The Washington Post. Big business news coming up in that SpaceX is headed for an IPO. And the numbers are incredible, right? $1.82 trillion valuation coming out. So what impact do you think that might all have on all of this? I mean billions of dollars getting freed up that might go somewhere else. 

36:21 - 37:34 

(CD): Yeah, and it just shows the the evolution and just the SpaceX is one of the biggest stories of American entrepreneurship of the last 100 years, moving from just being building rockets and spacecraft to a constellation of 10,000 satellites to now talking about orbital data centers and compute and working with artificial intelligence and xAI. You know, so, again, not just a rocket company, but an artificial intelligence company and internet provider, all of these things driving that. 

And I remember the old adage from it was only really like ten years ago when nobody wanted to invest in space, or the only people investing in space were just sort of hobbyists or very passionate people. And the saying, of course, was ‘the quickest way to become a millionaire in the space sector was to start out as a billionaire.’ 

And we're seeing them drive enormous growth and attention - as to whether what are the downstream effects of that? Who can replicate it? We'll see. SpaceX has shown that it is singular in a lot of ways, and that its success has not been able to be repeated. So yeah, it's a fascinating time and then we'll see what the stock does once it goes public. 

I mean, if there'll be a spike or a drop or if it sustains over time.

37:35 - 37:46 

(MD): Do you think that the investor, the institutional, retail investors will rush to that stock, or will there be sort of a rising of all boats as people come to the space sector and pay more attention? 

37:47 - 38:37 

(CD): I do believe in the rising of all boats in that. I also think that as SpaceX has become so dominant from the U.S. government's perspective, and this is NASA and the Pentagon. And the Pentagon, of course, has a much, much bigger budget, that there is a real desire for alternatives – that we cannot place all of our eggs into the SpaceX basket, and that we need New Glenn to work. 

We need Neutron from Rocket Lab. We need Stoke Space to stand up and all of these other companies to come to fruition. And SpaceX is just like I call it SpaceX University where they've graduated so many engineers who then go off and start their own companies or go to work for other companies and bring some of that SpaceX secret sauce with them and it's proliferating. So I do think it's the tide rises all boats.

38:38 - 38:51 

(MD): So we've already established that I am not a medical professional, but I think I know the answer to this question. Has the writing of these books and your TV shows, has that immunized you from the space bug or do you still got it? And if you got it, what are you doing next?  

38:52 - 40:04 

(CD): Yeah, no, I still have it. I am trying to broaden my horizons a little bit. I think it's the Elon-Jeff stuff, which was sort of a theme of space barons or rocket teams. I'm moving on. I took a buyout from the Washington Post, as I know you know, but was able to stay on through the end of last year to finish a story about the Space Force and national security space. 

 And I'm really interested in delving into that deeply. I just don't think the American public fully understands what the Space Force does, the importance of it, the great service that it does for our nation, the threats we are facing in space and the fact that this - it's not new, it did not all of a sudden appeared in 2019 when President Trump created the Space Force. 

There's a long history and I think it's only going to accelerate in the years forward. I mean, you mentioned the huge increase that the Space Force budget is getting. I think there is going to be an acceleration of the threats, the proliferation of spacecraft, our reliance on them. And then, as you said, that next frontier, if we're going to the moon or into cislunar space, we're bringing American assets and the American economy and American values that the United States is always going to defend, and it will always defend all of that in any new frontiers. What it's always done. 

40:05 - 40:46 

(MD): This allows me to close with and this is the origin story of Eara Nova, right? Those of us who were in this national security space world for decades and have been through all the changes and all the threats, as you rightfully talk about and when, when we are here to try to to help companies, to help the financial markets, to really all come together and continue to accelerate our capabilities and our ability to protect the nation and to be a leader on the global stage in space and the space economy. 

So I really appreciate you as an author and having read your books, they are very engaging and really easy reads because of the storytelling that you obviously from this podcast are so good at. Thank you for coming on the podcast again. We look forward to the next time we can do this. And I'll leave you with the last word. 

40:47 - 41:12 

(CD): And I would just say that in the past couple of years, I think what you've done at Elara Nova is incredibly important. It's a great service to the American industry, to the Pentagon and to the nation as a whole. I don't think I was fully aware of that. Even a couple of years ago when you started out on this journey. 

And now that I am, you realize just how significant it is. So I would just turn back to you and say thank you for everything that you're doing. It's a great service and we're grateful. 

41:13 - 41:53 

(SK): This has been an episode of “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series of “The Elara Edge” podcast. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.