Podcast: Could The U.S. Lose Its Leadership In Space?

America remains a hotbed of space innovation, but worries mount over China’s rapid advances. AIA's Steve Jordan Tomaszewski joins Aviation Week editors to discuss.

Transcript 

Joe Anselmo:

Is the United States in danger of losing its enviable leadership position in space? As space becomes an increasingly contested domain and US adversaries field new capabilities, the alarm bells are growing louder by the day. Make no mistake, the US space industry is still on the cutting edge. The concern is whether the federal government is equipped to harness innovations that are being rolled out at a breakneck pace.

Welcome to the Check 6 Podcast. I'm Joe Anselmo, Aviation Week's editorial director. And joining us to discuss that troubling question is a special guest. Steve Jordan Tomaszewski is Vice President of Space Systems at the Aerospace Industries Association.

Joining Steve in today's discussion are two Aviation Week editors. Graham Warwick is our executive editor for technology, overseeing Aviation Week's technology coverage, and Garrett Reim is our Space and Emerging Technologies reporter.

Welcome, Steve. I wanted to ask you to start off, how would you characterize where we are with space becoming an increasingly contested domain and adversaries rapidly fielding capabilities to challenge the US? How worried are you?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

Well, thanks, Joe, for having me. And at the Aerospace Industries Association, we work with companies across the space industry to really identify trends and see how the government can better work with the private sector in order to keep our competitive edge in space. I would say, first and foremost, that the United States has the best space capabilities out of any country in the world, but it is of concern because we see significant progress and investments from some of our strategic competitors out there that are trying to catch up to the United States.

And the reason for that is we use space for so many things in our daily lives, from communications to positioning navigation and timing to weather to space situational awareness, and missile warning. And other countries want to be able to take advantage of those capabilities as well. So they're investing in space, and they're also investing in ways to hold our space capabilities at risk.

Joe Anselmo:

So what barriers specifically do you see that are preventing the federal government from leveraging the innovations coming out of the commercial side of the industry so quickly?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

A couple of things. I think, first and foremost, you always want to take a look at if there are regulations that are impacting how you can rapidly field new capabilities. For space systems, there's three primary regulators out there. The Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Commerce, and the Federal Communications Commission looking at spectrum, remote sensing licenses, and launch and reentry licenses there.

And so part of that is to see if the regulations are keeping pace with the technology and making sure that you're not stifling innovation by being overly bureaucratic and making companies jump through too many hoops. You also want to take a look at export control reform, making sure that you're protecting critical technologies for space systems but also being able to export and share those technologies internationally.

There was a significant effort towards the end of last year, looking at some export controls specific to space, and we're hoping that that momentum continues. And then overall, you want to look at acquisition processes from the federal government, from different agencies that are dealing with space and making sure that the risk tolerance is enough that the government can still look and get some new technologies on board but provide the essential services that we need day to day.

Joe Anselmo:

Garrett Reim, from where you sit in Seattle, you cover a lot of the emerging space companies, and it's really exciting stuff. Why are we hearing that there's so much worry on the military side of things, particularly when it involves China?

Garrett Reim:

I think for the last few years, one of the biggest worries has been their hypersonic boost-glide missile progress. They, and Russia, seem to be ahead of us, and we've been struggling to catch up. Also, there's a lot of concern about essentially spy satellites, recon satellites from China and Russia that are observing American satellites getting in closer look and could be up to nefarious things as well as their anti-satellite missiles, which are launched from the ground. Those are some of the things I hear most about.

There is some concern as well that they've starting to pick up momentum with their lunar missions. [China’s] Chang'e 4 mission was the first to land on the dark side of the moon. They recently returned a lunar sample as well. They have their own independent space station efforts. So there's certainly a lot going on that's also connected to the military side but not directly militarized. Those are the things I hear most about.

Joe Anselmo:

So, Graham Warwick, you can go back to the beginning of the space age 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik, and there was complete panic. And there's countless examples over the years. I mean, are we in that again? Is there too much angst or is this a real threat? Because China really is advancing quickly in space and in military propulsion.

Graham Warwick:

So you're pointing out to people that I'm two years older than the space age. Here's how I come at this. So there is no doubt the US industry is highly innovative, right. What we're seeing in China kind of started in the US a few years before, but China just moves faster. Once they get momentum, they move faster. So do not think that the US industry is not innovative. When it comes to national security applications to me the biggest problem is what's always been the biggest problem with the US is how it procures things. It just takes too long to write a requirement, go through all the stages of a program of record, and get a capability into operation. And it costs way too much, or it costs more than it should. Let's put it that way.

When you look at China, they don't seem to have quite the same constraints. So there seems to be a tighter loop between innovation and deployment in China. Now, they're not superhuman. They probably have all the same issues the US has with things that don't work. You've still got to have them prove that they're operationally suitable and all that sort of stuff, and that's just the all-of-government approach they have. Once they identify a priority, they just throw things at it.

The second sort of related point is the financing environment, separate from what DOD does. A lot of what we're talking about in China with space innovation is the commercial startups beginning to move quickly. Launch vehicles, reusable launch vehicles, small satellites, these are all being developed quite quickly and being adopted or at least adapted by the military to their ends as well. But the financial environment works differently in China.

Most of the investors in these startups, whether it's in space or in immobility or in whatever, are state-owned in some way. They're either central state-owned or they're provincial state-owned or they're municipal state-owned. So there is this flow of money into the commercial industry, particularly the emerging commercial industry, that is much harder to find in the US. I mean, we've got venture capitalists. But beyond venture capitalists, it gets kind of difficult to find sources of funding that can bridge the gap from proving an innovation to getting into a procurement system, that valley of death between showing you could do something and getting the DoD to buy it.

A third observation. I'll just throw this in. There is an upside to China's innovation in space. The more vested they become in space, the more they use space for commercial applications, the more difficult it becomes for them to exploit space in a negative way. I mean, you've got Geely, which is one of the largest Chinese manufacturers, putting up its own satellite constellation to connect to its cars. If you turn space into a battlefield, it's really, really hard to not impact your own operations, your own economy, your own industry.

So I think the more that China does what the US is doing in terms of developing that low earth orbit economy, commercial economy where we are actually using these things for commercial purposes, the harder it becomes to China to act like a bad actor in space. They have to watch out for their own economy, whatever they do. There are forces at work here, but to just summarize. The US is innovative. The problem is getting that innovation into the national defense issues, and the commercialism of space makes people behave differently.

Joe Anselmo:

Steve, you heard what Graham just said. Are there any solutions that AIA has identified to help maybe cut through that red tape and get the system moving a little faster?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

Yes, absolutely. I think one of the points that Graham just brought up was really important, talking about how other countries like China have been investing more into space, which makes it less likely that they're going to want to cause more destruction to the domain overall. The space domain is very different than the air domain. If you blow something up in space, those pieces of debris could last for thousands of years, but it's not going to happen if something happens in the air domain, right. So if we even look back at what happened in 2007 when China shot down one of their own defunct weather satellites, there's still, according to the Space Force, over 2,700 pieces of debris that are still orbiting around the earth today from that test back in 2007, right.

What that also does, though, is it forces countries like China to think about counter-space threat systems differently. Maybe they don't want to do as many kind of kinetic threats that would leave long-term orbital debris but instead look at effects where they could have an impact on systems like a cyber attack, maybe using a jammer that could take off satellites temporarily or laser systems and just pivot the way that they're looking at holding other systems at risk. So those new types of investments are being made from China and Russia and to a lesser extent, Iran, North Korea, and some other countries. So those are kind of concerns just to be aware of.

But getting back to your question, talking about what the United States can do to then really take advantage of all of this great innovation happening in space, and maybe the two trends that I would point out would be the rapidly decreasing cost of launch, as launch has traditionally been a bottleneck for space, and then also proliferated low earth orbit constellations where we used to have just a handful of satellites in higher altitude orbits. Now, we're seeing thousands of satellites at lower altitudes, and that's mainly enabled by new types of technology, miniaturization of different computer systems.

So for the United States to take advantage of all these new types of technologies, they have to make investments, and it's investments in finding new ways to get new entrants on board. The federal government is an extremely important part of the space economy, and it will continue to be for the foreseeable future. 

So, finding new ways to bring capabilities on board, taking advantage of new commercial services that have never been there before for different things like space domain awareness, where it used to be an only government function, but now there's companies that are developing systems and able to sell those services directly to the government. And then figuring out ways to take advantage of some of those private sector investments like venture capital. But you have to have the right rules in place to be able to allow companies to compete for federal contracts as well.

Joe Anselmo:

Speaking of regulations, I think as long as I've been covering space in my career, close to 30 years, there have been complaints about US government export control restrictions, the Missile Technology Control Regime. How much is all that impacting the ability of the US to collaborate with international partners in space?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

It does have a huge impact. And the technology for space capabilities is changing so quickly that you want to continue to review to make sure that you're protecting critical national security capabilities but while still allowing for some of those sales opportunities and working with international allies and partners.

Recently, AIA submitted comments to key government agencies giving updates of some of the space export control rules that came through. And it was a great opportunity for industry to kind of come together and to show what needs to be updated, but regardless of when we're going to see some changes happen, and hopefully, it'll be sooner than later, you just have to keep going back to reviewing those technologies. And to your point about the Missile Technology Control Regime, that's also an aspect that needs to be reviewed -- how that was set up initially and how it's kind of framed out today. We just need to make sure it's aligned with our overall national security objectives.

Joe Anselmo:

Okay. And our listeners might be forgiven for thinking, "Well wait a minute, if you loosen controls on technology, that just makes it more available to the Chinese." But I think your point is that the US needs international collaboration, right, if it's going to be in a race against China?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

Absolutely. Not only do we need international cooperation, but some of these technologies have been changing over time to where something might've been a very closely held type of technology in the past, but it can be more or less proliferated around the world today. So, if we're putting up barriers to stop things that are already out there or already widely commercially available, it's really not helping us protect those technologies from getting in the hands of China or otherwise.

Graham Warwick:

This is my personal feeling here, but I think we need to start looking at commercial space, particularly new commercial space, particularly proliferated commercial space, in a different way. We're export controlling technology, but these are services. These are communication services, positioning services that are global in nature once you put those satellites up there.

China is very good at going around the world and getting political influence using economic power. So it'll go into a country and say, "We'll pay for some giant infrastructure projects, and as a result of which you'll sign an alignment agreement or something like that," and it becomes a sort of an ally or something like that.

If you go into a country that has no terrestrial communications infrastructure and offer them the equivalent of Starlink, you could get huge political and economic leverage in a country with a service, right. So we've got to think about that. The second thing is as we allow more pieces of space to become commercial, we start to get services that emerge that are in domains that used to be kind of controlled by the military.

The big one is going to be GPS. So the moment GPS is a US Air Force system that is used commercially, globally, free use, et cetera. But because of GPS's issues with jamming and spoofing, there's this huge growth in interest in alternatives to GPS. So you're starting to see commercial companies come up with alternatives, start putting things on their satellites, start imagining constellations that would be entirely separate from GPS, entirely commercially run.

You could end up with precision positioning services available globally, with no US ability to control them, that could guide weapons to targets and would be on frequencies that the US maybe. It just complicates the process. So you have to think about those as well. I mean, if you're not exporting and gaining influence over a market, and if you're not recognizing that commercial services can be used against you, you've got a problem.

Garrett Reim:

You basically saw that happen in Ukraine, where the Russians started buying Starlink terminals and using it for their own purposes. Or you also see it with like DJI drones being used by both sides, even though ostensibly China says they're not supposed to be used in war.

Joe Anselmo:

So Steve, before we wrap up, I've been dancing around the one elephant in the room. You, Graham, and I are all in Washington. A space guy, Elon Musk, certainly shaking up this town, shaking up the federal government as we speak. Are the activities of DOGE a threat to the space community as we know it? Is it an opportunity? Or is it just a lot of noise?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

I think there's a lot of opportunity here at the end of the day. I think if you talk to anyone that's worked with the federal government, folks are going to tell you that there's always opportunities for greater efficiency. And I think that sentiment is shared. What we need to make sure that's happening, though, is that we are ensuring that we are continuing to deliver these critical space capabilities across the space enterprise for civil space purposes with NASA and NOAA, but then also for Department of Defense and intelligence community purposes.

So lots of opportunities there at the end of the day. Really interested to see how the different operations are going to be implemented. And I know AIA is looking forward to partnering with the new administration here and really trying to see where we can add some additional ideas.

Joe Anselmo:

And the Space Force, it's been with us five years, if you can believe that. How do you evaluate its progress? Has it been worth it?

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

So I had a small hand in starting up the Space Force five years ago, and some of the main reasons that we decided to reorganize the Department of Defense to include a new military service were to respond to the threat, number one. Number two, really kind of focus Department of Defense space efforts across the board as there had been a lot of fragmentation and then acquisition reform as one of the main drivers.

So with that, if we look at that in the lens of how is the Space Force doing and where are they going to be going, responding to the threat there still needs some extra help. In the fiscal year 2025 budget, the Space Force was the only military service to take a hit and to actually go down, which was a big challenge as we're seeing more and more threats worldwide. And then on focusing Department of Defense space efforts, I think there's been a lot of progress there of just being able to have that culture for the new service as they've been trying to make sure that space capabilities are integrated across the Department of Defense.

And then for acquisition reform, I think there's still a lot of work the Space Force needs to do, not only finding ways to onboard new entrants but making sure that those programs were executed across the board. So, room to grow, but a great start, and really hoping that the future of the Space Force is going to be bright.

Joe Anselmo:

We are Just about out of time, but Garrett, I wanted to ask you, you deal with all these startups there. They're not even primarily focused on the federal government. Some don't even want to do business with the federal government. It's too complicated, right. It's not fast enough for them.

Garrett Reim:

That's certainly true. I mean, they need to produce revenue and show traction to their VC investors. But I would say since the reelection of Donald Trump, there has been a bit of a pivot to defense all across aerospace. All these commercial folks say, "Oh, actually we do defense now too." So I think there's an expectation that more money will be flowing into defense and space. How easily they can get their hands on it and the sort of acquisition reforms that come out of this administration, it's to be seen.

There was a lot of enthusiasm in the startup community around the Space Development Agency, and its a proliferated LEO effort. There's been some turmoil at that agency recently, and new administration may have a new take on where the Space Development Agency should be placed within the Space Force and all that. So that remains to be seen. But that was certainly one area at least where you saw some startups pretty enthusiastic to do business with the government.

But SDA -- the Space Development Agency -- was stood up to be really a lean organization that didn't have the typical government bureaucracy. And these things don't always last. So we'll see if they can keep that strategy.

Graham Warwick:

We have a story coming out in Aviation Week about the X-37B reusable space plane. And I think that's a classic example, an illustration of what we're talking about here. If you look at another example, the US spent years and billions developing hypersonics and then kind of just stopped until the other guy had hypersonics, and then all of a sudden, we needed hypersonics. Well, we started the X-37 program years ago as an experiment. China's gone off and done essentially its own version of that.

Our story kind of implies it's still in experimentation, trying it with this, trying it with that. Well, what if China's X-37 becomes an operational system? We'll suddenly be chasing to catch up. We have a capability that isn't a pathway at the moment to get that capability into operation. I would just make an appeal and take a risk. We need to start moving some of these things out of the experimental into the operational and start gaining experience so that we're not running to catch up when somebody else does it before us.

Joe Anselmo:

Do you think it'll take a Sputnik moment, Graham, to sort of shock the system?

Graham Warwick:

I don't know. But I mean, if they start flying a fleet of reusable space planes, that'll be a Sputnik moment.

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski:

If I could maybe just build on Graham's piece, one of the challenges that we've always had for space is to get acquisitions of new types of capabilities and programs from a 1Z, 2Z prototype, or experiment, into more of an operational stance. And I think Graham was thinking about that. But we have a real big opportunity right now with the new types of constellations that are coming online and proliferated architectures that this is no longer a one or two-science experiment type of acquisition. It's changing the game and turning into mass production on a big scale.

So the problems in the past of really kind of refining a specific technology or getting something that is space-qualified up into orbit is shifting into things like supply chain concerns. So I think the new questions we're going to be hearing, especially over the next few years, are where are the strategic investments the government needs to make in order to help alleviate some of these industrial-based or supply chain concerns?

There's shortages of components. There's shortages of some of the raw materials like critical minerals and certain gases that are used almost exclusively in space. So, it's an interesting new shift, and hopefully, we can make sure that industry and the government are collaborating and talking to each other to make very smart investments that will last us for years to come.

Joe Anselmo:

Steve Jordan Tomaszewski, this is your first Check 6 Podcast. Given what's going on in the space, I'm sure we'll be asking you back to talk more in the future, but we appreciate you taking the time today. Thanks to you, Graham, and to you, Garrett, as well. That is a wrap for this week's Check 6 Podcast.

A special thanks to our podcast producer in Ohio, Andrea Copley-Smith, and if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Check 6 so you never miss an episode. If you've found today's discussion helpful, consider leaving a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Better yet, share this episode with a friend or colleague. Bye for now, and join us again for another Check 6.