The DownLink Podcast

This week on The DownLinK, we’re looking at U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s four-day trip to Paris. She had a number of events, but what we’re interested in is her discussion with French President Emanuel Macron, very specifically the portion of their chat at the Élysée that covered cooperation in space. There were three key developments. To unpack these developments, Laura Winter spoke to Xav...

This episode is about infrastructure, a subject, no doubt, that you have probably been hearing a whole lot about these past few days, especially if you are in the United States. That’s because the U.S. Congress is getting set to vote on two multi-trillion-dollar bills, one of which is called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The success of that feat depends on whether the lawmakers can a...

The U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley not only confirmed that the U.S. intelligence community, and therefore the Department of Defense and the U.S. administration believe that China test-launched a new hypersonic weapons system sometime in late July, he said it was close to a Sputnik moment. To understand better what Gen. Milley is saying, I spoke with one of the most kno...

What the heck did China send up into orbit? The Financial Times says China launched a hypersonic glide vehicle carrying a fractional orbital bombardment system into orbit in the July-August time-frame and shocked the U.S. intelligence community. If true, this development could make it much easier for the peer competitor to threaten the U.S. homeland. Everyone can agree that China launched a rocket...

This is the first episode… Or just episode zero in podcasting parlance. Episode zero is usually used just for sending out an RSS ping to all of the podcast platforms, like Soundcloud, to let those platforms know there are more episodes on the way. It can be long or short, but episode zero doesn’t get much love and attention. If you are a bit nerdy like me, I actually listen to them. So for this ep...