The DownLink Podcast

Space Competition: Trump’s South Korean Space Opportunity This week China, Russia, and North Korea deepened their military bonds in exercises and meetings, presenting the incoming Trump 2.0 Administration with an illustration of how security in East Asia has become more fragile in the four years since Donald Trump was in the White House. Trump’s “America First” acolytes may find economically attra...

Space Competition: Great Power Strategy, “America First”, and The Mars-shot This week U.S. President-elect Donald Trump continued to shape his incoming government, naming cabinet nominees, including two authors of the controversial governance plan “Project 2025”, and enlisting adherents to the “America First” political philosophy. To understand how this plan, treatise, and talk of going to Mars, t...

Space Power: Trump 2.0 May Attempt Human Mars Landing, Establish Department of the Space Force Space policymakers from President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration debated what may be in store for the civil and defense space sectors, including sending humans to Mars instead of the moon, and establishing a Department of the Space Force. Laura Winter speaks with Doug Loverro, President, Lover...

Space Power: President-Elect Trump Expected To Supercharge U.S. Space Ambitions This week President Donald Trump, with the help of billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk, became the 47th President-Elect of the United States, for a second non-consecutive term. Space power advocates believe Trump, with the added influence of Musk by his side, will speed-up mission timelines that include the moon and M...

Space Money: Report - DoD At Risk of Losing New Commercial Space Suppliers And Capabilities The Department of Commerce has just released some interesting economic indicators that lean positive, and there are expectations that the Federal Reserve Board will again lower interest rates. Despite this good news, it may be some time before new venture capital invests in space technology, leaving some co...

Space Competition: Threats and Trends A Year After October 7th In the year since Hamas launched its brutal attack in Israel, tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as technologies, and security alliances have evolved in the space domain of operations. Laura winter speaks with Namrata Goswami, an independent scholar on space policy and great power politics and co-author of the book “Scramble...

Space Power: A National Guardsman’s View On Why A Pentagon Plan Is A “Lose-Lose Proposal” Last week Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus assumed responsibility as the 30th Chief of the National Guard Bureau, inheriting a politically thorny issue: a piece of legislation that, if passed into law, would transfer Air National Guard space units into the Space Force. This episode is about why some, possibly u...

Space Tech: Talking To The Far Side of the Moon On the Moon China’s ahead in the race to stake claims for lunar resources by the not-so-simple fact that it can communicate with its equipment on the far side, near the south pole. This week’s episode is about how ispace’s Mission 3 could change the state of the race and establish the very communications network that will be necessary to create a lun...

Space Money: Q3 Take - “Money Doesn’t Care” The Fed lending rate reduction was nice, but is it enough pressure on investors to empty their money market accounts and invest in space companies, even if it’s answering a defense-related demand signal? Laura Winter speaks with The DownLink regulars, Chris Quilty, Founder of Quilty Space; and George Pullen, Chief Economist at Milky Way Economy.

Space Competition: How To Better De-Risk Adversarial Threats To Space Systems’ Value This episode was recorded before a live audience at the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center’s Value of Space Summit, convened in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The discussion focuses on threat trends, the lack of insurance cover for certain types of attacks; and how to better secure the value of space syste...

Space Policy: Space Force CSO - “What We Were Is Not What We Must Become” The U.S. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman announced on Tuesday that the Space Force has started to take over recruitment and training of uniformed and civilian Guardians, from “Mother Air Force”, to create a separate “space-minded” force to meet the nation’s requirements in the friction-filled era of “great pow...

Space Tech: Is It A Bird? A Plane? Actually It’s A Drone Space Force acquisitions officials have said for years that they want tactically-responsive commercial-off-the-shelf solutions that can be easily configured for military uses. The founders of BlackStar Orbital Technologies say their drone, a satellite-space plane hybrid, will answer the call, at a competitive price point. Laura Winter speaks...

Space Money: Starliner, A 737 Max Felony, and a New Boeing CEO With Boeing’s Starliner human-rated capsule safely on the ground, the Crew Flight Test mission has ended, but with incidents and without its crew, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. Boeing, a major supplier of space vehicles and services to NASA and the U.S. Space Force, is at a crossroads with a new CEO in charge. What should Boeing do?...

Space Competition: Geo-Strategic Questions Over NASA’s Plan to Destroy the ISS This is part 2 of a deep dive into NASA’s plan to destroy the 420-metric-tonne International Space Station by de-orbiting. This episode is about the geo-strategic consequences and risks associated with de-orbiting and alternative ideas for the space station after 2030. Part 1, “Space Technology: Holes Bubble Up In NASA’...

Space Power: War-Gamers Say We’re “Behind the Eight Ball” What should the new U.S. vice president and the National Space Council do if China achieved a Sputnik-like moment? According to this week’s guests, we’re “Behind the Eight Ball”, which is the title of their first report on a series of recent wargames that included former NASA and Department of Defense political appointees, representing both...

Space Tech: Defense Looking At Modular Upgrades For Greater SDA Space Command wants “enhanced battlespace awareness”, a clearer picture of what’s going on on orbit. This episode is about how a new set of modular technologies can provide satellite operators with “upgrades” and the opportunity to participate in the space domain awareness ecosystem, to serve military and commercial customers, and to...

Space Money: Silicon Valley - “The DoD Has Not Brought The Dough” While it may not be surprising that space companies lead the Silicon Valley Defense Group's NATSEC100, there is an imbalance between the amount of capital venture capitalists are putting in and and the value of defense awards. Laura Winter speaks with James Cross, SVDG’s co-Founder and Executive Chairman, and Co-Head of Private Inve...

Space Power: SmallSats - Time To Plan, Procure, And Execute Almost seven years after U.S. Air Force General John Hyten said, “I will not support buying big satellites that make juicy targets”, the Space Development Agency has seemingly cracked the code on procuring and deploying small satellites, or smallsats, quickly with the desired effects. Nevertheless, experts argue that the U.S. Space Force...

Space Technology: Holes Bubble Up In NASA’s Narrative On Plan To De-Orbit The Space Station NASA claims the commercial space sector provided no “feasible proposals” from “discussions” or “viable interest” in response to a Request for Information (RFI) on how to reuse, repurpose, or recycle part or all of the 420-metric-tonne International Space Station. Space companies say they never saw or even h...

Space Power: NATO Summit - Defense Industry! Can You Hear The Demand Signal Now? Before meeting with heads of state, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told leaders from the Allied defense industrial base that more than two-thirds of the Alliance’s 32 member nations were spending at least 2% of the GDPs on defense. “So there is a good market outlook for you.” To understand what the secretary...

Space Power: NATO Summit - Security Alliance Is Employing More Than Words In Space Domain In the month running up to the 75th NATO Summit in Washington, D.C., the Alliance has been busy in the Space Domain of Operations. To understand the state of the NATO Alliance, what it has recently achieved going into the summit, and what outcomes to expect, Laura Winter speaks with Jim Townsend, former Deput...

Space Money: Welcome To The Second Half Of 2024! We’ve reached the end of Q2, which means it is time to take a look at the top space business and finance events in this year’s first half, how they are shaping the remaining six months, and what space businesses big and small are doing, and how investors in the public and private markets are reacting. Laura Winter speaks with Chris Quilty, founder o...

Space Competition: “We Need To Go From Ambition To Implementation” This week’s episode is coming from the 7th Prague Space Security Conference in Czech, where government officials and experts from Europe, the United States, East Asia discussed what Western nations, space agencies, and militaries can and should do to protect and defend access to space and space capabilities. Laura Winter speaks wit...

Space Power: What’s the Story With The Space Force? While SpaceX’s latest test launch is a clear message to the world about U.S. space power and where the nation is aiming to go, the role and even the very existence of the U.S. Space Force remains opaque to most Americans. This week’s guest argues that this must be addressed and that there are solutions. Laura Winter speaks with Hannah Dennis, a r...

Space Money: The Long-Term Strategy Inside The Space Force Budget Numbers While the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee has sent its draft of the FY 2025 defense spending bill to the full Appropriations Committee without drama, a Trump campaign representative is reportedly urging Republican senators to block any spending package from passing until after the presidential inauguration in Janua...