The DownLink Podcast

Ursa Major is betting that its one and only product line - 3D-printed rocket engines - will not only disrupt how rockets are manufactured but lower costs for budding launch companies and the Air Force Research Laboratory. What also makes Ursa Major special is where it prints its engines - Youngtown, Ohio. The city has seen some very hard times since the closure of many of its steel mills in the la...

NASA wants the commercial sector to provide pretty much everything, from housing to mining operations on the moon. But first, the space agency needs to establish itself as the anchor tenant to bring the commercial sector along. Meanwhile, China plans to establish a base within the decade. Laura Winter is at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Lunar Surface Innovation Consortiu...

No Satellites, No Economy: What You Need to Know About High Altitude Nuclear Detonation There's been a lot of talk about “tactical” nuclear weapons and rational choices. That discussion has been firmly anchored to ground effects. But what if the state actor simply wants to destroy the economy, without actually destroying much at all, at least immediately, on the ground? They would aim for space, s...

“It Is Weird Out There”: Space Economists & Space Capital Market Experts To demystify just what is happening in the space capital markets and the space economy writ large, Laura Winter speaks with Justin Cadman Partner at Quilty Analytics; George Pullen, Chief Economist at Milky Way Economy, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University in New York, and Author of the book, “Blockchain and the Space Eco...

This week the Biden Administration released its long-awaited National Security Strategy. To unpack just what the strategy means and doesn’t for space as a region and a warfighting domain, and for our space-based critical infrastructure, Laura Winter speaks with Chris Stone, author of “Reversing the Tao - A Framework for Credible Space Deterrence” and a Senior Fellow for Space Studies at The Mitche...

Voyager Space and its subsidiary Nanoracks are aiming to launch Starlab, a commercial space station in 2028. They just announced an agreement with The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio to build the terrestrial home for the science and technology the space station produces. Why Ohio? The state’s got a growing ecosystem of small businesses that are at the cutting-edge space manufacturing on an...

This week the U.S. Air Force celebrated its birthday, marking 75 years since it gained its hard-won independence from the U.S. Army. This independence remains not only about who is in command of who, but perhaps more importantly it is also about identity and culture. What lessons can the newest branch of the military, the U.S. Space Force, take from the Air Force experience to launch itself into a...

What should be the vision of the next and second U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations be for the future of the U.S. military’s newest service branch? U.S. senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee this week asked just that of the nominee for the job, Lt. Gen. Chance “Salty” Saltzman. The only recent and comparable American experience is that of General Hoyt Vandenberg, the second Air F...

The Pentagon on Friday released a readout of a close-hold classified meeting of the Defense Policy Board that illustrates a growing concern that China and Russia are likely developing weapons systems for the space domain that “could impact U.S. deterrence and strategic stability” and a need to develop options to counter those systems. And that’s in addition to the release of multiple defense polic...

While NASA tests its Space Launch System to usher in a new age of human space exploration, testing whether Space-Based Solar Power can deliver an era of net-zero electricity, affordably, to the U.S. consumer energy market is being left up to the commercial sector. Laura Winter speaks with Ed Tate, Co-Founder and CTO of Virtus Solis, whose journey to SBSP started at General Motors, where he worked...

Now pushed back to Friday, NASA is billing the $4.1b Artemis I mission launch, a test of the Space Launch System and the crew-rated Orion capsule, as the beginning of a new chapter of U.S.-led human space exploration and sustained presence on the moon. Putting the warm and fuzzy excitement aside, Laura Winter explores the geostrategic and economic implications with Namrata Goswami, an independent...

The European Space Agency’s Director General Josef Aschbacher this week announced on LinkedIn that the agency will “propose a Space-Based Solar Power preparatory programme to Member States called #SOLARIS.” That means Europe is getting primed to move forward with its own proprietary SBSP program, independently. Put another way, this is not going to be another exercise in admiring the problem. Laur...

Is this sci-fi? Or could there be a space-based solution to securing reliable, renewable, and affordable energy and stop making awkward trips and payments to the petro-dollar-funded authoritarians, like that guy in the Kremlin? This week Laura Winter explores Space-Based Solar Power, or SBSP, with Martin Soltau, Co-Chair of Britain’s Space Energy Initiative and Frazer-Nash Business Manager; and Pe...

Will norms of space behavior be enough to protect the $469 billion-dollar and growing space economy, the government-funded exploration and science programs, and the critical defense assets in orbit? Perhaps what’s needed is a bit stronger and binding. Like rules. Laura Winter speaks with Kevin O’Connell, the former Director of the Office of Space Commerce at the U.S. Department of Commerce, under...

Sure. It’s easy to simply pin Russia’s announcement that it is quitting the International Space Station as a natural result of President Vladamir Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine. Yet, Russia’s reduced space industrial base, Putin’s ambitions, and a series of sackings and demotions illustrate a more complicated political and security picture in the space domain. To read the tea leaves, Laura Wint...

Space companies bring high-paying high-tech jobs and create revenue for local businesses, and municipal and state governments. They can lessen the brain drain from rural localities. Thing is, it’s got to be the right fit - the right business plan for the right community - or the business may not even break ground, let alone launch. Laura Winter speaks with U.S. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia...

Macroeconomic forces are just as inescapable as gravity. The commercial space sector is not immune from the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine, historic inflation, and the cost of borrowing. Laura Winter speaks with Chris Quilty, a pioneer of Wall Street analysis of the commercial space sector and founder of Quilty Analytics. He says what's different from past economic downturns is that the space...

The U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond said Sunday that China “enjoys the same space capabilities and the same advantages that we currently enjoy.” That sounds a lot like parity. Congress is including inflation in its calculus, but what about what’s needed for deterrence in the space domain? To take a closer look at the numbers and what they mean, Laura Winter is jo...

This week’s episode is a part two of two on PNT - positioning, navigation, and timing. This is about the business opportunity of providing time as a service to critical infrastructure sectors. PNT comes from the space-based Global Positioning System, or GPS. Anything from precision farming and guided missiles, and the operational synchronization of critical infrastructures like dams and refineries...

This week’s episode is a part one of two on PNT - positioning, navigation, and timing. All three parts come from the space-based Global Positioning System, or GPS. Anything from precision farming and guided missiles, and the operational synchronization of critical infrastructures like dams and refineries depends on GPS. Thing is, if something goes wrong, there’s no “plan B”. Laura Winter speaks wi...

Hypersonic weapons are a tricky class of missile systems. They’re hard to find and even harder to persistently track, even when using satellite capabilities together with ground-based radar. That affects America’s ability to deter attacks on the homeland. Laura Winter speaks with Christopher Stone, who has an idea, which he laid out in his most recent policy paper, “Orbital Vigilance: The Need for...

In this part two episode of The Downlink’s coverage of the State Of The Space Industrial Base Conference And Workshop, organized by New Space New Mexico, Laura Winter speaks with Jim Keravala, CEO, Chief Architect and Chairman of the Board of Off World. Keravala, like other commercial space leaders involved in anything from cargo delivery to support NASA’s Artemis program, to space domain awarenes...

Commercial space companies involved in anything from cargo delivery to support NASA’s Artemis program, to space domain awareness, and even mining the moon and asteroids are preparing to go to the lunar neighborhood and set up shop. They’re wondering whether the Department of Defense is going to join them in the cis-lunar region to sustain friendly commercial activity, and are concerned about the f...

China is looking for "a combination of soft and hard kill methods” to destroy Elon Musk’s broadband satellite communication constellation Starlink. So it’s not surprising that U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to China’s democratic neighbors produced agreements bolstering the space economy and space defense. Does this Indo-Pacific cooperation change China’s calculus? Laura Winter speaks with Brenda...

The U.S. Department of State quietly launched a new organization that’s fusing commercial satellite imagery with social media posts to provide evidence of Russian war crimes to prosecutors, such as those in the International Criminal Court. It’s called the Conflict Observatory. Laura Winter Speaks with Nathaniel Raymond, a war crimes investigator and the Executive Director of Yale University’s Hum...