Transcripts
What You Missed on The Vector Episode 21: “Safeguarding the Space Domain: National Security & Awareness”
Written by: Morsiell Dormu
In this engaging episode of The Vector, Kelli Kedis Ogborn, Vice President of Space Commerce & Entrepreneurship at Space Foundation, sits down with Lieutenant General John Shaw, retired Deputy Commander of US Space Command, to discuss safeguarding the space domain in the evolving “Third Space Age.” Shaw’s extensive experience in national security space operations and strategic transformation provides a unique lens into the intersection of commercial, civil, and national security sectors.
Highlights include Shaw’s insights on:
- The Third Space Age: Shaw explains the transition into the Third Space Age, characterized by the growing interdependence of commercial, civil, and national security sectors in space. He highlights key inflection points around 2015, such as SpaceX’s reusable launch capabilities and Starlink’s debut, which transformed commercial space activity. Concurrently, the Department of Defense began recognizing space as a contested warfighting domain, leading to the establishment of the US Space Force and revamped US Space Command.
- National Security and Commercial Interdependence: Shaw emphasizes how national security increasingly leverages commercial capabilities while commercial companies must now consider threats such as electromagnetic jamming and deliberate interference. He points out that this dynamic requires new strategies, like establishing clearer rules of engagement for space traffic management and operational norms, particularly in low Earth orbit (LEO).
- Challenges in Space Traffic Management: Shaw underscores the need for international cooperation to address space congestion, drawing parallels to air traffic control systems. He proposes norms such as requiring deorbiting capabilities and open tracking mechanisms for satellites operating in LEO, which would improve safety and transparency for both commercial and national security entities.
- Space Domain Awareness: Shaw discusses the critical need to modernize space domain awareness systems, moving from cataloging objects to active tracking of potential threats. He highlights gaps in sensor placement (predominantly terrestrial) and calls for more in-orbit sensors to improve monitoring and defense readiness in space.
- The Role of Economic Security: Shaw ties the need for safeguarding the space domain to its growing role in global economic stability. With the space economy increasingly driven by commercial revenue (78% in 2023), he argues that fostering investment and ensuring the sustainability of the space environment are vital for both national security and societal progress.
- Artificial Intelligence as a Game-Changer: Shaw predicts that artificial intelligence (AI) will become integral to managing the vast amounts of data generated by space activities and enabling autonomous operations for spacecraft. He views space as a proving ground for AI applications, with potential benefits for both tactical operations and broader strategic insights.
This episode provides a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities of securing the space domain amidst rapid growth and innovation. Shaw’s perspectives offer a roadmap for balancing economic investment, security, and international collaboration in this critical era of space exploration and utilization. Whether you’re a commercial innovator, policymaker, or industry professional, this conversation highlights the need for strategic alignment across all sectors in the global space ecosystem.
Episode Transcript
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Vector where we discuss topics, trends and insights shaping the global space ecosystem. I am your host Kelli Kedis Ogborn, and today’s conversation is all about safeguarding the space domain. The space domain has gone through many evolutions, but one thing remains true that we know intimately from our space origin story. It is a domain of national pride, national posturing, and national security. In our current landscape, there has never been more interest or activity. And as we continue to push the exploratory and innovative boundaries of what is possible in space, and as we engage in space in new ways, the domain will increasingly become congested and contested. Therefore, how can we think about securing this critical domain while still enabling its growth and economic potential? These are the themes that we will be exploring in today’s episode, and I can think of no better person to join me in the conversation other than Lieutenant General John Shaw, who is a seasoned leader with over 33 years of experience in national security space and aerospace engineering, specializing in executive decision making, strategic risk management and combat operations.
He is a recognized leader in organizational transformation, strategic cultural transformation, and the innovative integration of allied international and commercial capabilities into national security. Missions recently retired as a three star general and deputy commander of US Space Command. He directed 12,000 personnel and a $525 million budget to secure critical space assets for military and civilian purposes. Shah’s previous roles include being the first commander of Space Operations Command and he has significant experience in the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office. He holds advanced degrees in astronomical engineering, aeronautics and organizational management, and is a recognized speaker and author on space strategy and security, Lieutenant General John Shaw. Welcome to the show.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Morning Kelly, and thank you for having me on the show. Glad to be here.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
I’m so thrilled you’re joining and particularly because this topic is extremely timely and a lot of the themes that we discuss on the Vector are all about increasing commercial space and really a close cousin and a sister to this is always the national security domain because as we continue to engage in this space, it’s really difficult to decouple commercial from national security and civil just because of how we all engage in the area. And I want to start this conversation by really creating a framework of thinking for where we are in this moment in time within the space domain. And you are an extremely prolific speaker and writer on the topic and you often mention that we are in a third space age. And so I’d love for you to illuminate what do you mean by that and really how has this shift shaped modern space engagement?
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Well, thanks Kelly and I, probably some of your listeners are having me heard me talk about this, but yeah, I think it’s actually more appropriate than ever this idea you mentioned in your opening comments about how civil and commercial and now security are intertwined and I totally agree with that. The point of thinking about this as a third space age is it wasn’t always that way in what I call the first base age or the Cold War. It was mostly national security efforts and even the civil activities were mostly trying to demonstrate, as you pointed out, national prestige on the space stage in contrast with the Soviet Union and then at the end of the Cold War and then for about the next 25 years or so, we were in a second space age where things started to move forward, commercially civil space in particularly human space flight, got routinized and trips to orbit on the space shuttle and then to the International Space station when operations commenced there.
But on the national security side, we were not under threat in the domain. And then as I like to kind of shape it right around the 2015 timeframe is when all three sectors, I say sector, civil and commercial and national security all went through inflection points at around the same time. And some of it was probably interdependently causal, but others were not. And on the commercial side, 2015 is when we saw SpaceX launched the first reusable core stage for their launch vehicle. And that is really as we’ve seen, transformed how we’re thinking about launch, right, brought down cost, and now we’re thinking about completely different ways in ways we were not in those earlier ages. And then that also was the same year by the way that that same company SpaceX filed for its license to operate starlink, which is an exemplar of many things that have happened on the commercial side.
They’re not the only proliferated low earth orbit constellation in operation or others that are in planning, but it was kind of the first, so that was the commercial side on the civil side, right around then is when the NASA actually enacted and had come into play the commercial transport to the ISS. This is something pretty hard to stretch to think about outsourcing to a commercial company. Usually it was the subject of a film or something where things went wrong, but it’s actually paid off. It was a great initiative of NASA in the early two thousands that paid off in the 20 teens and now it’s routine right now. That’s how we are getting astronauts to the International Space station in low earth orbit. And I do expect that human space flight activity is going to strongly leverage commercial in the future. So all of these interdependencies too, commercial and civil and then national security 2015, if you look back 2015 is really when the leadership of the nation and particularly the Department of Defense started to talk about space as a war fighting domain.
Didn’t the threats suddenly emerged in 2015, but it was an inflection point in policy ship where we recognized the steady drumbeat of increasing threats in the domain and kind of openly acknowledged that. And that really kind of pivoted national security space policy around that same timeframe. I was actually working in the Pentagon in the 2012 and 2013 timeframe in the policy organizations in the Office of Secretary of Defense, and we were on a march to that. We saw that happening and now we have new organizations focused on this from a national security perspective, US Space Force, which will celebrate its fifth birthday next month
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
For revised US space command that has its own history, but stood up again and had its fifth birthday back in August. But the key takeaway for the listeners here in this third space age is that all of these sectors are now interdependent. National security is trying very hard to leverage commercial. And there are many examples of that. You have a US Space Force, commercial space strategy, A DOD, commercial space strategy, and then all the leadership’s talking about how do we use commercial better? And that’s a very deep discussion on what do we mean by commercial and how do we do it? But it is clearly a real recognize of a need to leverage that. I’ve already mentioned how civil is leveraging commercial, but commercial has to think about possible threats in the domain now in ways they didn’t have to think about before, right? If I’m a commercial company that’s doing surveillance and reconnaissance activities or remote sensing from space, is it possible I might get lead by some entity on the planet if a war is going on and they suspect or I actually am supporting somehow to some extent, we got to think about that.
The likelihood of being jammed, electromagnetic jamming is higher than it’s ever been and not only from an unintentional perspective because there’s so many platforms operating, but from an intentional perspective in terms of a threat, and I could go on and on and on. So the bottom line is what you said, it’s actually right up front. We’re in this exciting new time that’s not even really a decade old in my mind and we’re still working our way through it where all the sectors are interdependent, they need to leverage each other, but there’s great opportunity here as well to do this and really move forward in the space domain in all of these sectors. And I think we will, my monologue’s getting long here, but we’re going to see in the next, I expect by the way, especially as this next administration is coming in, it’s going to be faced with some decisions and challenges. Are we going to commit to going back to put humans back on the moon? How are we going to address growing levels and wider spectrum of threats in the space domain and how are we going to maybe most important of all encourage and support economic investment in the domain for the betterment of our society here on the planet and beyond? So it’s an exciting time. There. It is.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
I love it. Well, it’s extremely exciting and what’s fascinating about all of those subpoints that you brought up is each of those could have their own thesis discussion around it, and that’s what makes the domain so fascinating because to your point, we’re not even a decade into this and we’re really at its infancy to see what engagement and activity and growth looks like and the concept of interdependency that you mentioned. I want to pull on this more because it is fascinating the point that you made that commercial companies are now having to think about threats in space. And if you look at the commercial landscape, particularly just around spacecraft, in 2023, over 90% of all spacecraft put into space were commercial, which is massive and we’re only going to see that continue to uptick. And so when you think about the threat landscape and especially how we’re going to be engaging in space on sis lunar activity, LEO infrastructure, how can we assess maneuvers in space that might be done for technical demonstration and understand if that’s truly what it is or decouple it as national posturing in a potential threat because that’s purely speculation, but there’s probably things that you can identify.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Yeah, it’s a good question. So first of all, we have to start by how is the space domain maybe a little different than the other domains in that regard? If you’re going to test a new air platform, you can do it within your own airspace as a nation, and we have our own ranges where we do that. Our potential adversaries and even our partners have their own ranges where they test air and it’s kind of localized. If you’re going to test an ocean going platform, you probably have a range that’s close to your boundaries of your nation and is kind of apart from where other things are happening in the maritime domain, shipping lanes and other activity, you can localize it to some extent when it comes to space, it’s hard to localize things if we’re going to do some sort of demonstration activity and it’s going to be you want to test a geosynchronous platform, it’s going to be done in the geosynchronous belt and that’s going to be by default near probably some other traffic of other nations, whether it’s commercial or civil or other. And so just recognizing that we’re kind of all in it together and anyone who’s testing or doing, as you say, technical performance analysis of a new platform is doing it in that collective context. Really it isn’t the fact that that’s happening, it’s really trying to derive is there some sort of intent or messaging or other behavior about the activity that is
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Concerning.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
So I’ll give a couple examples. If China is trying to work on a new platform in geosynchronous orbit and it’s commercial, right? It’s a commercial company and they’re trying to kind of shake it out and such, they’re probably going to do it mostly in the longitudes that are over there that cross China proper, and they’re probably, and it may not be concerning to us at all, they’re just doing a test. Let me contrast that with what we saw. What we’ve seen Russia do in the last few years is when they launch a new kind of capability into lower earth orbit that appears to have very clearly appears to have a national security mission to it, maybe even an aggressive offensive one, and they launch it into the same low earth orbit plane as one of our high value capabilities that is different, that is clearly demonstrating or messaging something and has an intent that is other than just the shakeout of a new capability, it would be roughly analogous to a country testing a new submarine and in so testing it, they put it in close trail of one of our aircraft carriers and call that a test or a shakeout.
I mean that is clearly different than doing what I mentioned earlier, doing your own range near the border of the country that that’s what Russia has done with its platforms that they’ve launched into low earth orbit and there’s no denying it. They can’t say it’s coincidental. It is exactly in that plane, and anyone who understands their astrodynamics know that there’s intent behind that. They’re purposely coming close to one of our capabilities. So that’s a long answer to your question. So I think you can derive by just understanding what is responsible space operations versus somewhat irresponsible space operations and from the behavior is how I think we determine the intent and whether there’s a potential threat.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
That’s a good point. And I wonder too, as we see the increasing interconnectivity of commercial and national security and with some of these more, I want to say aggressive maneuvers or demonstrations or behaviors from advers, traditionally adversarial countries in space, how do you see the commercial and the national security domains evolving? Do they already talk enough to be able to decipher these behaviors and threats or does that need to be coordinated more closely?
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Yeah, very. Again, we could spend a couple hours on just that one question, so let me just break it down into a couple pieces. The first is really one thing that we are going to need to continue to grow economic activity in the domain is we’re going to have to have better rules of the road for how we operate in space. We’ve been talking about this for years, but this is no different than why we have air traffic control for international airline travel. Why does everybody, why is it that every nation kind of agrees there needs to be air traffic control in their interest, right? And why do commercial airline companies want air traffic control for safety, for transparency, for security, for managing risk? It’s hard to, we could try to imagine it, but stretch our imagination quite a bit. A world where we don’t have air traffic control and airlines are trying to function by just trying to get to a destination without a cooperative framework to have that done.
We don’t have that cooperative framework in space the way we need to. We’re getting there. I think it’s terrific and hopefully all your listeners are tracking that the Department of commerce is now in a beta mode with their space traffic management capability. We’ve been working on this between the Department of Defense and Department of Commerce for years. We’re making slow progress, but at least it’s moving forward and I think that will ultimately evolve to be a form of space traffic management that will be international in space for, and again, primarily for commercial platforms that want to operate the same way airlines do in air traffic control, safely, securely, low risk transparency. I think that may be supplemented by some additional agreements.
In fact, I spoke at the Space Foundation Space Symposium earlier this year on this topic where I mentioned that I think our real problem, our biggest challenge, don’t look up at space homogeneously and say, we got to get rules of R for space. Let’s fix LEO first. Low earth orbit is our challenge. That is where almost all of the debris is. It is where the vast majority of satellites are operating today. If you look at again, proliferate, low earth orbit constellations with many more to come and that’s the piece that probably needs the most attention. An example of an international agreement for operating in low earth orbit, however you want to define it, maybe it’s 400 kilometers to 800 to a thousand kilometers, is you can, you really can’t operate in that region with a satellite unless number one, it can deorbit itself when it’s done and two, it’s got some sort of open tracking mechanism.
We can see it’s their analogous to a transponder in the air domain. That would be an example of an agreement that I think would be mutually beneficial to everyone trying to operate in low earth urban. I think commercial companies would probably like that. It may impose a little bit more costs on them on being able to do those things, but the trade-off in terms of security and transparency I think would be beneficial to them. So I think that’s probably where I would want to focus first shortly after that is geo, which is also hopefully your viewers are tracking the Intel SAT incident from a few weeks ago where we had an Intel SAT come apart and now there’s lots of debris in the geo belt. It’s a much bigger space. I think we can manage that, but that’ll be the next place to go. So my answer to your question is we start with that cooperation between national security and civil by actually our and commercial by actually having better framework for commercial and then national security operates around that the way we do in every other domain.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Yeah, the concept of standards, guardrails and norms really comes up in all threads I’ve seen within the space conversation, and I do want to pivot more into space domain awareness, but this is a really good time to pull in a question from one of our viewers because you’re talking about securing and rules of the road for Leo, and their question is if there’s any security concerns with the thousands of Starlink satellites that are being continuously deployed in leo?
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
I think it’s a good question to ask that question. Here’s how I think that risk is mitigated. SpaceX and Starlink on their own designed in a couple features to that constellation that everyone should be aware of, that they did on their own. They did not have to do this. This was not regulatory, it was not required. They did it and I think it’s important to point that out. The first is they have some autonomous maneuvering capability to avoid debris that doesn’t come free. Starlink chose to put that on their satellites again to mitigate risk and to ensure safety of the operation of their platform. The other ability, and I alluded to before that was built into Starlink is the ability to deorbit.
Now occasionally one of satellites going to have a problem and fail and may not be able to deorbit itself, but by and large, the vast majority of Starling satellites have the ability to deorbit themselves at the end of life and they’ve done it. I actually have lost count how many, I should go find out what it is now, how many satellites or starling satellites, SpaceX has orbited purposefully and part of its continued replenishment and of evolution of their constellation. Those two things are important. When China puts up a similar constellation as they’re planning to do to Starlink with thousands of satellites in low earth orbit, are they going to have those features? Will they be able to a timeless maneuver to avoid debris in an open sharing catalog? That would be something that the space traffic management architecture would contribute to. And are they going to be able to deorbit themselves at the end of their operation?
I hope they do. I think we have to get to a point where it’s actually a norm to do so, and it’s an international agreement if you’re going to operate in that space. By the way, in case some of your listeners are thinking, Shaw, you’re inhibiting freedom of operation if you’re telling, if you’re going to put some rules on who’s going to operate between four oh kilometers and a thousand kilometers, I would just point to air traffic control. Lots of aircraft are not allowed to operate in high traffic areas around major airports. I think everybody generally tends to agree with this with maybe very, very minor exceptions that are hard to justify. And so we need to think of it along those lines
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
And it’s in everyone’s best interest because the utilization and the access of space and what everyday citizens are going to be able to do through engagement, I think is interesting and we need to make sure that it’s an area in a domain that spacecraft can operate and that there isn’t those sort of inherent risks. And I think what you said though, it really punctuates a broader point of having these rules of engagement because on the other side of the spectrum is the whole conversation around space sustainability and how you think about that, especially in commercial engagement. So this concept of deorbiting who’s actually thinking about space sustainability, how do we enforce it, is quite interesting and I think when it gets to domain awareness in this area that you’re really intimately involved. I do want to ask you a question on something you said a few weeks ago because it’s a really good analogy, and you said that our current space domain awareness approach is looking for car keys under a street lamp. Can you further discuss what you mean by that?
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Yeah, I did say that, and that was in the context of mostly what our Department of Defense, US Space Force and US Space Command and the capabilities we have to conduct space domain awareness. We haven’t been as aggressive as we intended to be about five years ago on kind of changing the way we do space domain awareness. We were going to pivot, we were going to go from old ways of just sort of tracking objects using what we call metric observations. You get a reading from an object on its position of velocity vector, you propagate that into an orbit and then you have an idea where it’s going to be a couple of days from now, a couple of weeks from now, and that’s a catalog that’s necessary but not sufficient. And that we need to get, as a department of defense, we need to be able to more actively track capabilities in orbit, especially ones that might be trying to evade detection and custody and tracking.
And we have not really done made much progress along those lines. An analogy would be the difference between air traffic management radars, which are looking for transponders and expecting aircraft to operate as they’re asked to, right? So that’s sort of an expectation usually like, okay, this airliner is here and it’s on this course to here and we’ve told them to stay at this altitude and speed, and so I expect it to be here in an hour to transfer it over to another air traffic center or maybe even to an airfield, but that’s necessary but not sufficient. Why do we have battle management radars for the air domain? Why do we have AAC to conduct air battle management? Because adversaries aren’t going to adhere to that, are going to tell you where they’re going to be. We need to transition that. And so the headlight looking under the lamplight was we still are mostly focused on orbit propagation techniques for space domain awareness and more of a long lead kind of figure out where an object is and if it maneuvers, we pick it up again and project where it’s new orbit is.
And that’s sort of a more deliberate approach. We need to get into closed loop active monitoring and tracking capabilities for potential threats that may be maneuvering or aggressively or trying to evade detection. And it seems like we keep going back to the easy stuff to do and we really need to get after this hard stuff. I’m optimistic though, Kelly, that again with one of the incentives the Department of Defense has had working against it to keep doing this old orbit propagation capability is because we’re still, the Department of Defense is still the standard for space traffic management today.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
People rely on that. So we track debris, we track things and folks rely on that. And that would be making the Air Force in charge of air traffic control and the safety of civilian airliners all day. It’s going to come at a cost on their focus on doing air battle management. And so I think that’s why I’m optimistic that as we grow the civil side of this for space traffic management, the Department of Defense is going to get more and more focused on the things it needs to be able to do to assure security in the domain for its mission sets and collectively that structure will be beneficial to all.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
So as we look at adapting this engagement and really coming into being able to address modern day challenges, what needs to happen first and what do you think are our biggest capability gaps in doing that
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
On the very surface, I’ll focus in on national security, I think that’s what you’re asking. I’ve already alluded to a little bit on space domain awareness, and again for your listeners who aren’t aware, and maybe we can post this link later, Dr. Shankar Patrick, who was a previous deputy J two at US Space Command and I co-authored a paper for CSIS as part of a presidential transition series. It was put out before the election for whoever won the election, and we talked about what we think our space domain awareness needs will be in the future. And it kind of continued the discussion I already had here, but we need to look at new techniques, new phenomenology’s, passive elimination, active illumination and other and RF detection, and we probably need to have those capabilities in space more than they are today. If someone, it would be a good research project, someone did a compendium of all the sensors being used to look onto space today to understand what’s going on. My guess is 98% or more are terrestrial and less than 2% are actually platforms in space trying to understand what’s going on. That seems like an imbalance to me. So phenomenology where you put the sensors and then our approach, right? It’s been traditionally, as I pointed out about orbit propagation, it now needs to be about active tracking and battle management. So that’s space command awareness, space command and control is another area that is not where it needs to be.
How do we actually give a more comprehensive and thorough space domain awareness picture that includes all those things that I mentioned. How do we now assess threats and then how do we react to those threats? And that’s what space command and control’s about integrating all of our capabilities primarily for US space command to now conduct operations in an integrated fashion with all the capabilities that we might have. And this means everything from protecting our own space capabilities and our allied space capabilities, understanding commercial assets that are in the game, understanding threats that are in the game, and then taking the actions to mitigate threats and beyond.
I would say that those two are probably the biggest piece. And then if I had to go to another, it would be what is our true mechanism to protect our capabilities and maybe go after threats. Those actual capabilities too need some work as well. So there’s, again, each one of those themselves is a whole discussion at some, right? And some of it gets classified pretty quickly, but we are not where we need to be across those three major areas and we need to move out Now. I do think we are moving out. The question is, is it fast enough? Will it be in time for a potential confrontation in space or not? If it’s not, we’re going to have a large emotional lesson learned that will drive us forward if it is ready in time, if we do have the space domain awareness and the space C two and the capabilities for defense and offensive necessary in time, then my optimistic expectation is that actually deters a war or confrontation in the first place. And that’s really the ultimate goal is to continue to have the domain be peaceful, transparent, secure and sustainable,
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Being good stewards in space. And your point about protecting assets, I actually want to pull in a question from a viewer right on target, they want to know how we can reconcile the conflicting needs for transparency in space operations for debris mitigation and national security requirements while protecting space assets.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
If I understand the question, and I think I have a fairly simple, hopefully sufficient answer to that, the question is, Hey, I’m going to restate the question we got. You want transparency on the one hand understand debris and everything that’s going on and let commercial operate freely and safely with minimum risk, but then we also want to be able to do things on the national security side that might work against transparency. My answer to that is we’ve been doing that for almost all of history in all of the domains, and I guess I’ll use the air domain just right now. I’ve already laid out everything on air traffic control and why that’s necessary across the globe for traffic, for air traffic, for safety and such. Does that inhibit us from conducting air operations? It really actually doesn’t. We just have capabilities that operate around that. We have stealth bombers, we have fighters with stealth capabilities. We have the ability to rapidly maneuver or to jam potential radars that could be used to try. I mean, we will learn how to operate around that.
I could give the same talk from the maritime domain. We want transparency of shipping in the maritime domain and shipping lanes and counter piracy to partnering and all that thing to make things safe for commercial and civil traffic. But we also know how to conduct war fighting operations in maritime domain if we need to. And we simply just operate kind of around that. Absolutely, we can do that in space. I have no reason to think we can’t do it. There will be challenges that we have to figure out how do we do that, but we can do it and that’s how we should do it, and we shouldn’t have national security drive a lack of transparency from that regard. That would be the tail wagging the dog in the wrong way to go.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Well, and the whole transparency piece is also with international cooperation, and since you did bring up the election, there is a question related to that that I do want to pull in. So with the current administration and this America first trend, how do you think that will play into international cooperation in the space sector and is there an integrated role you can envision for Europe?
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
So, well, first, I’ve been asked a lot actually in the last couple of weeks about the election results last week and a half or so. And so to anticipate that question, I think there’s going to be two forces at work with the new administration that comes in. The first is, I frankly think the new administration is going to be fairly bullish on space, and that’s simply because the president-elect was the president when Space Force was stood up. He seems to have a personal interest in space and we saw that in the first administration. So I think that will be a dynamic. I don’t think anyone denies that.
But the other dynamic is important too, the other force and that is we’re going to have to deal with and answer some questions and make some commitments really across all the sectors in the next four years. And that would’ve been regardless of what administration would’ve come in. And what do I mean by that? I do think that we’re going to see China continue its plan and they’re on track to put a human presence on the moon in the early 2030s. Are we going to match that commitment as a nation or not? I don’t think NASA is funded completely to do it right now. Are we going to do it or not? That’ll be a force that the administration will have to deal with. Commercial, we’ve made some progress. Actually some announcements are just made in the last couple of weeks. We’ve made some progress on export controls and normalizing the sharing of technologies that are finally getting where they need to be to enable the better use of commercial capabilities for national security purposes as well as with other nations.
I think we got to keep getting at that to encourage economic investment in the domain. You don’t want to an investor thinking, I’m going to get overregulated. I don’t want to invest in that. I’m going to go someplace else. I think we want to encourage that investment and then a national security state. I don’t think the threats are going to diminish. I think they’re only going to grow in terms of kind and scope, and we’re going to have to learn to deal with those as well. And so those forces plus an administration that’s probably going to be leaning into space are going to provide for an interesting, I think, arena for discussion in the future. The question particular I think was getting, after I heard the America First International and such, I think we’re just going to have to wait and see how that plays out. I would just point out it’s hard to do things on your own in space because we’re all in there together. It would be trying to do air traffic control all by yourself. I mean, there has to be some level of cooperation to move things forward, and I think that we’ll just see how that policy evolves with the new administration.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Agreed. And I think that the point you made about economic security thematically, we’re going to start to see more increasingly that economic dominance and security is national security in a lot of ways. And the way that, going back to the original part of this conversation, national security and commercial space domains evolve, I think will become increasingly more connected out of necessity, but also as a tactic perhaps.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Yeah, it’s another facet of the third space age, the first space age space, it was mostly a proxy environment for national security purposes and proxy to some extent. We kind of played out what was going on there, and there were some strategic capabilities that we learned to put in space that made it easier to facilitate how we posture during the Cold War, but it was never economics that was driving things in the space domain in the first space age and only very rudimentary fashion in the second space age. Now, actually, this is an optimistic thing. We have actually normalized, I actually think the primary need now for securing this space domain is not some sort of proxy prestige thing on the planet or such. It’s actually to again, encourage economic investment, make it secure, make the environment itself sustained, be sustainable for further economic opportunity. And that is the true engine of growth that historically, right? It’s always been economic opportunity and security comes along with that. And I think that, again, I think that’s kind of exciting that we finally reached that normalization in this third space in based domain.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
And I think the realization that is a really critical area. The Space Foundation puts out an annual space economy number, and for 2023, we quantified it at five 70000000078% of that is commercial revenue. The other 22% is government spending either on civil and national security. And of course from a commercial engagement, the government is still the main customer. So it’s intertwined in that way. However, you do start to see a lot of that economic prosperity and the importance of economic return when it comes to space conversations.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
I don’t envy the folks at Space Foundation that have to come up with that number.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
They’re a fabulous team.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
I could be a real instigator and say, show me something that doesn’t involve space in our economy today. If space were to suddenly disappear, what would still be working? What would still be driving economic growth? And maybe it becomes sort of a red herring kind of question in the end, right? We’re ultimately hugely dependent on the space domain for everything that happens on this planet. Almost everything that happens this planet, we just need to realize that and move forward. But anyway, I’m being an instigator. I think someone, we got to probably try to quantify it just to make sure people understand how important it truly is.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Yeah. Well, and your point about, I agree with you, I often get into conversations with people where I’m almost like that my big fat Greek wedding where he is like, give me any word, and I can tell you the Greek word. It’s sort of like, give me any industry and I’ll tell you how it’s related to space. But that’s a great point, Jeff, your point as how as engagement builds out, we’re going to start to see a lot more of these seemingly disparate industries or adjacent industries to space become more increasingly relevant. And from your perspective, when you’re looking at engagement and particularly around space domain awareness and others, I’m sure that there are industries like artificial intelligence and quantum computing and others that are really critical. So if you’re looking at the five, 10 years ahead, what industries would you encourage to take a look at becoming part of this equation?
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
I think you hit on a big one, and that is artificial intelligence is going to play a role in the space domain. It may even be the space domain actually might even be the proving grounds for a lot of AI capabilities in many ways. And let me explain what I mean. I’ll start with more tactical, and that is I like to point out probably the most impressive autonomous machines that humans have ever constructed are probably satellites. And even today, even in the last week, the Voyager spacecraft is in the news. Some of your listeners know what I’m talking about, right? Still operating. And that’s just an example. We’ve sent many planet probes to the planets. We have satellites operating that have been operating. Even the satellites that I was responsible for as a squadron commander, our mill star communication satellites designed during the Cold War, had a lot of autonomous capability built into them.
They were really advanced for their time. That’s not going to go away. As we do more and more in space and activities become more and more dynamic, it’s more crowded, there’s more maneuvering going on, there’s more threats and such. We’re going to rely on autonomous platforms and smarter and smarter autonomous platforms to conduct those kinds of missions. And so again, I think space is actually a proving ground for a lot of some of those, how we will apply those technologies more broadly, though, I don’t want to just get on platforms, just how as we continue to do data analytics and understand what’s happening on our planet using some space capabilities mixed with retrial capabilities and such, you’re going to need the ability, large language models and such to understand all of that and stay ahead of maybe where a competitor is in the commercial environment or an adversary is in the national security environment. And so we’re going to need artificial intelligence applications in that regard too. And so I absolutely, very bullish on that. And any AI companies that I talk to, that’s usually one of my questions is how are you looking at the application for this in the space domain?
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Well, and I think too, to your point about approving ground, we’re entering this era as well where we’re going to have more data than we know what to do with from these satellite constellations. And so being able to qualify, quantify, store, make sense of it, I mean, the use cases are endless as well. And on that side too, for terrestrial bound applications as well.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Yep. Absolutely. By the way, space domain awareness is a good kind of microcosmic example of that, right? As we get more and more data from more and more sources, commercial allied, even scientific sources of what’s going on in the domain, how do we make sense of that and how do we look for trends that we need to be concerned about, immediate challenges or dangers, even if it’s debris that’s affecting civil operation, or is it a national security threat? That’s just a good example if you want to kind of neck it down on how to use data to better understand and stay ahead of what’s happening in the space domain rather than lagging or understanding.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
That’s a good point. Well, haw, I really enjoyed this conversation, and we’re probably going to have to do a part 2, 3, 4, 5 to just pull on the various themes, but I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing your expertise with us.
Lt. Gen. John Shaw:
Well, it was enjoyable, Kelly. I hope the listeners got something out of it, and I look forward to maybe one of those opportunities down the road. That’d be terrific.
Kelli Kedis Ogborn:
Definitely. Well, thank you so much and to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for engaging. We got a lot of questions we didn’t actually have time to get to, so we’ll make sure to jump in and engage on LinkedIn and other platforms. And for everyone listening, just remember that there’s a place for everyone in the global space ecosystem. Thank you for tuning in and stay apprised of future vector conversations. Have a lovely day. Bye.
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Safeguarding the Space Domain: National Security & Awareness