This week’s is the third episode in a month-long series looking at various, cross-cutting aspects of the state of the space industrial base. Laura Winter speaks with the Defense Innovation Unit’s Director of the Space Portfolio Steve “Bucky” Butow, who is intimately involved in growing the Space Industrial Base through government contracts and informing policy. In uniform he is Brig. Gen. Butow, Commander of the California Air National Guard where he leads 4,900 Airmen assigned to five wings and a headquarters staff.

This is the second episode in a month-long series looking at various, crosscutting aspects of the state of the space industrial base. Space and cyber leaders in the United States and Europe are now looking to create systems of collective cyber security for the 21st Century, covering assets on orbit, on the ground, and in production. The push to develop cyber-security information-sharing alliances is intensifying, as software, the cyber warrior’s attack surface, is increasingly driving the printing of space components, including solid rocket motors. Laura Winter Speaks with Samuel Visner, Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center; and Erin Miller, who is the Space ISAC’s Executive Director.

This is the first episode in a month-long series looking at various, sometimes neglected, aspects…

This week’s episode focuses on the very latest space domain developments coming out of the Far East. Laura winter speaks with Jonathan Ward, a China scholar, founder of the Atlas Organization, and book author, who has a new tome out this week titled, “The Decisive Decade: American Grand Strategy for Triumph Over China”; and Joshua Carlson, a “Blue Water” space power writer, managing editor of the online magazine Dauntless, and author of the book, “Spacepower Ascendant: Space Development Theory and a New Space Strategy”.

This week’s episode is coming out of Space Symposium, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. With much…

The White House says it wants, “to achieve the goal of enabling human transportation and settlement within the solar system.” There are two, possibly seismic, events about to happen in the space ecosystem that could help: The ispace moon landing and SpaceX’s first orbital flight test of its Starship super-heavy rocket. To understand what this could mean for the civil, commercial, and defense space sectors, Laura Winter speaks with Chris Quilty, Founder of Quilty Analytics; George Pullen, MilkyWay Economy’s Chief Economist; Chris Stott, a serial space entrepreneur, and the Chairman & CEO, Lonestar Data Holdings; and Peter Garretson, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and co-author of the coming book “The Next Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy”.

The commercial space ecosystem is weathering multiple storm systems. First, there was the Silicon Valley…

This month the Tokyo-based company ispace plans on delivering three rovers to the lunar surface, including a small but real Transformer. This could be a first for Japan, but perhaps more importantly, if successful, it will also be a first for the commercial space sector, worldwide. Laura Winter speaks with Namrata Goswami about how Japan’s government is shaping policy to specifically develop its space industry and grow its national defense space capabilities, even to perhaps intercept China’s hypersonic glide vehicles.

In this week’s episode, Laura Winter unpacks the security requirements and the policy the advent of AI necessitates with Samuel Visner, the Aerospace Corporation’s newest Technical Fellow who is a longtime cyberwarfare and intelligence veteran in and outside of government, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Science and Technology in International Affairs at Georgetown University; and Gregory Falco, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Assured Autonomy and the Civil and Systems Engineering Department, inventor, and a “Forbes 30 Under 30” alumnus.

This week the DownLink serves up a deep dive into what’s in the Department of Defense’s FY ‘24 United States Space Force budget request and an interview with the service branch’s Director of Science, Technology, and Research, Joel Mozer. In addition to the chief scientist, Laur Winter Speaks with Chris Stone, Senior Fellow for Space Deterrence-National Institute for Deterrence Studies and author of the book “Reversing the Tao: A Framework for Credible Space Deterrence”; Peter Garretson, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and co-author of the coming book “The Next Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy”; and Sam Wilson, senior policy analyst for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corporation.