The Space Force Is a Transformative Victory for American Leadership in the 21st Century
The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act took a bold step forward to “restore America’s proud legacy of leadership in space” with a new mission for national security driven by visionary space policies to guide us into the future. We’re joined by Dr. Mir Sadat, Former Policy Director at the U.S. National Security Council, to discuss current space issues and the role of the U.S. Space Force in protecting civil exploration and freedom of commerce in space while continuing to support the mission of our forces here on Earth.*
Mir, Welcome! Let me start by asking you about your recent role as the NSC Policy Director at the White House, where you were involved with national-level space policies. What can you tell me about this remarkable experience?
I worked in the Defense Directorate of the US National Security Council (NSC) at the White House. The NSC Defense Directorate is the lead NSC interlocutor with the Department of Defense (DoD). In the Defense Directorate, I was one of only two space-qualified professionals — actually in the entire NSC. My primary portfolio — Critical Enablers — allowed me to be involved with a variety of topics and offices within the White House.
Now, I should also acknowledge the 2017 revival of the US National Space Council (NSpC), the lead on all White House space policy. NSpC coordinates and consults with the NSC when it involves national security matters.
There are also other White House space stakeholders such as Office of Management and Budgets (OMB), National Economic Council (NEC), Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Domestic Policy Council (DPC). In short, the work we did was to ensure that policy was conveyed and executed throughout the interagency.
Should America’s newest military branch, the US Space Force, be primarily focused on the “Brown Water” role of supporting military operations on Earth, or should it embrace more of a “Blue Water” vision for protecting US interests by supporting private space enterprise as our nation expands into the solar system?
The US, along with its allies and partners, have recognized space as a warfighting domain primarily in response to Russian and Chinese counter-space capabilities, military operations, and declarative statements. That is why on December 20, 2019, a bipartisan 2020 NDAA signed into law authorized the creation of the US Space Force (USSF), under the Department of the Air Force, to secure our national interests in an increasingly contested domain.
The USSF should play an integral role in America’s competition for cislunar leadership and to secure our national interests in space — whether military, commercial, or civil. The stakes are high because there is a real race for dominance over cislunar access, operations, and resources.
The USSF’s role must be more than just terrestrial focus and include freedom of US space commerce and civil exploration just as the US Navy stands the watch to ensure that US sea commerce and exploration can freely navigate the world’s seas. The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) prioritizes unfettered access to, and the freedom to operate in, space — as a “vital interest” — that is usually something for which countries go to war over.
This means evolving the “space sanctuary era” thinking that settles for space superiority vs. space supremacy or dominance. To align with the 2017 NSS because we should not settle to only dominate an adversary only at a specific time and place but we should want domain superiority everywhere at all times and target an aggressor at any time if we say “freedom of operation” is a vital national interest. The Navy would never settle for just being a superior naval force. They aspire for sea supremacy, and to dominant adversaries at any time and any location.
To normalize the space domain, we need to evolve our thinking and both our lexicon and actions must match that thinking. As such, the 2020 Defense Space Strategy (DSS) should have like I mentioned earlier set the USSF’s role for maintaining freedom of space commerce and civil exploration and their role in safeguarding the space industrial base.
It sounds like that the needs of our national defense are deeply entangled with our goals for space exploration as well as the emerging space commercial & industrial economy. Taking that into account, what are your thoughts on the role of the Space Industrial Base?
Trillions of dollars of economic activity are moving into and about low Earth orbit and beyond. Millions of jobs can be created in our Space Industrial Base (SIB). Therefore, the US must not just maintain but expand its SIB.
Visionary policies can responsibly unleash the SIB’s financial, information services, transportation, logistics, human space presence, power systems, manufacturing, and resource extraction subsectors. You cannot be a Space Power without a robust SIB. Can you imagine an Army, Navy, or Air Force without a thriving industrial base? These military services are tightly intertwined with their support bases to harness the full capabilities and services they offer. The same relationship applies to how NASA needs to align itself with the SIB.
Strengthening the SIB is not only vital to our military but also civil space priorities. And of course, NASA has always been fundamental to America’s national security. A diverse and robust SIB will retain US leadership in civil and national security space, and serve as a source of overall US national power.
Recently, I contributed to the latest “State of the Space Industrial Base Report 2020” co-sponsored by the US Space Force, the Defense Innovation Unit, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. I would highly recommend reading the report if you’re interested in learning more about the SIB.
This is a really exciting time for space exploration, with a lot of recent change in military & civilian policy along with a renewed commitment to lunar exploration. Let me ask what our administration’s space policy is today, and where do you see that going?
A few days ago, the National Space Council issued a thorough and lengthy report outlining a new strategy for deep space human exploration. For over three years since its revival, the NSpC, in coordination with the other White House stakeholders, has led the piece-meal update of the most outdated portions of the 2010 US National Space Policy. This undertaking marks a tremendous step toward guiding the nation’s top-line space policies for our economy, national security, and scientific exploration.
The NSpC, along with the NSC, OMB, and OSTP, have also driven the birth of the new US Space Force, reinvigorated NASA’s human space program, advanced space traffic management, and streamlined commercial space regulations among many other policy initiative successes.
In February 2020, the membership of the National Space Council was amended to include the Secretary of Energy, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. This inclusion signals greater White House support for the US space industrial base and the Department of Energy’s commitment to solar and nuclear-powered space propulsion and lunar power generation.
In May 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released revised regulations regarding the licensing of private remote sensing space systems. These regulations reassign licensing requirements based on the global availability of that capability rather than national security risk.
The Federal Aviation Administration also recently reorganized their space organizations and also expects to release final licensing and safety regulations for various types of launch and re-entry vehicles in September 2020. These actions are key steps forward to aligning US regulations and policies with the rapid advancements in commercial space both at home and abroad.
Beyond these successes, we need to position America for the next 20 to 40 years to successfully compete globally by addressing other policies within the context of the next 5–10 years as rising economic benefits, national security importance, and advances in fundamental technologies further increase space activities and improve capabilities of great powers such as China and Russia but also spacefaring nations.
However, as a whole, while many policies and strategies are calling for cooperation and understanding, there is an absence of an integrated, comprehensive 2060 American Space Vision and Strategy that fuses national security, civil and commercial space efforts. This space vision should update the existing National Space Strategy and thus drive updates to other government strategies and policies, with particular attention to (not listed in order of importance):
- Declare space a “Zone for Economic Ventures and Civil Exploration” because emerging commercial ventures and the development of smallsats, cubesats and satellite constellations is outpacing efforts to develop and implement policies and processes to address these activities.
- Establish space sustainability, norms of behavior, and codes of conduct;
- Designate space as a critical infrastructure;
- Standardize space cybersecurity and transmission security;
- Share responsibly across the spectrum band;
- Review the over-classification of compartmented & special access programs to allow for greater participation of people with a need to know and not to keep everything black where it serves no deterrent value to foreign adversaries;
- Message strategically and publicly to allies, partners, and adversaries.
- Advance solar & nuclear powered space propulsion as well as lunar power generation;
- Encourage US-persons to enter and graduate vocational and academic STEM programs;
- Promote supply chain hygiene with front-of-the-line contract passes for supply chain illumination;
- Align counterintelligence and counterespionage in our laboratories and SIB, and also educating participants about potential threats;
- Increase export control information sharing across the government for expedient dual-use technological transfers and national security;
- Leverage US economic offensive & defensive tools to increase American commercial space activities and support the growth of American space companies across the wide spectrum of the domestic space market and international ventures;
- Reform government procurement and planning to send predictable signals to private space companies; and
- Bolster existing space equities exchanges, creating an eventual separate & unique Space Commodities Exchange along with bond market utilization.
NASA recently partnered with SpaceX for the first crewed launch from American soil since 2011. Given the success of this endeavor & the emerging role of private space ventures, do you anticipate seeing future collaboration between the Space Force, NASA, and the private sector?
The USSF’s first recruitment video says “maybe your purpose on this planet isn’t on this planet” and the second recruitment video features an astronaut. At the moment, the Air Force, Army, and Navy have astronaut career fields but the Space Force does not have them yet. This needs to be addressed. There should be stronger ties with NASA and the private sector because the USSF will eventually grow to ensure access, operations, and safety of both commercial space and civilian space. USSF leadership will need to embrace and support this momentum.
The 2020 DSS mentions integration of military space power into operations — referring to space power only along the lines of joint and military services level. The DSS could also have gone further than the familiar “cooperate” by using the word “integrate” with other US federal departments and agencies, allies and partners, or even our industry.
Our global competitors and foreign adversaries have integrated their military and national security space entities across their respective governments and even their space industrial base. Now, they are working on building global partnerships.
What we need is an integrated whole-of-government space power that includes civil and commercial space lines of efforts but most importantly uses to the fullest extent possible all the national instruments of power: diplomacy, information, military, economics, finance, intelligence and legal. Integration is not an end-state but a means to assimilate our shared technologies, talents, investment and discoveries.
In March of 2019, Vice President Mike Pence announced an accelerated timeline for NASA’s Artemis program to land the “first woman and the next man on the moon” in 2024. Given the unexpected new challenges we’ve faced from the COVID-19 pandemic, do you think the 2024 timeline is feasible to put humans back on the moon?
As far as the COVID-19 pandemic impact on the US space industry, the exact magnitude and success of the industry’s recovery is still uncertain but it will have a negative impact. According to Space Capital, investments in space-based companies in the 2nd quarter of 2020 were down 23% from the record highs hit in 2019.
NASA is on an ambitious critical path with Artemis for a return to the Moon by 2024 and the development of the capabilities and infrastructure for a sustained lunar presence.
While a lunar landing again is important, what is more important is readiness and capability to permanently stay on the Moon. NASA and DoD should provide more precise assessments as to when they expect human settlements on the Moon. That date should supersede and become the goal date, if necessary, and drive any other subsequent dates.
I understand the administration’s current focus on the Moon and cislunar space is seen as a necessary step to create a staging area to support future Mars missions. What are your thoughts on that?
Getting to the lunar surface and permanently staying there is important before humans journey deeper into the solar system. Before any undertaking expeditions, the military stages rehearsals and exercises to ensure that all their planning, equipment, operations, and other associated requirements are met. Similarly, the lunar surface provides us with environmental and operational challenges to prepare us to overcome the same challenges on Mars later on. These conditions simply cannot be replicated here on Earth.
Imagine all the on-the-spot lessons learned from just one day on the Moon. I’d want my expeditionary force to be trained and exercised on the Moon before I take the risk of sending them in harm’s way into deep space. This will also involve the Lunar Gateway as an expeditionary outpost orbiting the Moon to provide support as a sustainable, long-term lunar surface and staging point for deep space exploration.
While on the Moon I would expect modern technologies such as space mining and 3D printing to aid us in building shelters and exploration. We could also see efforts to use the Moon ice reserve for water and energy sources. We’ll need to explore a variety of new energy sources, so we should be open to using compact nuclear systems to power our efforts on the lunar surface.
We should additionally be open to the use of nuclear power propulsion for spacecraft, which would dramatically reduce the travel time to Mars resulting in rationed supplies, oxygen, and impacts on the human body. All of these efforts are conditioned on first getting to the Moon again, and then demonstrating that we can stay and survive on the Moon.
Does China fit into our space program at all? Are we collaborating with them, competing against them, or are both nation’s programs essentially independent and agnostic of each other at this point?
China hasn’t displayed any behaviors that warrant the trust of the US and our closest allies — in fact, their recent actions have been done quite the opposite. China has attempted to undermine America’s traditional role in space and create schisms between our ally and partner spacefaring nations. Spacefaring nations need to decide whether they want to do the same routine, boring thing — stranded on a Chinese space station OR do they want to be part of something spectacular, amazing, and exciting — and explore the Moon and Mars with the United States? Complicating their decision is China’s spamming of world markets to in order to dominate market share and buy or lease friends.
In terms of space, over a decade ago China laid out a 30-year cislunar economic and industrial plan and committed vast resources and talent to achieve its “space dream” of becoming a leading, global space power. The Chinese government has provided funding to its commercial sector and advanced its customer base via the Belt and Road Initiative at a scale and price point that market-driven firms in the United States cannot match.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative Space Information Corridor and Digital Silk Road will supposedly generate $10 trillion by 2050 — which dwarfs America’s estimated economy of $1.5 trillion by 2040 (pre-COVID19 estimation) from today’s approximately $385 billion.
We may think, “that’s 30 years from today and that’s far away,” but the 30 years or so until 2050 will pass in the blink of an eye as the Chinese have demonstrated — theirs is a true inflection point because more than 40 years after the Russians and Americans embarked on the space race, China in 2003 sent its first astronaut into orbit and in 2018 China conducted more space-oriented operations than any other country. And as already mentioned, they have already informed us about their intents for the next 30 years.
It’s our move now. To compete with China, the US cannot become China so we must play to our strengths to retain our global competitive advantage. The US strength is its position as leader of the world in technological innovation and vibrancy of a true market economy, and most importantly democratic norms and values. The US must provide allies and partners, and other nations that view the US as leader of the free and open world with competitive military, civil, and commercial partnership frameworks.
Like I mentioned earlier, the US should develop a multi-administration guiding “national vision” for multi-generational, space industrialization and national space development to catalyze whole-of-nation efforts and enable the United States to compete and win now and into the future. This multi-generational vision should supersede and update all strategies, policies, actions, and engagements.
A lot of the discussion around China these days involves supply chains. What do you think about this discussion as it relates to transparency & traceability efforts to keep state-owned companies of foreign adversaries and fake parts out of the Space Industrial Base?
Supply chain transparency and traceability is a key element for leveling the playing field for US space companies and implementing US-led economic principles of product quality, safety, and liability for failure faced by the corporations, their banks, investors and contractors. Foreign manipulation and irresponsible use of supply chains is a concern at the highest levels of the US government. Additionally, complex, global supply-chains introduce a high degree of risk to domestic companies, and in turn, national security space end-users.
The US, along with its allies and partners, must understand the origin and assembly process of critical components for complex space-based technologies to prevent malicious or counterfeit parts. Supply chain hygiene is crucial to the development of space-technologies for US national security purposes and commercial purposes.
Government procurement and global supply chain managers rely on a vast array of data to ascertain suppliers’ compliance with legal requirements such as anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist funding, anti-corruption, and best practices such as environmental, human rights, fair labor, and other development goals that promote US civil society policies. However, no company, regardless of how large or global, has the resources to conduct the due diligence needed to ascertain the direct ownership, indirect control, and other undue influences that a foreign country uses to unfairly and potentially illegally gain access to sensitive proprietary commercial intellectual property.
To resolve the problem of counterfeit or malicious parts, the Space industry must look toward lessons learned and success from the aviation industry especially with regard to assuring component integrity and for tracking the manufacturing origin, method, pedigrees, and testing for commercial aircraft parts, and when and how they were replaced.
The US government should also create a golden accreditation certificate process to ensure durable space supply chain accountability and to reward firms that demonstrate supply chain hygiene, by illuminating a required number of layers in the supply chain, with front-of-the-line passes in the contracting process.
This effort should be coupled with the development and adoption within the federal government and contracting firms of new technologies such as blockchain or distributed ledger for supply chain management. The US government should undertake an assessment of findings, challenges, and recommendations of the impact of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States specific to the space sector to check if the policies and measure are working.
These efforts necessitate that the US government assess the adequacy in training, capability, and development areas of all counterintelligence offices and intelligence cadre assigned to national security, civil, and commercial space and tasked with tracking space supply chains and dual-use technologies. There is no full-time cadre of law enforcement experts doing this.
Finally, the US government should consider a Five-Eyes style of collaborative agreement that would be inclusive of all our allies and partners to develop a common standard and to formalize information sharing on space supply chain providers. This Five-Eyes style of partnership should also include counterintelligence training and capability to secure all allied and partner space industries.
We’ve spoken about growing the Space Industrial Base. What are your thoughts about the need for US domestically sourced STEM expertise to support future growth of the space sectors of the economy?
America’s greatest assets are its people’s knowledge, innovation, and resolve. Without Americans and their abilities, no amount of resources or technological capabilities can ensure the US to last as a great power or to win in great power competition. The space industrial base and government space organizations compete with each other, and with other cutting edge technology sectors, for recruitment of talent. There is no denying that we have a shortage of STEM vocational and educational graduates to support all of these various technology sectors. So, the government and industry need to work together to fix this labor and talent shortage.
Space currently provides value because it facilitates the creation, distribution, and selling of data but in the future space will become increasingly commercialized and industrialized which will demand highly skilled human capital. NASA’s Artemis program will require an additional 10,000 STEM graduates over the next five years for civil needs alone, and this does not take into account what is needed to support the new US Space Force or the enlarged space industrial base.
Current STEM personnel numbers are insufficient unless we do something to meet the needs of expanded national space capabilities and the industrial base that provides those capabilities. The industry will require non-STEM personnel knowledgeable of the space enterprise in a variety of support occupational fields such as financial engineering, economics, and law. We require a whole-of-government mobilization especially in light of our STEM statistics as compared to our great power competitors if we are intent on sourcing those talents domestically.
(*)Disclaimer: Mir Sadat’s views expressed in this interview reflect his professional expertise and opinions, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the US Government or any of its particular Departments or Agencies.
About Our Guest
Dr. Mir Sadat, Former Policy Director at the U.S. National Security Council, joins us where he led interagency coordination on defense and space policy issues. In this role, Mir supported the establishment of both the US Space Force and US Space Command, and review of national security decisions involving NASA and also the US commercial space sector.
Mir is also a naval officer with intelligence and space qualifications and in his preceding two naval assignments; he served as a Space Policy Strategist with Chief of Naval Operations and a Space Operations Officer with U.S. Tenth Fleet.
Mir has a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University and has taught at various universities in California and Washington, DC. Before joining the government, Mir spent 10 years in various capacities at Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. You can follow Mir on Twitter (@Dr_Sadat_USN) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fours)
