America is engaged in a new space race – one that will determine whether the U.S. or China will be the dominant nation in space. The stakes are too high for America to accept second place. For the sake of our national security, our economy, and even our physical safety, we must employ every tool at our disposal to ensure that the U.S. leads in the space domain, ahead of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). America’s greatest asset has long been our thriving private sector. We must harness the technological, intellectual, and financial horsepower of our free, innovative economy. Prioritizing public-private partnerships can play a key role in getting there.
The New Space Race Is On
The efficacy and lethality of our military, in addition to countless civilian applications, largely depend on the capacity of American equipment in space to withstand both kinetic and cyber-attacks. Satellites and other technologies form the backbone of our communications systems, which given our increasing reliance on drones, is a massive vulnerability. In the 21st century, losing a satellite could mean losing a war. Space also provides much of our real-time intelligence and battlefield awareness. Space-to-earth weaponry is another long-term worry.
The military implications are not the only concern. Space is also the stage for the next great economic competition. The space “market” could be worth $1.8 trillion, including everything from mining minerals to enabling the next generation of farming to empowering the Internet of Things and even designing new pharmaceuticals. The U.S. must dominate in space to ensure both our military edge and global economic leadership remains intact.
Even our ability to respond to disasters relies on our equipment in space. We have relied on satellites to track and predict wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters for decades. The government has no higher responsibility than the safety of its citizens, so we cannot leave the tools we use we keep them safe vulnerable to malicious actors.
That is why, in his first term, President Trump focused his attention on space. He stood up the U.S. Space Force and produced an aggressive national space strategy, reorienting large sums of federal resources and attention to ensuring America’s space leadership.
Yet the CCP has pressed its advantage, namely its enormous space industrial base. Its formidable manufacturing capacity enables it to produce more of the hardware – rockets, electronics, and the like – needed to have a real presence in space than America can.
The U.S. alone cannot keep up with their manufacturing capacity, but we do have our own advantages. Our private sector, free from state control, can and does innovate better than compliance-oriented Chinese companies can. With the right support in place, our flexibility will let our innovations go from sketchpad to reality far faster. We must leverage this advantage by doing everything in our power to enable private-sector ideas, technical know-how, financial resources, and experience scaling ideas quickly to come together.
Public-private partnerships are the most efficient means of bringing together stakeholders while limiting costs to the federal government. Blueprints like the Berkeley Space Center show how academia, private industry, and government can come together to identify, incubate, and launch tomorrow’s breakthroughs in scientific research. These models are also excellent uses of federal resources that can shift the balance in America’s favor by reinvigorating our labs and research infrastructure and enabling access to valuable technology. Important public-private work is also happening at the University of Oklahoma, where students and researchers lead on developing future aerospace and defense technology. It’s the same model that helped Bell Labs develop the transistor, satellite-enabled communications, and so much else that allowed us to win the first space race.
If we are going to once again dominate in space, we need to replicate this model all over the country. Wherever the U.S. has a critical mass of aerospace expertise and a strong university presence – like the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the Stennis Space Center and the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and the University of Colorado in the Denver area – we should have such innovation hubs operating as a public-private partnership. Investment in these and similar projects would provide the technologies, the private capital, and the workforce we need to compete in space for decades to come.
The current space race is a tight one; as our military strength, our economic security, and even our safety ride on whether we win, the stakes are arguably higher than the space race we ran against the Soviet Union. We must pursue public-private partnerships if we are to avoid second place.
About the Authors:
Alexander B. Gray served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the White House National Security Council, 2019-21. Timothy Smith is the Chief Development Officer at SKS Partners.
