I’m planning the next few essays about space, a domain with nearly endless topics to write about. As I made my list, it grew and grew. Technology and geopolitics. The course humanity will take as it explores the edges of the universe. Whether there’s life out there, where it is, and why we haven’t met yet.
The breadth started to feel like a grab bag. A little bit of this, some of that. You do the natural thing. Bucket the topics logically, make a schedule that seems like it’ll flow. But it still didn’t feel right. The disparate topics raised a question: why does all this matter? Are these just interesting stories, or is there a there there?
That led me to think about what space is to me. The breadth of topics didn’t collapse. Instead, I came to understand it’s the very thing that makes space something special.
Space inspires.
I watched the Tom Hanks series From the Earth to the Moon when I was a kid. One episode profiled Gus Grissom, a famed Apollo astronaut who tragically died in the Apollo 1 fire.
He visited the factories that built Apollo hardware, walking the floor and meeting technicians.
One scene had him speaking with the toolmakers. They weren’t making the hardware. They were making the hardware that made the hardware, their work often unknown and overlooked.
Grissom spent the time with these guys, seeing their craft and talking about how their work enabled the bigger mission. I think about how proud they must have felt going home that night.
I probably watched this series in eighth grade, but thinking of this scene still chokes me up a bit. It represents so much of what I believe in. And I map it directly to working in space.
Launch is addictive.
The livestreams show the shiny side of launch. But in reality, it’s a brutal endeavour. To get to orbit, every system must push to the edge of its performance envelope.
The scope is also wildly broad, which means you have to keep track of many different systems and risks. Failures happen, and when they do, it’s often something that in and of itself feels stupid and embarrassing. But it was one of hundreds of risks being managed.
It’s a high profile game. The world can watch, and you get immediate feedback, usually in the form of a fireball, if it doesn’t work.
But people — myself included — just keep coming back for more.
I think because there’s something about it that you can’t quite get anywhere else.
It’s expeditionary. You’re out at a remote site running ops. There’s a ticking clock. If there’s an issue in the countdown, you’ll find yourself doing real math to resolve it. You have to make decisions. They have real, fast consequences. When the clock hits T0, all these super high performance systems need to turn on and work at exactly the same time.
It’s really terrible when they don’t. But that’s what makes it so good when they do.
Space is foundational to daily life.
We rely on space every day. We often think of it as the future. Something that’s coming. But space is here and been here for a long time.
GPS is widely understood. We use it to navigate home on Google Maps. But GPS doesn’t just give our position. It provides universal time too. This allows us to precisely synchronize clocks around the world.
We use GPS time for financial transactions from Venmo to credit cards to stock trades. It marks transactions to make sure each settles in the correct order. Bob paid Sally, then Sally paid Susan. If you look closely at the NYSE operations center, you’ll see an array of GPS antennas on the roof. They’re not for position. The building isn’t moving. They’re for time.
Similarly, the power grid needs more energy at 5 pm than at 5 am. But we can’t just hook a power plant up and flip a switch. The loads must be balanced and phases aligned.
Synchrophasors in substations measure the magnitude and phase angle of the alternating current running through the grid. Every measurement is timestamped using a GPS signal. This allows operators to compare measurements from a substation in New York with those from one in Florida at the exact same millisecond.
After the 2003 Northeast Blackout, synchophasors were rolled out to monitor the grid’s heartbeat. They’ve been attributed with a significantly more reliable grid in the years since.
Remove GPS, and we lessen our ability to transfer money and electricity — the two things that underpin an economy.
Space is the ultimate high ground.
We’ve wired our civilization through orbit. Now we need to defend it.
But it’s a unique domain.
It’s easy to find objects in space. Anyone with an amateur telescope can track spacecraft. So for the most part, everyone knows where everything is.
Defenses are difficult. You can’t armor something in orbit in the way you might on Earth. Even with plummeting launch costs, armor is too heavy to fly reasonably. Further, the velocity of objects in space is so high that it wouldn’t be particularly effective.
Attacks can be reversible. An adversary doesn’t need to destroy a satellite to make an impact. They can hold it hostage by jamming the signal or blocking the solar arrays. They can even kidnap it, dragging it to a different orbit. Are these acts of war? It’s unclear, and grey zone operations create a whole new dimension of conflict.
At the same time, space based assets are the enablers of nearly every operation on Earth. Satellites provide early warning of ballistic missile launches. We use GPS to direct troops, ships, planes, and weapons. Orders and intelligence travel the globe instantly via secure space based communications.
In any and every conflict in the future, space will play a role, and it’ll likely be a major one.
It’s also a geopolitical contradiction.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In the years since, Western states have decoupled from Russian energy, uranium, technology, and investments. Oligarchs’ superyachts have been impounded across the globe. The U.S. and NATO are supplying aid to Ukraine, propelling us into the most extreme proxy war since the Berlin Wall fell.
And yet: Russian and American astronauts still share meals on the International Space Station. They rely on each other for safety. They conduct joint experiments. The same countries that are arming opposite sides of a ground war cooperate daily in orbit.
Space has always held this tension. The Apollo-Soyuz handshake happened at the height of the Cold War. Former enemies built the ISS. The domain seems to exist slightly outside the standard rules of geopolitics.
Space is the next logical place for human exploration.
Humans have ventured nearly every inch of the world. Shackleton aimed at the South Pole. Hillary and Tenzing climbed Everest. Darwin mapped the Galapagos. On a macro scale, we’ve mapped and characterized the Earth. For true exploration, space is next.
Our current technology can get us to the Moon, Mars, and Venus. The first two offer more reasonable conditions for humans. Like on Earth, pure exploration is coupled with strategic and economic opportunity. There’s prime real estate on the Moon that could serve as an outpost, a leaping off point for resource mining, or further advantage for earth-based operations. Mars could serve as Planet B, a second home for humanity.
What comes after is more open ended. It requires new technology — either in propulsion for faster transit, life support for long duration missions, or a new understanding of physics entirely.
It holds the biggest question.
Is there other life out there? The best answer I’ve ever heard was “absolutely, but it doesn’t matter.” We’re separated by light years of distance and millennia of time. If advanced life is out there, it’s irrelevant because we’ll never cross paths.
There’s something settling about this answer, maybe akin to closure. But at the same time, you never know.
Space is all of this.
This breadth is what makes space special. What else brings together childhood ambition, the foundation of our economy, the ultimate battleground for modern war, and the wonder of if we’re alone out here in the universe?
In the last two decades, it’s been the arena for some of the most advanced engineering accomplishments. Vehicles the size of thirty-story buildings float in mid-air before softly landing.
More is coming. Year after year, exotic architectures are contemplated and then actualized, furthering the impact space has on all of our lives.
Sometimes this impact is obvious, while at other times it’s invisible. Either way, something this embedded is worth understanding, and that’s the reason to dig into space.