The Future of Space: Business, Defense, and Innovation
With guest Jon Kirchner, Eleven Canterbury Consultant & Space & Technology Expert, and Dan Martin, Eleven Canterbury Programs and Relationship Manager
SUMMARY
The new Space race is no longer just about exploration. It’s about infrastructure, industry, and national security.
Space and technology expert Jon Kirchner joins Dan Martin to explain why governments and private companies are increasingly focused on establishing a permanent presence on and around the Moon and why falling launch costs could reshape entire industries.
As the cost of reaching orbit continues to decline, activities once considered impractical or prohibitively expensive are becoming economically viable, from satellite communications and in-orbit servicing to lunar infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and space-based data centers. Jon also discusses why governments increasingly view space as critical infrastructure and how that shift is influencing investment, innovation, and defense planning.
In this conversation:
- Why the Moon is becoming a strategic destination once again
- How SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other commercial launch providers are reshaping the Space economy
- Why NASA increasingly relies on competition to accelerate innovation
- Why launch infrastructure and orbital services are becoming increasingly important
- What comes next for low Earth orbit, cislunar development, and Mars exploration
- How falling launch costs could reshape the economics of Space
From Artemis and lunar energy systems to satellite networks and space-based infrastructure, Jon explains why Space is becoming far more than a destination. It is increasingly a place where business, technology, and geopolitics collide.
Jon Kirchner is one of more than 3,000 senior leaders in the Eleven Canterbury network who serve organizations worldwide as trusted expert witnesses, interim executives, and strategic consultants.
About the series: “Conversations With the Experts” features industry leaders sharing practical insight from the front lines of business, technology, and transformation.
TRANSCRIPT
Dan Martin: We’re talking about the moon today.
From growing up, I remember Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the moon. I remember John Young driving the lunar rover. I remember thinking, by the time I’m as old as I am now, that we’d be walking on Mars and having space stations around Jupiter. Now we’ve got the excitement of Artemis going back to the moon. Are we in the middle of a race? What is going on, and why has it taken so long to go back, Jon?
Jon Kirchner: Great to be back with you, Dan. It’s been a couple of years since our last conversation.
The Moon is a different place than it was 50 years ago. Not in that it’s different itself, but how we hold it and what we want to do there, which is completely different. Back 50 years ago, when JFK said we’re going to go to the Moon, that was a race to do something we’d never done before.
Today, it’s a race to put something there permanently. Back then, it was “I want to put my foot down on the Moon. I want to put my flag down on the Moon.” Frankly, nobody cares about that today. What we care about, and we’re not the only country that does, but what we’re interested in as the United States is creating a permanent presence on the Moon for both economic reasons as well as geopolitical military reasons.
Then the extraplanetary reasons are to look at it as a stepping stone to Mars. So, there are a lot of different attributes that make the Moon, frankly, not what it was 50 years ago as a target destination.
Dan Martin: It also seems that there are lots of opportunities. As you said, we’re looking for a permanent presence on the Moon, but as part of doing that, it’s gotten a whole lot cheaper to get into space in the first place.
Jon Kirchner: That’s right.
Dan Martin: I would imagine that opens up opportunities as well, not only on the Moon, but in closer near-Earth orbit.
Jon Kirchner: Yeah. In the last couple of years, there has been an emergence, a blooming of completely new use cases and applications. But if we go back over the last five or ten years, one of the most important things that has happened is that launch cost has come down to thousands of dollars per kilo. Ultimately, we’ll see hundreds of dollars per kilo, and that’s where things get really crazy and really magical from a space point of view.
The one thing most people are very familiar with is Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. Super successful, wildly successful. They use LEO, Low Earth Orbit spacecraft, really relatively small. There are 10,000 of them, actually a little more than that, in orbit today. That is totally enabled by low-cost launch. But other use cases, like in-orbit servicing, mining, and eventually data centers from space, these are the kinds of things that when we get launch costs down into the mere hundreds of dollars per kilo, we’re going to be able to see those kinds of use cases really blossom at scale.
Dan Martin: Data centers in space. I’ve read a lot about people not wanting data centers in my backyard, or my state, or near my rivers.
Jon Kirchner: Right. We suffer down here with some of the aspects of physics and municipal politics. Thermal cooling is expensive and hard, and it uses a ton of water, which is a problem down here. We have a solar power issue: you can power some of these from the sun, but we often don’t have power from the sun for half the day.
It’s also a big grid compromiser. There’s a lot of grid infrastructure that doesn’t exist to accommodate it. And then, of course, these things get in people’s backyards. And that’s an issue. You sort of put all those things together, you see, increases in electricity prices for people.
So, there are a lot of dynamics here on Earth that, at least in structural theory, can be addressed by putting them in space. You can get perpetual sun and perpetual power. You have the benefit of being on the dark side, put a shield in front of the sun in space, and it’s dead cold. It’s super freezing, so you can get cooling. The challenges, however, are that to put data centers in space, the cooling infrastructure and the solar panel infrastructure that’s needed are massive. It’s football fields massive, and therefore you have a mass issue getting that into space.
And then even if you got it there, the challenge we have is back to launch, because we don’t have the launch cadence or the launch supply we would need to ultimately get thousands and thousands of data center nodes into space. So, there’s an interesting dynamic here, launch is what’s gotten us to this really super place to get things in orbit at scale. But the scale we would see with data centers and other use cases is another order of magnitude different. So, the industry needs SpaceX to continue to be wildly successful. Blue Origin to be successful. Stoke is another one to be successful. And there are other launch companies out there.
We need more launch vehicles. And then the other thing, everything relates to something else, you need launch sites to launch them from. That’s another gap we are dealing with in the space industry: where do we put launch facilities? Vandenberg and Kennedy Space Center are great. They are ultimately headed toward being full. So, there are spaceports. That’s the next thing you’re going to see and hear a lot about: the need for spaceports in different parts of the world, let alone different parts of our country. Not necessarily being on the coast, but also being inland, in places like Midland, Texas, for example, or perhaps Colorado or Montana.
There’s a real movement in this country to build out spaceports that are different from airports, because you need to launch from a place that doesn’t have many humans around, but still has infrastructure. So, what you’re hearing from me is every sort of knock-on element in space, the value chain of space, has some aspects that we’ve made huge strides in, which are enabling incredible applications and real economic growth. But as we look ahead to scaling it even further, there are other infrastructure plays and capabilities we’re going to need at an even bigger scale than we have today.
Dan Martin: It seems, as you said at the very beginning, Jon, we’ve gone from we’re going to do it because we want to explore and to prove that we can, to we want to do it to be commercially successful; to move it away from just exploration to doing more business kinds of things, which has some advantages for continuity.
Jon Kirchner: Well, you may have seen recently, in the United States, there have traditionally been 16 critical infrastructure categories. I can’t name all 16, but think of oil, think of telecom. There are another 14 more.
Space has been officially added to the list of critical infrastructure capabilities for the United States. It’s a government designation that tells you everything you need to know: this form of infrastructure is now intrinsically, critically dependent. The country is critically dependent on that form of infrastructure for communications, for military purposes, and for general everyday life. John Deere Tractors, Caterpillar machines, airplanes, jets, the in-orbit internet that you get, that’s all coming from space. That’s not coming from anywhere else. Just that character and the change in the role it plays in society and geo-national security gives you a hint about how important it is. But I do want to bring it back to the moon, because that’s where this started.
The moon is a cislunar ecosystem. There is a ton of activity and investment that’s happening. We have a new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman. What an accomplished entrepreneur, what an accomplished businessman, what an accomplished individual who’s just really keen on technology and space.
NASA’s going through its own budgetary perturbations. I would say it’s not just a budget question; it’s a focus question. Instead of researching about something, NASA’s focused on doing something, and that is a big change. It’s also a big change in how they contract. Instead of NASA seeing itself as an owner/operator of infrastructure, it’s moved to a commercial outsourced first model where it really sets up the industry to provide multiple sources of capability, not just one, which provides resilience. It provides cost competitiveness.
So, there’s a real movement in change in the business model that NASA’s implementing, which is really great for the long term. And you’re starting to see the benefits of that in how we’ve actually gone back to the moon. There are efforts to deploy nuclear fission, and the way we’re going to do that is not for NASA to do it, but to get three or four companies out in industry to do nuclear fission, because you need that kind of capability on the moon to deal with the 14 days when you have no light; a lunar night is 14 days.
Dan Martin: It also addresses one of the challenges that NASA has had, being tied to government funding, which involves these cycles of up and down.
I spoke with somebody who was talking about dealing with China, which, he said, plans on 10-year horizons or lifetime horizons. If we move it out of government funding and go where there’s more commercial incentive, it plays to our strengths as a country of commerce and competition. Am I right about that?
Jon Kirchner: Yeah, it totally does. The one thing that separates us, and I see this continuing, the one thing about this country, we don’t have as many people, and we don’t have a dictatorial, authoritarian government at the center. We have a democracy and innovation.
We out-innovate everybody on the planet. The way NASA has moved is to tap in, incentivize, and foster that innovation by having multiple organizations providing the same kind of capability. And back to competition, competition breeds innovation. The way NASA is now set up to contract and engage is all about driving innovation across every element of the value and supply chains for space.
That’s the big macro change that was started in previous administrations, but what you’re seeing in this one is that it’s moving on steroids. It’s really pronounced how we’re changing and how we’re doing business.
Dan Martin: It’s an exciting time to be alive.
I can’t wait to get back to the moon. And as you’ve said, it’s a stepping stone to Mars. I’m looking forward to further explorations and commercial success.
Jon Kirchner: You’re going to see not just a return to the moon, but you’re going to see all sorts of other use cases and applications that you, your grandchildren, they’re all going to benefit from. It could not be a more exciting, more compelling time than it is now for space.
Dan Martin: Well, thank you. Given how quickly things are accelerating, we may not have to wait another couple of years for a talk. We’ll talk again soon.
Jon Kirchner: Exactly.
