The Space Race That Will Decide the Future of Freedom

W hat America does in space during the next ten or 20 years may determine humanity’s trajectory for centuries to come. We are in a race with China that will decide whether tens of billions of people yet to be born will live in freedom or under rules established by the Chinese Communist Party.

The nation that first achieves rapid, fully reusable orbital flight will dominate commercial space. Commercial space dominance will lead to military space dominance. Military space dominance will confer decisive advantages across the entire planet — on land, at sea, and in the air. The dominant military in space and on Earth will acquire unprecedented leverage over the international order and possess the ability to impose its values on billions.

The key technological revolution in space is reusable launch — it is the Moore’s Law of space. Every integrated circuit, software platform, and artificial-intelligence system today rests on Moore’s Law, which states that as microchip technology improves, costs decrease, lowering the cost of computing. In the same way, everything humanity does in space rests on launches becoming cheaper, more reliable, and more frequent. A decade ago, America (including NASA and private companies) launched a couple of times per month. Today, we launch several times a week. Soon, we will see multiple launches per day.

The true linchpin capability is the ability to operate a reusable launch vehicle like an airplane — to land, refuel, and launch again in an hour, and then again, repeatedly. Whoever gets there first will gain a long-term strategic advantage that will be difficult to overcome and has major national and economic security impacts.

Why does this race matter so much? Because whoever controls the space domain occupies the ultimate high ground. The dominant space power will possess truly asymmetric military capabilities. It will have an unblinking eye that can see tanks, aircraft, ships, buildings, and troop movements in all conditions, everywhere, while denying comparable awareness to its opponents. It will operate ubiquitous command, control, and communications (C3) networks linking autonomous systems across every theater — its drone army will go anywhere it wants, based on having ubiquitous C3. It will be able to project power quickly from space into all terrestrial domains. AI robots will want, need, and leverage ubiquitous C3 power. In the future, major wars could be decided in space before a single shot is fired on Earth.

In the long run, commercial and industrial leadership leads to military leadership. Great Britain turned dominance of maritime commerce, combined with state-directed industrial policy on a strategic industry, into unmatched naval power for centuries, enabling a small island, simply because it controlled the seas, to outfight far larger nations blessed with greater populations and resources. The emerging space economy will create a similar relationship between space commerce and military space power.

China understands this. Beijing’s space strategy is an extension of the strategy it has pursued to dominate industries here on Earth. China has already become the leading manufacturer in shipbuilding, electric vehicles, drones, batteries, solar cells, electronics, and rare earth mineral processing. It is now applying the same strategy to reusable launch, hypersonic technology, satellites, and mining the resources of the Moon. The Chinese government is subsidizing more than a dozen Chinese reusable launch companies, but it’s not just socialism. They are incentivizing China’s investors and capital markets to take extra risks to invest in Chinese space companies.

The United States still leads in launch capability, thanks overwhelmingly to SpaceX. But one brilliant entrepreneur and one extraordinary company do not constitute a sustainable national strategy. In fact, depending on one entrepreneur to stand up against millions of hard-working brilliant engineers, backed by the support of an entire nation, is a recipe for strategic failure.  SpaceX’s present lead cannot endure against a determined whole-of-nation competitor like China.

America has seen this movie before. Multiple times. A decade ago, Tesla led the global electric-vehicle industry; Chinese manufacturers are now the world leaders in electric vehicles. China combined a very aggressive and motivated group of Chinese automotive entrepreneurs with a focused industrial policy to support them.  More than 120 years ago, the Wright brothers were our genius entrepreneurs. When the Wrights asked the U.S. government to be a customer and support their efforts, their requests went unheeded. Instead, the government adopted a pure laissez-faire policy for aviation. Meanwhile, European nations actively supported their commercial firms with procurement and aeronautical research. Within a few years, Britain, France, and Germany not only caught up but leaped ahead of America. When America entered World War I, our pilots were forced to fly in British and French aircraft.

The most important unresolved challenge today is not merely making an orbital vehicle reusable. It is making the orbital stage rapidly reusable after returning through the atmosphere at Mach 25. Current thermal-protection systems (TPS) are highly fragile and maintenance-intensive. SpaceX’s Starship’s tiles crack, chip, and fail; the underlying materials erode and require inspection or replacement. Turnaround takes weeks. A reusable vehicle like Starship that turns around in weeks is revolutionary compared to expendable rockets, but it cannot compete with a future system that turns around in hours. The first nation to solve fully and rapidly reusable Mach 25 thermal protection will be the first to acquire true aircraft-like orbital operations.

But here’s the frightening little secret: NASA turned off investments in highly reusable Mach 25 TPS more than 20 years ago. The U.S. Department of Defense is not meaningfully investing in this technology either. Guess who is: China. The country’s 2024 National Natural Science Foundation of China plan describes funding for “airline-like” Earth-to-space transportation and a fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit system. Official research areas include active cooling, flexible heat-protective skins, mitigating damage during atmospheric return, thermal/structural integration, and operation from Mach 0-25.

America’s answer should not be an imitation of Chinese state capitalism. Our unique advantage is freedom, which drives our entrepreneurial culture and our innovation. The Chinese Communist Party can copy hardware and industrial processes. It cannot copy our freedom — our culture of entrepreneurial liberty — without threatening its monopoly on power.

But entrepreneurship alone is not sufficient. America needs a national effort in which private industry leads and government provides research, testing infrastructure, and the early demand the market cannot provide by itself. We know this model works. It was fundamental high-risk research by the predecessor to NASA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, combined with airmail bought by the U.S. Post Office, that helped America’s entrepreneurs recapture world leadership in aviation. More recently, NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and commercial space station cargo delivery program helped transform the United States from an also-ran in commercial launch into the definitive world leader. SpaceX is the company it is today because of a NASA partnership in 2006.

America can win again by leveraging and supporting America’s entrepreneurs and by investing in the advanced technologies required for rapid reusability. The contest is about much more than rockets, lunar bases, or national prestige. It is about whether billions across the world will enjoy the blessings of liberty or live in a world dominated by the CCP. We should support a restored NASA/Air Force Research Laboratory rapidly reusable TPS research line, which would cost roughly $150-300 million a year; a program to buy commercial flight demonstrations of fully reusable Mach 25 systems, modeled after the COTS program that led to SpaceX’s breakout success two decades ago; and recapitalization of arc-jet and hypersonic ground-test infrastructure.

Space policy is freedom policy — the time for America to act is now.

Note: This is adapted from the author’s recent National Review Institute speech.