Astro politics And The Post-Earth Economy

Mars As civilization expands beyond Earth, governance structures will have to account for a lack of instantaneous communications we take for granted on Earth today. (credit: SpaceX) Astropolitics and the post-Earth economy What holds civilization together when the speed of light is too slow? by David S. Rogers Monday, July 6, 2026 Civilization first learned delay on foot. Before mounted courier systems, postal relays, telegraph lines, and satellites, authority moved at the speed of the human body. Ancient Israelite communities, like many early civilizations, depended on runners and messengers to carry law, warning, ritual time, and political instruction across distance. In Jerusalem, the sighting of the new moon was not merely an astronomical event; it was information that had to travel. Couriers carried sacred time outward, and distant communities learned to live with approximation. Later, civilization learned patience from the sea. Sailors waited months for a message to cross an ocean, and trust—in commerce, in command, in one another—was built in the silence between departure and reply. Then we abolished that silence. When humanity moves beyond Earth orbit in sustained ways, delay returns as more than a mere inconvenience. A conversation becomes correspondence. Command becomes anticipation. Telegraph cables, radio, satellites, fiber-optic networks, and the Internet compressed distance until an entire species began to mistake speed for unity. Markets move in milliseconds. Weather, war, finance, entertainment, and rumor arrive everywhere at once. For a brief historical moment, modern civilization has behaved as though simultaneity were the natural condition of human affairs. It is not. It is a local achievement. When humanity moves beyond Earth orbit in sustained ways, delay returns as more than a mere inconvenience. A signal to Mars can take roughly 4 to 24 minutes one way, depending on orbital positions. A conversation becomes correspondence. Command becomes anticipation. Consent, adjudication, emergency response, and care must all survive the gap between event and answer. This is the central problem of astropolitics. Space is usually discussed in terms of rockets, mining, propulsion, tourism, or flags. Those questions matter, but they sit on top of a deeper one: what holds civilization together when the speed of light is too slow? Every moral order, empire, market, and faith tradition has operated within the limits of how fast information could move. When communication moved at the pace of runners and ships, time itself was local. Distant communities learned to accommodate uncertainty. Empires ruled by dispatch and delay. Merchants priced risk into voyages that might not return. Faith, law, and commerce evolved around the reality that a command could arrive after the facts had changed. Each acceleration rewrote authority. Printing compressed theological time. The telegraph stitched financial markets together. Radio altered mass politics. Undersea fiber and satellite networks made near-real-time awareness seem planetary and permanent. By the early 21st century, humanity achieved global simultaneity without global coherence: awareness outpaced understanding, and speed became a substitute for wisdom. Space reverses that illusion. The farther civilization extends, the more it must relearn the governance of delay. Distance will again become political. Latency will again shape legitimacy. The systems that keep people alive, moving, trading, praying, building, and deciding will have to function when no single center can see, judge, or command in time. The first off-world settlements will not resemble the frontier cabins of national mythology. They will resemble logistics hubs, arbitration systems, communications relays, fuel depots, insurance registries, data centers, and closed-loop habitats. Their organizing principle will not be conquest but continuity. Space was built by states, but will be run by systems The first space age was born from fear. Between 1945 and 1989, rockets were instruments of deterrence and propaganda. The same laboratories, contractors, and military-industrial supply chains that perfected missiles and bombers pointed their work upward. Every launch was a diplomatic signal disguised as an engineering achievement. NASA and other national space agencies bureaucratic reflections of Cold War states: hierarchical, secretive, expensive, patriotic, and deeply dependent on a narrow class of industrial partners. Boeing, Lockheed, North American Aviation, Grumman, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, Bell Labs, Aérospatiale, Dornier, and their equivalents supplied the material culture of the first space age. Space was not an open frontier. It was an extension of total war by other means. The Earth-Moon system will be the first real test of whether humanity can organize space as a system rather than a spectacle. The Cold War built launch capacity, but it also built a governance assumption: space would be entered, managed, and narrated by states. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 reflected that world. In its older treaty language, it declared outer space the "province of all mankind" and rejected national appropriation, while presuming that states would remain the responsible actors behind space activity. That assumption is now aging. After the Cold War, space agencies increasingly became commissioners rather than sole builders. Governments still funded and authorized missions, but contractors, consortia, telecom operators, insurers, launch firms, and data companies began to shape the pace and purpose of space activity. Space stopped being only a theater of state prestige and became a workshop of markets. Commercialization began with paperwork: licenses, partnerships, frequency filings, launch approvals, insurance policies, and joint ventures. Reusable launch systems, miniaturized satellites, commercial imagery, broadband constellations, commercial space station plans, lunar payload services, and venture-backed launch firms have accelerated that shift. The state remains indispensable, but it no longer controls the entire rhythm. NASA buys services and funds programs through commercial providers. Regulators allocate launch permissions and spectrum. The International Telecommunication Union coordinates use of radio frequencies and, especially for geostationary satellites, associated orbital positions. The result is a quiet migration of sovereignty. Power no longer rests only in flags, treaties, or speeches. It resides in launch manifests, underwriting models, spectrum coordination, compliance databases, navigation standards, docking schedules, and communication protocols. This does not mean states disappear. It means states share practical authority with systems they cannot fully command. A satellite constellation, an orbital refueling network, a lunar communications relay, or a cislunar traffic-management regime may exert more direct influence over daily behavior in space than any constitution written on Earth. In the first space age, sovereignty was symbolic: who planted the flag, who launched first, who orbited, who landed. In the next one, sovereignty will become operational: who routes the signal, verifies the transaction, authorizes docking, insures the payload, allocates bandwidth, maintains the clock, and keeps the system in phase. Cislunar space as the first test The Earth-Moon system will be the first real test of whether humanity can organize space as a system rather than a spectacle. The coming cislunar economy will not begin as a self-contained civilization. It will begin as infrastructure: landers, relays, depots, navigation aids, power systems, payload services, private stations, surface robotics, resource prospecting, and traffic rules. The metaphor shifts from Apollo to the rail age. The decisive question is whether many actors can coordinate repeated movement, maintenance, finance, and risk across a shared operating environment. NASA's Artemis campaign, Chinese and other international lunar programs, and commercial efforts all point toward the same reality: the Moon is becoming less an object of symbolic arrival than a node in a larger system. It is quarry, port, laboratory, staging ground, communications relay, and governance experiment. Once regular activity begins, access will matter more than possession. A refueling depot at a Lagrange point, a reliable lunar relay, a docking hub, or a traffic-control system could quietly function like a government. It may set inspection norms, establish approach corridors, define emergency procedures, and create arbitration expectations. Jurisdiction will flow to whoever maintains the data feeds and controls the schedules. That is not science fiction but instead an extension of existing infrastructure politics. On Earth, airports, shipping registries, undersea cables, cloud platforms, payment networks, and satellite navigation systems already shape sovereignty by determining who can move, communicate, settle, and verify. In cislunar space, that logic becomes more explicit because the margin for improvisation shrinks. A missed docking window, corrupted signal, failed relay, or denied insurance certification can become a political event. The actor that keeps the system reliable gains legitimacy while the actor that introduces disorder loses it. The outlines are already visible. Broadband constellations are not merely communications products. They are political infrastructure because they define where connectivity exists and under whose terms. GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, and other navigation systems do not merely help machines locate themselves, but also provide the timing that synchronizes finance, logistics, weapons, and more. As comparable communications, navigation, and timing systems extend toward the Moon, they will carry governance with them. Cislunar space therefore becomes the place where space law, commercial practice, technical standards, insurance, national policy, and orbital mechanics begin to fuse. The first conflicts are unlikely to look like territorial wars. They may concern telemetry, frequency allocation, liability, debris, docking precedence, rescue obligations, safety standards, or the right to exclude an unsafe actor from a shared corridor. That is why the politics of space will become the politics of coherence. The actor that keeps the system reliable gains legitimacy while the actor that introduces disorder loses it. In a hostile environment, maintenance is not a technical afterthought. It is the foundation of authority. Law at the speed of light Law has always been a function of reach. A statute is only as real as the channel that can communicate it and the power that can enforce it. Rome ruled through roads. Britain ruled through sea lanes. The Mongols ruled through horseback. Modern states rule through cables, airspace, satellites, databases, payment systems, and logistics networks. Every legal order is, at some level, durable logistics. Space exposes that relationship by stripping it to physics. A rule issued from Earth means little if it arrives after the emergency has passed. A contract is only useful if the parties can verify compliance across delay. A court can only govern what its procedures can reach. Beyond Earth orbit, law will not disappear, but it will become less declarative and more infrastructural. It will travel through relays, ledgers, telemetry, docking permissions, insurance requirements, and executable protocols. The basic space treaties were written in the era of Earth orbit and great-power symbolism. The Outer Space Treaty, the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention, and later frameworks such as the Artemis Accords create principles, responsibilities, and cooperative expectations. They are important. But they largely assume that Earth remains the center of decision, responsibility, and adjudication. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, that assumption weakens as light travel times extend to dozens of minutes each way to Mars and asteroids. Farther out, communication delays become hours. When reply itself becomes slow enough for facts to change before instructions arrive, jurisdiction begins to decay with distance. When reply itself becomes slow enough for facts to change before instructions arrive, jurisdiction begins to decay with distance. This does not mean law disappears, but instead it changes form. Sovereignty will migrate from constitutions to control systems. Whoever manages docking queues, relay access, fuel corridors, orbital registries, sensor validation, and emergency protocols will exercise de facto authority. A station may formally belong to one nation, be financed in another, insured by a multinational syndicate, operated by a corporate consortium, and dependent on relay software maintained somewhere else entirely. Its practical citizenship may depend less on a flag than on whose systems keep it alive. Maritime law offers a useful precedent. A vessel can be flagged in one jurisdiction, insured in another, financed elsewhere, crewed internationally, and bound by the rules of whichever port it needs next. Space will extend this diffusion until enforcement becomes a property of physics. That which cannot reach cannot rule directly. Law will therefore evolve from instant interpretation toward deferred verification. Telemetry may become testimony. Smart contracts may release payment, insurance, access, or sanctions when predefined conditions resolve true. Embargoes may operate through expired access keys rather than naval patrols. Emergency authority may sit in code because no one can wait for Earth to respond. This raises a difficult legitimacy problem. When law becomes executable, justice becomes partly a firmware parameter. Who audits the system that decides whether a habitat is safe, a docking maneuver lawful, a claim valid, or a rescue obligation triggered? Who appeals when telemetry is incomplete, corrupted, or late? Who has standing when an automated decision protects the system but harms a person? The question once aimed at kings and parliaments—who rules?—becomes a new set of questions: whose code executes, whose data counts, whose clock is authoritative, and whose version of events survives synchronization? In space, legitimacy will not be measured only by consent. It will also be measured by uptime, auditability, interoperability, and the capacity to correct error before error compounds into catastrophe. Infrastructure becomes sovereignty The first infrastructure of off-world civilization may not be cities but rather data. Before humans settle a world in large numbers, their machines will map, simulate, communicate, monitor, and prepare. Autonomous construction fleets, navigation systems, robotic logistics, environmental sensors, and AI-assisted planning will arrive before durable human society does. Information will precede habitation. Territory will first be claimed in code. Every civilization centralizes its data near its energy. The industrial age built factories beside rivers and coal seams. The digital age builds data centers near cheap electricity, cold air, and water. A spacefaring economy will do the same under different conditions: solar flux, thermal stability, shielding, line of sight, and transmission delay. Relay hubs, computational nodes, archives, and traffic systems will become part of the political geography of the solar system. These systems will not be neutral. The databases that coordinate supply and navigation will also define jurisdiction. Whoever controls them will control the rhythm of arrival, the allocation of access, and the hierarchy of response. Law will follow latency. Governance will optimize for propagation, verification, and resilience rather than simply population or territory. On Earth, insurers have long acted as quiet regulators. They set safety standards, require inspections, price risky behavior, and make certain forms of commerce difficult without coverage. This is already how much of Earth works, though we often fail to see it. International banking runs on messaging standards. Maritime commerce runs on bills of lading, insurance certificates, vessel registries, and port permissions. Trade depends on Incoterms, customs codes, and logistics protocols. These are not always laws in the legislative sense, but they function as law because everyone depends on them. Orbital environments will accelerate this trend because real-time adjudication is often impossible and hesitation can be fatal. A habitat cannot pause life support while lawyers argue. A convoy cannot wait indefinitely for permission to alter course. A station cannot treat an airlock failure as a matter for leisurely review. Each node must carry some authority inside itself, encoded as procedure, automation, redundancy, and human stewardship. This is where finance, insurance, law, and survival begin to converge. On Earth, insurers have long acted as quiet regulators. They set safety standards, require inspections, price risky behavior, and make certain forms of commerce difficult without coverage. A ship without insurance may still float, but it becomes difficult to dock, finance, or trade. A building may stand, but without coverage it becomes economically illegible. The G7 oil-price-cap regime for Russian seaborne oil showed this logic at geopolitical scale: access to maritime transport, financing, and insurance services became a mechanism of enforcement. Off-world, this logic could intensify. Every station, convoy, mining operation, and habitat will depend on continuous validation from underwriters, regulators, sensor networks, and counterparties. Telemetry will feed the policy. Algorithms may release or withhold access to docking, credit, energy, or rescue priority. To be insured may be to be recognized. To be uninsured may be to operate as a shadow vessel, visible but illegitimate. The result is a continuity stack: a shared data layer where law, finance, communications, and survival meet. A failed transmission can halt trade. A corrupted ledger can paralyze access. A broken relay can isolate a habitat. When authority, economy, and life support depend on the same streams of verified information, synchronization becomes sovereignty. The danger is obvious. At its best, this architecture ensures coherence: no distress signal ignored, no unsafe approach unflagged, no habitat abandoned to silence. At its worst, it enables enclosure: a civilization where dissent is confused with desynchronization and where exclusion from the network becomes civil death. The task will not be to prevent infrastructure from becoming sovereign but to distribute trust well enough that autonomy can survive inside coherence. Our polycentric future Empire depends on simultaneity. When command and communication share the same clock, hierarchy can function. When they diverge, coordination becomes plural. Distance, not ideology, ends empires. A post-Earth civilization will therefore become polycentric long before it becomes unified. No single capital can govern across light-speed delay in any ordinary sense. Earth will remain the cultural, financial, legal, and biological anchor for a long time. The Moon may become an industrial and logistical extension of that anchor. Mars may develop semi-autonomous political and technical rhythms. Asteroid operations may be governed by corporate, cooperative, or chartered systems. Outer solar system settlements, if they ever emerge, will be aligned more by habit, standards, and memory than by immediate command. This does not mean fragmentation into chaos. It means integration without a single center. History has rehearsed versions of this pattern. The Hanseatic League bound merchant cities through trade, protection, and shared commercial interest rather than imperial unity. Venice governed by convoy, contract, and maritime logistics. Chartered companies such as the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the British South Africa Company built quasi-sovereign systems across oceans. Even today, digital platforms, standards bodies, financial networks, and infrastructure providers exercise forms of power that do not map cleanly onto territory. The International Space Station offers a small preview. It runs through agreed procedures, shared engineering standards, operational trust, and cooperation among nations that do not always agree on Earth. A Mars settlement would have to go further. It could not wait for Earth to decide every operational question. Its systems would negotiate, allocate, repair, and respond before instructions arrived. Authority would live inside the network, not above it. That is what a polycentric post-Earth order means in practice: many nodes, many clocks, many authorities, held together by interoperability rather than obedience. The political challenge of the solar system will therefore be less about declaring independence than about preserving meaningful participation across delay. Legitimacy in such an order must be earned continuously. Institutions will be trusted because they remain available, comprehensible, secure, auditable, and capable of correction. Governance may begin to resemble open-source development: branches, forks, merges, standards, protocols, and reputations. Conflict may be managed less by conquest than by compatibility. Systems that cannot interoperate will drift apart. This will produce new inequalities. Those closest to the best relays, most reliable clocks, safest trajectories, and most trusted infrastructures will live more fully inside civilization’s “now.” Others will live deferred. Delay can become disenfranchisement, and access to synchronization may become a form of class. The political challenge of the solar system will therefore be less about declaring independence than about preserving meaningful participation across delay. Democracy may survive, but it may look less like a synchronized ritual and more like an audit function: a way of verifying whether institutions remain in phase with the people they claim to serve. Dissent, in such a system, is not merely opposition. It is diagnostic information, telling the system where synchronization is failing. A civilization without a single capital can still remain coherent. But coherence will require continuous maintenance: shared standards, trusted archives, interoperable protocols, rescue obligations, open channels, and the humility to treat drift as a permanent condition rather than a temporary error. Continuity, not conquest The deepest question in space is not how far humanity can travel, but whether humanity can remain meaningfully connected after distance defeats simultaneity. For tens of thousands of years, human beings lived beneath one sky, one planetary rotation, one rhythm of light and dark. That shared environment gave rise to law, markets, ritual, memory, and belonging. We called its pull home. One day, dawn may circle many worlds at once. Each settlement will keep its own time. Each transmission will arrive a little late. Each institution will operate within its own tolerances of delay. The old gravity that held bodies together will become a problem of synchronization. Continuity will be the new mass. No empire will outlast the speed of light. No doctrine will conquer delay. What may endure are the systems, memories, rituals, contracts, archives, and habits that allow distant human communities to recognize one another as still belonging to the same civilization. Space will not reward rugged individualism for long. Every breath, watt, meal, signal, repair, and rescue will depend on another system working as promised. That is why the post-Earth economy cannot be understood only as resource extraction, launch capacity, or technological ambition. It is a test of institutional temperament. Can we build systems that remain coherent without becoming authoritarian? Can we automate response without erasing judgment? Can we price risk without surrendering sovereignty to insurers and protocols? Can we tolerate many clocks without losing a common memory? The frontier language of conquest is inadequate for this task. Space will not reward rugged individualism for long. Every breath, watt, meal, signal, repair, and rescue will depend on another system working as promised. Mutual reliance, not isolation, is the moral gravity of the vacuum. The civilizations that endure will be those that master continuity: the discipline of staying in phase while changing, listening across delay, correcting drift, and remembering why the system exists. Every action is a small rehearsal of permanence. The space industry calls this precision. Investors call it efficiency. Engineers call it uptime. Beneath those terms lies something older: the belief that the systems we build can outlast the fears that built them. Continuity is the payload and coherence is the destination. The underlying imperative remains unchanged: humanity must learn to remain one species even when the signal takes minutes, hours, or longer to say hello. Selected Sources United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. 1967. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects. 1972. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space. 1976. U.S. Department of State. The Artemis Accords: Principles for Cooperation in the Civil Exploration and Use of the Moon, Mars, Comets, and Asteroids. 2020. NASA. Space Communications: 7 Things You Need to Know. 2020. NASA. Human Landing System. NASA. Commercial Lunar Payload Services. NASA. Commercial Space Stations. International Telecommunication Union. Regulation of Satellite Systems. International Telecommunication Union. ITU-R: Managing the Radio-Frequency Spectrum for the World. U.S. Department of the Treasury. The Price Cap on Russian Oil: A Progress Report. 2023. Lloyd's. Space risk. OECD. The Space Economy in Figures: Responding to Global Challenges. 2023. The White House. Space Policy Directive-3: National Space Traffic Management Policy. 2018. McDougall, Walter A. ...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. Basic Books, 1985. Launius, Roger D. NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. Siddiqi, Asif A. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974. NASA History Division, 2010. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Semiotext(e), 1977. David S. Rogers is an operational leader, business architect, teacher, researcher, and essayist whose work focuses on how systems behave under pressure. Across more than three decades in consulting, technology, governance, organizational change, business integration, and operational continuity, he has worked at the intersection of institutions, infrastructure, and human behavior. His writing explores the patterns that emerge when complex systems strain, adapt, or reorganize under conditions of volatility and transition. He is the author of Augurnomics: First Principles for the Next Geostrategic Order and The Operational Sensemaking Handbook. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.

The Smithsonian Air And Space Mueum At 50

NASM The new “RTX Living in the Space Age Hall” at the National Air and Space Museum. (credit: J. Foust) Rededicating a space museum by Jeff Foust Monday, July 6, 2026 When the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum opened on July 1, 1976, it did so in a suitably Space Age way. As President Gerald Ford and the museum’s director, Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins, looked on, a signal from NASA’s Viking 1 Mars mission arrived at Earth and was transferred to an engineering model of the sampling arm on Viking’s lander. The arm then cut a ceremonial ribbon, formally opening the museum. It was, Collins said in an interview years later, a bit nerve-wracking. “I was holding my breath, thinking all those electrons gone lost up there in space,” he said. “But, believe it or not, all the electrons did their cute little things, and the ribbon got snipped, and the building got open.” (There were several engineering models of the arm that could have been used for the event, and it is unclear which one actually snipped the ribbon.) Exactly 50 years later, the rededication of the museum was a bit more down to Earth. Rather than a live signal from Mars, a ceremony in the museum instead played a video from the four NASA and ESA astronauts currently on the International Space Station. “Because we love a good countdown,” said NASA’s Jessica Meir, “join us as we unveil a rededication plaque in five, four, three, two, one, zero!” At zero, it was human rather than robotic arms that pulled off the fabric draped over the plaque. The rededication was more than a symbolic moment to mark the museum’s 50th anniversary. It also celebrates the (nearly) completed renovation of the building, a years-long effort that updated the building itself as well as its exhibits. When the museum opened in 1976, it was as high-tech as its ribbon cutting, recalled the museum’s current director, Christopher Browne, in a media preview in late June. “Washington and the Smithsonian have finally moved into the 20th century,” he said, reading some of the media accounts of the museum’s opening. “They also said that the exhibits feature every audio visual and electromagnetic device known to man.” “It became clear a decade ago that significant work was needed to bring this museum into the 21st century,” he said, kicking off extensive renovations. “We embraced the opportunity to reimagine our galleries, exhibitions, and displays, and create a museum that belongs in the 21st century. We also took the challenge of adding new stories to the old favorites we’ve been telling since the building opened.” With the rededication, five galleries opened on the east side of the museum, joining those already opened on the west side (see “Screens and spaceships: inside the renovated National Air and Space Museum,” The Space Review, October 24, 2022; and “Commercial space at the National Air and Space Museum,” The Space Review, August 4, 2025.) NASM The New Shepard booster alongside missiles and rockets, including a V-2. (credit: J. Foust) The biggest of the five is the “RTX Living in the Space Age Hall,” RTX being the corporate sponsor of the exhibit. It features the return of two of the largest space artifacts in the museum’s National Mall location: the backup Skylab module and a full-scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope, along with several missiles. They are joined by some new items. One of the most prominent is a Blue Origin New Shepard propulsion module that was used for several test flights of the suborbital vehicle more than a decade ago. It is placed alongside the missiles, including a V-2 rocket that had been previously on display but is now shown in its original drab olive paint scheme. NASM The GAMBIT 1 spysat on display. (credit: J. Foust) Another major new contribution is a GAMBIT 1 reconnaissance satellite from the 1960s. It is on display in an expanded view to show the capsule that would return the exposed film to Earth. NASM Closeup of the nose section of the GAMBIT 1 spysat. (credit: J. Foust) There are many more satellite models on display, many suspended from the ceiling above GAMBIT 1 and elsewhere, including an ITOS weather satellite from the 1970s and a more recent CYNGSS smallsat for monitoring cyclones. A model of a Boeing 702 communications satellite is up near the ceiling; despite its size it can be easy to miss when you’re on the first level unless you look way up. One challenge with the display of the satellite models is that it can take some effort to identify each satellite: the placards for the models are sometimes not near the models themselves. The determined visitor will find them, but the causal guest may not. NASM A menagerie of satellite models suspended above the GAMBIT 1. (credit: J. Foust) The gallery includes other items with space, or Space Age ties, from models of spacesuits to a Cold War-era fallout shelter sign and air raid siren. The spacesuits in particular are models of what might have been rather than what has actually flown: they include an Apollo-era hard suit concept, a design that Collins Aerospace had worked on recently before dropping out of a NASA commercial spacesuit development program, and the form-fitting BioSuit concept developed at MIT. There are now several large video screens arrayed in the hall above (most of) the exhibits. They display information about some of the key items, part of relatively straightforward multimedia additions. NASM Spacesuits that could have been on display. (credit: J. Foust) Next to the Living in the Space Age gallery is Discovering our Universe, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Its focus is on the tools used in astronomy, from a telescope used more than two centuries ago by William Herschel to equipment used in modern facilities, such as the Event Horizon Telescope and Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The exhibit also includes models of astrophysics missions, including the International Ultraviolet Explorer and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe. Unlike the large Living in the Space Age gallery with natural light, this smaller exhibit is kept dark, keeping with the astrophysics theme but making it more difficult to fully appreciate it. NASM The “Discovering our Universe” exhibit. (credit: J. Foust) Space has cameo appearances in two other new galleries. The “Textron How Things Fly” gallery is largely a hands-on educational exhibit to demonstrate the principles of both aviation and spaceflight. A gallery upstairs includes air and space artwork, including an exhibit of the works of Robert Rauschenberg. NASM Space-related art on display in a new gallery a the museum. (credit: J. Foust) With the rededication, the renovation of the museum is nearly complete. Two more exhibits are slated to open this fall, including “At Home in Space,” which the museum promises to be an “immersive, highly interactive exhibition” on how living in space. During the media preview, it was possible to get a glimpse of the ongoing work there: above a barrier blocking the entrance to the gallery was a spacesuit on the end of a Canadarm robotic arm suspended just below the ceiling, along with a small model of the shuttle, among other items. More items will come. At the rededication ceremony, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced that NASA will loan to the museum the Orion capsule from the Artemis 1 uncrewed mission. (The museum, presumably, will seek to swap that capsule at some point with the one on the later Artemis mission that returns NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, just as it has the Apollo 11 command module.) He also presented back to the museum a piece of fabric from the Wright Flyer plane; that swatch was flown on the Artemis 2 mission earlier this year. NASM A hint of what is still to come: the “At Home in Space” exhibit set to open this fall. (credit: J. Foust) “This effort was never simply about renovating galleries or restoring a building,” said Ellen Stofan, a former director of the museum and current undersecretary for science and research at the Smithsonian Institution, at the rededication ceremony. “It was about ensuring that this institution can continue inspiring discovery, advancing science, and welcoming future generations of explorers and innovators for the next 50 years and beyond.” That work is done, for now. But long before the museum needs another extensive renovation, perhaps in another half century or so, the exhibits will need more updates to continue inspiring discovery as humanity expands deeper into space. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

The Galaxy Garden: A Milky Way Analog

Galaxy Garden The Galaxy Garden at Paleaku Gardens Peace Sanctuary on Hawaiʻi Island. (credit: Deana L. Weibel) “Vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big”: The Galaxy Garden as a Milky Way analog by Deana L. Weibel Monday, July 6, 2026 How can the galaxy be made knowable? My research suggests that the universe itself is overwhelming for those who study it, whether through astronomy, through efforts to prepare spacecraft or human bodies for space exploration, or through the firsthand experiences of astronauts peering through the windows of the International Space Station or during brief moments of contemplation on spacewalks. It is too big, the scale is too large, the quantity of celestial objects is literally incomprehensible.[1] To quote a JPL engineer I interviewed, “the vastness of [the universe] is just so amazing and just terrifying with the powers involved, and the sizes of things involved.” He dealt with the great cosmic unknowns by dedicating his life’s work to exploring them. The size of the cosmos is an intellectual challenge for us all, but sometimes helpful ways of seeing come from unexpected sources. To quote a JPL engineer I interviewed, “the vastness of [the universe] is just so amazing and just terrifying with the powers involved, and the sizes of things involved.” In May 2026, I had the opportunity to visit an unusual window onto the Milky Way: the Galaxy Garden. This literal garden is included among a variety of beautiful botanicals at the Paleaku Gardens Peace Sanctuary in the town of Captain Cook on Hawai’i Island, not far from Kona. It was funded by the Change Happens Foundation (with additional seed funding by the New Moon Foundation) but was the brainchild of artist Jon Lomberg.[2] Jon Lomberg has had an impressive career with a lot of achievements (including winning an Emmy Award for his special effects work on the television show Cosmos) but is probably best known as the Design Director for the Golden Record included on Voyagers 1 and 2, launched in 1977 to explore the outer solar system and continue far beyond. A copy of the Golden Record was attached to each of the Voyager spacecraft, a literal phonograph record filled with sounds from our planet (natural sounds, human voices, machinery, music) but also audio signals that could be transformed (if ever found by intelligent extraterrestrials) into an array of visual images. Lomberg was the main person responsible for these images. He worked to obtain them or photograph them, determine how they might be interpreted by alien minds, and decide how to order them in a logical, even pedagogical, way. He also designed the iconic Golden Record cover, which, nearly 50 years later, continues to appear in popular culture, art, jewelry, and tattoos. Galaxy Garden An interpretive guide to the Galaxy Garden, a scale model of the Milky Way. (credit: Deana L. Weibel) The Galaxy Garden, secluded on an island in the Pacific Ocean, is far less well-known, but being able to visit it with Lomberg himself made me want to bring more attention to this very original take on astronomy. It is a living planetarium, a walkable orrery. And it helped me understand, just a bit better, the scale of our galaxy. The Paleaku Gardens Peace Sanctuary is an interesting hybrid of science and spirituality. It describes itself as “a botanical healing garden and learning center that provides a facility for educational, spiritual, and cultural programs.” There is a strong Buddhist undercurrent to the Gardens. During our visit Lomberg explained that there are two painstakingly made Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas on display, both very rare to see. One is a Healing Mandala and the other a Mandala of Compassion. Such mandalas are sometimes said to depict “cosmic realms”[3] and are normally brushed away after they are created in order to emphasize the ultimate impermanence of reality. The two mandalas at Paleaku were reportedly given special dispensation to remain intact by the Dalai Lama. Other spiritual elements at Paleaku include a Buddhist stupa, several statues, and even a replica of a Cretan labyrinth, which can be walked by the botanical garden’s visitors. Less overtly spiritual but even more profound, however, is the Galaxy Garden itself. Lomberg’s Galaxy Garden opened to the public in 2007. It is a scale model of the Milky Way galaxy, its disk shrunk to 100 feet (30 meters) across, composed of an array of plants arranged into spiraling arms like the real Milky Way. Gold dust croton, a plant whose green leaves are dotted with gold spots, represents the galaxy’s stars. Regions where stars are being formed are identified by the presence of red and black croton, whose leaves are patterned in ebony and crimson. Hibiscus flowers represent the galaxy’s larger nebulae while vincas flowers stand in for its smaller nebulae. The Milky Way’s globular clusters appear in the garden as red bromeliad flowers and spiky dracaena leaves. At the very center of the Galaxy Garden is a black water fountain representing the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, its water portraying relativistic jets shooting out into space.[4] It is a galactic analog, not because it recreates the physical conditions of the Milky Way, but because it makes galactic scale available to the body as something that can be entered, walked, measured, and felt. Jon Lomberg, who has painted many well-known galaxy images during his career, including his painting for the cover of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact as well as a famous portrait of the Milky Way housed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum,[5] led the way to a galactic arm labeled the “Orion Arm.” A few yards in, he stopped and gently took a leaf of gold croton into his hands, being careful not to harm the plant. He then pointed out a golden dot approximately where our own Sun would be located. It was one dot among dozens, even on that single leaf. Lomberg gestured to the other leaves around it, and instead of literal leaves, I found myself seeing them as clusters of stars, of other suns. Pointing to a leaf on the Sagittarius Arm, Lomberg, the co-creator of a message sent out into the stars in 1977, asked why anyone who lived on one of these leaves would bother with those of us back on our own leaf. They’d have their own leaf to explore. I understood in that moment that, at this scale, Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Sirius, and many other nearby stars would all be crowded almost unimaginably close to our own Sun. The stars that clustered near our own were really, really close, especially compared with other “leaves” on the same arm, let alone the leaves on other arms. I had certainly imagined the Milky Way galaxy before but there in this Hawaiian garden—near a labyrinth, a pair of mandalas, and a stunning view of the Pacific Ocean—the sheer massiveness of our home galaxy all by itself hit me in a new way. Galaxy Garden A gold dust croton leaf in the Galaxy Garden, where the yellow dots represent stars. (credit: Deana L. Weibel) We proceeded toward the center of the Galaxy Garden. Lomberg indicated nebulae and brightly-colored stellar nurseries along the way. Eventually we reached the supermassive black hole, whose place was marked by a well-like black fountain. The visit took place soon after the May 2026 Hawaiian earthquake, so the fountain wasn’t running, but even without the “relativistic jet” spraying, it was possible to see how the fountain was designed to show the event horizon, gravity well, and the black hole itself. Seeing the galaxy through a garden overlay was a strange experience but one that made me understand the Milky Way in a fashion I hadn’t before. After we exited the “galaxy,” we contemplated the Pacific Ocean from a conveniently placed bench. I began to think of the “deep field” photos taken by the Hubble and Webb telescopes, the ones where what looks like a starfield at first has to be reevaluated as a field of galaxies instead. I imagined a whole deep field of galaxy gardens, wondering if they’d stretch to Japan or the US mainland or could even fit on Earth. Children sometimes come to the Galaxy Garden on field trips, and it is certainly also visited by plant lovers and spiritual seekers. But it deserves to be a destination for scientists and space enthusiasts. There are lunar and Martian analogs all around the world, but the Galaxy Garden is something rarer. It is a galactic analog, not because it recreates the physical conditions of the Milky Way, but because it makes galactic scale available to the body as something that can be entered, walked, measured, and felt. It is a galactic analog that can be explored in an hour. Taken together with stargazing on Mauna Kea and a visit to Kilauea, it could complete an “itinerary of awe,” creating an awareness of deep time and deep space that is often hard to come by.[6] A single inch of the Galaxy Garden is analogous to 83 light-years.[7] Voyager 1, which carries images created and curated by Jon Lomberg, has traveled for nearly 49 years. On November 18, 2026, it will have traveled the distance light can travel in a single 24-hour day.[8] Measured on a gold dust croton leaf, that’s 0.000033 inches, or 1/80th of the thickness of a single human hair. The great Douglas Adams once wrote, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”[9] Thanks to the Galaxy Garden I’m now able to believe it, understand it, more than I ever did before. Works Cited Adams, Douglas. The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. United Kingdom: Harmony Books, 1980. Bedeaux, Rob. “The Tibetan Sand Mandala: A Short History.” Minneapolis Institute of Art. August 26, 2025. Goldstein, J. J., M. Bicay, R. Gorchev, J. Lomberg, L. Blitz, and V. Neal. “A Portrait of the Milky Way: The Jon Lomberg Painting: Art and Science Working Together.” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society 26 (1994): 1550. Klaes, Larry. “The Milky Way as a Garden.” Centauri Dreams. November 14, 2007. Lomberg, Jon. Galaxy Garden. Accessed July 1, 2026. Mann, Marya. “The Galactic Interpretations of Jon Lomberg in Flowers and Other Media.” Ke Ola Magazine. June–July 2009. NASA. “Where Are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Now?” NASA Science. Last updated June 30, 2026. RECONS. “The One Hundred Nearest Star Systems.” Research Consortium on Nearby Stars. Georgia State University. Accurate as of January 1, 2012. Weibel, Deana L.. The Ultraview Effect: What We Can Learn from Astronauts about Awe, Humility, and Exploring the Unknown. United States: University of California Press, 2026. References Deana L. Weibel, The Ultraview Effect. Larry Klaes, “The Milky Way as a Garden.” Rob Bedeaux, “The Tibetan Sand Mandala: A Short History.” Jon Lomberg, Galaxy Garden. J.J. Goldstein et al., “A Portrait of the Milky Way.” Deana L. Weibel, The Ultraview Effect. Marya Mann, “The Galactic Interpretations of Jon Lomberg in Flowers and Other Media.” NASA. “Where Are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Now?” Douglas Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Deana L. Weibel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University with a joint appointment in GVSU’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies. She has held a lifelong interest in pilgrimage, tourism, scientific expeditions, and the religious and cultural dimensions of outer space exploration. A member of the American Anthropological Association and a Fellow of the Explorers Club, where she currently chairs the Chicago/Great Lakes Chapter, Weibel has conducted ethnographic field research in a number of settings, including the Black Madonna shrine of Rocamadour, France; Spaceport America; NASA’s Johnson Space Center; and the Vatican Observatory. Her book The Ultraview Effect: What We Can Learn from Astronauts about Awe, Humility, and Exploring the Unknown was published by University of California Press in May 2026. She is currently collaborating with Jon Lomberg and Glen E. Swanson on a book about Voyager’s Golden Record, to be published in 2027 by Profile Books in the UK and the University of Chicago Press in North America. You can learn more at http://www.deanaweibel.space.

Transforming Domains: Space, Military Justice, and the Air Force Judge Advocate General's Office in 2050

Raymond Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, the first chief of space operations of the Space Force, speaking at a conference in 2022. (credit: US Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich) Transforming domains: Space, military justice, and the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps in 2050 by Todd Pennington Monday, July 6, 2026 Two phenomena with inexorable momentum today will continue on their current trajectories for the foreseeable future. By 2050, I predict they will drive changes in the Air Force and the Space Force resulting in a Judge Advocate General’s Corps dramatically different from the one we know today. These two phenomena are the growth of the US Space Force (and the “space domain”) and the decline of the military justice system (and the “military justice domain”). The Judge Advocate General’s Corps will evolve to address a growing Space Force at the same time it adapts to the decline of the military justice system. The establishment of the Space Force was driven by the maturation and proliferation of activity in the space domain. As dynamic as the Space Force is, it is not, as an institution, what drives the growth and relevance of space. Rather, the establishment and growth of the Space Force is a trailing indicator of the strategic importance of the space domain. Early in the space age, only governments had the means to reach space. Following entry into force of the Outer Space Treaty, most activities were uncontested, with plenty of space (physical and political) for everyone who could get there. The Gulf War was a wake-up call to our strategic competitors about the military advantages the United States enjoyed based on our space capabilities, which we employed from a domain we could, at the time, treat as a sanctuary.[1] Why would our competitors not seek to first deny us those advantages, then strive to outmatch us? This is exactly what they have done over the past 30 years.[3] And this competition emerged at a time when plummeting costs of space launch made the domain more accessible: first to other states, then to large corporations, eventually to small startups and even not-for-profit organizations. Today, space access is sufficiently democratized that high school student groups have been able to fund the construction, launch, and operation of satellites. Trends in miniaturization of technology accelerate this trend. Compare the costs of launching a room-sized 1970’s era supercomputer into orbit, at a cost of $100,000 per kilogram, to the cost today of launching an iPhone-sized microsat into orbit, about $2,000 per kilogram.[3] Where human activity goes, there goes competition. Between now and 2050, the most consequential frontier of human activity (and competition) will be outer space. The Space Force was established in December 2019 in a manner reflecting the political compromises necessary to make it happen at that time. The law establishing the Space Force did so by re-designating the legacy Air Force Space Command as “U.S. Space Force.”[4] In six short years—a strobe flash in Pentagon time—the nation’s military space enterprise has been comprehensively transformed into something closer to space enterprise leaders’ vision.[5] However, the rapid implementation of these new organizational structures should not invite complacency. The growth of existing capabilities, the fielding of future capabilities, and their growing relevance in competition and conflict mean that the Space Force is sure to grow and evolve—a lot—in the decades to come. The Judge Advocate General’s Corps will evolve to address a growing Space Force at the same time it adapts to the other phenomenon mentioned above: the decline of the military justice system. When I speak of the “decline” of military justice, I am not asserting any moral flaw in our current and legacy justice systems, nor do I mean to imply any diffidence or dereliction among military justice practitioners. Indeed, the experience of prior rounds of military justice reforms show that military justice practitioners uniquely appreciate the military value of a commander-based discipline system and are exceptionally proficient at advocating its merits.[6] I predict a “decline” in the military justice system driven by external political considerations, not any intrinsic design flaw or deficiencies in execution. While the broad structure of the Uniform Code of Military Justice has long history in the legal traditions of British and American armed forces, the heyday of modern military justice practice for Judge Advocates occurred in the two decades between enactment of the Code in 1951 and the 1971 decision to maintain an all-volunteer force. These were the decades when the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam required a mechanism to enforce military discipline on large numbers of conscripted forces deployed overseas, in an era when due process protections for accused service members had advanced substantially from prior conflicts.[7] In the decades since Vietnam, the number of persons in the US armed has diminished in total numbers and as a percentage of the population.[8] Most military justice specialists first experienced cracks in the armor of the modern military justice system in the 2010s, during the intense public and Congressional focus on sexual assault in the ranks. Many will recall a series of Congressional hearings starting in that decade and continuing into the present, at which successive senior Judge Advocates from all services were confronted with asserted shortcomings of the military justice system.[9] Most recently, the Code was amended to remove the most consequential decisions about when and how to exercise military justice authority from command, and vest this authority in Judge Advocates.[10] These reforms are in the earliest stages of implementation, and they will probably not be the last military justice reforms before 2050. Once the most serious military justice matters are no longer vested in command, can it be long before our society (and its representatives in Congress) question why the military requires jurisdiction in many of these cases at all? In the decades to come, the jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice is likely to be dramatically curtailed, through a series of incremental reforms. We may see military jurisdiction curtailed when a US state or territory has effective jurisdiction over an offense. This curtailment could arise from a law- or policy-driven decision to limit or defer the exercise of military jurisdiction, or from state and local jurisdictions asserting the jurisdiction they already hold in parallel with the military over most offenses committed by service members in the United States. To the extent military jurisdiction endures over offenses in domestic areas, it may come to be less preferred than state or territorial jurisdiction when the victim of a crime is a civilian with no military affiliation. There will always be a role for some form of military justice system. However, by 2050 the standards for UCMJ jurisdiction may look very different than today. In 1978, the Supreme Court eliminated a requirement for “service connection” to a charged UCMJ offense.[11] In the years to come, the requirement for service connection as a threshold for UCMJ jurisdiction may be re-established by legislation or policy. UCMJ jurisdiction in 2050 could be limited to offenses that occur outside of US civilian jurisdiction, or which have some particularly acute military nexus, such as law of war violations or an offense involving the abuse of military authority. Such a change is a predicable trend in a system transitioning from one grounded on command authority, to one in which the most consequential criminal law decisions are vested in “professional prosecutors,” the phrase often used describe the leaders and staff of the Office of Special Trial Counsel.[12] The number of cases satisfying such narrow jurisdictional thresholds by 2050 could be a small fraction of today’s court-martial docket. There will always be a role for some form of military justice system. However, by 2050 the standards for UCMJ jurisdiction may look very different than today. How will the concurrent trends of an ascendant Space Force and a waning military justice system work together to drive major changes to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps? The increase in overall activities in the space domain and the Space Force’s expected growth as an organization as space capabilities proliferate in number, in orbital diversity, and in mission type, will probably expand the scale and complexity of legal support for space operations. This trend of growth in operational space law support will likely be in inverse proportion to the diminishing role of military justice as the military justice function trends away from command authority toward a small, lawyer-led, niche discipline. In other words, the Space Force will need more legal support for operations, and less legal support for military justice. This trend will tend to drive the professional development of Judge Advocates more through the operations and civil law practice areas, and less through military justice. The military justice system of 2050 may look much more like the claims function of 2025: a small cadre of specialists, mostly civilian, operating from a single consolidated location. The efficiencies of this type of military system are not hard to imagine. Based on my observations as a Staff Judge Advocate, already most court-martial participants must travel for trial proceedings. A diminishing number of cases will compound that trend, particularly if the overall case processing time for General Courts-Martial continues to expand. At some point efficiency or necessity will warrant consolidating court-martial functions at fewer locations—eventually, a single location—for court-martial proceedings. Continued attenuation of command authority in the military justice system will tend to shift the rationale for military jurisdiction away from “good order and discipline” and toward “jurisdictional necessity” in cases where state and local jurisdiction does not apply, or when the military nexus to an offense is particularly acute. The nation will always need good order and discipline in its armed forces: however, it may be that tools other than plenary criminal jurisdiction will suffice for this purpose. As the relationship between military jurisdiction and command authority wanes to principally involve petty offenses and administrative infractions, the rationale for requiring convening authorities, judges, and trial counsel to be military officers may fade as well. By 2050, the need for lawyers experienced in a niche practice, occurring at a small number of locations, may drive reforms that authorize court-martial trial counsel who are civilian government attorneys. Once military jurisdiction is distinct from command authority, service leaders may question the wisdom of placing responsibility for the accused’s personal well-being through the disposition of charges on the commander of the accused’s unit. Persons awaiting trial in 2050 might be administratively transferred from their former unit to one located at the consolidated court-martial location. Consolidation of court-martial activities could incentivize creation of a unit chartered and resourced to employ and care for the well-being and resilience of Airmen and Guardians awaiting trial. Indeed, many may come to question why service members facing court-martial charges are kept on active duty for the entire time they await trial at all, especially if the time it takes to pursue a case to sentence or acquittal continues to grow longer (as was the trend during my final decade on active duty.) Legal reforms could establish the option to place service members facing trial in an appellate leave-like status, pending the adjudication of charges. Similar trends could prompt new authority for provisional discharge of service members facing criminal charges of sufficient gravity, with a mechanism to return a member to active service could exist should they ultimately secure an acquittal. As the nexus between military criminal jurisdiction and command authority grows more attenuated, such options may gain support. By 2050, the military justice practice may be sufficiently small and specialized that it will no longer be a defining mission of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Military Justice may not remain the primary legal discipline for the professional development of military legal officers. If the trend of de-linking command authority from military justice authority continues, by 2050 military justice could be a niche, mostly civilian, specialty practice. The Space Force was established without a legal career field of its own, relying on Air Force judge advocates assigned to Space Force organizations. Today the Space Force relies on the Air Force to provide a judiciary system, a defense bar, and a cadre of victim’s counsel. Because military justice will be in decline as the Space Force grows in size and relevance, it will not be military discipline that creates demand for a legal career field for the Space Force. Rather, the growing scale, significance, and legal complexity of activities in outer space will be the principal drivers for the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps to adapt to a legal career field in the Space Force. Three trends in space operations explain why this will be. First, the overall volume of space operations activities is rising,[13] and will continue to rise rapidly for the foreseeable future. We are fielding systems in greater numbers, intentionally designed for shorter service life. Advances in launch capability, miniaturization, and computing power challenge legacy thinking about quality versus quantity: today, it is often possible to have both.[14] Second, the foundational principles of space law will be increasingly challenged as our competitors grow more capable and bolder in space. Will the Outer Space Treaty principle of non-appropriation survive Chinese settlement of the lunar south pole? Will principles of state responsibility for space activities be undermined by a trend toward launch and registration state “flags of convenience” as in the maritime domain?[15] Could a Russian assertion of an excessive “safety zone” around a space vehicle orbiting in Lagrange Point space impinge on a US assertion of free access to that same orbital regime? Many of the foundational premises of law governing space activities will be tested in unexpected ways in the decades to come. By 2050, the Space Force will probably be advised by Judge Advocates who are Guardians, that is, attorneys commissioned as United States Space Force officers. Third, addressing all these issues will increasingly require commanders, space operators, and legal advisors recruited and developed in a military culture focused on the space domain. In the 1930s and 1940s, Airmen argued forcefully that the air forces were not fundamentally an extension of land or sea forces. More recently, prior to establishment of the Space Force, airpower advocates were as opposed to the independence of a Space Force as Army leaders of an earlier era were opposed the independence of the Air Force.[16] They argued that air was a wholly different domain, requiring a different way of thinking about all sorts of problems, not just the tactics of flying an airplane. By way of example, tradition holds that Air Force convening authority came to be aligned with installation command, not mission command, because aircraft launch and recover from airfields. This operating convention led to many responsibilities in the Air Force—including court-martial convening authority—being vested in the commander responsible for the airfield itself rather than the airpower mission. Military space systems do not have this same link to a terrestrial installation. Most military satellites remain on orbit their entire service life, and the globe-orbiting nature of Space Force missions means that Space Force units are often geographically dispersed around the planet. Factors like these motivated the Space Force to adopt a mission-aligned model of court-martial convening authority in which a Delta commander serves as special court-martial convening authority for forces under his command, regardless the installation at which those forces are based. The space domain is as different from the air domain as air operations are from land operations or naval operations. The fundamental differences in the domains are why we have separate military services, each structured to build warfighting experts for their own domain. Those differences can be seen in the differing traditions, strategy, doctrine, and culture of the military services. Today, Airmen assigned to various Space Force units serve effectively and are appreciated by the Guardians they serve with. However, the Space Force is only six years old. The traditions, strategy, doctrine, and culture of the Space Force will evolve over time to reflect the operational distinctives of the space domain. In doing so, the Space Force will begin to diverge from Air Force traditions. There will always be places in the joint force for Airmen and Guardians to work side by side: however, over time the Space Force will need to become a force of Guardians, to include their assigned legal counsel. The Space Force was originally established with only a handful of career fields focused on the space-distinctive functions of the Space Force. Most of its combat service support continues to be provided by the Air Force for now, but there is no reason to believe the Space Force will not, over time, take on independent responsibility for these functions. This is exactly what happened when the Air Force was established as a military service independent of the Army. In 1947, commenting on the original organizational decisions regarding the Air Force, Secretary of Defense Louis Arthur Johnson (also an attorney) noted, “Provision had also been made for the Army to go on performing common services for the Air Force in finance, hospital facilities, quartermaster administration, and transportation.”[17] As the Air Force eventually developed organic capability for those functions, so will the Space Force. By 2050, the Space Force will probably be advised by Judge Advocates who are Guardians, that is, attorneys commissioned as United States Space Force officers. What that career field looks like will largely depend on how stakeholders address the inevitable Space Force demand signal for its own legal career field. One possibility would be for the Space Force to break away from the Air Force entirely, forming a new Department of the Space Force within the Department of Defense[18] and taking its pro rata share of the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps with it. In this model, a Space Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps would be a truly separate, independent entity, as organizationally independent from the Air Force as the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the Air Force is from that of the Army or Navy. Alternatively, a Judge Advocate career field could emerge in the Space Force even as the service remains in the Department of the Air Force. This future would resemble today’s Department of the Navy, with separate Navy and Marine Corps Judge Advocate career fields in the services of that Department, with many functions organized as dual-service entities (such as the Naval Justice School, the Navy-Marine Trial Corps Judiciary, and the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals).[19] Under this model certain functions, such as the uniformed judiciary (should any remain by 2050) and legal education, would continue to serve both the Air Force and the Space Force in the same military department. Perhaps a future Space Force legal function will be entirely civilian, rather than uniformed? The growth of the Space Force and the decline of military justice will drive radical transformation in the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the decades to come. As these two inversely proportional trends drive change, some will embrace the change and some will resist it. For those Judge Advocates who will be around to experience it, I do not advocate either approach. Rather, I encourage you to stay grounded on what is in the best interest of the United States at the time. Change is not inherently an indictment of past practice. The Judge Advocate Generals’ Corps of the future will adapt, as they have in the past, to meet the needs of their time. References Rajeswari Pillai Rajogopalan, China Aerospace Studies Institute, 2020 Conference Paper, China’s Growing Military Space Prowess: Institutions And Capabilities 6 (2020). U.S. Dep’t Of Def. Report To Congress, Space Policy Review And Strategy On Protection Of Satellites, September 2023. Thomas G. Roberts, Space Launch to Low Earth Orbit: How Much Does It Cost?, CSIS Civil And Commercial Space Data Repository, last updated Sep. 1, 2022, (last visited Feb. 10, 2025). United States Space Force Act, Subtitle D of Pub. L. No. 116-92 (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020), § 952 (2019). Jennifer Dimascio, Cong. Rsch. Serv. If12610, Defense Primer: The United States Air Force (2024) See, e.g., Examining the Role of the Commander in Sexual Assault Prosecutions, Hearing Before the H. Armed Services Comm. Subcomm. on Mil. Personnel, 116th Cong. (2019) (statement of Lt Gen Jeffrey Rockwell, Judge Advocate General of the United States Air Force). Elizabeth Lutes Hillman, Cold War Crime and American Military Culture: Courts-Martial in the United States Armed Forces, 1951-1973, 69-88 (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University) (ProQuest). Armed Forces Personnel As A Share Of Total Population, 1985 to 2020, ourworldindata.org, (last accessed Feb. 10, 2025) See, e.g., Sexual Assaults In The Military, Hearing Before the S. Armed Services Comm. Subcomm. on Personnel, 113th Cong. 303 (2013) (statement of Lt Gen Richard Harding, Judge Advocate General of the United States Air Force). See generally David Schleuter and Lisa Schenck, Transforming Military Justice: The 2022 and 2023 National Defense Authorization Acts, 231 MIL. L. REV. 1, 1 (2023). US v. Solorio, 483 U.S. 435 (1987). John Donnelly, Gillibrand calls new NDAA ‘huge milestone’ in military justice, Roll Call, Dec. 7, 2022 (last accessed Feb. 10, 2025). See generally Challenges To Security In Space, Def. Intel. Agency, (2022) (last accessed Feb. 10, 2025). Charles Galbreath with Aidan Poling, Small Satellites: Answering The Call For Space Superiority, Mitchell Institute Policy Paper, Vol. 52, July 2024. See generally Franz von der Dunk, Towards 'Flags of Convenience' in Space?, Space, Cyber, And Telecommunications Law Program Faculty Publications, 76 (2012). See, e.g., David Deptula, Yes To A U.S. Space Command But No To A Separate Space Force, Forbes, Apr. 10, 2019 (last accessed Feb. 11, 2025). Herman S. Wolk, The Struggle For Air Force Independence, 1943-1947 226 (Air Force History and Museum Programs 1997). Space Policy Directive 4, Establishment of the United States Space Force, 84 Fed. Reg. 6049 (Feb. 19, 2019). Para 2.b. states “The term ‘Department of the Space Force’ refers to a future military department within the Department of Defense that will be responsible for organizing, training, and equipping the United States Space Force.” Also, per 10 U.S.C. § 8088, 8089, the Judge Advocate General of the Navy and the Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Navy may be a Judge Advocate from either the Navy or the Marine Corps. Colonel (retired) Todd Pennington is the Senior Research Fellow for Space Strategy and Policy at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, DC. He served for 25 years as an active duty Air Force Judge Advocate, with assignments including Staff Judge Advocate for US Space Force and Judge Advocate for United States Space Command. From 2008 through 2011 he was Deputy Staff Judge Advocate to then-LTC Joseph Berger at Joint Special Operations Command; since 2025 he has been a floater on the crew of LTG (retired) Berger’s sailboat. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.

The Mars Tax: Starship's Toll On American Lunar Ambitions

Starship HLS An illustration of the lunar lander version of Starship that SpaceX is developing for the Human Landing system program (credit: SpaceX) The Mars Tax: Starship’s toll on American lunar ambitions by Ethan Hicks Monday, July 6, 2026 As the Apollo 9 Command Module orbited the Earth in 1969, the Lunar Module (LM) approached for docking and testing. It was the final system needed to carry humans to the Moon mere months later. Artemis 3 is slated to fly a similar mission in 2027, testing the Human Landing System (HLS) in Earth orbit ahead of a planned 2028 Artemis 4 landing. This time, however, one of the vehicles awaiting the astronauts in orbit will not be a lunar lander: it will be a Mars rocket. Designed primarily for a Mars mission, SpaceX’s Starship is significantly over-engineered for its assigned role as the HLS and remains far from mission-ready one year out from its Artemis 3 rendezvous. NASA’s selection of Starship, driven by budget constraints and a lack of viable commercial alternatives, has effectively allowed for the imposition of a “Mars Tax” on Artemis, embedding the costs of SpaceX’s future Mars missions into a program that requires only a simple lunar lander. This tax is not a monetary one; instead, it is measured in the burdens placed on the Artemis program by a Mars-focused HLS design: crew safety risks, considerable program delays, and limited NASA control over design and development. These embedded costs manifest in the growing possibility that China may beat the US in its return to the Moon. Starship is made for Mars SpaceX’s stated goal since its 2002 founding has been to colonize the Red Planet, and Starship was introduced as the vehicle that would realize this goal. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk put it plainly in a January 2025 tweet: “[W]e’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” Musk has since walked back this statement, yet SpaceX continues to resist fundamental changes to the program that would make it a more effective HLS. NASA’s selection of Starship has effectively allowed for the imposition of a “Mars Tax” on Artemis, embedding the costs of SpaceX’s future Mars missions into a program that requires only a simple lunar lander. Though SpaceX will deliver a modified “lunar” variant of Starship, it will share a majority of its core components with the base, Mars-bound design, including its impressive size, standing at 171 feet (52 meters) tall on the lunar surface. An Artemis landing, in this sense, is as much a Mars test flight as it is a lunar one: a Starship HLS would help accumulate the operational experience SpaceX needs for the Red Planet. This has led to suboptimal design choices, including an 11-story-tall external elevator required to descend the length of massive propellant tanks intended for a Martian takeoff. Additionally, the Starship program will include elements unnecessary for the scope of Artemis 4, including full reusability, a 100-metric-ton payload capacity, and in-orbit refueling. While essential capabilities for a sustained presence on the Moon and Mars, they are extraneous to a lunar landing first accomplished half a century ago. Starship’s payload capacity is designed for Mars colonization, where the nearest resupply is months away. For Artemis 4, the HLS will carry two astronauts, provisions, EVA suits, and scientific equipment— a fraction of that capacity. Given Starship’s size, in-orbit refueling is necessary to achieve the fixed delta-V required for trans-lunar injection, but this solution creates additional challenges. Assuming SpaceX can successfully demonstrate ship-to-ship refueling, it would require additional Starship launches to sufficiently fuel just one Moon-bound Starship, increasing risk and complexity. Estimates vary depending on boil-off predictions, but NASA officials have put the number “in the high teens,” while in 2024 SpaceX vice president Jessica Jensen said “10-ish” refueling flights would be needed. In effect, NASA has contracted for a derivative of a Mars vehicle rather than a purpose-built lunar lander, to SpaceX’s specifications and timeline. While this could speed up a Mars mission in line with NASA’s stated Moon-to-Mars initiative, it comes at a steep cost as the Mars Tax imposes delays and safety risks onto the Artemis program. NASA’s concerns As part of their contract, SpaceX is required to complete an uncrewed Starship landing on the Moon before the 2028 landing. The technical hurdles to be met in two years’ time are substantial, with some imposed by Mars requirements. SpaceX must be able to reliably “catch” Starship’s returning upper stage, quickly refurbish it, perform cryogenic fuel transfers across multiple launches, and integrate lunar-variant modifications before successfully landing and lifting off from the Moon. As of now, none of these milestones have been attempted or scheduled. In March of 2026, NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a report titled “NASA’s Management of the Human Landing System Contracts,” which provided a candid look at NASA’s risk assessment regarding HLS. Skeptical that Starship will be ready in time, OIG stated that SpaceX “will be challenged to complete required milestones ahead of the Artemis III mission.” (The report was written when Artemis 3 was to be the first lunar landing; just before the report’s release NASA added a low Earth orbit test of landers now designated Artemis 3, with the landing now planned for Artemis 4.) NASA attributes much of this challenge to the novel cryogenic propellant transfer capability, which itself has been delayed by far more than a year, with no test date announced. “NASA is tracking a top risk that some of the cryogenic technologies and capabilities SpaceX is developing will not be adequately mature ahead of the Artemis III mission… resulting in the potential for mission delays,” OIG stated. The report also points out that “SpaceX has yet to demonstrate the required 12- to 24-day turnover of its launch pad,” a turnover rate necessary to support the ten or more Starship launches required. With little margin for error remaining, “should SpaceX experience any technical issues commonly encountered during development and testing of new technologies or any additional flight test mishaps, the resulting schedule delays could impact the Artemis III launch date.” The Starship-driven Artemis delays that the OIG and GAO mention would entail little more than congressional ire if not for the imminent Chinese landings. Beyond delay, the OIG detailed significant crew safety concerns in Starship. The aforementioned elevator, for example, is a top safety risk for NASA. As it stands, “there is no other method for the crew to enter the vehicle from the lunar surface in the event of an elevator failure,” potentially stranding the crew outside of the lander. This is a significant point of risk for NASA, which requires “single failure tolerance,” or “the ability of a system to sustain a single failure and not have it affect the design goal.” The elevator fails this requirement in its proposed form, and though SpaceX has committed to building a “robust” elevator system, NASA remains concerned. Another critical safety issue lies in crew-accessible manual controls for the lander. “NASA’s human-rating certification requires vehicles provide the capability for crew to take manual control during all phases of flight,” explained OIG, pointing out that of the six crewed Apollo landings, backup manual controls had to be engaged for all of them. NASA and SpaceX disagree as to whether Starship includes enough manual control options for the crew. OIG notes that, despite promises from SpaceX, “NASA’s tracking of SpaceX’s manual control risk indicates a worsening trend” that could end with more automated procedures than NASA’s safety teams are comfortable with. This could “adversely impact the crew’s ability to intervene, potentially leading to the loss of the crew or mission.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO), in a 2025 report to Congress on major NASA projects, raised several overlapping concerns with the OIG as well as a worry that the Artemis astronauts will not have the time or facilities to be adequately trained on the HLS controls due to Starship delays. At worst, “this could result in an increased probability of loss of the vehicle, crew, and mission during the landing phase.” Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, in a Senate hearing last September, spoke plainly about the problems with a Starship HLS. While he is a Republican appointee criticizing a decision made during a Democratic administration, he echoed many of the same criticisms as NASA’s independent watchdogs about over-complexity before taking them a step further. He called NASA’s 2021 choice of Starship “a problem that needs to be solved,” adding that “instead of buying a Moon lander, we’re gonna buy a big rocket.” He then explained that it “puts us as a nation at risk” with regards to Chinese lunar ambitions: “It is highly unlikely that we will land on the moon before China.” Geopolitical costs of delay Bridenstine is far from the only person to raise the national security concerns that come with a Chinese lunar landing. The Starship-driven Artemis delays that the OIG and GAO mention would entail little more than congressional ire if not for the imminent Chinese landings, targeted for 2030. In a 2025 report to Congress, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission concluded that China is fully dedicated to becoming “the world’s pre-eminent space power.” The Commission warned that “falling behind in space would not only diminish U.S. standing, [but] would also threaten U.S. national security, global influence, technological dominance, and commercial competitiveness in the growing space economy.” Artemis has the vital political task of preventing such a scenario, but it can only do so with a completed HLS, currently weighed down by the mission misalignment inherent in the Mars Tax. China, meanwhile, has taken a more prudent approach to its lunar lander. Rather than betting on unproven technology, Beijing is opting for a lander comparable to the Apollo LM. Lanyue will be a two-stage lunar lander launched on a single Long March 10 rocket, and will rely on stored hypergolic propellant rather than in-orbit refueling. In a testament to its relative simplicity, Lanyue passed initial testing in August 2025, including validations of its takeoff and landing capabilities. Lanyue is a vehicle of first contact and the US currently has no answer for it, having prioritized new technology over mission readiness. Congress and commercial space The risks that came with a Starship HLS were not unknown to NASA when it was chosen, but in many respects its hand was likely forced. The space agency requested $3.4 billion for the HLS in fiscal year 2021, but Congress allocated only $850 million—25% of what it needed. When SpaceX was ultimately awarded the contract in 2021, over Blue Origin’s and Dynetics’ proposals, cost was perhaps the single biggest consideration. Typically, NASA awards contracts to two companies for initial development at this stage in the procurement process; however, the budget constraints imposed by Congress left only enough money for one winner. Though then-Acting Administrator Sean Duffy reopened the contract in October 2025, presumably to either incentivize faster development or hedge against a potential Starship failure, SpaceX already had four years of HLS development. If the United States is serious about beating China to the Moon, a priority realignment is necessary; pennies on the dollar from Congress and an ambitious Mars project will be no substitute for a purpose-made lander based on proven technology such as Lanyue. NASA was limited to the proposals submitted, rather than able to co-design a lander as it had during the Apollo era. Though it made all its mission requirements clear, the large variations between proposed landers shows the flexibility allowed. Under this fixed-price procurement approach, NASA had to rely on competition to deliver the best lander for the program. However, none of the other HLS proposals were able to truly compete with Starship’s proposal in 2021, either due to cost, technical ability, or procurement issues. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon proposal, for example, had a good enough design to be chosen for future Artemis missions, but higher cost and “development and schedule risks” removed it from this contract’s consideration. While the source selection authority acknowledged the significant risks inherent in Starship’s Mars-designed height and complexity, the vehicle offered superior payload and fuel capacity at the lowest cost from a reputable company. Going into selection, SpaceX’s credentials were very strong. It had extensive experience working with NASA’s fixed-price human spaceflight program through Crew Dragon, as well as a history of groundbreaking technological advancement in Falcon 9 reuse. More than any faith in the company, however, was the price. Starship would only cost the taxpayer $2.9 billion over the life of the contract, significantly less than any other proposal, despite the program’s complexity. This is because SpaceX is self-funding most of Starship’s development. Total project costs for Starship have already exceeded $15 billion with years of progress remaining. This means that NASA will be paying for less than 20% of Starship’s maturation, making the space agency a minority stakeholder in its own HLS development. This economic reality contextualizes SpaceX’s uncompromising design choices, with the government essentially relegated to funding source rather than mission partner. NASA’s contract dollars are inadvertently subsidizing a Mars program that constrains the agency’s decision-making ability. While some of this is inherent to fixed-price contracts, SpaceX’s ability to resist government pressure is largely a function of funding independence and divergent purposes. Tax breaks If the United States is serious about beating China to the Moon, a priority realignment is necessary; pennies on the dollar from Congress and an ambitious Mars project will be no substitute for a purpose-made lander based on proven technology such as Lanyue. A new approach freeing the HLS from the Mars Tax will give it the flexibility and leanness to compete. Reportedly, a group of traditional “Old Space” companies have told NASA that they can build a simple Apollo-like lander “within 30 months”—a figure that, while unverified, reflects the relative predictability of developing a lander using heritage technology. In a statement, a Lockheed Martin official stated that the company “has been performing significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers … to return humans to the Moon as quickly as possible” should NASA call on them. The cost-plus contract this would entail, while significantly more expensive than Starship’s, would serve to effectively restore NASA’s design authority, diluted in part by Mars ambitions. Additionally, Congress may be more willing to fund a more expensive lander given the growing likelihood of a Chinese landing, more imminent now than in 2021. While a simplified lunar lander started now would still push back a crewed landing, a more reliable path to the lunar surface is preferable to the uncertainty surrounding Starship’s development timeline. This option had support from within the agency, including from associate administrator Amit Kshatriya, who previously led NASA’s “Moon-to-Mars” program. The fact that someone as invested in the Mars vision as Kshatriya would favor a simpler lander over Starship speaks to how significantly the Mars Tax has weighed on the agency. Under this scenario, the Starship and Blue Moon contracts could remain intact for their eventual use as large-payload and long-duration landers in constructing NASA’s Moon base, but this use will be years down the road when their development isn’t tied to a geopolitical deadline. Congress still has the opportunity to make up for its 2021 shortfalls and create a hedge against a Starship failure, but that window is narrowing as China’s 2030 goal approaches. Starship is undeniably an engineering marvel that will eventually redefine transportation to Mars, the Moon, and low Earth orbit. However, no amount of technical ability will make up for a lander that comes in second. If Lanyue touches down while Starship is still refining cryogenic refueling, the Mars Tax will quickly become more than NASA is willing to pay—it may have already. A Starship HLS may accelerate a journey to the Red Planet, but it does so at the expense of a timely and safe American return to the Moon when US space leadership hangs in the balance. NASA doesn’t need to deliver 100 metric tons to the lunar surface before China; it merely needs to land people. At this phase of Artemis, NASA doesn’t need Starship– it needs a lander. Ethan Hicks is an undergraduate Political Science student at Florida State University with a passion for spaceflight and government. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments an

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