Wishing For Rockets

launches A ULA Vulcan on the pad before its first—and, so far, only—launch of the year in February. (credit: ULA) Wishing for rockets by Jeff Foust Monday, August 17, 2026 Last month, Cambridge University researchers published a study hailing a breakthrough in access to orbit. Launch costs, they argued, were cheaper than ever, at $3,868 per kilogram, and projected to fall further: $1,569 per kilogram by 2030 and $273 per kilogram by 2040. “The cost of space launch technology is now falling faster than during one of history’s greatest transport revolutions,” said the lead author, Alessio Terzi, referring to the rise of steam-powered ships in the 19th century. One industry executive had a succinct response to that study. “I wish,” said the official, speaking on background. “I don’t think Cambridge professors have been buying many rockets recently.” If they had, that official and others have said, they would find a highly constrained market where it is difficult to find a ride to orbit—and if you do, you’re likely paying a premium price for it. That is a combination of rockets currently grounded, rockets whose introduction continues to be delayed, and worries about the future of a program that has provided affordable access to space for smallsats. launches Blue Origin continues to rebuild Launch Complex 36 and return New Glenn to flight after an explosion in May. (credit: Blue Origin) Wishing for rockets to resume launches The lineup of rockets currently grounded is impressive—or would be, if it wasn’t maddening to customers. Blue Origin’s New Glenn, of course, is out of service since an explosion during a static-fire test in May that seriously damaged its Cape Canaveral launch pad. ULA’s Vulcan has not flown since February, when a solid rocket booster on a launch suffered a “significant performance anomaly,” although the rocket was able to successfully complete its mission. India’s PSLV rocket, a workhorse for India’s space program and a popular option for some companies, has suffered back-to-back failures. Last week, Japan’s H3 performed its first operational launch since a failure last December (it did conduct a successful test flight in June of a different variant of the vehicle, which carried only a few smallsats.) That is significant capacity sidelined, to the detriment of customers ranging from the US Space Force to Amazon, whose Amazon Leo constellation is relying in large part on New Glenn and Vulcan. “They’re targeting this year. We’re not betting on that necessarily,” said AST SpaceMobile’s Wisniewski on New Glenn’s return to flight. How long those vehicles will remain out of service remains unclear. India has provided few details about the two PSLV failures, other than both involved the rocket’s third stage; some recent media reports indicate the vehicle could return to flight in September. Blue Origin has been consistently stated since shortly after the pad explosion that it is trying to get New Glenn flying again by the end of the year, which requires both resolving the issue that caused the explosion and rebuilding the pad. Blue Origin said earlier this month it traced the pad explosion to a liquid oxygen valve in a BE-4 engine in the rocket’s first stage, and was taking steps to fix that problem. It is also working effectively 24/7 to rebuild the pad, incorporating changes in the pad design rather than do a straight rebuild to speed things along. Customers are cheering Blue Origin on, but are not necessarily counting on having New Glenn flying by the end of the year. “They’re targeting this year. We’re not betting on that necessarily,” said Scott Wisniewski, president of AST SpaceMobile, in his company’s earnings call last week. AST SpaceMobile is counting on New Glenn to launch its constellation of broadband direct-to-device satellites, along with SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9. “We’ll be happy if they do it, but we’re not betting on that in our numbers.” ULA has not announced when it expects Vulcan to resume launches. In an earnings call last month, Northrop Grumman, which makes Vulcan’s solid rocket boosters, said it had implemented corrective actions but suggested redesigned boosters might not be ready until the end of the year. Vulcan can launch smaller missions without any boosters, but most missions on its manifest require two or more. Its return to flight is further complicated by the BE-4 engine issue discovered by the New Glenn explosion. That has put financial pressure on the company, which early this year said it expected to launch Vulcan 16 to 18 times this year. In July, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which each own 50% of ULA, said in SEC filings that they provided loan guarantees to ULA because the grounding was “negatively affecting ULA’s financial condition,” as Lockheed stated. “While the window for an end-of-year [Neutron] launch is narrowing, the work we’re doing now is about risk trading, balancing the timing of our first launch against how quickly and seamlessly we can scale our 10th launch,” Beck said. Even rockets that have returned to flight have been slow to do so. In March, Firefly Aerospace successfully launched its Alpha rocket for the first time since an April 2025 launch failure. (The company also suffered the loss of an Alpha booster during a static-fire test in September of 2025, delaying the vehicle’s return to flight.) Firefly said then it would move on to an enhanced “Block II” version of Alpha, with stretched first and second stages and upgraded subsystems, set to start flying in late summer. In an earnings call last week, the company said it was now targeting the fourth quarter for that next Alpha launch. It also said it would conduct just one more launch this year after that, rather than two previously planned. Firefly’s CEO, Jason Kim, said in the call that the company has sold out the majority of its manifest of Alpha launches in 2027, but declined to say how many launches that would be. “We’re not going to talk about guidance for 2027,” he said when asked about the cadence of Alpha launches. launches Rocket Lab’s Neutron, originally planned to begin launches in 2024, could see its first launch slip to 2027. (credit: Rocket Lab) Wishing for rockets to begin launches A similar industry lament involves rockets in development. There is a wave of vehicles that promise to introduce more capacity for customers, if they ever make it to, and off of, a launch pad. One of them is another Firefly vehicle, Eclipse. In 2022, Northrop Grumman announced it would partner with Firefly to develop a new first stage for Northrop’s Antares rocket—replacing one built in Ukraine with Russian engines—as a step towards a new medium-lift rocket. The companies said at the time they expected the revised Antares vehicle with the Firefly first stage, called Antares 330, to begin launches as soon as 2024, with the medium-lift vehicle to follow in 2025. As of August 2026, though, that vehicle, now called Eclipse, has yet to launch. In the earnings call, Kim discussed progress the company was making on Eclipse but provided few details about the schedule. “We’re just working toward our first launch,” he said, which he estimated to be no earlier than 2027. Rocket Lab is in a similar situation with its Neutron medium-lift rocket. Announced in 2021, Rocket Lab originally planned to conduct its first launch in 2024. A year ago, the company said it was pushing to carry out that launch by the end of 2025, but said it was on a “green light” schedule with little schedule margin to achieve that. That launch then slipped to 2026, but in an earnings call last week, CEO Peter Beck said the window for launching Neutron this year was “narrowing.” “While the window for an end-of-year launch is narrowing, the work we’re doing now is about risk trading, balancing the timing of our first launch against how quickly and seamlessly we can scale our 10th launch,” he said. In the call, he committed only to getting the first Neutron on the pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, in the fourth quarter of this year, with significant testing of the rocket planned there before a launch attempt. “We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more,” Musk said of Starship. Schedule slips are also issues at both ends of the launch vehicle spectrum. In Europe, there is a race among several startups working on small launchers to be the first to reach orbit, one with no clear leader. Isar Aerospace launched its first Spectrum rocket in March 2025, only for it to malfunction and crash shortly after liftoff. The company was gearing up for a second orbital launch in January, but that launch has been repeatedly delayed by technical issues (including one last-second launch scrub in March) with no clear launch date. Rocket Factory Augsburg, meanwhile, has been working on its RFA ONE rocket, planning a first orbital launch attempt in August, two years after it lost a first stage in a static-fire test. (Notice a trend here?) However, the company postponed the launch attempt because of issues with the rocket that required destacking it from the pad at SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands. OHB, the German aerospace company that owns a majority stake of RFA, said earlier this month it still expects a first launch some time this year. At the opposite end of the spectrum is SpaceX’s Starship, which has now performed 13 suborbital test flights over more than three years without yet attempting an orbital flight. In a company earnings call earlier this month, its first since going public in June, CEO Elon Musk said the flight next will be an orbital one, deploying Starlink satellites to an “operational orbit” while attempting a catch of the Starship upper stage at Starbase. He said then the launch was planned for the end of August, although NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said Fridya he expected that launch in early September. “We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more,” he stated. Given Musk’s propensity for aspirational timelines, few in the industry expect Starship to be flying daily in a year. launches A Falcon 9 lifts off on the Transporter-17 rideshare mission in July. (credit: SpaceX) Wishing for rideshare launches Those doubts about a rapid increase in Starship launches are rooted in the experience of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which launched 165 times—a little less than once every two days—in 2025, 15 years after the rocket’s debut. That was still a record for the company and accounted for half of all orbital launches worldwide last year. While Falcon 9 has a been a godsend for most of the space industry, not to mention NASA and the US national security space community, there are questions about its future as SpaceX shifts to Starship. Those concerns started to come to light a few months ago, as companies that have used SpaceX’s rideshare missions, including Transporter launches to Sun-synchronous orbit and Bandwagon flights to mid-inclination orbits, reported no availability for missions after 2028. While SpaceX has not commented publicly on the long-term future of those rideshare launches, companies that relied on them for regular and affordable access to orbit now worry those missions will go away. “It is not something that is keeping us up at night right now,” sSerafini said of the future of SpaceX rideshare launches. Other companies are stepping in, offering their own rideshare launches by working directly with SpaceX. In May, Exolaunch, a German company that has arranged launches of hundreds of satellites on SpaceX rideshare missions, said it had purchased two Falcon 9 launches which it will use for its own rideshare missions to Sun-synchronous orbits. SEOPS, another aggregator, announced at the same time it purchased its own Falcon 9 for a Sun-synchronous rideshare mission called Waymaker. SEOPS announced on Monday that, given the high demand for that first Waymaker, it will fly another to a mid-inclination orbit. Both are scheduled for 2028, while Exolaunch’s missions are planned for 2027 and 2028. Evan Hoyt, president of SEOPS, said in an interview that the first Waymaker mission is “90-plus percent” sold out after less than three months. The second Waymaker, he said, will use a Falcon 9 SEOPS previously ordered for a geostationary orbit rideshare mission; demand for the LEO missions, he noted, is far higher than for GEO. Some companies have emphasized that, amid the uncertainty about the future of those rideshare launches, they have locked in capacity for the foreseeable future. Executives with HawkEye 360 and Spire Global, two satellite operators who have made extensive use of SpaceX rideshare launches, noted last week they have secured launches through 2028. “It is not something that is keeping us up at night right now,” said John Serafini, CEO of HawkEye 360, which uses satellites for radiofrequency geolocation services, primarily for government agencies. “We have the benefit of being locked down for the next two years, but we are looking at and we are considering different options.” Those different options, he said, include looking at launch vehicles under development from companies like Firefly and Stoke Space, as well as Rocket Lab, whose Electron rocket has launched several HawkEye 360 satellites. “Fortunately, if this is two-plus years out, that gives more time for other platforms to become viable,” he said. Hoyt said that companies need to start planning further ahead than they used to, looking out two to three years in advance for launch services. “They don’t seem to be operating in any kind of panic,” he said of customers. “They’re just responding to what they see and what they assess the market’s doing.” The end of SpaceX rideshare services—at least those operated by SpaceX itself, rather than companies that purchase Falcon 9 launches for rideshare missions—would be a precursor to the gradual phaseout of the Falcon 9 itself as SpaceX moves to Starship. “While we have steadily increased our Falcon 9 launch cadence over recent years, we expect Falcon 9 launches to decrease over time,” the company stated in May in the prospectus for its IPO. “While Falcon 9 currently drives the majority of our launch activity, we expect Starship, which is designed to be the world’s first fully, rapidly, reusable launch vehicle, to become a larger contributor to our launch volume as it enters operational service.” “I can’t stress enough that the demand for launch capacity is amplified right now. We’ve never seen launch capacity so constrained,” said Firefly’s Kim. The company didn’t give a schedule for retiring the rocket, but company executives said last year that SpaceX was approaching the peak of Falcon 9 launches in anticipation of moving to Starship. However, the company hinted it would continue to operate the Falcon 9 for some customers, particularly the government, for the foreseeable future. “As Starship progresses toward full operational utilization, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy platforms will remain key assets for specialized missions, including NASA crew rotations and national security payloads,” the company stated in its prospectus. Even without the debate about Falcon 9’s long-term future, it’s clear that the current state of the market is one where supply of vehicles is constrained by developmental delays and technical problems and doesn’t match the growing demand. “I can’t stress enough that the demand for launch capacity is amplified right now. We’ve never seen launch capacity so constrained,” said Firefly’s Kim. “I’ve personally never seen launch so constrained in pretty much ever,” said Rocket Lab’s Beck. “The amount of launch that's left in the industry is really, really tight.” That suggests the Cambridge academics should revise their price forecasts, at least in the near term. 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.

Samos E-5/Lanyard Reconnaissance Project

SPARTAN Launch of a CORONA E-6 reconnaissance satellite in June 1962. The E-6 had a pointed reentry vehicle that carried the exposed film from the two cameras. Five Samos E-6 missions were launched in 1962 and all failed. The E-6 was later developed into the SPARTAN experimental reconnaissance program. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection) Lemons to bitter lemonade: from the Samos E-5 to the LANYARD reconnaissance satellite (part 3) by Dwayne A. Day Monday, August 17, 2026 The Samos E-5/LANYARD reconnaissance project was not the only effort to get something useful out of the Samos reconnaissance satellite program. When the Samos program was underway, the US Air Force sought to develop both a higher-resolution satellite—the E-5—as well as a satellite that could image large areas of the Earth at lower resolution so that photo interpreters could look for changes and new construction. That program was named the Samos E-6. But the Samos E-6 also suffered development problems and was canceled. Like the E-5, the Samos E-6 was also revived in an effort to adapt the camera system to use proven CORONA technology. That project was known as SPARTAN, named not for the famous Greek warriors, but for frugality (see “Lemons to bitter lemonade: from the Samos E-5 to the LANYARD reconnaissance satellite (part 2),” The Space Review, August 3, 2026, and part 1.) SPARTAN The Samos E-6 satellite was equipped with two cameras that were capable of photographing larger amounts of territory than the Samos E-5. The film would be wrapped up in in takeup reels inside the conical reentry vehicle at left. It would separate from the spacecraft, leaving the cameras to reenter and burn up. The reentry vehicle would deploy a parachute to be recovered in mid-air like the CORONA reconnaissance satellite. However, if it landed in the water, it would immediately sink, unlike CORONA. Five spacecraft were launched in 1962 and all five failed. The camera system was later adapted for the SPARTAN reconnaissance system. (credit: NRO) The Samos E-6 The Samos E-6 incorporated two 36-inch (0.9-meter) focal length Eastman-Kodak manufactured cameras that could scan large areas of the ground below at an estimated resolution of about six and a half feet (two meters), good enough to spot and identify aircraft, ships, submarines, and possibly even military ground vehicles, and better than the early CORONA versions. The E-6 used wide film, 6.6 inches (16.8 centimeters), bigger than the E-5’s 5-inch (12.7-centimeter) film. After the film was exposed in the cameras it was wound up on spools inside the reentry vehicle. The size of the E-6 film would prove to be a liability, because it limited how much could be stored in a reentry vehicle. In 1962, while the KH-6 LANYARD was under development, the Air Force launched Atlas Agena rockets with Samos E-6 satellites in April, June, July, August, and November 1962. All five missions failed to successfully return film. The operation of the E-6 camera remains a bit of a mystery to this day. It consisted of a long tube with an image-reflecting mirror at one end that bent the image of the Earth below 90 degrees and sent it down the tube with an image-focusing mirror at the other end. That focusing mirror concentrated the image and sent it about halfway back the tube, where another small mirror reflected it up and onto a film strip that was pulled across an aperture. The focal length was 36 inches (0.9 meters, compared to CORONA’s 24-inch/0.61-meter focal length). Only one poorly reproduced image of the camera design exists, along with some photographs of a wooden camera mockup, and it is unclear how the camera scanned the ground below from side to side. Other specific operational details also remain unknown. Carrying two cameras meant that one could point at a slightly different angle than the other one, providing stereo photographs and making measurement of objects on the ground easier. The earlier Samos E-5 reentry vehicle was a large blunt-body design, nearly the size of a Mercury spacecraft, and also would have returned the camera to Earth. In contrast, the Samos E-6 reentry vehicle was long and pointed, and would not have returned the cameras, only the exposed film. While hanging underneath a parachute it would have been grabbed out of the air by an Air Force C-130 transport plane in a method that CORONA had successfully demonstrated numerous times. If the plane missed, the E-6 reentry vehicle would immediately sink in the ocean, whereas the CORONA vehicle floated for a limited time before it eventually sank to prevent recovery by the Soviet Navy. SPARTAN Joseph V. Charyk, the first director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Charyk approved modifying the Samos E-6 cameras to become the SPARTAN reconnaissance experiment in 1963, but he soon left the NRO and the program died. (credit: Wikimedia Commons) In 1962, while the KH-6 LANYARD was under development, the Air Force launched Atlas Agena rockets with Samos E-6 satellites in April, June, July, August, and November 1962. All five missions failed to successfully return film. The E-6 reentry vehicle overheated and was destroyed before it could ever deploy its parachute. The multiple failures led to serious doubts about the program within the Air Force and intelligence community. On December 11, 1962, almost one year after canceling the Samos E-5, Director of the National Reconnaissance Office Joseph Charyk terminated the Samos E-6 program and ordered that the remaining cameras and payload vehicles be placed into storage.[1] Charyk’s decision was based not only on the E-6’s reentry vehicle problems but also on several other factors. The E-6 required a more expensive Atlas Agena launch vehicle. There was also a perception among some of those who knew of the program that it was of dubious value. Finally, the latest version of CORONA (known as the CORONA-MURAL as well as the KH-4) accomplished many of the same goals as the E-6, using proven equipment and a less expensive Thor Agena launch vehicle. Although CORONA’s resolution was not as good as the design resolution of the Samos E-6, it imaged much more territory. And it worked. SPARTAN The only known photo and diagram of the E-6 camera. The SPARTAN proposal was to use a single camera in a spacecraft and use a proven CORONA reentry vehicle. Although work was started on the program, it was halted in 1963. (credit: NRO) Fast, simple, SPARTAN At the time Charyk canceled the E-6, he also ordered that the NRO office in Los Angeles investigate the possibility of launching a single E-6 camera into orbit. He gave Major General Robert E. Greer, who ran the Secretary of the Air Force Special Projects Office, or SAFSP, discretion in finishing out the E-6 program and determining what could be done to salvage the work performed to date. Charyk’s idea was that the goal would be to prove the capability of the E-6 camera in orbit rather than developing a new area search system to replace CORONA—but the CIA did not see it that way. The Samos program office within SAFSP quickly responded with three options. The first was to keep the Atlas Agena, develop a satellite midsection adapter to hold a single E-6 camera, and use a CORONA reentry vehicle. An additional option was to continue testing the E-6 reentry vehicle by mounting it to an Atlas rocket and lofting it on a trajectory that would test its heating qualities. The final option was to use the planned TAT Agena-D rocket, a new midsection atop the Agena with a single E-6 camera, and a CORONA reentry vehicle. The satellite would make one pass over the Soviet Union taking photos and then be recovered on the second pass, at nighttime over the Pacific Ocean, providing “invulnerable reconnaissance” of the Soviet Union because it would not be in orbit long enough for the Soviets to attack it. The Atlas Agena option could possibly be ready as early as April 1963, with the cheaper TAT Agena-D vehicle available by November. The program office also offered two more complex and expensive options. One involved carrying both E-6 cameras on an Atlas Agena equipped with two CORONA reentry vehicles, one for each roll of film. CORONA’s film was 70 millimeters wide, and a reentry vehicle could carry two takeup reels of film side by side. But the Samos E-6 film was 168 millimeters wide, and only a single takeup reel could be mounted in a single reentry vehicle. Another option would have involved redesigning the camera to handle narrower film, enabling two E-6 cameras to use a single CORONA reentry vehicle, but that was a major redesign of the camera. SPARTAN A CORONA reentry vehicle containing two film takeup reels. Although developed for CORONA, it was also adapted for the GAMBIT reconnaissance satellite and used for the LANYARD as well. It was planned to be used for SPARTAN, but the E-6 film was more than twice the width of the 70 mm CORONA film, meaning that only a single takeup reel could be included in the reentry vehicle. (credit: National Air and Space Museum) SAFSP’s recommended version was for a single camera and the Atlas Agena rocket using a CORONA reentry vehicle, along with the Atlas test of the original E-6 reentry vehicle. SAFSP also recommended development of a lighter weight midsection to hold the single camera. In addition, the special projects office noted that it was possible to merge the E-6 camera with Samos E-1 and E-2 hardware to create a “recovery-readout” capability. Five E-1 and three E-2 camera payloads were still in storage and the ground equipment also still existed. There were eight E-6 cameras in storage. After some delays, at the end of January 1963, Charyk approved a “black,” or covert, project to demonstrate the E-6 camera in orbit. The work on the new project would not be done in the SAFSP offices in Los Angeles but in a nearby Eastman-Kodak facility. Charyk ordered that they use the TAT Agena option with a CORONA reentry vehicle. But there remained many details to be decided, including whether to use an Agena B or the more capable Agena D upper stage. Other decisions concerned developing a new satellite midsection, identifying a funding channel and cover plan, and determining how to procure CORONA reentry vehicles without disclosing the new covert project’s existence.[2] A day after approving the covert program, Charyk ordered that no more Samos E-6 missions be conducted. SPARTAN Contractor illustration showing the TAT Agena on the launch pad. This was the vehicle selected for the SPARTAN program because it was cheaper than the Atlas Agena. (credit: Douglas) Charyk’s approval stated that “The approach should be spartan in nature, as simple as possible, and should take no consideration of any future system applications.” That order resulted in the project being named SPARTAN, although on February 2 it also received the formal designation of Special Project-Advanced Study 1963, or SP-AS-63.[3] Once it was approved, the concept evolved into two possible design approaches. The first would have a single camera, the original E-6 midsection, and a single CORONA type reentry vehicle. The second approach was to have a single camera equipped with a rotating mirror to provide stereo capability. It would require a redesigned midsection and either an enlarged reentry vehicle or two reentry vehicles in tandem to enable it to operate longer and take more photographs.[4] Whereas the Samos E-6 was designed to operate in a 125-nautical-mile (231.5-kilometer) orbit, SPARTAN would operate in a 100-nautical-mile (185-kilometer) orbit. The single SPARTAN camera would also have improved lens-film definition, meaning that the images focused by its lenses would result in more detail on the film. If it worked as planned, SPARTAN would have better resolution than the Samos E-6, and significantly better than CORONA.[5] SPARTAN A wooden mockup of one of the cameras for the Samos E-6. This mockup and the camera system was built by Eastman-Kodak of Rochester, New York. The red cylinders at top contained two film supply reels. A mirror at left looked out a port in the satellite and took a panoramic image that was longer in length than width, representing more territory covered east-west than north-south on each film frame. A second port for the other camera is visible at right. The two cameras looked at the ground at different angles, enabling stereo imagery that was valuable for measuring objects on the ground. (credit: NRO) Going nowhere, fast Despite Charyk’s approval, SPARTAN ended up in a strange state of limbo throughout February 1963, apparently due to CIA opposition. Herbert Scoville, CIA’s Deputy Director for Research, the official in charge of CIA reconnaissance satellites, perceived SPARTAN to be a competitor to the CIA’s plans to improve CORONA’s performance. At the time, other issues had resulted in a deteriorating relationship between Scoville and Charyk, and Scoville was now questioning every decision Charyk made. Although officially SPARTAN was only an experiment, Scoville indicated that he suspected it was a prelude to a new satellite system. The CIA was then evaluating a proposed MURAL-2 (or M-2) concept that would have provided 6-to-8-foot (1.82-to-2.44-meter) resolution, compared to SPARTAN’s 6-to-7-foot (1.82-to-2.13-meter) resolution. Charyk engaged in a game of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand: he ordered that SAFSP could continue “studies” of using the E-6 camera with the goal of achieving SPARTAN’s objectives. But SAFSP was also spending money to procure hardware, not simply conduct studies. While the arguments raged in Washington, work on SPARTAN continued on the West Coast. SAFSP developed a budget and a plan for launching four vehicles starting in July 1963. A cover story was produced that it was for development of a new reconnaissance system, although the specific details of that cover story remain classified. Kodak was actively working on plans to modify the camera for use in the new vehicle. On February 12, Charyk disapproved the specific SPARTAN proposal, although he allowed the studies to continue. Charyk’s decision was apparently due to Scoville’s opposition to SPARTAN. Both Charyk and General Greer had doubts that the CIA’s M-2 camera could provide consistent quality, whereas they believed that the E-6 camera had a smoother operation that would be more reliable. Charyk engaged in a game of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand: he ordered that SAFSP could continue “studies” of using the E-6 camera with the goal of achieving SPARTAN’s objectives. But SAFSP was also spending money to procure hardware, not simply conduct studies. On February 18, Eastman-Kodak received the contract for the SPARTAN camera modification work.[6] By this time, Kodak had also determined that using a mirror with a single E-6 camera could provide stereo imagery with six-foot (1.82-meter) resolution, possible because new mirror coatings would improve the quality of the image going into the camera. The swath width would be 17 by 140 nautical miles (31.5 by 259.3 kilometers). Kodak also proposed that it construct the camera vehicle in-house rather than delegating that task to General Electric. In addition, Kodak suggested other camera modifications to improve performance.[7] Charyk’s “disapproval” of the SPARTAN plan effectively ended the name as well, and after that point all work was referred to as SP-AS-63. Kodak proposed a minimally modified E-6 camera for the first flight by July, which it designated the Type A configuration. The company also planned to deliver four vehicles between July 21 and September 15, 1963. The Type B configuration would increase film capacity, improve resolution, and provide for stereo photography. General Electric would provide a scaled-up reentry vehicle that would be 45 inches (1.14-meters) in diameter compared to the original 33-inch (0.83-meter) diameter for the CORONA vehicle. Kodak also indicated that there were other growth options for the camera system that would improve performance and reliability.[8] Despite it being an experimental program, all parties involved were looking for as many improvements as possible. Kodak leadership obviously sensed an opportunity to take the wide area search mission away from their rival, Itek, which was responsible for CORONA. SPARTAN In July 1961, a CORONA reconnaissance satellite photographed the Soviet island of Novaya Zemlya, which was one of the main nuclear test sites for Soviet weapons. This image illustrates how the CORONA panoramic photographs covered a large swath roughly east-west, and a narrow swath roughly north-south. Normally, the CORONA would have taken a bunch of images like this as the satellite passed north to south, "mowing the lawn" and covering much of the territory. The Samos E-6 was similar in operation, but covered a significantly smaller swath of territory at higher resolution. (credit: Harry Stranger) Things fall apart By March, Joseph Charyk had left as NRO director to become head of the newly established Comsat Corporation at a considerable salary increase. He was replaced as director by Brockway McMillan, who inherited a rapidly deteriorating relationship with the CIA, and lacked Charyk’s reputation. McMillan ordered a special study of an “improved search type satellite reconnaissance system” which would include variations of the Samos E-6 as well as the CIA’s M-2. Rather than reinforcing the work that was already underway, McMillan’s study had the effect of raising doubt about the rapid effort to fly an SP-AS-63 vehicle in four-months’ time. After all, nobody wanted to finish hardware for flight if an impending study proved it was unnecessary. But the bigger problem was that the CIA was still opposed to reviving the E-6 camera in any form that challenged the CIA-managed CORONA. McMillan ordered the study in response to a statement at the beginning of the year by the United States Intelligence Board about the need for a reconnaissance system with five-foot (1.52-meter) resolution and stereo search capabilities. The USIB established intelligence requirements, and none of the systems then in development could meet that USIB requirement. In response to McMillan’s order, SAFSP created an ad hoc committee which eventually concluded that reactivating the Samos E-6 program made the most sense, an idea that impressed nobody. Work continued on SP-AS-63, but it began to slow. Officially the launch date was now July 1963, but it was increasingly doubtful that this goal could be achieved. The SPARTAN experiment had been designed to determine the maximum resolution of the camera, in part by lowering its orbit. This lower orbit limited its ground coverage, and those outside the program criticized its limited coverage. But the bigger problem was that the CIA was still opposed to reviving the E-6 camera in any form that challenged the CIA-managed CORONA.[9] The SP-AS-63 project continued to evolve in April and May. Kodak also began evaluating significantly improved versions of the E-6 that would have essentially been new cameras, undermining the argument for flying an experiment using one of the existing E-6 cameras. Support for the experimental project evaporated. By July 9, the NRO formally canceled the SP-AS-63 project, along with any hope of reviving the Samos E-6.[10] SPARTAN The Sukhoy Nos nuclear testing area on the island of Novaya Zemlya photographed by a CORONA reconnaissance satellite in July 1961. In late October, only a short distance south of this area, the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear weapon ever exploded on Earth, the so-called "Tsar Bomba." The United States photographed Soviet nuclear test areas with satellites to detect preparations for future tests. (credit: Harry Stranger) Samos’ swansong SPARTAN petered out in the first half of 1963 both because of bureaucratic opposition by the CIA and technological obsolescence. Whereas both SPARTAN and LANYARD were efforts to salvage technology from the Samos program, SPARTAN threatened the CIA’s CORONA program. But from the CIA’s perspective, LANYARD was an insurance policy in case the Air Force-led GAMBIT program did not work. CIA opposition, and a lack of clearly defined objectives, killed SPARTAN, but CIA support allowed LANYARD to continue until it was no longer needed. Reconnaissance satellite technology was advancing rapidly by the time LANYARD launched in summer 1963, and engineers were learning many things about operating a reconnaissance camera in orbit. LANYARD was in essence a 1958 camera launched in 1963, and although it included some systems that had been successfully proven in orbit, like the CORONA recovery system, it was still an outdated approach to the problem at a time when new technologies were in development. As one person put it, the LANYARD camera “included a lot of things that clanked back and forth, sometimes rather violently.” By this time, program managers and camera designers were interested in more elegant solutions.[11] Once the GAMBIT demonstrated that it worked as planned in the latter half of 1963, LANYARD became superfluous. As NRO historian Robert Perry explained, LANYARD had always been an insurance policy in case GAMBIT did not work and CIA officials never thought of it as anything else.[12] SPARTAN A 1966 comparison of the different reconnaissance satellites successfully operated by that time. The Samos satellites, which were not successful, were not included. The resolution data for LANYARD is not completely accurate. The early photos from the camera were high quality, but a thermal problem then affected the resolution of later photos taken over the Soviet Union. [larger version] (credit: NRO) GAMBIT provided better resolution than LANYARD, and the GAMBIT-CORONA combination complemented each other quite well: CORONA found the targets in the vast territory of the Soviet Union and GAMBIT reported their characteristics. LANYARD occupied a niche between the two other systems, and CIA and NRO officials decided by late 1963 that this niche no longer needed to be filled. Even LANYARD’s designer, Jack Herther, conceded that the camera was near the practical limit for conventional refracting optical systems. To obtain better resolution, camera designers would have to switch to reflecting mirrors instead of heavy glass lenses. GAMBIT therefore had greater margin for improvement—and would be improved substantially over the next two decades—whereas LANYARD was a technological dead end. Even during the 1995 declassification of early American reconnaissance satellites LANYARD was nearly forgotten. But the satellite had a positive, if unheralded legacy. It proved the capabilities of the TAT Agena-D booster that soon became the mainstay of the CORONA program. It also forced Itek to conduct research and development on large, lightweight optical mirrors, which enabled the company to propose a radical new camera system. There was one other LANYARD legacy as well. In the mid-1960s, Lockheed was able to win the contract for the GAMBIT-3 spacecraft, in part because of work it had first demonstrated on the LANYARD. The KH-7 GAMBIT-1 had used a spacecraft developed by General Electric that separated from the Agena upon reaching orbit. But the GAMBIT-3 utilized the Agena upper stage as the spacecraft, providing power and stabilization in orbit. Lockheed had incorporated a roll joint at the front of the Agena that enabled the forward section of the spacecraft, containing the payload, to rotate to either side and photograph targets that were not directly below. Lockheed had demonstrated the roll joint worked on the single successful LANYARD mission. Note: A previous version of this series on LANYARD appeared in Quest – The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. A version of this article on SPARTAN appeared in The Space Review in early 2022. The LANYARD reconnaissance images have only recently become available thanks to the work of Harry Stranger. Endnotes Robert Perry, “A History of Satellite Reconnaissance, Volume IIB – SAMOS E-5 and E-6,” October 1973, p. 461. Ibid., p. 467. Ibid., p. 468. Ibid., p. 469. Ibid., p. 470. Ibid., p. 474. Ibid., p. 476. Ibid., p. 478. Ibid., pp. 481-483. Ibid., pp. 484-485. Ibid., p. 389. Ibid., p. 390. Dwayne Day is interested in hearing from anybody who can shed light on the operation of the Samos E-6 camera system. He can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.

Two Futures On The Moon

Two futures on the Moon by Alexander William Salter Monday, August 17, 2026 In November 2023, Chinese and Russian defense researchers secretly gathered in Guangzhou to plot the destruction of American commercial satellites. The point of developing orbital assets, building a Moon base, and journeying onto Mars is human flourishing. Space can make our lives longer, richer, happier, and more humane. Documents from those meetings, revealed this July by a joint investigation from The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, describe a partnership to build weapons to counter Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation. The goal is to combine Russian battlefield experience with Chinese industrial might to jam, hack, and even physically kill a major satellite network. One Chinese presentation called the constellation’s hundreds of satellites a “space blockade” and proposed cheap “one-against-many” weapons to shoot them down faster than SpaceX could launch replacements. There’s an almost flattering admission in the Russia-China plan: America’s commercial dynamism outpaces anything they can produce. Our rivals can’t build what we have built. Instead, they intend to break it. An honest recognition of hostile intent must shape American space strategy over the next few decades. But what is our strategy for? Space superiority is certainly desirable. But it is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The point of developing orbital assets, building a Moon base, and journeying onto Mars is human flourishing. Space can make our lives longer, richer, happier, and more humane. That includes the pure thrill of discovery, which needs no economic justification, alongside the obvious scientific, commercial, and military gains. The moral case for American space leadership is simple: The character of the leader determines whether space becomes a frontier for human excellence or merely the newest site of coercive domination. Four principles underpin a humane space agenda: Proactive rule-making. The first task of leadership is writing the rules of the game. Happily, America is doing pretty well on this front. The Artemis Accords, launched in 2020 with eight nations, reached 70 signatories this July when Mauritius signed on. The Accords commit members to the peaceful use of space, transparency in missions, orbital debris mitigation, and avoiding harmful interference. Importantly, the Accords are not a treaty. They are a coalition of like-minded nations, committed to lawful and mutually beneficial interactions beyond the Earth. Unsurprisingly, both China and Russia have declined to sign. They are building an alternative lunar framework of their own, the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Non-binding principles like the Artemis Accords might seem like poor protection against determined adversaries. It’s a valid concern, but this framing undersells the importance of what the Accords can achieve. The rules we write today determine whose interests space development serves tomorrow. Treaties, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, are the foundation of public international space law. Changes in the formal rules require agreement among sovereigns. But our rivals would never consent to developing a shared governance framework that respects human freedom and innovation. That’s our comparative advantage, not theirs. The solution is to flesh out the often-unclear legal principles with both domestic legislation, such as the 2015 Space Launch Competitiveness Act, and further international agreements, such as the Accords. Rules shape expectations, and expectations shape behavior. Leadership of a spacefaring coalition offers the United States the chance to establish practices and norms where formal rules are ambiguous. Space superiority empowers us to serve the ends of peace, wealth, and general human prosperity. When Mauritius signed the Accords, its representative said the country joined to help ensure that space “serves humanity by protecting our oceans and coastlines.” A small island nation understood the point better than several great powers: The rules we write today determine whose interests space development serves tomorrow. Leaving the rules to Moscow and Beijing is a dereliction of both our national interests and our duty to human flourishing. Real interests and accountability. American space activity should serve Americans’ legitimate interests. This sounds obvious. But it is regularly denied in practice, with public dollars diverted to projects that cost taxpayers far more than they gain. Space policy, like all policy, must create benefits that accrue to its ultimate beneficiaries: We, the People. Notice I said legitimate interests. Our commercial, scientific, and military objectives do not entitle us to violate the rights of non-citizens. In fact, we best secure our interests by cooperating with other nations to advance a shared vision—one in which space’s bounty is widely available to free nations of goodwill. “For all mankind” is a worthy moral aspiration. But it is not a coherent responsibility mechanism. Pursuing American interests means resisting the temptation for bureaucracies and legacy contractors to conflate the means of space exploration with the ends. To cite one example, a $4-billion-per-launch rocket has no legitimate claim to ongoing taxpayer support. Parochial interests in “old space” make-work are no substitute for real human achievement. Sovereignty, rightly understood, means the people are the principals and the government their agent. NASA spends roughly $25 billion per year. The White House recently requested a $71 billion budget for the Space Force. That money has major opportunity costs. It carries an obligation to deliver value back to the citizens who provided it. It also requires us to consider the interests of future citizens. Long time horizons naturally characterize space policy. Opening the final frontier will greatly benefit our descendants. That also means missteps will greatly burden them. Of course, many space activities plausibly create nonrivalrous and nonexcludable benefits. GPS satellites, solar storm monitoring, and planetary asteroid defense all transcend narrow interests. Accordingly, framing space strategy in national terms may seem inappropriate. Yet somebody must build the infrastructure and bear the risks of operation. Absent fundamental changes in public international space law (an unlikely outcome), that “somebody” will be the public authority of a sovereign nation, accountable to its citizens. General benefits to humanity are real, but they are downstream of concentrated investments by spacefaring leaders like the US. “For all mankind” is a worthy moral aspiration. But it is not a coherent responsibility mechanism. Pretending otherwise is how public resources get squandered with no accountability. Commercial and non-commercial values. America’s decisive advantage in space is its commercial sector. The Starlink plot illustrates it. Two authoritarian governments, soberly assessing the physical, financial, and human capital at their disposal, concluded they needed a plan to neutralize commercial satellites, or else remain at a perpetual disadvantage. Their fears speak volumes. Space is creating exciting new avenues for commerce. The global space economy reached $686 billion in 2025, with commercial activity making up $544 billion of it—nearly 80%. Some of the fastest growth came from novel business opportunities, including manufacturing, resource extraction, and lunar infrastructure. America is uniquely positioned to thrive in this environment. We are the capitalist power par excellence. Policy must adapt to the new reality of space operations. We can’t afford to tax ourselves with regulatory delays. Consider the regulatory approval process, which forces new missions through a maze of agencies where anyone can say no, or simply say nothing. On July 30, the FAA proposed a rule to streamline environmental review for commercial launches, so that routine, well-understood launch profiles are not forced through the most expensive tier of assessment. “We will not keep pace with this rapid growth,” the FAA’s administrator said, “unless we streamline, modernize, and strengthen our regulatory approach.” He’s right. And yet, commercial value is not the only consideration. Rocket launches and satellite reentries have environmental costs. Peer-reviewed research finds that satellites burning up on reentry deposit aluminum oxide and other metals into the stratosphere, where they may catalyze the chemical process that thins the ozone layer. The effects currently appear small. But they accumulate. As megaconstellations grow, modeling suggests the metal burden could climb into the tens of thousands of tonnes per year. This is a genuine problem. Anyone who cares about human flourishing should take it seriously. But notice how poorly our current regulatory system deals with this problem. It forces a company through the costliest environmental review over the local effects of a launch site (effects on marshes and wetlands, for example) while the genuinely global problem goes unaddressed, because nobody assesses what reentries do to the upper atmosphere. The process is simultaneously too strict for the familiar case and too lenient for the unfamiliar one. Meanwhile, the lack of clear, predictable rules creates needless uncertainty. The experimental, often messy character of America’s commercial space sector is the source of our asymmetric advantage. Our adversaries fear it because they can’t replicate it. We can’t stay grounded while China seizes a launch advantage, but neither can we dismiss environmental concerns out of hand. The answer is to match the review to the harm: Streamline the overly burdensome local assessments while building a serious, science-based framework for the atmospheric effects that may imperil our homeworld. Regulatory certainty can do both. We can create predictability, which commercial space firms need, while also incentivizing responsible use of the atmospheric commons. What does this have to do with commerce? Just as a private company revolutionized launch to meet public goals, an expansive definition of space business should include the ecosystem of commercial entities that can make a profit by stewarding Earth’s natural resources. The nation that leads in business is also the nation best positioned to spearhead conservation efforts. We have the data, the engineers, and the infrastructure. It’s time to dispel the myth that financial sustainability and environmental sustainability are inherently at odds. Embrace the mess. In harnessing private enterprise for public purposes, we must respect the independence of the businesses and researchers who make the whole enterprise work. Resisting the temptation of hierarchical control is crucial. We can’t overcome Russian and Chinese space ambitions by adopting Russian and Chinese methods. Our rivals operate in a top-down manner, directing resources from the center toward state objectives. China’s commercial space sector, for example, is best understood as a government dispensation that makes limited use of profit-and-loss incentives to serve the ends of the Chinese Communist Party. When facing a serious threat, it seems natural to nationalize, direct, and control. But this regimentation would suppress our greatest strength. The experimental, often messy character of America’s commercial space sector is the source of our asymmetric advantage. Our adversaries fear it because they can’t replicate it. Furthermore, it is the economic foundation that supports our scientific, commercial, and military interests. This makes it even more important to define the state’s proper role. Some tasks have inherently public components. National security launch, deep space science and exploration, and the basic “rules of the road” for orbital integrity all require public activity. Businesses can help achieve these goals as contractors, of course. Where private enterprise can do the work, the government's job is to empower it and clear the way. Public-private relations in space should be cooperative and coordinative, with the state maintaining a guiding rather than a controlling role. Our promise to lead. American space leadership is worth pursuing without reservation or apology. Our rivals would use space as an instrument of terrestrial domination. We must use it to preserve freedom, an essential precondition for humane living. Space superiority is not a martial boast but a moral duty. Let’s keep the final frontier open, lawful, and free for all those who will come after us. Alexander William Salter, an economics professor in the business school at Texas Tech University, has published space policy commentary in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, The Hill, SpaceNews, and several other outlets. He is the author of Space Economics: Production Possibilities for the Final Frontier. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.

Colonizing Antarctica and Other Anti-Space Fables

McMurdo The National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station in Antarctica. (credit: NSF/Elaine Hood) Colonizing Antarctica and other anti-space fables by Milan M. Ćirković Monday, August 17, 2026 There is a persistent red herring that emerges whenever feasibility and desirability of space colonization is debated: “Why don’t we colonize Antarctica?” Or, perhaps a more sophisticated version: “Why don’t we colonize Antarctica first?” Shouldn’t that be easier? Shouldn’t that be more “natural”?[1] These are ostensibly reasonable questions that, on some further reflection, turn out to be irrelevant, misguided, and confusing, not to mention often malevolent. There are at least five different reasons why that is so, outlined here roughly in order of decreasing importance. 1. It’s a dead end. Colonizing Antarctica is almost the dictionary definition of a dead end(n.): 1: an end (as of a street) without an exit 2: a position, situation, or course of action that leads to nothing further Both meanings are applicable here. Not only you have nowhere further to go from Antarctica in geographic and physical sense, but there is no way to construe the hypothetical colonization of Antarctica as a necessary step for something else, an A to be followed by a B, C, or D. After all, Antarctica has a land area of about 14 million square kilometers, making it smaller than South America and somewhat bigger than Europe or Oceania. Although we do not know the extent of mineral resources hidden beneath the thick ice sheet, there is no a priori reason to expect those to be more abundant than in a landmass of roughly comparable size, say South America. The only advantage Antarctica affords over other deserted places on our planet is that it has a lot of empty space into which humans have not so far migrated. Colonization of Antarctica would do nothing, or at least almost nothing, for mitigating global catastrophic and existential risks we face on Earth. An obvious point: unless our primary motivation for undertaking space colonization is the concern about overpopulation (as it was, for instance, in the Ancient Greek colonization), then the “let us try Antarctica first” argument makes no sense. There are still many mostly empty places on Earth outside of Antarctica, such as northern Siberia, the interior of Saharan desert, or the Australian outback. If living space were the only concern, it would even make more sense to reclaim the sea, Netherlands-style, or to create artificial islands and floating ocean-cities at moderate latitudes and in proximity to trade routes, than to colonize Antarctica. In reality, however, we do not need more living space on Earth, since the overpopulation is a phantom of weak minds containing an abject lesson how ridiculous is to mechanically extend the perceived trends into the future. Otherwise, we could seriously expect that human population will approach/have approached infinity on Friday, November 13, 2026! (As Heinz von Foerster argued tongue-in-cheek, since that would have been his 115th birthday.) Not once since the 1960s heyday of Ehrlich’s Population Bomb have space advocates seriously argued that we need space settlements to prevent overpopulation. In fact, the population of the planet—barring some collapse or extinction catastrophe—will likely stop growing and begin to rapidly shrink by the end of the century, bringing forth its own bunch of problems. 2. Shared terrors of the Earth. Colonization of Antarctica would do nothing, or at least almost nothing, for mitigating global catastrophic and existential risks we face on Earth. It is exactly the touted advantages of Antarctica, namely its proximity to the rest of humanity and its sharing the same atmosphere (and the same climate trends), which make it superfluous in this regard. It is obvious: a colony in Antarctica would not do much for prospects of humanity in the case of a Chicxulub-scale asteroid strike, a Wah Wah Springs-scale supervolcanic eruption, a nuclear winter, a runaway climate change, or a global totalitarian revolution (led or “served” by a hostile AI.) While Antarctica could and should host some catastrophe refugia similar to the Svalbard Vault, it is not obvious that the benefit of full-fledged colonization in this regard would be anything but marginal. The problem lies in the shared atmosphere. Both natural and engineered pathogens of significance for the global catastrophic risk studies are likely to be airborne, and thus the issue of shared atmosphere is crucial. 3. The unbearable lightness of laziness. To put it simply: While colonizing Antarctica would be easier than colonizing Mars, easy is not what we look for. In fact, easy here is an obstacle of and in itself! Not just because President Kennedy said so (although his speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, remains certainly one of the most important orations ever delivered), but because, just as in point 1 above, it is the foundation of our understanding of goals. If the goal is human flourishing, it makes no sense to follow the path of least resistance. Quite to the contrary, resistance below a certain threshold is wildly counterproductive on multiple levels. It is easy (pun intended) to see it on examples from everyday life. If members of your household increase in number, say through marriage of your children and their having offspring, would you rather put them in a cellar—with some make-shift adaptation of that cold and damp cellar—or help them build a house of their own? This is not just some moralistic grumbling: it is very much a practical issue, although it may be difficult to visualize from our myopic, day-in, day-out mundane lives. What the Antarctic Treaty has very successfully done is to make everything related to the southernmost continent outrageously expensive. Toynbee’s theory of challenge-and-response may be useful here: a primitive community encounters a chance to build true civilization when faced with a challenge: some unpredictable factor or event posing a threat to the well-accustomed, “normal” way of life. A challenge would arise as the result of many things: population growth, exhaustion of a vital resource, climate change, a belligerent neighboring tribe, an earthquake. It is the response to this challenge which really matters: the action taken by the group to cope with the new and difficult situation. Successful responses result in magnificence: as once fertile Saharan plains desiccated due to climate change, the most ingenious tribes living there moved to the swampy Nile valley, drained the marshes, and established the ancient Egyptian civilization that would last more than 3,000 years. Unsuccessful responses are usually forgotten by history; only modern archaeological methods enable us to reconstruct those lost civilizations that could have been. Going forward requires things not to be easy, a lesson only recently forgotten by postmodern snowflakes searching for “safe spaces“ and whining about everything, from traumas of reading Shakespeare to not diverse enough vegan meals in the cafeteria to too much homework. Looking for easy modes has a simple enough and time-tested name: laziness. 4. It’s illegal! Busybody lawyers and do-gooder politicians have already ruined Antarctica for humanity. The Antarctic Treaty, which entered into force in 1961, effectively prohibited any commercial usage of material resources of the continent and even prohibited prospecting for such resources. An even worse fact is that the treaty system cannot be changed before 2048, and will even then be excessively difficult to amend or change. So, the question about colonizing Antarctica is moot: those still asking it are either uninformed or, more probably, just hostile toward space colonization and using empty rhetoric to undermine the idea. It is hardly credible to hear that many legal scholars find the Antarctic Treaty quite a success; and way more disturbing still is the fact that some people would like to see a similar legal mechanism for Moon, Mars, and other extraterrestrial bodies. They will say that the treaty has maintained peace, without any shred of evidence that either its absence or a different content would have led to war. Now, you may think that this legalistic argument is nonsense just as, for example, the prohibitions on wearing fake moustaches in churches in Alabama or chewing gum in Singapore, and it indeed might be. Notice that, by definition, it cannot be worse nonsense than the corresponding argument that space colonization is illegal under the international law, which many space skeptics try to assert. If anything, the space version contained in the Outer Space Treaty is more ambiguous and open to interpretation. What the Antarctic Treaty has very successfully done is to make everything related to the southernmost continent outrageously expensive. Habitation, transport, food, communications—everything is awfully and unnecessarily expensive, for both tourists and workers in one of the Antarctic research stations or lighthouses. A century ago, for example, prices of everything in Alaska were very high, vaguely comparable to those in Antarctica. Since then, Alaska got much cheaper, while expenses of living, even for a short term, in Antarctica have been frozen (no pun intended) at the very high level, without chances for going down significantly in the near future. The major difference? There has been no Alaska Treaty! Consequently, hard-working and ingenious American settlers and entrepreneurs (together with many Native Americans) developed the Alaskan hostile environment and made it a prosperous state which is consistently among the first 10 US states by GDP per capita, corresponding to $95,147 in 2024 (the data of the US Bureau of Economic Analysis). It is not only higher than the US average, but also higher than in countries often listed as rich, such as Norway, Qatar, Denmark, Japan, or Germany. And it is not just the wealth: Alaska has the Human Development Index of 0.933 (data for 2022), which is also above the USA average and is exactly equal to the one of California, an outstanding and frankly unbelievable fact when the difference between physical conditions in these two places is taken into account. Invoking that canard is at least reflection of shallow thinking on the subject. It corresponds to a “minor” difference between a future human civilization lasting, say, 1,000 years and the one lasting 1,000,000,000 years. 5. Morally suspect disturbance to penguins. Even if colonizing Antarctica were not a dead end and even if it were legally permitted, it would exactly be the place to exercise our ecological caution. In contrast to Moon, Mars (most likely), the asteroids, Titan, or your favorite Kuiper Belt object, the southernmost continent is home to an actual, living, even relatively rich ecosystem which does need conservation and protection measures. There’s nothing problematic or hypocritical here: if alien biospheres are detected elsewhere in the universe, the project of human settlement within the same habitat should be at the very least re-evaluated and severely restricted, until we know more. Therefore, an actual conservationist argument can be made for Antarctica without invoking nebulous antihuman nonsense such as postmodernist “rights” or “desires” of Moon rocks.[2] Penguins do not need “rights” assigned by bored human bureaucrats, but they need to be left reasonably alone in the wilderness, or at least in sufficiently extensive natural reserves. This does not mean, of course, that if one day humans find themselves in dire need of the Antarctic land for survival—perhaps due to some awful industrial accident in the northern hemisphere which happened because humans had not been wise enough to move risky industries to outer space!—the comfort of penguins could not be violated; but it would need a strong countervailing reason to do so. All in all, colonization of Antarctica as a substitute for space colonization and settlement is at best a non-starter and at worst a demagogic ploy to delay or prevent humanity’s great task ahead. Invoking that canard is at least reflection of shallow thinking on the subject. It corresponds to a “minor” difference between a future human civilization lasting, say, 1,000 years and the one lasting 1,000,000,000 years. It corresponds to the difference between the timid existence in the shadow of extinction, huddling on a single minuscule planet, and making our own bright and powerful destiny in space. Endnotes Some of the many examples are Regis, E. 1990, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge (Addison-Wesley, Boston), p. 217; Stoner, I. 2017, “Humans should not colonize Mars,“ Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3, 334-353, p. 338; Weinersmith, K. and Weinersmith, Z. 2023, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought this Through? (Random House, New York), pp. 288-9. A brilliant SF author and one of the major figures of the New British Space Opera, Charles Stross, suggests settling the Gobi Desert instead, but that is just a weaker form of the same argument, since (a) people have actually–and amazingly!–lived in the Gobi for thousands of years, developing all sorts of important survival techniques and habits; and (b) the Gobi is entirely located within the national borders of China and Mongolia, so its legal and political status is very different from the one of either Antarctica or the potential space colonies or habitats. Invoked, for example, by Mary-Jane Rubinstein (2022, Astrotopia: The dangerous religion of the corporate space race, University of Chicago Press, Chicago), p. 150. Milan M. Ćirković is a Research Professor at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade (Serbia) and an associate of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (Connecticut, USA). His primary research interests are in the fields of astrobiology (habitable zones, habitability of galaxies, SETI studies), philosophy of science (epistemology, philosophy of cosmology), and futures studies (global catastrophes, epistemology of risk, human spaceflight, space settlement). He co-edited the widely-cited anthology on Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2008, with Nick Bostrom), wrote four research monographs (the latest being Cosmic Microwave Background: Philosophical and Historical Aspects, Cambridge University Press, 2024, with S. Perović), as well as six popular science/general nonfiction books, and authored about 250 research and professional papers.

The Soviet Space Program As Seen From Washington 1964-1968

N1 Satellite photo of an N1 rocket on its launch pad at Baikonur. The United States tracked the development of the Soviet lunar program primarily using reconnaissance satellites. (credit: via Harry Stranger) The Soviet space program as seen from Washington, 1964–1968 by Andrea Zullo Monday, August 17, 2026 The centrifuge on which Yuri Gagarin trained, before becoming, in April 1961, the first man to fly in space, was not of Soviet manufacture. It had been built in West Germany, installed at a research complex on the outskirts of Moscow, and tested in early March of that year. The detail is not merely a curiosity in itself. It matters above all because Washington knew it. In a report by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, dated December 1964,[1] American analysts had already put in writing that part of the equipment the Soviet Union used to prepare its cosmonauts had been purchased in the West: two large West German pressure chambers, for which the report estimated a cost of about twenty-one million marks, a little over five million dollars at the time, and a Swedish centrifuge used to train Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space. The answer that emerges from a handful of now-declassified documents, read as far as possible without the illusion of hindsight, is neither that of a blind intelligence service nor that of an omniscient one. It is worth starting here because this small fact illuminates a more general feature of the way the United States observed the Soviet space program in the 1960s. The superpower that the popular imagination painted as closed and self-sufficient was buying part of its own training infrastructure on the Western market, and its adversary recorded the fact with a bookkeeper’s precision. The question that runs through this article is how well, in concrete terms, American intelligence managed to read that program: what it saw clearly, what remained closed to it, and where it went wrong. The answer that emerges from a handful of now-declassified documents, read as far as possible without the illusion of hindsight, is neither that of a blind intelligence service nor that of an omniscient one. It is rather that of an observer highly skilled at mapping what the Soviet system was forced to expose, disciplined in inferring from a few material clues, but structurally incapable of penetrating the core that the system truly protected, and periodically exposed, in the public sphere, to the noise of rumor. What could be seen The December 1964 report under examination devoted to Soviet biomedical research and the human spaceflight program, is largely a map of people and places, with an information cutoff set at September 1 of that year.[1] In it, the analysts reconstructed with considerable accuracy the skeleton of the medical and training complex: the cosmonaut training center northeast of Moscow, an institute of aviation medicine, an engineering academy where the cosmonauts received their theoretical instruction, and a research site where the space suit and the emergency ejection system were developed. They had the names of the leading medical and scientific figures, with their posts and affiliations, from the head of the cosmonauts’ medical services to the vice president of the Academy of Medical Sciences. They knew about the aircraft flights used to simulate weightlessness briefly, about the isolation chamber, the vestibular training, the centrifuge. It is worth asking how they had arrived there, because the answer explains their successes as much as their limits. Almost everything came from what the Soviet system, paradoxically, was forced to let out: the open scientific literature, the medical journals, the official photographs, the proceedings of the international congresses that Soviet scientists attended. Space medicine was, by its nature, an academic activity that produced publications and well-known figures. It was visible because it had to be. For precisely this reason Washington knew a great deal about it: the 1964 report lists dozens of institutes and more than a hundred researchers, together with their locations. The fact about the equipment bought in the West deserves emphasis because it is the kind of information that is taken for granted today and that, at the time, was a small analytical achievement. To establish that the centrifuge on which Gagarin had been tested was West German and operational from March 1961, and that a Swedish centrifuge had served for Tereshkova, meant having tracked contracts, shipments, and installations of industrial equipment across the Iron Curtain. This was economic and technical intelligence of good quality, concrete and, as far as today’s sources allow one to judge, substantially correct. The void at the center of the map Yet the same report that described the medical complex with such care admitted, on the decisive point, that it knew almost nothing. To the question of who directed the Soviet space program, the answer was an admission of ignorance: the top authority was believed to sit under the Council of Ministers, but, the analysts wrote, very little information existed about its existence and its composition. In the attached organizational chart, that apex was a box the CIA itself labeled as hypothetical. The CIA knew the doctors because the doctors published. It did not know the engineers because the engineers were buried inside anonymous design bureaus. A distinction is needed here because it is easy to confuse two different things. The analysts were not unaware that a chief designer existed. The name of Sergei Korolev, the engineer who was the true driving force of the entire enterprise, appears in the report only once and almost in passing, as the presumed designer of the launch vehicle used for the manned flights. What was missing was not the name but an understanding of his weight: no perception of his absolute centrality, no notion of the system of experimental design bureaus, first among them the one Korolev directed, that held up the entire program. The engineering heart was invisible to Washington and remained so for a long time. Korolev’s identity was, in any case, a state secret until his death during surgery in January 1966; until then the Soviet press referred to him only as “the chief designer.” The contrast is instructive. The CIA knew the doctors because the doctors published. It did not know the engineers because the engineers were buried inside anonymous design bureaus, identified in the documents only by plant numbers. American intelligence, in other words, saw very clearly the part of the program that was, by definition, exposed and stayed in the dark about the part that was, by definition, protected. The analytical risk in such a situation is subtle but real: to mistake the visible portion for the whole, and to reconstruct the program’s physiognomy from its academic shell rather than from its industrial core. This is not a failure of skill but instead the consequence of the geometry of secrecy. Reading the words, guessing the intentions A second document, a confidential chronology of Soviet public statements on a possible manned lunar landing, gathering declarations from January 1965 onward, shows another tool of the trade: the analysis of rhetoric.[2] In it, the analysts had collected and translated a sequence of statements by academics and officials that appeared in the Soviet press in the spring of 1965, just after the Voskhod 2 flight during which Aleksei Leonov had carried out the first spacewalk in history. The tone was triumphal and forward-looking: the docking of spacecraft in orbit, the building of stations, man soon setting foot on the Moon. Tracking that rhetoric was useful, but it was also a double-edged blade, and here one should be cautious in judging its value. The public statements of a closed system are not a window into its plans but rather an instrument of those plans. In 1965, the Soviet leadership spoke of the Moon with confidence precisely while its real lunar program was in deep difficulty and would later fail. To measure intentions by the volume of propaganda meant risking the overestimation of an undertaking that the propaganda served, among other things, to inflate. This is a limit of method that should be noted, without turning it into an accusation: in the absence of access to the engineering core, rhetoric was one of the few available signals, and had to be treated for what it was, a clue to be weighed and not a confession. Intelligence at its best If 1964 shows the limits of observation, other documents show it at its best. A February 29, 1968, assessment, plainly titled after the Soviet manned space program, is an exercise in disciplined inference from limited evidence, and it ages remarkably well.[3] In it, the analysts correctly read the slowdown of the program after the death in April 1967 of the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who perished on the reentry of Soyuz 1, and they attributed that slowdown partly to the development of a new spacecraft and partly to the shock of the accident. They then pointed to the automatic docking of two Soyuz-type vehicles in October 1967, under the cover designations Cosmos 186 and Cosmos 188, as proof of the Soviet ability to carry out complex and fully automatic operations in space. From this they drew the inference that the next phase of the program would consist of longer and more complex operations in Earth orbi—a path not far, in logic, from the one the Americans had followed with Gemini.[3] That is what happened: first came the first docking of crewed spacecraft and the transfer of cosmonauts, in January 1969, then the Salyut stations. The intelligence service that had correctly foreseen, years earlier, the arrival of a rocket far larger than the Proton failed to notice its first flight. There is a second thread, even more surprising, and it must be followed to the end precisely because it begins earlier. Back in 1965 the analysts had reasoned about the heavy launch vehicle.[2] They estimated that the new Proton launcher had a thrust on the order of two and a half million pounds, and they held that a manned lunar landing would require a much larger rocket, of about five million pounds of thrust: the kind of vehicle that the Saturn V was for the Americans. That rocket had not yet been seen in flight, but its necessity was deduced from the limits of what could be seen. It really existed: it was the N1, the gigantic Soviet lunar launcher. Years before its first flight, intelligence had correctly deduced its existence and its function. That line of reasoning honestly sums up the method and its boundaries. The analysts knew they could not see the engineering core until it moved: the development of Soviet space hardware remained hidden until the flight tests. For this reason, they built their conclusions on the few objects the program was forced to expose: a heavy satellite in orbit, two automatic spacecraft docking, a spacecraft that fell silent after an accident. From those few points they traced a trajectory that time would confirm. The noise One last part of the story remains, and it is the one in which the United States got things most wrong, even if those who erred were not the intelligence analysts. In the autumn of 1967, a few months after Komarov’s death, the American public sphere was crossed by a persistent rumor: that the Soviet Union had lost far more men in flight than it admitted, and that Washington knew it and kept silent. An article by the researcher Julius Epstein, of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, published in the American press in October 1967,[4] claimed that the Soviets had lost 11 men in space in addition to Komarov, and attributed the confirmation of those numbers to a classified document delivered to the White House. The article dusted off the best-known rumors of the kind, from the alleged cosmonaut announced by the communist press in April 1961 to the insinuations contained in the so-called Penkovsky Papers, and denounced a supposed agreement of January 13, 1961, between the defense apparatus and the civilian side not to disclose failures. Almost nothing in that funereal accounting holds up to the test of facts: these were rumors, not data, and time has disproved them. But the contrast with the intelligence documents is precisely what makes the episode instructive. While the public sphere let itself be carried away by the myth of the lost cosmonauts, the sober 1968 assessment treated Komarov’s death for what it was, the only serious known setback of the program, without endorsing any count of imaginary victims.[3] The institutional part of the American apparatus, the one that reasoned from data, was more accurate than the public part, the one that reasoned from fears. The US was right and wrong at the same moment, depending on which room one looked at. The overall picture, and a final irony Lined up together, these documents tell a coherent story. American intelligence was extraordinarily good at mapping what the Soviet system was forced to expose, from the medical complex to the academic figures to the equipment bought in the West. It was disciplined and often right when it inferred from a few material clues, as in 1965 and in 1968. But it was structurally blind to the core that the system truly protected, the design bureaus and their chiefs. This blindness was not a failure of skill but a consequence of what the adversary did or did not let out. And in the moments when the data was missing, the empty space filled with rumor. There is, finally, an irony that closes the circle. The launch vehicle that intelligence had deduced to be necessary as early as 1965, the N1 lunar rocket, made its first launch attempt on February 21, 1969, and it was a failure. According to the reconstructions of later historiography, American technical surveillance did not catch that first launch, and for years its occurrence was denied, while it was British intelligence that recorded it; the same American systems would, by contrast, detect the three subsequent launches. It is a detail that describes with precision the limit discussed here: the intelligence service that had correctly foreseen, years earlier, the arrival of a rocket far larger than the Proton, yet failed to notice its first flight. It is there, in the gap between what can be deduced and what can be seen, that one best measures what it truly meant to observe the Soviet space program from Washington. References Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Scientific Intelligence, “The Soviet Bioastronautic Research and Manned Space Program,” OSI-RA/64-4, 22 December 1964 (CIA-RDP78T05439A000400350028-3). Central Intelligence Agency, Office of National Estimates, “Review of Estimate on Soviet Manned Lunar Landing,” with the appended “Chronology of Selected Soviet Statements on a Manned Lunar Landing, Since January 1965,” 13 September 1965 (CIA-RDP79R00904A001200030027-9 and CIA-RDP79R00904A001200030042-2). Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, “The Soviet Man in Space Program,” 29 February 1968 (CIA-RDP70B00338R000200130021-9). Julius Epstein, “Russia probably has lost 11 men in space,” Houston Chronicle, 5 October 1967 (CIA-RDP69B00369R000200240026-0). Andrea Zullo is an entrepreneur, science communicator, and independent researcher in the history of spaceflight. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted. Home Subscribe to our weekly newsletter email address

International Lunar Consultations

lunar base A UN team is examining how to better coordinate lunar surface activities to avoid future conflicts over landing sites and resources. (credit: ESA) International lunar consultations: future-looking developments at the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space by Giorgio Cardile Monday, August 10, 2026 As lunar exploration accelerates, avoiding interference is a pressing diplomatic issue. In 2024, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) established the Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation (ATLAC) to facilitate expert exchanges. Its mandate complements Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty and other COPUOS groups. While private enterprises advance landers and extraction technologies, UN delegates linger over terminology. Operating on a 2025–2027 workplan, ATLAC’s work matured into substantive policy debates by mid-2026, with a final report expected next year. This April, a coalition of ten states submitted a joint Conference Room Paper urging ATLAC to formally discuss an “international consultation mechanism.” It recommended dedicating meeting time to this framework, conducting tabletop simulations to test it in practice and incorporating perspectives from civil society, academia, and emerging spacefaring nations. During COPUOS plenary, debates continued over this mechanism’s scope versus an alternative “International Lunar Environment/Locations” (ILEL) framework, focused on definitions and information exchange. These discussions culminated in a negotiated draft report. At the final informal meeting on June 17, member States agreed to continue discussions on whether to establish a potential international mechanism for information sharing and exchange, as well as consultations related to lunar activities in accordance with applicable national regulatory framework and international law. The Action Team would continue such discussions, including on the potential scope and mandate of such a mechanism. The Action Team had noted a conference room paper prepared by the Co-Chairs (A/AC.105/2026/CRP.39), a background paper prepared by the secretariat (A/AC.105/2026/CRP.33) and a presentation by the representative of Mexico relevant to such discussion and further agreed on three paragraphs to be included in the final 2026 report of ATLAC to COPUOS. Deliberative, or too slow? Compared to rapid commercial lunar developments, ATLAC may seem slow. While private enterprises advance landers and extraction technologies, UN delegates linger over terminology. Technical challenges are daunting: an analysis compiled by the ATLAC Co-Chairs in 2026 highlighted that lunar operations face unique risks like landing plumes, dust ejecta, and electromagnetic interference. Notably, methane from lunar landings can travel and contaminate pristine Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs). Furthermore, without atmospheric re-entry, orbital debris will accumulate indefinitely without proactive disposal guidelines. Achieving diplomatic consensus is also inherently difficult. During informal meetings, delegations spent considerable time debating the difference between information “sharing” and information “exchange,” arguing that “exchange” implies necessary reciprocity and consultation, whereas “sharing” is mere unilateral action. Others expressed concern that continuously adding layers of legal language to draft recommendations slows down substantive progress. An international “mechanism” The central ATLAC debate concerns the proposed mechanism’s design. A background analysis by the Co-Chairs identified five core functions: pre-mission information-sharing, managing harmful interference, coordinating end-of-mission disposal, prioritising operational alignment (e.g., common docking/communication standards), and developing shared scientific baselines. States lack architectural consensus. One proposal suggests a “Coordination body for Lunar workstreams” leveraging existing UN resources to coordinate space debris (IADC) and space resource expert groups, avoiding new bureaucracy. It also proposed adapting, from the Antarctic Treaty System, Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPAs) to safeguard sensitive lunar sites like PSRs and far-side radio-quiet zones without claiming sovereignty. This debate has also exposed underlying geopolitical tensions regarding lunar resource utilisation. One state presented a proposal based on the BBNJ (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction) agreement, arguing that the Moon, like the high seas, is an area beyond national jurisdiction where no state can claim sovereignty. ATLAC’s most significant achievement may be maintaining open diplomatic channels between established and emerging spacefaring nations, ensuring lunar competition remains a matter of regulatory divergence rather than geopolitical confrontation. However, others highlighted a fundamental legal fracture: unlike seabed resources treated as the “common heritage of humankind,” the legal status of space resources is contested. Some stressed the mechanism requires answering fundamental questions regarding who holds lunar obligations and the legal characteristics of extracted resources. Others insisted any mechanism must be strictly bound by existing international law (lex lata), while noting ATLAC’s work overlaps with the Working Group on Space Resource Activities and discussions on safety zones. Predictions for ATLAC Heading into its 2027 final reporting phase, ATLAC’s trajectory suggests a cautious evolution, potentially becoming a long-lasting COPUOS working group serving as a central lunar coordination hub. Upcoming ATLAC meetings are scheduled for September 30, October 31, and November 18. In the near term, ATLAC is well-positioned to prevent operational and technical conflicts. By facilitating information sharing, establishing life-support and communications compatibility standards, and implementing practical frameworks like Antarctic-style management zones, ATLAC can help actors avoid physical interference and operational disputes. However, ATLAC may struggle to resolve political conflicts over lunar resource rights. The international community may be heading toward a bifurcated lunar future: technical coordination managed by a UN-backed ATLAC mechanism, alongside resource extraction governed by a patchwork of national laws and bilateral agreements. Ultimately, ATLAC’s most significant achievement may be maintaining open diplomatic channels between established and emerging spacefaring nations, ensuring lunar competition remains a matter of regulatory divergence rather than geopolitical confrontation. Giorgio Cardile is a licensed lawyer and LL.M. Candidate in Leiden University in Air and Space Law. He attended the International Space University Space Studies Program (SSP) in 2024 and is a PhD candidate in Defence studies at the Ministry of Defence University of Italy. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submi

Decision Without Deciders

Golden Dome When space systems increasingly rely on automation and AI, there needs to be ways to audit the decisions those systems make. (credit: Boeing) Decisions without deciders: authority at machine speed in the space enterprise by Bharath Gopalaswamy and Daniel “Sphinx” Dant Monday, August 10, 2026 In February, Operation Epic Fury opened with space and cyber forces rather than with aircraft. Less remarked was a second shift underneath it. A growing share of the decisions that determine who sees, who talks, and who moves in a contested environment are now executed by software in milliseconds, against rules written months in advance. The governance problem this creates is simple to state: machine-speed allocation now makes sovereign decisions before any accountable human can reconstruct them. At machine speed, governance is whatever was specified before the crisis. Machine-speed allocation now makes sovereign decisions before any accountable human can reconstruct them. Governance is whatever was specified before the crisis. This had to happen, and it is the right development. At the tempo of modern conflict and the scale of proliferated constellations, no human-in-the-loop process could keep pace with the volume of allocation and routing choices a crisis generates. The programs that delivered this capability moved quickly and were right to move quickly. What has not advanced at the same rate is the record that lets anyone reconstruct, afterward, why a system decided as it did. That gap is narrower and more fixable than it looks. Let’s start with how these decisions actually present. They rarely look like decisions. In a crisis touching orbital infrastructure they appear as configuration: bandwidth prioritization, service tier enforcement, geofencing, imagery release thresholds, and the throttling rules that determine whose traffic degrades first. Each is defensible as engineering. In aggregate, under pressure, they allocate national capability, and the commercial incentives bearing on those choices are not the same as the operational ones.[1] A commercial operator exercising ordinary contractual discretion can determine which military formation stays connected, which hospital network holds, and which exchange clears. It is acting within its rights. The open question is not whether it may, but whether anyone can afterward establish why. When allocation is performed by a learned model rather than a rule table, that answer is frequently unavailable. That’s not because anyone is concealing it, but instead because the system was never asked to produce it. Logs record what happened, but they rarely record what was weighed, which alternatives were scored and set aside, or under what authority the action was taken. Without that record there is no way to verify that contractual priority was honored, no way to compensate a party that went dark, and no way to improve the system from the event. This is a specification gap rather than a limit of the technology. The operational reality is already here. Maven shows how far the capability has come. Established in 2017, it became a program of record at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2023 and now supports the Pentagon’s combined joint all-domain command and control effort. What began as a system for identifying objects of interest can now integrate data from multiple sources, track targets, recommend which weapons are available against them, and compress sensor-to-shooter timelines from hours to minutes.[2] In March 2026, the Deputy Secretary of Defense consolidated oversight under the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office and named AI-enabled decision-making the cornerstone of that architecture.[3] This is genuine progress, delivered at pace. The natural next step is to specify what such systems should be able to show about their own reasoning. Golden Dome makes the timing concrete. An architecture of proliferated sensors, space-based interceptors, and battle management at machine speed, carrying a 2028 demonstration, will encode allocation rules whether or not they are debated.[4] The engineering choices being made this year are governance choices in a different vocabulary, and they are far cheaper to set now than to revisit once fielded. Auditability is a design property, not an overlay, and it means something specific. It is neither a dashboard nor an explanation generated after the fact by a second model, which yields a plausible account rather than a true one. There is a strategic dimension as well. Dual-use sensing and interceptors blur the boundaries between defense, surveillance, targeting, and preemption, an ambiguity that long predates autonomy and that has shaped space security debates since the first anti-satellite tests.[5] When sensing and interceptors are cued automatically on commercially operated systems, an adversary assesses American intent against a process that is hard to reconstruct even from the inside. Deliberate ambiguity is a legitimate instrument of strategy, but ambiguity the originating party cannot resolve is not. Other sectors settled this in calm conditions, and the precedents are binding, not advisory. Telecommunications operates priority frameworks written into obligation, among them Telecommunications Service Priority and the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service.[6] Electric reliability standards, aviation safety duties, and financial stress-testing follow the same logic: obligations defined before the event, binding on the operator, surviving a change of ownership. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 governs autonomy in weapon systems and requires appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.[7] It does not reach the allocation layer, where a great many crisis decisions will actually be made. Civil practice is moving first. On August 2, European obligations for high-risk artificial intelligence took full effect, requiring that such systems allow the automatic recording of events across their lifetime.[8] Those provisions reach hiring tools and credit scoring. No standing equivalent applies to a system that recommends which weapon answers which target. That is not because anyone judged military systems to need less traceability. It is because the question has not yet been put. The precedent for setting rules ahead of the event also exists inside this domain. The first National Security Space Strategy, issued in 2011, described a space environment growing congested, contested, and competitive, and argued for shaping that environment deliberately rather than responding to it after the fact.[9] Much of that agenda was carried out. The allocation layer is the part of it that was never finished, largely because the technology that would make it urgent did not yet exist. Nor does the fix require research. Auditability is a design property, not an overlay, and it means something specific. It is neither a dashboard nor an explanation generated after the fact by a second model, which yields a plausible account rather than a true one. At a minimum, it means three records: the state observed and the confidence assigned, so a reviewer can distinguish a poor decision from one made on poor information; the options available and the scores they received, since an allocation is only assessable against the alternatives; and the model version in force at the moment of action, because thresholds are tuned and models are retrained. All of this is routine in fields where decisions must be defended. Published work has already demonstrated response systems that reason under explicit legal constraints, using deontic logic to return a set of permissible options rather than a single opaque output.[10] The methods exist and are documented. What is absent is the requirement to use them. Vendors build to the requirement they are given, and where a specification is silent no source selection will score a feature nobody asked for. Three acquisition requirements would close most of the gap, and the Department of Defense can impose all three now, through instruments it already holds. The first is decision provenance as a contract requirement: any system holding a sovereign-critical allocation function should produce an auditable record of the inputs received, the rule or model invoked, the alternatives considered, and the authority claimed, written into the request for proposals, scored in source selection, and demonstrated at acceptance. The second is a priority framework for orbital services, negotiated in peacetime and written into contract, with defined tiers, override conditions, and compensation for commercial parties who lose revenue when a priority order is exercised. The third is a named authority able to order, override, and answer for an allocation decision under declared emergency conditions, with the legal basis established in advance rather than assembled during the event. The owners of the problem are identifiable today: the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, which now holds oversight of AI-enabled decision-making; Space Systems Command, which is writing Golden Dome’s requirements this year; and the combatant-command requirements writers whose operational plans assume the allocation layer will hold. None of this runs against the commercial interest. Vendors build to the requirement they are given, and where a specification is silent no source selection will score a feature nobody asked for. A clear and uniform requirement applied before award is easier for industry to price and to meet than a standard assembled afterward through inquiry. That has been the experience of every sector that has been through this. Capability has moved faster than the paperwork, which is what happens when a country is serious about delivering. The paperwork is the cheaper half, and it is the half still available to us. The specifications are being written now, and the only question is whether anyone accountable is holding the pen. Notes Bharath Gopalaswamy and Daniel Dant, “Golden domes, fragile firms: the business risks of AI-enabled space infrastructure,” The Space Review, March 16, 2026. Palantir Technologies, “Palantir Expands Maven Smart System AI/ML Capabilities to Military Services,” September 20, 2024; Center for Strategic and International Studies, “What Is Maven Smart System, and What Does It Do?” June 2026. DefenseScoop, “Feinberg’s new Maven directive sets AI-enabled decision-making as ‘the cornerstone’ for CJADC2,” April 3, 2026. Space Systems Command, public release on the Space-Based Interceptor program, describing a demonstration capability integrated into the Golden Dome architecture by 2028. Bharath Gopalaswamy, Final Frontier: India and Space Security (Westland/Tranquebar, 2019). Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Telecommunications Service Priority (TSP) and Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) program documentation, cisa.gov. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, Autonomy in Weapon Systems, updated January 25, 2023. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 12 (Record-keeping); obligations for high-risk systems applicable from 2 August 2026. Department of Defense and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Security Space Strategy: Unclassified Summary, January 2011. T. Deb, M. Jeong, C. Molinaro, A. Pugliese, A. Quattrini Li, E. Santos, V.S. Subrahmanian, and Y. Zhang, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics 54, no. 12 (2024): 7147–7162, presenting a framework for multi-objective decision-making under legal constraints using deontic logic and Pareto-optimal status sets. Bharath Gopalaswamy, PhD, is an aerospace, defense, and emerging-technology executive. Col. (Ret.) Dan Dant, Vice President at KBR, is a defense industrial-base strategist. Gopalaswamy and Dant are Senior Fellows of the National Spacepower Center. The views expressed are the authors’ own.