The U.S. is in Space Race 2.0 — and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Washington Times National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang sits down with Karman Space & Defense CEO Jon Rambeau to discuss Artemis, the arsenal of freedom, and what it will take to meet America’s growing defense demands.
[WOLFGANG] There’s such an energy here in this room at Space Symposium. There’s a lot of reasons for that. I think one of them, of course, is the Artemis mission, which seems to have kind of captured everybody’s imaginations and really reignited a fascination and love for space among a lot of people. How would you describe that energy, that feeling that you have here at Space Symposium this week?
[RAMBEAU] This is certainly one of the best attended Space Symposiums that we’ve had. And, you know, when you think about Artemis, what that did — that brought together years and years of aspiration for mankind to get back to the moon. And we are right there on the cusp of it. And our Karman employees are incredibly excited that we had a part of the Artemis mission. A number of components on the spacecraft, and just a lot of excitement within the workforce and within the community about space.
[WOLFGANG] It does seem like there’s a — I don’t want to, maybe patriotism is a little bit too clichéd of a way to put it — but it does seem like everybody’s kind of working together on things like that. A lot of companies had a hand in the Artemis mission, Karman, of course, being one of them. And it seems like there’s a sense that we need to kind of all pull toward the same goal for the United States in space right now.
[RAMBEAU] Absolutely. Certainly there’s always going to be a little bit of competition within the industry, but we are all working together toward the same goal of getting back to space. And getting back to see what a space economy could eventually look like someday — you’re starting to hear companies talk about commercial applications for space capabilities, data centers in space, et cetera. So there’s a real energy around not just the traditional military component of space, as we’ve seen in this industry, but also a commercial-oriented piece as well.
[WOLFGANG] How do those two tracks kind of work together — the space economy, the economic track, and the national security military track? Because we’re in Space Race 2.0 right now, as some people have said. In Space Race 1.0, you didn’t have that economic component. There was a lot of economic activity on Earth, but only the rockets and satellites were going into space, and the astronauts. Now it’s a different ballgame. Are they in conflict with each other, or are they kind of working two sides of the same coin, so to speak?
[RAMBEAU] I think they’ll be symbiotic in the sense that a lot of the building blocks will be common. The launch vehicles will be common, some of the basic satellite technology will be common, and certainly life support in space will be a common thing. And then you’ll have, you know, divergence from there — to the national security applications as compared to what the commercial applications might be and how those will evolve.
[WOLFGANG] Arsenal of democracy, arsenal of freedom, as Defense Secretary Hegseth puts it. We’ve spent a lot of munitions in this country. We’ve been going through a lot in recent years. We have to replenish all over the spectrum — space-based capabilities, traditional munitions. Is industry ready to meet that challenge? And what’s it going to take to get these stockpiles back to a level that everybody’s comfortable with?
[RAMBEAU] We are going to see an unprecedented demand for munitions as the stockpiles need to be replenished, and also as there’s still a demand for next-generation capabilities at the same time. So it’s going to be a big push on the government to figure out how to resource that demand. And for industry, how do we respond to that?
A lot of talk about the prime contractors and how they’re going to respond. There’s also a lot of pressure in the second tier of the supply chain, and that’s where Karman really comes in. We provide a very unique solution to the primes because historically they’ve had two options. One was to vertically integrate — do everything themselves, which is very complex and consumes a lot of resources and investment — or to buy the piece parts from a number of smaller suppliers.
What Karman has done is purpose-built a portfolio where we can provide integrated sub-systems to the primes. We do have greater resources to invest in capacity, and we’ve been investing ahead of demand to make sure that we are there to meet that signal when the pull comes from the primes, which it already has begun to do.
[WOLFGANG] It’s such an interesting point. I’m curious, you know, from your perspective — you could expand on that a little bit — because the Secretary of Defense has focused a lot and talked a lot about primes. And it seems there’s a lot of pressure on primes to kind of evolve and change, be faster, more nimble. A layer down from that, out of Karman Space & Defense, do you feel that pressure? Maybe you thrive on that pressure. What do you take away from that?
[RAMBEAU] We very much do. We’re actively engaged in a dialogue with a number of prime contractors. We are on 130 programs with 80 different prime contractors across our space and defense applications. So pretty much every major munitions program, we’re a part of. We’re actively engaged in a dialogue with all of the primes about how Karman is not just going to meet the capacity demands of today, but how we’re investing to meet the demands of tomorrow.
[WOLFGANG] We’ve mentioned a lot here, from production of new space-based capabilities to munitions. All of this is going to require certain infrastructure investments in the United States. We talk about AI, we talk a lot about data centers, and some municipalities are moving to ban data centers because of water concerns or aesthetic concerns. There’s concerns about launch space. Do we have enough pads to get a lot of this stuff into space?
Where do the infrastructure investments need to go in the U.S.? What do we need to build and make sure we have enough of, so that the kind of stuff that you guys do actually can get where it needs to go and function?
[RAMBEAU] I think you touched on some of the major elements here, which is that the power infrastructure is going to be required, the data center horsepower is going to be required to support artificial intelligence applications that are going to allow us to iterate more quickly on the hardware and software designs. And then there’s going to be the capacity, the launch vehicles, the cadence of launches to get things into space, because there’s going to be a huge demand for all variety of payloads. How do those payloads get to space? It’s going to be the launch vehicles, and it’s going to be the launch cadence.
