Watching the Currents
(NOT) Predicting the Future. Thanks to Bryce Tech, SIA, Yogi Berra, Aerospace, and Rivers everywhere
Space Rivers: What Will Happen?
In probably the very best quote on “predictions”, there is this gem: “Predictions are difficult, particularly when they are about the future.” In fact, the quote is so intuitively correct that it has been claimed that it was first uttered by no less than Mark Twain, Neils Bohr, Yogi Berra, Nostradamus, and any number of other sages, philosophers, and historians. I even hear that Abe Lincoln bookmarked it when he first saw it on the internet and referred to it often during his presidency in emails to his staff.
So, viewed as a cautionary tale, that quote is pretty cautionary. It is so cautionary that I surely won’t hazard guesses. But I have always thought that a better way of thinking about the future is by thinking about rivers. They often meander about but usually stay within their banks. Floods and droughts will, of course, change things, sometimes in predictable ways, but just as often the effects look random or, worse, seem to be the most awful thing that could have ever occurred. It is crazy hard to predict the location of a wave or an eddy from one moment or day to the next – a fool’s game, you might say.
Rivers, Currents, and Flows
But rivers have a current. And there is, I think, something to be considered when you are trying to peer forward. During “normal” times and “chaotic” times, there is a current, a flow, that in a preponderance of cases, moves in a discernible direction. That flow, if you can see it, can give you insights. When you are paying attention to things like this, the facts of the moment are like you what you see when you are looking at the river and seeing which way the water is going, how deep it is, how quickly it’s moving, how turbulent it is. Sure, it might change, but it is still decent data, even if, for some reason, you don’t like it or wish that it was flowing in some other direction.
And note here that there is nothing wrong with swimming against the current, but if you plan to do it, you want to be sure you are up for the swim. What I am trying to do here is to tell you what the river looks like from where I am standing.
Overall Budgets for Space Stuff
It is, brace yourself, not actually a terrible time for space budgets. Writ large, the world spends far more on space than it ever has. Venture capital funds, corporate investment funds, government funds, and even money from wealth individuals is pouring into the sector. In fact, if you look at the recently released 2025 Annual Space Industry Association report on the “space economy” you will note that not only were all sectors up in terms of overall spending, the percentage increases across the subsectors were in double digits in most cases. On top of THAT, they discovered that there is even a whole new subsector, “Space Sustainability Activities” that has emerged to capture new things like space related “assembly”, “manufacturing”, “mission life extension”, and space situational awareness”. These things are already generating not just investment interest and “tech development funding” but actual revenues. Their assessment is that all of this activity and growth will continue based on things like projected government, corporate, and private budgets.
So, the “current” here is flowing toward more of pretty much everything when it comes to space stuff: more launches, more satellites, more operations, more services, more technology investments, and more use cases for all the things derived from space.
US Government Civil Space
Just as I was buckling down to take a hard look at all this, the good folks at Aerospace came out with an awesome report, which you can download (with supporting data for those interested in self-flagellation) here. It summarizes most (not all) US (federal) Government spending on Civil Space up through FY2025. Now, admittedly, there is some stuff left out of this (state expenditures, which are, believe it or not, non-trivial, and a number of agency expenditures that aren’t shown or are arguably dual use), but to scale, those things are nits. This report is a good one to have in your head when you wonder who in the Federal Government is doing what in space.
Now, you may notice a problem here. If you squint, you will surely see that “up through 2025” is, well, not the problem. The problem is the proposed 2026 and beyond budget for many of these agencies. Most of them are in for very severe cuts if enacted budgets are anything like what is proposed. So, unfortunately, if you are a participant in this particular sector, almost all of this is under severe budget pressure. While it is all still up to Congress, the likely budget reductions are very likely to be on the order of 20% or so across the board with pretty severe hits at NASA’s Science and Technology Mission Directorates but also at NOAA and many others. These cuts could impact not just missions and infrastructure, but people, both civil servant and contract, and are likely to remake affected agencies in ways that will be persistent for quite some time.
So, the “current” here is reduced government - designed, government - directed civil space missions and technologies, reduced opportunity and ability for related agencies to be the repositories of space expertise and capability, as well as reduced government – led investment in transformational technologies needed for future civil concepts related to exploration or science.
US Military Space
These numbers are harder to find, but they are increasing in oddly competing ways. This is not new – the various services have always competed with each other when it comes to weapons systems, R&D, money, and everything else related to a “theater of operations”. Space is not different that way. But what is different is that space is now widely acknowledged as a relatively new “theater of potential operations”. And since it is relatively new, the investments, writ large across the department of defense and all the various R&D and Intelligence agencies, are increasing. And really, once you start using terms like “golden”, as in Golden Dome, to talk about future defense systems, the total budget outlays in military expenditures will vastly outweigh (in dollar terms) any cuts that can be made from civil programs. As a Navy Admiral once reminded me with fire in his eyes when I was “disinclined to acquiesce to his request”, “We spend more on one aircraft carrier than we spend on your entire agency budget, Son.” That was true, by the way (even though it didn’t matter at the time). It is still true and what it means is that the increases in DoD will more than offset civil space reductions. Here is a pretty decent, though already – out – of – date, report from April of this year that talks about some of the DoD and Civilian stuff together. It’s not directly comparable to the earlier Aerospace report, so don’t get hung up on the specifics.
So, the “current” here is increased spending on space stuff on the non – civil side of things. Given the way they do things in DoD, most of this spending will be in the form of contracted work, including delivered ‘services’, capabilities, and technology development.
International Space
Bluntly stated, the international space community is either horrified or thrilled by the proposed changes to civil space budgets in the US. At the simplest level, US allies and partners are horrified since our civil programs are often a vitally necessary catalyst for their own efforts in these areas. In addition, the data products from our science work benefit their terrestrial activities just like they do ours (think weather and agriculture and resource monitoring and search/rescue things). There are even a fair number of US military entities that are more than a little spooked by the threats to civil space budgets since a great deal of the exploration and science technologies are very much dual use to the point of being either pathfinders or actual backups to military capacities. US adversaries are the ones that are thrilled since lower US investments in space related systems, capabilities, and technologies will make it easier for them to catch up and/or supersede the US in the “new theater of potential operations”.
So, the “current” here is really that while total spending is often at a much lower level internationally than it is in the US, those other entities are not actually seeing dramatic changes in the trajectories of their space expenditures or aspirations. But oddly, there is also a little thrill in some of the allies and partners with more mature programs. More on this later, but the shortened version of the thrill is that there may be a more available (displaced), experienced workforce for THEM if the US civilian cuts actually happen in the US.
Other Considerations:
· There is a significant subset of the civilian space workforce that, no matter what the incentive, simply chooses never to work in a military or intelligence setting. They just don’t and, if you ask them, they just won’t. They’d literally rather do anything than that. Whether you call it “moral misgivings”, “peaceful tendencies”, or “too much Star Trek”, doesn’t matter. Their allegiances, as human beings, are more to science or technology than to money or flags.
· Civil space employees “tend” to resist walking out on their work using things like “deferred retirement” or “early retirement”. Heck, many of them don’t ever retire even when they are eligible and there is no more financial incentive to keep working. I actually handed a man a 65-Year Service Award. He had been eligible for retirement for more than 30 years and had never hung up the cleats. Often this is just true love of the work, but it is often combined with a willingness to believe that the science, the mission, the logic, or the truth of what they are doing matters so much that it overcomes what might have seemed an obvious path in the face of threatened disruptions or even human mortality.
· The human presence in space is no longer all about exploration and exploring. The Space Force’s Guardians need their own astronauts to protect, rescue, or defend something in the national interest. This is already openly discussed. Similarly, there are already discussions of humans being more than “space tourist” when it comes to reasons to send someone into space. Often those reasons involve having someone fix something, collect/mine something, or assemble something.
· There are no politically powerful entities that are positioned to change the likelihood that the cuts to US civil space budgets. By the luck of the political landscape, the only effective advocacies, sparse though they are, are concentrated in areas related to human exploration of the Moon and Mars. But even in these cases, the “rescues” are not part of a coherent and rational framework so much as they are “keep doing the stuff you are doing in my state”. So, they may not make a ton of sense. even if that particular thing can be successfully accomplished. Not even other nations’ links to science activities are sufficient to move the budget needle back to where it was.
· In the US Constitution’s Preamble, “Provide for the Common Defense” is an important and specific duty assigned to the government, and now that space is officially a theater and defense expenditures are in the many tens (or low hundreds) of billions, things like exploration and science are no longer primary when it comes to government space. The fact that the revenue generated by space activities exceeds 400 billion dollars annually further reduces the primacy and visibility of civil activities in space.
· Disruptions of highly skilled, niche experts on any scale lead to unpredictable changes in innovation, what people do, who they do it with, and how they do it. Consider the redistribution of brain power during and after WWII (physics, space technologies, and many others), the dramatic economic effects of things like Middle Ages pandemic events (medical theories and practice, weapons systems, whole economic systems, education itself), the invasions of Asian steppe nomads into China and Europe (accelerated transfers of knowledge of mathematics, weapons, and technologies between China, Europe, and others, particularly Arabic and Moslem thinkers and technologists, that had not been in contact with each other).
I don’t think these qualify as “currents” so much as little oddities in the river bottoms that have been there a long time and will probably cause strange eddies as the flow does its thing.
Surveying the Rivers
So, I put all that stuff into a landscape, a riverscape. What do I see?
· The civil space activities of the US Government could be reduced very much in accordance with the various budgets that are being floated around in the news. The loss of personnel could make it difficult to reconstitute, certainly in its current form. Over time, its reduced presence and the dominance of defense needs/priorities on the US mindset could, in a few years, lead to a rethinking of NASA (and perhaps others) as a purely science or R&D entity more like NSF or DARPA/IARPA. Regardless, even under the current structure, the civil space agencies could, by necessity, become less able to rely on their own expertise and will, like DoD, increasingly become establishers of frameworks, architectures, and requirements, rather than developers, managers, and technologists. This will lead to a need to choose carefully where to have “insight” versus “oversight”.
The “what has been lost/changed” in civil space will probably attract far more attention than the valuable, productive, and innovative capabilities, missions, and people that remain. In their areas of expertise, these remnants could easily remain scientifically unequaled and technologically superior to pretty much anything else, and their continuity of data and capability will remain a national treasure scientifically and economically.
· The purely civil model on which NASA is based could weaken and the nation could more openly desire a more unified approach to something so expensive and so crucial as space related technologies and capabilities. At a minimum we could see a more consistent trend toward civil space leaders with military backgrounds (and vice versa, such as with the current NRO director, for example).
· There will very likely be plenty of work for those with technical and scientific expertise related to space. The US commercial sector is hungry for that workforce and has the money and customer base to absorb it. The US defense/intelligence establishment is likewise hungry for that workforce and has the money and mission to absorb it. But such disruptions are never smooth in the near term.
· The most likely destination for much of the displaced technical workforce could very well be in the commercial sector, and there could be a huge burst of innovation and accomplishment as thousands of highly skilled, incredibly knowledgeable, deeply experienced space professionals engage that community. There is a non-zero chance that, as a result, the 70-year or so efforts of US civil space work could be hailed as an incredible success given the wave of technical and economic “spin-offs”. (I am really not joking here…this could be the ultimate ‘spin-off’…not of space technologies, but of space technologists.)
· It would not be at all irrational for foreign, particularly allied, aligned, or partner, nations to seek some of the civil space workforce. This could be accomplished straightforwardly by offering internationally based employment or more creatively by somehow augmenting US civil space activities (a multi-national NASA?) or by creating “foundations” that would serve as some sort of US-based but international laboratory focused on civil space goals such as science, applied science, or even peaceful exploration.
· NASA centers could easily be re-imagined as ‘hubs’ – entities that are less the source (center) of deep and broad space – and space science – related expertise and more the enablers of national capabilities in those same areas.
· Venture capitalists, wealthy individuals, or monied private scientific associations (national or international) could forseeably begin to be the source of some innovative space science missions and this will be particularly appealing to a subset of the current workforce not interested in purely commercial or defense related work. This would take time to emerge.
· There could certainly be more forced departures from NASA (and other civil space organizations) than there need to be since many people will resist departing something in which they so strongly believe.
· (maybe this one is actually a prediction): The money made from and in space will continue to grow and will reach a tipping point as a result of the development of commercially provided infrastructure in the form of power, space surveillance, mobility / logistics technologies, and/or PNT. Mining or large scale power production will follow and will be among the first money-makers. The history of human exploitation of discovered natural resources (like oil, sugar crops, spices, etc.) will probably tell you how that will play out given that such things quickly become ‘national priorities’ and need to be defended.
It is late. I have so much more I want to write about this topic. Soon, I expect I will look at this and wonder what I was thinking, but I’ve been playing with this for a while and just feel like I should get it out here, just in case it is useful in provoking some thought.
Stay safe and sane. Keep thinking … if you do you will be one of the few.
J