Plus: A financial pitch for on orbit data centers
By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
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If putting boots on the moon again before China does is a national priority for the United States, why then is the country putting all of its faith into an architecture that is "extraordinarily complex, burdened by untested technologies?" That question was posed by Doug Cooke, an aerospace consultant who spent decades at NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.
It's time, Cooke argued in a recent article, to seriously pursue a "plan B" lander to ensure that American leadership in space doesn't hinge entirely on a single program that's currently years behind schedule while its credibility is repeatedly challenged.
"Without a Plan B, we risk waking up one day to find the truth staring us in the face: The U.S. has lost the moon," Cooke wrote. "Furthering U.S. space leadership is either a national priority or it isn't. If it is, then decisive action is required now."
You can see the full article here. |
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In the conversations about moving data operations off-world, concerns about cost generally focus on the hurdles of getting infrastructure into space. But, as Joseph Minafra, lead of innovation and technical partnerships for the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute at NASA Ames Research Center, wrote in a recent commentary, the benefits of housing data centers in space will eventually make doing so not only cost-effective but profitable as well.
You can check out the full article for his financial breakdown. But Minafra's argument hinges on the fact that moving data centers to space removes the need for some of the greatest costs for terrestrial data centers: energy, provided by continuous sunlight in orbit; and cooling, managed through radiative heat dissipation rather than the millions of gallons of water per day used by data centers on Earth. | | |
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 | Axiom Space and Spacebilt plan to install an optically interconnected orbital data center node on the International Space Station in 2027. Credit: Axiom Space
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Getting back to the race to the moon between China and the United States, EarthLight Foundation founder Rick Tumlinson wrote in to argue that the U.S. is completely missing the moment by chasing symbolic wins compared to China's coordinated push to become the next leaders in space.
"A human Chinese landing on the moon — whether in 2026, 2028 or 2030 — is treated as a symbolic challenge to be countered by a symbolic response," Tumlinson wrote. "Commentators and important committee chairs frame it as a "new moon race," and aerospace contractors encourage that framing because it supports expensive, urgent sprints to plant American boots back on the surface first. But a replay of Apollo is not a strategy. And a short-term 'race to the next footprint' is not the competition we are in."
That mismatch of priorities, Tumlinson argued, puts the U.S. at greater risk of ceding leadership in space. "This is not a 'race,'" he wrote. "It is a campaign of long-term strategic positional advantage."
See the full article here.
SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors. |
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FROM SPACENEWS |  | Meet the 2025 Icon Award Winners: This year's recipients range from a company that successfully landed on the moon to an agency leader who transformed NASA's relationship with industry, making room for commercial lunar landers in the first place. On Tuesday, Dec. 2 in Washington D.C., we awarded this year's Icon Awards during a program at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center. Learn more about what made this year's class stand out. |
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