This spring, NPEC will offer a six-lecture virtual fellowship on the fundamentals of civil and military space policy followed by an additional round table policy discussion and a space war game. The nation’s leading space policy practitioners and experts would teach the course. It would offer 1. a brief history of space exploration and an overview of current and planned space programs; 2. an analysis of the debates over alternative proposed military and civil space strategies; 3. an overview of existing and planned U.S. and allied military space programs and what challenges they face from Russia, China, and other countries; 4. an assessment of the military and commercial benefits and costs of the most significant civil and commercial efforts now being proposed; 5. a brief history of space diplomacy, the current issues and players, and most important proposed space control ideas; and 6. an assessment of China’s space programs. These lectures and a policy round table session would be followed by a war game that would play out what might emerge from a credible North Korea threat to detonate a nuclear weapon in low-Earth orbit.
The course is designed for full-time legislative staff (including fellows detailed to the Hill); executive branch staffers working space policy issues; embassy staff from friendly space-faring nations; and journalists working national security and space-related beats.
Course Description: NPEC plans to hold six lunchtime seminars between April and June 2022. Sessions are held on Friday afternoons. Individuals who complete the program will also have the opportunity to participate in NPEC’s spring space war game set to take place in June. All events will take place virtually. The seminars are taught by the following lecturers:
Scott Pace (lectures 1, 2, and 3) is the former chief of staff of the President’s Space Council. Dr. Pace, who worked at RAND and as a NASA administrator, currently runs the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He is well-known as one of the nation’s top space policy analysts and administrators.
Peter Hays (lecture 3) is a Senior Space Policy Analyst at U.S. Department of Defense. Peter has been helping develop and implement all major national security space policy and strategy initiatives since 2004 and serves as a senior advisor on policy, strategy, governance, and strategic messaging issues. Dr. Hays was presented the National Intelligence Professional Award by the Director of National Intelligence in 2014.
Jeffrey Becker (lecture 4) is a future consultant for the U.S. military. He previously served the U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Futures Group where he researched and helped write three editions of the Joint Operating Environment, which addresses changes in the geopolitical and military landscape that will confront future joint force commanders. He has written extensively about the overlap between civil, commercial, and military space.
Peter Garretson (lecture 4) served as a strategy and policy advisor for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, as Division Chief of Irregular Warfare Strategy Plans and Policy, and as the Chief of the Future Technology Branch of Air Force Strategic Planning. As an instructor of Joint Warfare at Air University, he initiated the Schriever Scholars and the Space Horizons Task Force (America’s think tank for space). He also was the first U.S. officer to serve at India’s premier strategic think tank, the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis (IDSA), and was the designer of several Joint and interagency, airpower, and space power war games, including the Air Force Future Wargame Series (2005-2009) and the first-ever U.S.-UK-France Trilateral strategic wargame. He has written extensively about the future of space commerce.
Henry R. Hertzfeld (lecture 5) has served as a Senior Economist and Policy Analyst at both NASA and the National Science Foundation, and has been a consultant to many U.S. and international organizations, including a recent project on space applications with the OECD. He is the co-editor of Space Economics (AIAA 1992) and researched the privatization of the Space Shuttle, the economic benefits of NASA R&D expenditures, and the socioeconomic impacts of earth observation technologies.
John Sheldon (lecture 5) is an Associate Partner of AzurX and Founder of Lunapolitics, previously served in the British Diplomatic Service, taught at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, and served as executive director of The George C. Marshall Institute.
Namrata Goswami (lecture 6) won the prestigious MINERVA grant awarded by the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense (OSD) to study great power competition and is currently working on a book project (2020-2021) on “China’s Grand Strategy and the Notion of Territoriality and Resources.”
Kevin Pollpeter (lecture 6) is a research scientist in the CNA China Studies Division. He is an internationally recognized expert on China’s space program and is widely published on Chinese national security issues, focusing on Chinese military modernization, China’s defense industry, and Chinese views on information warfare.
Tentative Schedule:
• April 29 Why and How We Went Into Orbit
• May 6 What Do You Do After You Go to the Moon?
• May 13 America’s Military Space Force: What Is It and What It’s Up Against
• May 20 How We All Might Get Rich: Alternative Civil and Commercial Space Futures
• May 27 Statecraft and Spacecraft: The History and Future of Space Diplomacy
• June 3 China: Why Its Space Programs Matter
Seminars will address the following questions:
- To what extent, how soon, and how much should the United States and its space-faring allies invest in geo and low-Earth orbit space systems designed to support economic, environmental, and military operations on earth versus cislunar and deep space systems designed to support operations on the moon and beyond?
- What military and civil space systems and services should U.S. and allied governments buy from commercial space firms and which ones should they build themselves?
- Should the United States prioritize spending to militarily dominate space now or focus more in the short-run on terrestrial military challenges (e.g., defending Taiwan)?
- What should the ideal Space Force general officer be — an accomplished space “fighter pilot” operator (General Patton) or a space diplomat-soldier (a space George Marshall)?
- What weaknesses in China and Russia’s military space efforts could the United States and its allies best exploit?