Tangle - FULL EPISODE: SPECIAL EDITION - The U.S. has weapons in space — what happens next?

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

In September, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced that the United States has “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.” The comments sparked a rash of questions: What kind of weapons? What adversaries are we competing against? Could we soon see those weapons deployed?Shortly after the announcement, Senior Editor Will Kaback spoke with Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. Swope’s career includes an extended stint at the CIA, time spent advising lawmakers on national security and space in Washington, D.C., and a lead role in Amazon’s efforts to establish a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit.The conversation explores lingering questions about the state of the U.S. space-weapons program, what technology we might now have in orbit, how the space arms race could factor into ongoing geopolitical conflicts, and why the U.S. wants these weapons in the first place.You can check out more of Swope’s work here: https://www.csis.org/people/clayton-swopeWe're launching something new.In yesterday's edition of Press Pass, I wrote about going back to my roots (more writing, more brevity, more personality). As part of that goal, I’m thrilled to announce that we’re launching a dedicated YouTube channel for some video essays about the current happenings in politics. This will be a place for me to get into some stuff we don’t cover in Tangle, and deliver “My take” essays in video form. The channel launched today with a deep dive on the plans for a border wall in the Big Bend region of West Texas, with some personal stories about my connections to the area and why I think it’s a historically bad policy idea. You can watch it here.Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast hosted by: Will Kaback and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Tangle podcast. This is Senior Editor Will Kayback. As an editor at Tangle, I consume a lot of news every day. A side effect of that consumption is that stories that once would have stopped me in my tracks just don't anymore. And it can get to the point where even the all caps, bolded, italicized, stop what you're doing and look at this right now, news items, really generate not much more than a skeptical eyebrow raise for me for better. worse. And then there are some stories that I come across and I quickly pass over, and then I pause, I scroll back on my timeline, and I take another hard look at what I just read. That happened a couple weeks back with a fairly innocuous, at least at first headline from the New York Times,

and it read, US has deployed weapons in space, Air Force Secretary says. Weapons in space? The words brought to mind sci-fi blockbusters like Star Wars and Golden Eye. Admittedly, I even thought about former representative Marjorie Taylor Green's infamous Facebook post about space lasers causing wildfires in California. But as I dug deeper into the story, my curiosity was further peaked. While most of our attention right now is on more earthbound conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, a weapons race in space has really been playing out for, decades and now seems to be kicking into another gear, at least if you believe what the U.S.

is currently saying. To dig deeper on that question, I connected with Clayton Swope, who is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. Swope's career includes an extended stint at the CIA, time spent advising lawmakers on national security and space in Washington, D.C., and a lead role in Amazon efforts to establish a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit. In the conversation that you're about to hear, Swope and I discussed the lingering questions about the state of the U.S. space weapons program, as well as what technology we might now have in orbit, how the space arms race could factor into those ongoing geopolitical conflicts

that I mentioned, and also why the U.S. wants these weapons in space in the first place. It's a really fascinating discussion, and I'm excited to share it with you now. So let's dive in. Clayton, great to have you on the show. Thanks, Will, for the invitation. So before we dive into the main topic of this conversation, I'm curious to hear a little bit about the path that led you to your current focus, which, as I understand it, is aerospace security and defense.

So to start off, could you just tell me a little bit about how you came into this area and then also what your core focus is these days? Yeah, sure. So half the answer is I don't know how I got here, and I feel very lucky to be working in a think tank and a job where I actually don't have to do anything other than have an opinion. It's refreshing. Before this, I worked at Amazon.

I worked on Amazon Leo. It's the broadband constellation. When I was there, it was called Project Hyper. I also worked a bit at AWS. I worked on the Hill for a member of Congress who represented a district in Washington State. He's retired now. And before that, I worked at the Central Intelligence Agency for almost 15 years. Now at the think tank I work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,

I do focus on aerospace issues, more specifically on space issues. Just really anything that has to do with space, it's probably something that I look at, I write about, at research, I talk about. Hard not to think about different reasons that we go to space, business reasons, national security reasons, prestige, science, all those things are things that I look at. I do feel like I've evolved into this portfolio, if you will, on space. Not something I would have thought. I would have ended up looking so closely at on a day-to-day basis, but I'm really happy.

When I was in high school, I always wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to work at NASA. And when I left college, I never thought I'd get back to work on space issues, and I'm really happy that I did. Yeah, and that's a really cool path to get there too. I appreciated the sentiment of this actually touches a lot of different facets of our politics, our economy, our aspirations as a country and as a world. I think the jumping off point for our discussion is this announcement last week about the U.S. having weapons in space. And in our current news cycle, not to put too fine a point on it here, but it feels like everything's focused on what's happening on the ground. And then you get news like this. And it reminds you, there's actually this whole broader project that's been going on. So I'm going to read exactly what the Air Force Secretary Troy Mank announced last week in his comments. He said that the U.S. currently has, quote, on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action, end quote.

That's about the extent of the detail and information we got about that announcement. before we go into what it could refer to, the implications, all of that, could you just give me a general picture of what kinds of weapons systems he could be referring to here, the kinds of weapons systems that we plausibly could be putting into space? Yeah, one thing that I like to remind folks is that when we think about the military use of space, this is something that goes back a very long time. The very first man-made object into space, so not into orbit, the first human-made object in orbit was Sputnik.

But in the space, and that's 100 kilometers from Earth, that was a German V2 missile test in June 1944. So we've always had this relationship with space that involves military use, national security that starts from the first time that we sent anything into space. And that's continued. I continue throughout the Cold War. We use satellites for a lot of different purposes,

for surveillance and reconnaissance, for communications, and these uses of satellites has continued to the present day. The main ways that we use space for defense and national security and military are really still surveillance and reconnaissance, communications, and then also, you know, it's kind of technical, but positioning, navigation, and timing, really that's just GPS and systems like that that other countries operate. So to get access to space, we do space launch.

And then you want to be able to, I guess you could say in kind of the military parlance you want to be able to protect and defend your ability to use space for those purposes. And that's where we come into things that I would call counter space and maybe even counter counter space. So counter space is really just the idea that the military wants to prevent our adversaries from using space for their own operations. And then we want to make sure that if an adversary tries to prevent us from using it, then we can counter that. And that's where we get to this notion of space control and the idea that we want to have weapons, or we want to conduct activities that preserve our access and use of space and also deny the adversary access and use of space. And I also want

to just mention, if you think of a ballistic missile, so that missile test in 1944, that was a ballistic missile. Throughout the Cold War, we had arsenals composed of intercontinental ballistic missiles. On their trajectories, they go through space. So I don't think many people think of that as a space weapon, but essentially it uses space on its merry way as part of its journey from point A to point B. And when we think of weapons that could protect and defend our access to space and prevent someone else from using space, it's really anything that you could think of. So that's anything from a missile launch from Earth, we would say a direct ascent anti-satellite missile missile. It's meant to aim at and strike a satellite in orbit. You could think of a satellite in orbit

that is launching a projectile at another satellite. You could think of a jammer or a spoofer. Right now we hear a lot about GPS jamming and spoofing. That's essentially a counterspace activity. You could think of a laser. You can think of a laser that you turn the power up high enough. It could fry another satellite. Or a laser that you could just turn up just enough

that it could, I would say, dazzle a sensor of a satellite that's taking pictures of things on Earth. So that would be a laser dazzler. You could also think of cyber. So cyber activity. that might be targeting a satellite or targeting a satellite ground station. So an activity there that is within the cyber domain has an effect in space. And then one final kind of area that's kind of a weird one, you know,

satellite that is meant, let's say, to do satellite servicing or to remove space debris. Essentially, it could latch on to something else in orbit. That could be used as a weapon as well. It could move a satellite out of the place that it's supposed to be to somewhere where it's not. So there's really all kinds of weapons, some that could be in space. some that could be on earth, that could be having this effect of both defending our ability to use space and then also ensuring that our adversaries can't use it either. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Yeah, that's a wide array of possibilities. And the question that leads me to is what is the actual status of what we have there now and what could it look like in the near future. based on what you know about the development of the, we'll call it the U.S. space weapons or space defense program, what to you, we wanted to narrow this down a little bit to what it might be currently, what comes to mind or what do you think our capabilities could look like right now?

It's pretty hard to narrow down. So we look at right now what the U.S. has publicly said about it's what I would say again, counter space. This is that type of activity that's trying to prevent our adversaries from using space for their military purposes. We're talking things that work in the electromagnetic spectrum domain. There are systems that the U.S. has talked about publicly that fall into that category. But historically, there's also been testing of more destructive capabilities

of the United States for anti-satellite capabilities, but then these are things that other countries have also developed and tested more recently. The U.S. tested systems that were missiles targeting satellites in the 80s. There's one sitting in Udvarhazi, the Smithsonian Museum near Dulles Airport. You can go see it. The Russians, the Chinese, the Indians have tested systems like that more recently. China did a destructive anti-satellite missile test in 2007. The Russians did one in 2021.

So the idea, though, that I suppose you could say that both on the destructive side and then this jamming and spoofing side, that that wouldn't be something that countries are capable of doing now, that I think, you know, that there's enough evidence to say that countries from everything from the United States to China, Russia, India have all shown that they can produce systems like this. over a number of years, over decades. So nothing really that we could be thinking about for these weapons is new. And that's why it's really hard to kind of narrow down what precisely this disclosure could be referring to today. Because all of those things are things that we've seen historically. So I think the new part, though, is that the U.S. is saying it's something on orbit. You know, that's maybe the slight difference.

A lot of these things that I just mentioned are things that originate from the ground. But just kind of from just the idea of what could be on orbit that is kinetic and could blow up something, for example. This is something that at least throughout the Cold War, the Soviets were testing satellites that were on orbit, and they would launch a projectile at another satellite to damage or destroy it. And then there's been, you know, you could see anything happening in space from Earth. there's been evidence that more recently the Russians have tested satellites that launch sub-satellites or projectiles and other satellites. And we've seen, from public information,

we've seen the debris that could be generated by those tests. So even things like that where you have a kinetic capability in orbit, we've seen evidence that those are tested recently, not from the United States, but again, examples where countries are testing systems like this. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the factors, of U.S. adversaries or competitors

and how they might be part of this calculus. But another broader question I have is just why announce this now? And I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah. Yeah, I think the U.S. is looking for tools to deter concerning, hostile, alerting behavior of satellites operated by China and Russia in orbit. And that's happening routinely. And that's happening for a number of years.

I think the idea that announcing a weapon alone would deter is, I think it's missing a few parts, it's missing kind of a sense of what's the destructive potential of this weapon? What is the consequence if the U.S. uses this on-orbit weapon? What shouldn't I be doing so that the U.S. doesn't use this weapon? I think if you have kids, you kind of know what goes into a good, a set of things that you can use to deter your children from doing things that you think are bad. You know, this is what happens.

You don't get dessert tonight. Right. You don't get to use your favorite tour. I'm taking the Nintendo away. So there's a level of specificity there in addition to the consequence. And then what you don't want your kids to do or what you want them to do. If you put that on the scenario here, that might be missing. So though there is behavior that we see from China and Russia right now in space that we don't like,

you know, you could think that this is a tool, which is, you know, something that was in the secretary's remarks that this is part of deterrence. But some of those building blocks aren't quite there yet, and maybe we'll see that rolled out with time. So you could say, well, that might be why we're doing it, why we're doing it now. It also is just, you know, a second thing just to think is that we have been more public about talking about space control, space war fighting. that space, and this is not just happening in the last month, but that space is a war-fighting domain. Space is an area where military operations occur. And this has been a trend that's been ongoing, at least for the last,

I would say more like five to ten years, certainly in the last five years. And it did start with this current administration. It's been something that's been kind of building and ongoing with time. But again, I just want to underline that this idea that the military use of space or that the militarization of space or even the weaponization, should have space. Whatever all that means is something new. I just want to point out that's wrong. Really, we've been talking about using space for military purpose, putting weapons through space when we're talking about ballistic missiles. This has been something that's been ongoing since the

earliest days of humanity's journey into the stars. Yeah, the space program outright. Yeah. Right. On the point of the policy under the Second Trump administration, have there been any notable changes in this area that you've seen or that you think are worth paying attention to? Not downright new things. It's just really a continuation of the trends that we've seen in prior years, prior administrations. And again, that really relates to this idea that, and it's always been like true that a military conflict on Earth will extend into space. We see more public recognition of that and talk within. And it's not just the United States.

I mean, I would even point to NATO, recognizing that space is an operational domain. Within the last six, six-ish years, six-seven years, other allies also talking about space in that way. And just this recognition that it is something that it's fragile as well, that we have to protect and defend our ability to use space. But at the same time, you do that in the wrong way. And it means that we can't use space for our own purpose.

So kind of trying to walk that line, I think, is kind of the continued challenge here. How do we make sure that adversaries can't use it? We could still use it. How do you also recognize, though, that in a conflict, things blow up? So, yeah, obviously, like I said, you know, you've got this line between, where we still want to use space, we want to make sure our adversaries use it. Well, we could do jamming and spoofing and it doesn't, and it doesn't create debris in Spain. but how maybe if there is a conflict, would there be a situation where the U.S. would use a weapon

that creates debris in space? The U.S. has said, this was in the last administration, moratorium on destructive testing of direct descent anti-satellite weapons. It doesn't say that you're not going to use an anti-satellite weapon that creates debris during a conflict, just you're not going to test it in peacetime. So, you know, this balance between how to, we use space in peacetime? What do we do to make sure that it's a safe and is a sustainable way

that we use it, but then recognizing that in a conflict that might be very different. We're working through those, I think, challenges now. I don't think that has anything specifically to do with this administration, though, we have seen, though, in the last year or two, a lot more talk publicly about a lot of these concepts, but all the pieces were there in the latter part of the Biden administration too, so that's not new. Yeah. We talk a lot or a lot of the conversation around this story is this notion of a arms race in space and countering future potential conflicts, a direct U.S. Russia conflict, a direct U.S. China conflict. But to clarify, is there also potential application to conflicts that are ongoing currently? I'm thinking about Ukraine,

thinking about Iran, other areas of the Middle East. Is this a situation to be maybe overly blunt where the president could come out and say, I'm aiming a space missile at Iran. And if they don't accede to our demands, they're going to feel the full force of that. Is there a current application of this weaponry or is it still in too nascent of a stage? Yeah, so well, like whatever the on-orbit space control weapons are,

me and you, we could equally have a good shot at guessing what precisely we're talking about. So, yeah, taking that, disclosure out of my answer to your question, because I really could be guessing, and it doesn't really help illuminate your points here. But I think when you look at something like Iran, you look at Ukraine, you do see the value of space. What I would say is to join operations on Earth. So to military operations in all domains on Earth, to forces operating at sea, in the air, on land. In the case of Ukraine, you see the value of Starlink, commercial service. You see the value of commercial

provided satellite imagery to the effectiveness of Ukraine's forces. You see how it was so effective at least Starlink that the Russians wanted to use it. So they have essentially bootleg terminals that they're using and that Starlink has tried to turn off and keep them from using it. But that's how powerful space has been in Ukraine. Let's look to Iran. You see how the Iranians appear to be using just satellite imagery for probably a lot of how they've targeted U.S. and allied and friendly forces and infrastructure in the region.

Things like data centers, they don't move around. If you get a good picture of that from imagery, it's probably there a week later, a month later, two months later. If you always park an airplane in the same spot at an airport, and you can catch that in remote sensing images of the ground, you don't need radar, you don't need something real time to be able to figure out where to point your missile. So you see how space has played into that conflict, but it's not necessarily because the Iranians are operating a very sophisticated network of satellites, too. A lot of this you could get an open source.

You could get it for free. You could get it from a company. You pay a company for it. Maybe a company in China is willing to sell it to you. Same thing for connectivity. Unclear exactly how that's playing into the Iran conflict, meaning are the Iranians trying to use Starlink? Are the Iranians hoping that they could buy?

equivalent to Starlink from a Chinese operator. What's that available? Not necessarily happening today, but is that something that we have to think about when we think about the use of space for military purposes? It's these third parties, these third countries who aren't necessarily in the conflict,

can you just get space, putting air quotes in here for the listeners, and use that for your military, and it's not even something that you operate. So when we think about the notion of other kind of jargon is space superiority, Do we need to think, if we say we have space superiority, we are preventing our adversary from using space for military operations.

Does that mean they can't get free Copernicus data from Europe? Does that mean they can't get broadband service from a Chinese broadband constellation? When we say space superiority, if you can get space from those sources and use it for military purposes, I don't know how you could claim you have space superiority because the adversary is still using space. So I think these questions are really interesting as we look at modern, conflict. Space is almost like a commodity now. So can I get it from something that's not like from a military owned and operated satellite and still use it effectively for my joint operations on Earth? Those are the questions that, you know, you think about, you know, on orbit space

control weapons. You know, I think, wow, that sounds very exotic. And certainly Iran probably Iran doesn't have that. But so that's really cool. And I think that matters when we talk about the idea of a conflict or the idea of creating deterrence, a deterrence framework with adversaries like Russia and China. But when you think about things that we see day-to-day, Iran, Ukraine, and maybe things like the Houthis, that's a different question from how to make sure they're not using space to really enable their military

and enable strikes, say, against the U.S. and friendly forces and infrastructure. We'll be right back after this quick break. A little bit of a detour just based on something you mentioned there in that response. As I understand it, China, this is mainly a government-state-driven initiative. In the U.S., it's much more of this private public. And you mentioned Starlink, SpaceX, is really taking on a significant load of bringing things into space that maybe NASA would have done in the past. Do you think that's an advantage for the U.S.? Do you think that that could help us gain that competitive advantage, superiority, whatever you want to call it,

or potentially a detriment? Yeah, so in China, there are a lot of companies. I'm doing air quotes again here that are trying to build satellite constellations, ability to do space launch, reusable space launch. Some of the funding for those companies is private funding, like in the United States and other places like Europe. But a lot of it is from the state, from the central government in Beijing, but also from other levels of government.

So what we would say in the United States, state and local government, State and local government in China sometimes have VC firms where they fund companies and they give money. They give capital to those companies. So you see a lot of that in China. So even if it's a private company, sometimes a lot of their investments still coming from some type of government entity, even if it's state and local. So it's a weird ecosystem. So these companies are trying to be the next SpaceX. They're trying to do reusable lots.

They're trying to do broadband. Some of them are trying to do remote sensing or all kind of weird things in orbit. They want to sell that. So ultimately, these companies to grow, they're going to do. to have to have enough revenue so they could generate a profit. And if they don't, they're going to be basically a boat anchor on all of these governmental entities in China that are funding them. And if there's, you know, the juice isn't worth to squeeze. Something doesn't make sense there. And either the government and all these different levels have to keep writing checks or some of these

companies fail. So that's the China's ecosystem right now. Can they create this self-sustaining flywheel, which essentially is SpaceX now? in other U.S. companies like Rocket Lab that are doing launch, and hopefully Amazon with Leo, where you have more revenue coming in than the cost is to run it, and then you have a profit. So in my mind, this is the notion of what you really need foundationally to have space superiority.

And this goes back to kind of like the Sea Power Theorist of 1890s, Alfred Thayer Mahon, U.S. naval officer, who essentially kind of wrote the book on what it means to be a sea power, a maritime power. And underlying that power is economic strength. And that economic strength is not just domestic. It's not just you can sell domestically. It's international. So commerce and trade, the British had sea power because they had a trading empire. And from that need to derive wealth from the trading empire, they needed a battle fleet. So you think about power in space in the future and has got to be somehow based on that too,

where you do have this commerce that is not just domestic, it's not just because the government is buying it. It's also not just based on resource extraction. He said that was ultimately the Achilles heel of Portuguese and Spanish sea powers. It was based on resource extraction. So the U.S. has a lot of those ingredients right now for that sustaining and enduring space power. China doesn't. So in the end, I think, unless China can address this trust issue,

we don't want to buy, we're not going to buy space stuff from China. We're not going to buy space launch in the U.S. We're not going to be broadband from China. We still trust them. We're not even allowing vacuums, you know, robotic vacuums from China. The Roombas are now banned. So I think to get to the point where China ever could compete with the U.S. for enduring space car, they're going to have to address that trust issue.

And I just feel like that is so far on the horizon right now that the U.S. has a very strong lead in that Mahanian sense that I just talked about to have that enduring space supremacy. Yeah. So maybe we can game out a little bit of the next five to ten years here. you know, thinking through some plausible scenarios, maybe we look back at this moment and just think about that announcement. It's like, oh, yeah, that was kind of a weird moment. Nothing really ever came of it. This is still a very influx issue or nascent stage. Or, you know, are we looking at a scenario where there's some kind of true arms race in place where all of a sudden there are these in-orbit

weapons, multiple countries putting them up there, and maybe even reaching some kind of nuclear resembling mutually assured destruction situation, right? Where do you see a few of these paths possibly headed? So in some sense, I would argue, beyond geostationary orbit, the space and the moon and deep space starts to look like Antarctica. What's the military value of Antarctica? I mean, I guess you could say if everyone started putting military forces there, there's just value because we've created the military value.

What's the economic value of our Antarctica? I don't know. You know, why do we have a base there? Well, a lot of it's science and it's prestige, and we've got to have a base because they have a base. And in the Cold War, somehow, the United States and the Soviets said, yeah, let's keep it this way. So that's why we have the Antarctic Treaty in the 50s.

And that's actually what the main space treaty, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, was modeled after. We just said, let's keep it this way. So my question is, one thing is, do we try to do that with space? beyond geostation area of it and say, hey, it's probably just better if we just keep it like Antarctica, essentially. And let's just not intentionally create a military value where there isn't one. And we should be sensitive to know what the economic value is. Meaning is the economic value

look more like, you know, the Pacific Northwest in the 1800s where there was actually stuff there. People already knew we wanted to, that had value and that, could be exported back to the East Coast or to England or to Europe, like beaver pelts, for example, those had value. Or are we generating value because we're essentially there? So meaning like on the moon, are we extracting resources and using them because we have a moon base there, which is funded entirely by a government, or are we extracting lunar resources and doing some kind of value-added manufacturing that then has value on Earth in a sustainable way?

If it's only government-funded ecosystem, that's a different type of economic value. So in that case, to me, there is a baseline economic value of these parts of space right now. Maybe there will be one day, but there's not today. So those two things are really important to see how we pan out, meaning, and they both are super important. And I think it influences how humans have gone to other areas. One is, is there a true military value to these parts of space? When we talk about cis lunar, so it's that area between geostationary orbit, which is 35,000 kilometers from Earth and the Moon and beyond deep space, is there a military value inherent

in that region, or does it look like Antarctica? And then secondly, is there an economic value that we find? Which means, especially does it relate to something that we could then sell to people on Earth because that's where everyone's buying stuff now. I think the answer to both of those questions determine whether or not space beyond geostation era of it looks more like Antarctica or it looks like something like the South China Sea where there's competition because there's economic value and a military value that's intrinsic to the region. And I don't know.

I think I have opinions about this, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. And I think if it looks more like the South China Sea or the Strait of Hormuz, for example, or some area where it's just in terms. intrinsically valuable, how nations go and populate that is going to look very different than if it looks more like Antarctica. And to me, we will probably figure that out in the next few years. And I think we will set the stage for decades to come on what that looks like, even though I'm sure like hundreds of years from now, it might be a totally different answer to both of those questions. But I think in the next few years, we'll know what it will look like for the next few decades.

Maybe our lifetimes and our children's lifetimes will be shaped by how we answer those questions. Yeah, so lofty questions here coming to fruition in the next few years. I guess the fatal question I would have for you is thinking about those questions, especially this maybe pseudo-binary of Antarctica, stop trying to see straight or foremost. What are you going to be paying attention to in the interim

that will give us an idea of where we might be headed? So I think it's one thing, let's see how this pans out. So how the United States and China right now have their own plants, to send humans to the moon. You know, the United States has been to the moon before, we're going back. China's going for the first time.

How does that, what is that, how does that develop? Is there really, is it really anchored in economics? Is it really anchored in security? Are those just essentially reasons given to paper over the fact that these are essentially prestige projects? And nothing wrong with that. We did that in the Cold War. The Secretary of Defense,

and the head of NASA said, we should go to the moon because of prestige, and that matters in the Cold War in a geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. I think we're going there for prestige. So I question in the long run, do we really know why we would want to stay there? And I think we know the answer to this in the next,

you know, it's 2026 right now in the next four-ish years. Why are we going back to the moon? Why is China going to the moon? If we really don't stay, we really can't convince anyone that there's a reason to stay, I think that answers my two questions. And so I think that's why, to a certain degree, I think we'll know over the next few years how we feel about that. So to me, that's the thing that I'm waiting for. What is that, do we really have a sustaining presence or does the second

moon race end up like the first? And we really can't figure out why we're there. Yeah. Well, there are lofty questions. I mean, I'll be fascinated to see myself just as someone who's much more of a layman on this issue, but, you know, who is really interested to see the trajectory of this question, especially, you know, as it relates, unfortunately, to increasing conflict and tension across the world and how this factors in. Well, Clayton, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation. And my last question to you is just for our listeners who want to continue following along with your work and the story, where would be the best place for them to do that. Yeah, thanks, Will. Yeah, great chat. Yeah, you could go to the CSIS

website at c sys.org and just look up my name somehow i'm identified as a scholar on that website and you can see the other things that i write about and speak about awesome well thanks so much again for your time no thanks you well appreciate it bye our executive editor and founder is me is jacall and our executive producer is john lull today's episode was edited and engineered by dewey thomas our editorial staff is led by managing editor rie whitesman with senior editor will Kayback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership,

please visit our website at retangle.com.