There was a time when human activity in outer space was a highly centralized, government-led endeavor, says Professor and Senior Associate Dean Matthew Weinzierl. But that era has passed: Over the past two decades, a calcified space bureaucracy has given way to a vibrant space economy dominated by private companies that have drastically lowered launch costs while pioneering new technologies.

This infusion of competition and innovation has led to an increasingly symbiotic relationship between the government and the commercial space economy in one specific area: national security. In their new book, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier, Weinzierl and his coauthor Brendan Rosseau—a former teaching fellow and research associate at HBS who now works for Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin—explore how the commercial space revolution became the not-so-secret weapon in the modern space race and what that means for the future of the sector. Space has long had national security implications, Weinzierl says. The very first forays into orbit took place against the backdrop of the Cold War, as the United States and the USSR, vying for military and technological dominance, established space programs that combined peaceful exploration and scientific research with military and intelligence activities.

But the salience of space to global national security has only grown as military services and civilian economies alike have become more dependent on orbital satellites for communications, data transmission, and remote-sensing capabilities. Space-based assets can ensure better battlefield communications and weapons-targeting systems, as well as track human migration, document the effects of climate change, help direct disaster relief, and monitor conflicts around the globe. At the same time, what was once a bipolar race between two superpowers has evolved into a more complex and unpredictable multipolar situation, with countries such as China and India establishing their own dual-use space programs and developing everything from lunar landers to antisatellite weaponry, Weinzierl acknowledges. The United States Department of Defense now considers space to be a “war-fighting domain,” and military planners assume that the next major conflict will begin in space. Case in point: Russia began its invasion of Ukraine by jamming the civilian communications satellites used by the Ukrainian military.

Maintaining a technological edge in space has therefore become crucial to national security. And as the main source of dynamism and innovation in the space sector, “the American space startup ecosystem is the single greatest advantage of America and its allies in the national security competition,” Weinzierl says. Sustaining that advantage has become a matter of policy. The US military, for example, not only buys services from private space enterprises but also invests heavily in them. “The leading space companies are pushing the technological envelope so fast that if you want to be at the cutting edge of space technology—and our national security establishment does—you’re going to be looking at those startups,” Weinzierl says.

Military funding has been a boon to space startups that have seen capital markets cool in recent years, especially as the business case for many space-based activities—such as space mining and microgravity manufacturing of specialized materials like semiconductors and optical fibers—could take a while to develop. “If you want to stay alive as a startup, one place where there are stickier sources of funding is the national security side of things,” Weinzierl says.

The creation of this new “military-celestial complex”—as Weinzierl and Rosseau call it—raises questions about how deeply national security priorities are influencing the commercial space sector. So far, they say, the military appears to be respecting the marketplace. “The Defense Department seems to have embraced one of the fundamental ideas of this commercial revolution in space, which is that the government should be only one customer among many,” Weinzierl says. “As long as we keep that balance, we’re not going to get too far away from what the market would want and therefore what will create value more broadly.”

The spillovers from innovation in the commercial space sector are also highly ecumenical. A space-based system capable of detecting troop movements, for instance, can just as easily gather data on supply chains. “This isn’t all guns and bullets and lasers,” says Rosseau.

More broadly, space has become a place for economic growth and value creation. And those, too, can contribute to national security. “There’s a lot of really good evidence that when economies are growing, things tend to be more peaceful,” says Weinzierl. “And so to the extent that space can do that, it will redound to all of us, in a national security sense.”

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