Aerospace Corp's CEO talks literal moonshots and Space Agenda 2025

At this year's TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, President and CEO of the Aerospace Corporation Steve Isakowitz and Agency Chief Technologist at NASA A. C. Charanya Charania took the stage to discuss a literal moonshot: how to build a thriving lunar ecosystem. Today on Equity, we’re taking you behind the scenes of TechCrunch Disrupt once again, this time with Devin Coldewey at the helm. For those keeping track, Devin’s kept the Equity podcast crew up to date on space startups over the past few months, including Starfish Space’s $29 million round and, more recently, SpaceX’s second commercial deal for the Starship lunar lander with Lunar Outpost. Listen to the full conversation to hear Devin and Steve Isakowitz discuss: What the path ahead looks like for space startups The shift away from government-dominated space programs to a more commercial landscape And what’s in store for Aerospace Corporation in 2025. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and we’ll be back on Friday for a special episode from our sister podcast, Found. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What one piece of advice would you give to someone looking to build a space business?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  You don't have to reinvent everything. You don't have to create everything. Leverage the services and capabilities that are out there and how can you build on top of that? Build on top of the internet, let's say. You don't have to, in terms of the internet analogy, you don't have to build a payment system. You don't have to build TCP IP anymore. You don't have to build a browser. Build your business assuming those things might exist. And then what could you do? And then how do you scale that very rapidly to get costs down? And then finally, if you're thinking about things, reusability. A lot of people are using that as a mechanism to enable all these things to get costs down and access up.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Last question. If you're the next person to step on the moon, what would be your immortal words as you put that first footprint out?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think the future favors the bold. Let's go boldly.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Okay. I'd probably just yell out, "We're back."

• 1:03Speaker 00

  AC, I want to thank you. It's a great conversation and this is a really exciting area and I'm really excited about the work that you're doing now and well into the future.

• 1:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bellan and this is our Wednesday episode where we home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. The voices you just heard were Steve Isakowitz, the president and CEO of Aerospace Corporation, and AC Cherania, agency chief technologist at NASA. The pair took to the stage at this year's TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco to discuss a literal moonshot: how to build a thriving lunar ecosystem. We'll have a link to the full onstage conversation in our show notes, but today, we're taking you behind the scenes of TechCrunch Disrupt once again, this time with my co-host, Devin Coldewey at the helm. For those keeping track, Devin has kept the Equity crew up to date on space startups over the past few months, including Starfish Spaces' $29 million round

• 2:03Rebecca Bellan?

  and more recently SpaceX's second commercial deal for the starship Lunar Lander with lunar outpost. Today, we have for you a conversation between Devin and Steve when they caught up backstage at Disrupt. The two discuss what the path ahead looks like for space startups, the shift away from government-dominated space programs to a more commercial landscape, and what's in store for Aerospace Corporation in 2025. Let's take a listen.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Steve, can you tell me a little bit about this huge new Space Agenda 2025 report? There's a lot in this report. I admit I have not read all of it, but what I did read was very interesting. Some of it was more theoretical, some of it was more practical. What are the things you think have the most important takeaways for our sort of like, you know, younger, more innovation-focused leadership or readers?

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Thanks, Devin. I would argue that the space industry is going through some of the most dynamic changes of any industry, whether it's technology, whether it's change in the industrial base, whether it's change in the government importance on it, and the opportunity to see tremendous growth, maybe more so than other industries. The Space Agenda 2025 was timed for the fact that every four years, we have a national election and new leadership comes into town, as well as people that are currently there that are trying to take a refresh on where we stand in space. So at Aerospace Corporation, we put that together to try to go after some of the most important issues that we believe policymakers

• 3:28Speaker 00

  and people that are having to make critical decisions should be thinking about in this time.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  And so what do you think, like, when we're here at a tech conference, you know, there's a lot of investments in, you know, startups and innovation. There's space startups, all kinds of space startups. They're great. We had a bunch on stage.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  What do you think is the most, some of the most relevant takeaways from the report for the population here? They're looking at the, you know, very early-stage stuff. Does that come into it at all?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that's been interesting in space is, again, if you look at the, you know, 60-year history of space, it's always been dominated by the government, right? It was all the United States versus the Soviet Union, the Apollo program, space shuttle, space stations, national security building, these Battlestar Galactica kind of capabilities that are out there. And there really was no room for really commercial activity, other than maybe communication satellites.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  But even those took like hundreds of millions of dollars. It was really the big players that were involved. The technology has changed and the economics have changed dramatically in the last 10 or 15 years. Whether it's new launch vehicles like SpaceX that have dropped by 10x the price of getting into space, advances in electronics. That allowed us to build satellites at a fraction of the size. So in the old days, if you want to start up, great. Get your check for a hundred million dollars and you're in. Today, literally for a million dollars, you can do an initial demonstration of a capability that would actually start to get investors. So because of that, we are seeing a complete change in the industrial base. And the government, in terms of purchasing those kinds of capabilities and supporting it through regulations,

• 5:02Speaker 00

  sees the fact that the government is no longer dominant. So directly to your question, whereas years ago, there was not a big place for commercial and entrepreneurship in space, that is reversed today.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  So how do you support that with policies, with new initiatives within the government, within, you know, the State Department, within the Defense, within all these departments? There's so many different programs, so many different names and funds. It's hard to imagine like being a startup and saying, oh yeah, let's go to, you know, NOAA and get a grant, rather than saying, let's go down to Sand Hill Road and get a couple of million bucks from Founder's Fund or whatever.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, there's a couple of things. If you want to get into the space biz, it's still a regulated business. You know, whether it is you're trying to do spectrum allocation, you have to get approval for that. If you want to launch something, it's got to make sure, you know, that it's safe to be able to have those things happen. If you want to take pictures of some space, you can only take pictures of certain things and of certain qualities that have to be approved. So there's still sort of this government oversight that you still need to interact with. Even if you're saying it's a pure commercial play, there's still that aspect of it. Now, the government is trying to make it easier for new ideas to come to the forefront. So if you can raise private money, that's best of all. That's probably a best place to start. But the government is trying to provide easier on-ramps to be able to start to provide some initial funds

• 6:20Speaker 00

  to help to steer some of those products in the way that the government can use. The big challenge is for those companies who say, you know, I need the government to be a major anchor tenant in terms of bringing this thing to market or keeping it sustainable in the long run. That's where it's more challenging, where you've got to find those major customers and try to help them solve their hard problems. But the government is not good at, is the government's so used to doing specifications on exactly not only what they want. But how it's designed and how it should be built. And that's the part where the government and my company Aerospace Corporation, we're spending time with the government to try to find out ways. Can we get 80, 90% of what we want, but get it much sooner and much less expensively from a taxpayer's standpoint than we could otherwise?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  That's the part that has really become very interesting the last few years.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Obviously, a lot of this has shifted due to the war in Ukraine, which has been a huge activator for a lot of different, I don't even know how to say it. It's such a huge effect on what is being funded, what is considered realistic in aerospace, in defense. What has been the effects of this really like extremely, it's such an influential conflict. Obviously, we don't want to make light of the seriousness of the conflict, but like it has had global effects on how things are developed and paid for globally. We're talking about like from Starlink to new companies appearing in the battlefield. It's crazy to see how fast things are moving. Do you think that that has had an effect on what our government

• 7:47Speaker 03

  and also what private actors are thinking of investing in and paying attention to?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  You know, absolutely. I think what's interesting about Ukraine is we tend to think of wars as governments bringing the best of their tanks and their stealth bombers to play in this thing. You know, wars right now are being fought with some pretty high tech in some pretty low tech ways, like drone technology, which has completely changed the landscape of Ukraine. What made Ukraine particularly interesting is Ukraine didn't really have a space program. Russia has had, you know, one of the probably top three superpowers with regards. So you would think they had total advantage. But almost overnight, the Ukrainians were able through commercial technology, whether it's through Starlink for communications, whether it was through companies like Planet or Maxar, to provide images from space to be able to bring commercial into the public domain.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  So even as Putin was saying, I'm not going to invade, it was actually commercial satellites that were taking pictures that proved him wrong. So suddenly nations from around the world are like, well, wait a minute. Not only could we tap into this commercial activity, we should also grow our own industries as well. So now you're seeing a lot of nations much more interested. And the United States is trying to figure out how through its allies to bring them together. And in fact, there's some examples now where the US is actually buying some commercial activities, capabilities from overseas.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  I think that's remarkable. The acceleration has been so fast. You know, Ukraine is a very sort of dire example, but it doesn't have to be warfare that activates this kind of thing. It just, this is a very extreme example of, like you said, there was nothing, and then there was something. And the only way you go directly from nothing to something is using, by saying, "I will buy this capability. I will take advantage of this. Yes, we will redirect that satellite. Those assets are already in play." It's pretty remarkable.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the US government was sort of underestimating what commercial could do. Again, they tend to think of all those small satellites, I'm sure there's some market for it over there. But when they start to see some of the exquisite capabilities that were coming back, the rapid deployment at which these things are done, the low cost from which you can get these things out in the field, suddenly the US government was doing like a double take, saying, "All right, this is the real thing." So now, that's why I think the government is much more engaged, seeing examples like that. And even like a lot of the natural disasters that are happening around the country where, you know, communications are being knocked out, the ability through things like GPS and direct-to-downlink from satellites directly to cellphone capability, those kind of capabilities has really been an awakening for the government.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Well, let me ask you this as a last question. There's a lot of policy recommendations and like ideas swirling around in this big report. If there's one thing, I mean, I hate to make you boil it all down to one thing, but if there's one specific policy that you really hope, or one specific program that you've nurtured, that you are like, "Hey, this is going to be really important for the next five to 10 years. Let's make sure that it gets the attention and care that it deserves." What would you say that thing is?

• 10:39Speaker 00

  I think it has to be policies that encourage the various agencies to leverage, wherever possible, to pursue those kind of commercial services first, before they go out and start building their own bespoke capabilities within those agencies.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Right. Just giving them that green light and just saying like, "Go do it. Go ask around."

• 11:00Speaker 00

  But it's more than just "go do it." It is a cultural shift. You really have to incentivize these agencies. Because again, you know, there's all these government workers and existing contractors that for decades have been the ones that you go to to build these things, under government specifications. Now here comes these upstarts saying, you know, we'll just send you the service. You know, you just tell us where to take the picture or where you need the communications capability. That is the part that it's really a cultural shift that's really got to be led out of the White House, the National Space Council, and policies that are enforced for agencies to take advantage of this new capability. And I think that sends a very powerful signal to the investor community that the government is serious about onramping these new capabilities, and that'll flow more investment.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it sounds a lot like it, yeah. Well, thanks for breaking that down for us, Steve. Always a pleasure to have you here, and I'm looking forward to seeing you at our next Shindig with Aerospace.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  All right, terrific. Thank you, Devin.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  All right.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Cal. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.