Space Symposium 2020: Where sci-fi meets national security

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Saturday, April 18, 2026

Space Race 2.0 is here. Washington Times National Security Correspondents John T. Seward and Ben Wolfgang are on the ground at Space Symposium 2026 with a look at how military, government, and private industry are converging in the race to dominate space.

[SEWARD] It feels like every conversation I’ve had is talking about things that edge us closer and closer in reality to the sci-fi genre that I grew up with.

[WOLFGANG] It’s amazing. I mean, stuff that really just seems so far-fetched into the future is now, like, closer to becoming a reality. Something like a base on the moon. Like an actual lunar base, including a nuclear reactor, on the moon. We’re hearing about potential data centers in orbit, on the moon, underground data centers being built on the moon.

All of this stuff, if you’d even five years ago, I think it would have been hard to keep a straight face if somebody had pitched some of that to you. But now you have officials, industry leaders talking about this stuff in real, concrete terms. And broadly speaking, one of the themes that’s jumped out to me are these two tracks in Space Race 2.0.

Whereas in Space Race 1.0 in the 1960s, you had the government, military, national security track — companies made money, certainly, off of space construction and the industry — but you didn’t have companies trying to make money in space, to do business in space. And we very much have that now. That’s a part of Space Race 2.0 — companies trying to figure out ways to make money in addition to this military and national security track. You put those two things together and you end up with this mind-blowing conference that we’re at this week.

[SEWARD] You talk about like economy in space, one of the things that’s come up — and I’ve talked to a couple of the industry partners, right? These are private companies that are doing supply for government. And then I’ve talked to a couple of government officials on this. We’re edging more and more into this idea of space as a warfare domain. One of the conversations that’s been happening — and mind you, it’s something that we’ve done for a very long time, but is now being used more in the warfare domain,”non-Earth imaging.” The idea that we’re going to take a satellite, it’s taking pictures of objects either here on Earth or solar and other extraterrestrial objects out in space.

And now we’re starting to point them at other satellites and point them at the moon for moon mapping. And not just for sort of that civilian application, but essentially to assist the Space Force in their operations. Just a mind-blowing thing. And again, pulling it full circle on this sort of sci-fi idea, we got a chance to talk to Jared Isaacman, the NASA Administrator. And he was very excited about a… interplanetary nuclear-powered spaceship.

[WOLFGANG] Amazing.

[SEWARD] That’s a nuts phrase to say.

They’re really leaning in to the development of a lot of smaller nuclear reactors, mobile nuclear reactors. And the goal, according to Isaacman, is to not wait till there’s a perfect solution, but instead to push forward with something that will actually make a nuclear-powered spacecraft, getting us further and further into our own solar system with manned spacecraft. So it’s absolutely phenomenal.

[WOLFGANG] There’s an energy here, and it sounds cliche to say it’s patriotism or whatever you want to say, but I think the Artemis mission kind of just injected an energy into all of this stuff that really we’ve been lacking in this country, in all facets of sort of the space industry, both privately and publicly in the government and in the private sector.

That’s there now. And you can feel it when you walk around Space Symposium that everybody does seem like, to a large degree, they’re kind of rowing in the same direction in terms of like… This is a major national security priority. And as Jared Isaacman told you, coming in second just is not an option for the United States of America.

[SEWARD] Absolutely. And a full congratulations to the Artemis crew — an amazing, successful mission going around the moon.