Jess Sponable, Friday, 5-30-25

The Space Show

Jess Sponable returned to the program to discuss his recent Op-Ed on NASA, aerospace and the defense sectors needing more entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. While Jess spent time with us explaining what he meant when he and others advocated for more of these folks in management and leadership, most of our program discussion was a mega-example of the need for innovation in R&D, problem solving, financing and such. Over and over again he stressed the need for the entrepreneurial type for leadership, even within the government structure of public organizations or government agencies. Jess used his experiences in the past for excellent supportive illustrations plus he talked about the early 1950's, 60's and 70's history with commercial and military jets, X-planes and flight in general. He focused on motivation while making the point that entrepreneurial type leadership would serve to motivate people. We talked about returning to the Moon, Mars, SpaceX, Musk and Starship as examples along with Starlink. The Golden Dome project was an additional large part of our focus with Jess making a call for it to be space based in design, not terrestrial or Earth-based with Earth-based infrastructure. Jess explained why he said it needed to be space developed but he was not sure this would be the approach taken by Golden Dome planners and designers. We did talk about the degree of protection we would get from Golden Dome plus obvious security gaps that would not have such protection as mentioned by one of our listeners regarding ships and port vulnerability. Dallas called as we were talking about developing a cislunar economic infrastructure plus the Blue Origin designs coming up. Jess mentioned competing rocket companies including Stoke Space, Rocket Lab and Blue as the companies driving down the launch costs which he said was absolutely crucial to get below $100/lb to LEO. Toward the end of the program our guest was asked about progress in human spaceflight medicine. Jess spent a few minutes at the end of the program to go over some the information on this subject and talked about spinning stations and more but we must get the price to LEO down and entrepreneurial leadership was what was needed. Other topics came up including the experience Jess brought to our discussion by his earlier work with DC-X, reusable VTOL Launch, DARPA and the Air Force. Before ending we squeezed in a short discussion on his New Frontier Aerospace company hypersonic flight project which would enable west coast to Asia in a few hours by skimming across the top of the stratosphere. Do not miss this concluding discussion to today's program. Jess said he would return after their demo flight next year. We wish him and our industry great success in moving forward, including handling the political, budget and policy challenges faced at this time. Check out the full summary at www.thespaceshow.com for this program plus the summary on doctorspace.substack.com.