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Howdy & happy Tuesday folks. Humans have now lived off the planet, without a single gap, for 26 years and counting. On Nov. 2, 2000, Navy SEAL turned astronaut and Per Aspera contributor Bill Shepherd led Expedition 1 through the hatch of the International Space Station.
Keep reading for some alpha on what it took to keep a program this technically, politically, and financially fraught alive: the war stories, the backroom deals, and the hard lessons from the people who willed the thing into existence.
Astronauts have voted from orbit since 1997, when Texas rewrote its election code to allow David Wolf to file a ballot from Mir (!). If Americans can exercise the franchise from 250 miles up, you can too.
Hopefully you’ve already cast your ballot. For the procrastinators out there… polls are still open, so get out there and vote. 🇺🇸
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
📊 Five charts, one hot streak
🧾 Drone boats, old birds, the vote
🧑🏻🚀 ISS lore: 26 years off the planet
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Here are five charts in no particular order we’ve been thinking about over the last week.
001 // MFG ORDER BOOK. American manufacturers ordered $4.76B of machine tools and other manufacturing technology through August, per AMT. August alone came in at $732.9M, the third-best month AMT has ever logged and the sixth straight over half a billion, the longest run in records that go back to 1998. Aerospace has taken a growing share since the rally began in September 2024, and at the midyear point, contract machine shops were outgrowing the market. Exhibit A is SendCutSend, the upload-a-drawing job shop that cuts and machines parts for Anduril, Waymo, and 60% of the Fortune 500. It recently raised a Series B at $2.1B, doubling its valuation from May, committed $63M to a new 200,000 sqft. plant in Pittston, PA, and created 90 U.S. manufacturing jobs last month alone. “We’re hiring and machines are landing,” says SCS Founder Jim Belosic. You truly love to see it. 🇺🇸
Data source: AMT. One caveat: AMT counts dollars, so pricier, more automated machines and imports are in the number alongside unit growth.
002 // BACKLOG BAROMETER. Four of the biggest U.S. primes added $330B to their backlogs in a year, per Q3 results. RTX is sitting on a record $340B after $81B+ of new awards in the quarter alone. Lockheed's book hit a record $292B, driven almost entirely by missile defense. General Dynamics doubled to $220.3B on a 6.8-to-1 book-to-bill quarter, courtesy of Virginia- and Columbia-class subs. Northrop, the slowest grower of the bunch, is up ~20% to $109.6B. The next generation of defense startups talks a lot of smack about the primes. What better way to clap back than to burn down these backlogs, cut cycle times, adopt a more commercial mindset, and deliver on schedule and on budget?
003 // SPACEX'S BEST CUSTOMER. Of the 2,244 tons SpaceX put in orbit last year, 88% was its own Starlink hardware, per Jonathan McDowell's GCAT catalog, up from 30% in 2019. Falcon 9 going away continues to make for unpleasant headlines for the industry, and while it may not have been priced in, it shouldn't have caught us by such surprise. The direction of travel has been clear for years (#067), and the closest thing new space has to an article of faith (that $/kg keeps falling) was already unraveling. Time for the industry to grow up, as a certain personality in the Per Aspera cinematic universe will argue in an upcoming op-ed…
004 // WHO LIVES WHERE. Our fourth chart comes courtesy of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), whose unclassified, 130-page Challenges to Security in Space report turned heads when released last week. If that up-close photo of China’s spaceplane graced your timeline/chat apps last week, the DIA report is why. The Russia chapter reads like a police blotter (Cosmos 2576 stalking a U.S. bird in 2024, another flying danger close this year, and Peresvet dazzling lasers at five missile divisions), the China chapter covers scale (22 launches in 2016 → 93 in 2025) and closing the capability gap, and there’s a weapons appendix ranging from robotic arms to high-power microwaves to “chemical sprayers.” This is the longer version of what Ryan wrote in #067: that life on orbit often looks more like Star Wars than Star Trek; it corroborates the threat Dan warned about in #065; and it’s central to Jeff’s investing thesis at IceNine.
A census on who’s moving in where in the neighborhood: 22 birds in highly elliptical orbit, 572 in GEO, 271 in MEO, and 95% (15,000+) having taken up residence in the low ring.
005 // WE'RE IN OUR MEGAPROJECT ERA. Ten of the biggest projects under way in America add up to ~$556B of announced investment, and only one is a datacenter. Two of them, TSMC and Micron, are on the same AI Supercycle path. But there are also LNG terminals up and down the Gulf, a $5.8B steel mill in Louisiana, a Philly shipyard aiming to go from fewer than two ships a year to 20, and SunZia, one of the biggest clean energy projects ever built in the U.S., which came online this summer. Hope springs eternal, and we’re hopelessly conflicted here (biased in favor of the builders). And we recognize a chart of announcements is a chart of promises, and that the press-release economy runs well ahead of the real one. But this time really does seem different, like we’ve said enough to three decades of physical stagnation, decided that more power would in fact be nice, and remembered that a nation of designers and marketers must also be a nation of manufacturers… ¡Viva la revolución!
001 // GULF ROBOTS… Last month, Seasats sent a fleet of Lightfish drone boats from the Texas coast into the Gulf of America to watch for drug runners and other unsavory characters, working for the Pentagon's homeland defense office. Seasats has had its Lightfish boats patrolling the Rio Grande since January; each is ~11 ft, 340 lbs, solar-powered, and capable of station-keeping for months. The San Diego company recently opened a 60,000+ sqft. facility, about 5x the size of its old building, passed 100 employees, and plans to grow an additional 50% next year. Proud investor alert: Seasats is an IceNine company, and our own Jeff Crusey has been fishing in these waters for a while (#067). More generally, we want to get smarter on the robots at sea beat (and subsea… and subterranean for that matter). Send in ideas, people to talk to, and trends to watch!
002 // NEW BRAINS, OLD BIRDS… Since 1963, Sierra Nevada Corp. has made a living retrofitting airframes the military already owns and giving them a new lease on life. On Oct. 27, SNC picked Skyryse (a PA Founding Sponsor 🇺🇸) to bring SkyOS, the fly-by-wire system that swaps a helicopter’s collective, cyclic, and pedals for a single stick and a touchscreen, into the fixed- and rotary-wing fleets SNC already modifies. "The fastest way to modernize a fleet is to upgrade the aircraft already in it," says founder/CEO Mark Groden, a lesson that scales more generally to things like our reactor fleet!
Skyryse’s firefighting Black Hawk (in development) 🔥
003 // THE DATACENTER ELECTION??? The following three things can all be true: 1) datacenters are good for America, 2) they are historically unpopular and politically corrosive, and 3) the election taking place today is not primarily about datacenters (that is to say, it is not the datacenter election)…
Question from a national NBC News poll, c/o Steve Everley (via X)
004 // “THE AI ELECTION” The AI industry knows the status quo can’t hold, and OpenAI in particular is trying to attack the unpopularity problem head on and behind the scenes. This week it launched the Grid Protectors Program, a pledge that future campuses will throttle power draw, by up to 1 GW, when the local grid is under strain, and pay the costs they create. The frontier lab is also preparing a full policy and PR blitz following the midterms, per Axios, starting with a rebrand of datacenters as “AI compute campuses.” Chris Lehane, OpenAI chief global affairs officer, has already sent a memo titled “2028: The AI Election” to a half-dozen prospective presidential candidates, arguing AI will be the top issue of the next cycle and that 2028 “has echoes of 1932.” Which leaves us wondering: What would FDR have to say about AI?
Re: the 26th bday of continuous human presence in space… Want to hear something crazy? Kids graduating high school at the end of this school year have never known a day without humans living off the planet.
We want to extend a massive, unauthorized pat on the back to our very own Dan Goldin, the NASA boss who got the ISS built and picked Bill Shepherd (“Shep”) to QB the first expedition, and who has no idea we wrote this and would never have given us his blessing to do so. Equally deserved is a massive congratulations to the tens of thousands of people out there — many of you included — who played some part in designing, assembling, launching, maintaining, and upgrading the thing, not to mention getting precious souls and cargo there and back.
Up top we promised some firsthand accounts, lessons, and war stories from building the ISS that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Here they are:
Nothing to show. By 1992, Space Station Freedom had burned through ~$11B without a single flight article, not even the “sky hook” you need to start the whole business. So Dan merged it with the Russians and called it the ISS (#018).
One vote. In June 1993, the whole program survived a House vote 216-215. Rep. John Lewis cast the deciding ballot and saved the station. Fitting reading for Election Day.
Expedition 1 was Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, with Shep as the lone American and commander. In Case Study: Building the ISS, Dan and Shep tell the inside story of how a program with nothing to show for itself became a machine that has run 26 years without a gap: Russians at the redesign table in Crystal City, Shep forward-deploying to Star City for years, four NASA/contractor fiefdoms folded into one, and the absolute imperative of “squeaky clean lines of authority.”
The weld that saved the ISS. In Friction Stir Welding, we recall how an obscure 1991 British patent rescued the Shuttle’s external tank, and with it the ISS. This technique flew 100+ times without a failure, and is now how much of the world joins aluminum.
A promise kept. Dan promised the station would go up by the end of the 20th century. "It went up, by the way, November 2nd of 2000," he told an audience last year. (Purists will note the century ran through Dec. 31, 2000. Made it with just a few weeks to spare!)
Dan's case for what comes next: In The ISS at 25 last year, the man who fought to build the Station shares why he thinks it should come down, and where the $3B/yr could go instead.
SEVENTY FIVE EXPEDITIONS ONWARDS, some 298 astronauts from 26 countries have come through the hatch. It wasn’t always easy… in fact, it was never easy… and that is the point: people showing up and doing hard things, every single day, for 26 years and counting.
It also paved the way for what comes next. As NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said yesterday:
“The research and advances made possible by our crews, teams on the ground and international partners have helped prepare us to live and work on the Moon and Mars. As we transition to the next era of our presence in low Earth orbit, we build on everything they have made possible.”
It took 37 Shuttle flights to bolt the Station together. On one of them, STS-92 in October 2000, the 100th Shuttle mission ever, astronaut Koichi Wakata operated the robotic arm that berthed the Z1 truss, the first piece of the backbone. Wakata, a 5× space flyer who would become ISS’s first Japanese commander, put it this way yesterday:
“To this day the station remains a place where we expand knowledge for life on Earth and prepare for the next steps beyond — a lasting testament to what international partnership and persistence can achieve.”
Hope you’re feeling fired up to run through some walls and go win the rest of your week. For any American readers still lingering around down here who haven’t already voted, go vote!
And with that, your crew at Per Aspera is signing off for Edition #069. We'll see y'all back here next Tuesday.
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