five questions for Charles Miller
advising NASA, reducing poverty, reaching Mach 25
This is the first in a series of Space Jam email interviews with leading space experts.
Charles Miller is a senior commercial space executive with over 35 years experience in commercial space and national space policy, who has raised more than $100 million for commercial space ventures. Most recently, he served as the head of the NASA beachhead team for the Trump-Vance transition. You can read his full bio below.
1) When did you get into thinking about space?
As a young kid I started reading science fiction, starting with Tom Swift in the second grade, and then quickly graduating to Heinlein, Niven, Asimov and Clarke.
2) What’s been your greatest experience in the space economy?
I have had lots of great experiences — it is never a boring moment in space! I have had the pleasure of working with many very smart people, working on big and hard problems over my 40-year space career. It is hard to pick one, but I will pick two.
In the 1990s, I was part of a ‘band of space pirates’ or ‘space revolutionaries’ who changed U.S. national law and policy that enabled everything big happening in commercial space today. Margaret Mead was right: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I lived that truth.
SpaceX would not exist today without the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which created a legal requirement for NASA to buy commercial space station cargo delivery services. Elon gives credit to NASA, but it was these commercial space policy revolutionaries who persuaded our elected national leaders to pass this law that forced NASA to buy commercial space cargo delivery.
The history books record that SpaceX was out of cash, and was a month from not making payroll, and could not raise money … when NASA called and said “you have a $1.6B contract”. Suddenly SpaceX could raise money. What the history books forget is that NASA would never have given SpaceX a $1.6 Billion contract for ISS cargo delivery in 2008, if it had not been for the small band of space pirates — led by the people in Space Frontier Foundation and ProSpace — who persuaded Congress and the White House that this was the right thing to do. It was the law, and only the law, because of this small band of committed citizens.
Second, I am perhaps most proud about creating the commercial company, Lynk, that invented ‘satellite direct to standard’ phone technology, and brought it into reality. Back in 2015-2016, everybody said “that is impossible”. We figured out how to do it, and then proved that a small satellite could connect to a ‘two ways’ with a standard unmodified mobile phone. This technology is going to affordably connect billions of people, and is going to change lives everywhere. Personally, I think it will help pull the next billion people out of poverty.
Today, everybody agrees that ‘satellite direct to phone’ or ‘direct to cell’ is a huge business category that the world needs. The largest companies in the world are jumping in with both feet. Copying is the sincerest form of flattery.
3) What can you tell us about your experience guiding the current administration’s NASA transition team?
We have a great opportunity to transform the relationship between private industry and NASA. China is coming on fast, and unless we transform that relationship, I fear that China will dominate the emerging space industries the same way they now dominate ship-building, drones, electric cars, and rare earths.
NASA is an amazing institution, which has huge potential to advance the large-scale development of space in partnership with American entrepreneurs, but it clearly needed new leadership who understood commercial industry and who had both the knowledge and experience needed, and the trust of our elected leaders. Fortunately, we now have Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator, who has demonstrated a great deal of ability. He is bringing brand new thinking to NASA … and Jared has about 2.5 more years to institute real change.
4) What’s the most overlooked space policy issue?
If I had to pick one thing: most people do not appreciate how hard that Mach 25 ‘full and rapid reusability’ is. It is very hard … it is the tyranny of E=MV-squared. A reusable Mach 25 second stage must dissipate 25-times the heat as a reusable Mach 5 first stage.
Personally, I don’t think that our current technologies that SpaceX is trying to implement on Starship are good enough. Those ‘thermal protection system’ (TPS) technologies were invented 20-30 years ago by NASA. We shut off the early-stage R&D in TPS technologies in the 1990s and early 2000s, and now we are paying the price.
Elon has said “Mach 25 reusability is very very hard” … but I think people are not listening. Elon is basically saying “this may not work”.
As a student of reusable launch vehicles, I agree. I would actually say that these TPS technologies almost certainly will NOT be good enough for Starship achieve full-and-rapid reusability. With an emphasis on the ‘rapid’ part. We can do, and need to do, much better.
5) If you could design a space mission, and money and bureaucracy were no concern, what would be its name and objective?
I would do one thing: I would make achieving Mach 25 full-and-rapid reusability — in partnership with America’s entrepreneurs — into our top national space priority. I would call it ‘Ultra-Low-Cost Access to Space’.
In the last ten years, we have gone from flights per month to space to flights per week. We are on the verge of flights per day to space. If we achieve Mach 25 full-and-rapid reusability, we will see flights per hour. This will change everything. Ultra-Low Cost Access to Space is the sine qua non of our future in space. Whoever gets to ULCATS first, wins.
With this one breakthrough — which is finally within our reach — we will then see permanent large scale human settlements on the Moon, and on Mars, and people traveling throughout the Solar System. We will see millions of people living and working in space. All we need to do is ‘solve the Mach 25 full-and-rapid reusability challenge’. Meaning that we need to solve for E=MV-squared … and dissipate the huge amount of heat caused by re-entering at Mach 25.
If we do this one thing … all those science fiction books that we read as kids … become reality.
Bio
Charles Miller is a senior commercial space executive with over 35 years experience in commercial space and national space policy, who has raised more than $100 million for commercial space ventures. Most recently, Miller served as the head of the NASA beachhead team for the Trump-Vance transition.
In 2017, he was co-founder and CEO of Lynk Global, Inc., the inventor of satellite-direct-to-phone technology, also known as direct-to-cell, a technology many thought impossible. In 2008, he was the co-founding CEO of Nanoracks LLC, the world’s first successful commercial space station company, which was sold to Voyager Space.
Miller also served as Principle Investigator of the USAF Fast Space study that recommended that the DOD set up a new organization optimized for ‘speed’ leading to the creation of the Space Development Agency, and as the Principle Investigator of the Evolvable Lunar Architecture study funded by NASA, which led to the creation of the NASA commercial Human Lander System and Commercial Lunar Payload Services programs. He also served as NASA Senior Advisor for Commercial Space.