The Historic Inflection Point in Commercial Space: A Conversation with Charles Miller
Charles Miller, a veteran of the commercial space industry and head of the NASA landing team for the Trump-Vance transition, will be speaking at Orbit.CityAge.com on February 27th in Washington DC to talk about America’s space future. He told CityAge’s Miro Cernetig about the historic “inflection point” we are in on the commercialization of this booming sector.
CityAge: You’ve been working in commercial space for a long time. How has the perception of the industry changed?
Charles Miller: Commercial space, once viewed negatively, is now mainstream. I’ve been involved in turning the “ship of state” toward commercialization for 40 years. Earlier space entrepreneurs failed because NASA had a monopoly and investors were reluctant to compete against the government. It took several decades to reach the “New Space age,” an era I was critically involved in, which is now characterized by significant money, innovation, and change.
CityAge: I see parallels between the current developments in space and the discovery of the “new world” — that state-sponsored exploration eventually leads to capitalist involvement, such as the East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, which establish trade routes and exploit resources. Are we seeing that same transition now?
Charles Miller: We are. That’s exactly the transition we’ve been working on for 40 years – moving from government monopoly to commercial involvement.
CityAge: Our upcoming space event stems from encounters like one with Space Tango. This isn’t just an event but the beginning of a campaign to bring leaders together in a multi-disciplinary setting. At City Age, we’re trying to link “looking up” at space opportunities with “looking down” at opportunities on Earth — addressing how infrastructure, telecommunications, education, and Earth observation data are all interconnected with space.
Charles Miller: That’s important work. These connections are crucial to understanding the full scope of what’s happening.
CityAge: Where do you see the future of commercial space heading?
Charles Miller: The Moon, asteroid resources, mining, and large-scale commercial space industrialization are the future. This is what we need to focus on.
CityAge: What makes this moment different from previous eras in space development?
Charles Miller: We are in the middle of a major inflection point for full and rapid reusability, a vision I have championed since the late 1980s and 1990s. Driven by frequent, lower-cost, and reliable access to space, launches are rapidly increasing from once per week to being “within spitting distance of launches per day,” after which we will see launches per hours. This is likened to a Moore’s Law for space.
CityAge: The Artemis program is NASA’s flagship lunar initiative. What’s your assessment?
Charles Miller: The Artemis program has a big problem in that it currently costs about two and a half billion dollars just for launch to Earth orbit. Everybody is now waking up to the threat from China – to leap frog over us – and are realizing that a permanent human base on the Moon cannot be built with current Artemis technology. It is unaffordable. More broadly speaking, space industrialization is unaffordable built on this tech base. We need a pivot to much lower cost technologies and approaches pioneered by commercial companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space and others.
CityAge: What role should the government play in this new space age?
Charles Miller: The US adopted a laissez-faire approach to aviation after the Wright brothers, allowing Europe to surpass the US within a few years due to their deep government subsidies to their own entrepreneurial companies. This laissez-faire attitude led to the US falling so far behind by World War I that America had to build British and French planes. It took us 20 years to recapture world leadership through government partnerships via organizations like the NACA and airmail from the US post office, who saw it as their mission to accelerate and support America’s aviation entrepreneurs. The strategy worked brilliantly.
The historical evidence supports a partnership strategy, combining the “best of government and the best of commercial entrepreneurial innovation”. This strategy outperforms both pure government control and pure laissez-faire commercial libertarianism. This is why, and how, China is leap-frogging us today in so many industries. They are using our own strategy against us.
History is very clear on this. We either do what works – and leverage the American entrepreneur – or we will cede world leadership in space.
Charles Miller will lead a one-hour discussion at CityAge Orbit on February 27th in Washington, DC on the impact of President Donald Trump’s executive order on space superiority, which Miller helped influence.
( Charles Miller has over 35 years experience in commercial space. Most recently, Miller served as co-founding CEO of Lynk Global, Inc. (Lynk) the creator of satellite-direct-to-standard-phone (sat2phone) that has become the hottest category in the satellite industry.
Miller’s prior startup was Nanoracks LLC, which delivered more than 700 payloads to date to the International Space Station (ISS) and was sold to Voyager Space in 2021. Miller led the “Fast Space” study for the USAF in 2016 that led to the creation of the Space Development Agency, which has a 5-year budget of over $25 billion. Miller led the “Evolvable Lunar Architecture” study for NASA that recommended that NASA adopt commercial partnerships for a human return to the Moon. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine adopted this recommendation leading to a $2.9B lunar lander contract with SpaceX and a $3.4B lunar lander contract with Blue Origin.)
