Happy Monday, and happy Fall, y’all. It’s good to be back in your inboxes — did you miss us? We’ve got an action-packed edition for you today, touching on the latest with Luna, what you all think will be the biggest Q4 story, why “slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” plus updates on creative industrial project financing, manufacturing jobs data, Starlink DTC, Project Kuiper, and more. Lots happening in the Renaissance, so let’s dig in.
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The Moon Is Back on the Menu
If you’re a space cadet, you’ve likely noticed the volume turning up on the Moon over the last few weeks: American timelines, Congressional hearings, China’s ambitious program, commercial landers, and a rising chorus of voices weighing in.
Below, you’ll find the unequivocal essentials: what’s happened, who’s saying what, and how the geopolitics of lunar access and operations are evolving. For now, we steer clear of interpretation. Consider this Field Note your scoreboard. The real analysis, the “why it matters and where we go from here,” is coming soon.
What’s Happening with the Lunar Discourse: A Brief Timeline
August 5: Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy (no relation to Per Aspera’s Ryan Duffy) announces the agency's accelerated plans to deploy a 100-kilowatt nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by the first quarter of fiscal year 2030. The move advances previous timelines that targeted the early-to-mid 2030s and represents a direct response to China and Russia's joint announcement to build an automated nuclear power facility on the Moon by 2035. "We are in a race to the Moon with China," Duffy declares, noting that the first nation to establish nuclear infrastructure "could potentially declare a keep-out zone" around strategic lunar real estate.
Early/Mid August: China conducts successful tests of its Lanyue lunar lander, marking the first demonstration of "extraterrestrial landing and takeoff" capabilities for a crewed spacecraft. Eric Berger of Ars Technica publishes his assessment: “China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon.”
Source: SpaceX
Late August: SpaceX conducts Starship Flight 10, achieving remarkable accuracy, with the ship splashing down just 3 meters from its target. Starship will serve as NASA’s Human Landing System for Artemis III, making every test flight critical for America’s future lunar lander.
On Sept. 2, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell posts on X: “Starting with Artemis 3, Starship will truly change the game. This is a race, not to repeat what has been done, but to do much more…Don’t bet against American innovation.”
Last week: The Senate Commerce Committee convenes a hearing titled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: How Congress and NASA Can Thwart China in the Space Race.” Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine testifies that under current schedules and funding, it is “highly unlikely” the U.S. will beat China back to the lunar surface.
His testimony echoes warnings from three former NASA human exploration heads who published an op-ed in SpaceNews, arguing that the current Artemis plan will not return the U.S. to the Moon before China, citing continuous delays in key program elements and mission complexity.
September 3: Duffy holds an all-hands meeting, telling NASA employees that “I’ll be damned if China beats us to the Moon.” That same day, former NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman acknowledges the complexity of America's lunar challenge while defending the ambitious approach: "I do agree we should be asking why taxpayers have spent [$100B+] trying to return to the Moon.” But, he argues, advances in orbital refueling and complex architectures are the price of admission for a sustainable lunar presence, not just a flags-and-footprints mission. In a separate post, he adds that “America will lead in this great adventure.”
This past Saturday, Sept. 6: The White House weighs in, backing up Duffy’s declaration that "America will win 'the second space race' against China." Duffy's promise: "We're going back to the Moon, and this time, when we plant our flag, we stay."
What’s missing in this swirl is strategic clarity.
Is the Moon a proving ground, a strategic minerals resource, a geopolitical prize, or a distraction from nearer-term needs? That debate is still wide open, and worth a deeper look. We’ll reserve the full analysis for a later date.
For now: America has been here before. The rhetoric can get chaotic, but the facts are these: The race is on, and the world is watching.
Stay tuned for more…
Catch your favorite Per Aspera duo 9th NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and Editor-in-Chief Ryan Duffy at the Space Economy Summit by Economist Impact, November 5–6, 2025 in Orlando. They'll join other industry experts to explore the next leap forward for space and the benefits to businesses here on Earth.
Register: Secure your spot here.
In our last dispatch, we asked: What will be the defining story of the rest of the year?
👇 Here’s what you had to say.
ONE NOTABLE RESPONSE
“I think as the general American populace starts to face the energy strain, energy will make more headlines. We are already experiencing higher electricity builds to offset data center demand, and MIT predicts that there will be rolling blackouts to keep data centers online by the end of 2026.”
Hey, it’s Jeff Crusey, your Resident Investor at Per Aspera.
"Slow is Smooth; Smooth is Fast"
There’s a phrase the U.S. military likes to use: “slow is smooth; smooth is fast.” It sounds paradoxical until you’ve lived it. In venture, we’re often tempted to move at breakneck speed — signal chasing, conviction compressing. But when I met Tapa Ghosh, founder of Volantis Semi, I chose to slow down.
At first blush, Tapa is the archetype of the “don’t blink or you’ll miss him” wunderkind. At 16, he was guest lecturing at Stanford on deep-learning processor architectures. That kind of intellectual horsepower is a magnetic signal. But horsepower isn’t enough. What matters is how you channel and steer it.
So I tuned down the noise of accolades and spent time watching how Tapa wrestled with design challenges for his photonic chip. Was he stubborn or nimble? Did he cling to old plans, or could he adapt without ego? What I saw was a process — measured, transparent, iterative. Not fireworks, not whiplash pivots — just the kind of thoughtful course correction that compounds into resilience.
And that’s when “slow is smooth” came into focus. By taking my time, I saw that Tapa’s combination of technical depth and low ego was catalytic. The company wasn’t lurching from wall to wall; it was gliding forward, building momentum with fewer collisions.
The best founders don’t just move fast. They move smooth.
VOLANTIS PHOTONIC MOTHERBOARD
The Laboratory of Democracy at work
Doña Ana County is fully scaling-pilled. Backed by the governor, officials from this patch of southern New Mexico are floating a $165B “phantom debt” package (with no taxpayer risk), layered with a casino’s worth of incentives—all to conjure Project Jupiter: a four-site AI data center campus rising from the Chihuahuan Desert.
The sleight of hand: The county “owns” the land (so, no taxman), then leases it back to developers who pocket states sales tax breaks. In exchange, the county collects $300M in payments and a job pledge (2,500 construction, 750 permanent). All of this runs through industrial revenue bonds: a popular, if polarizing, way to spur development without putting public $$$ on the line.
Some context: Doña Ana is sparsely settled (228,000 people sprawled across 3,800 sq mi), with some of the cheapest industrial power in the nation (8.3¢/kWh), but it does face stark water constraints (per capita consumption of 182 gallons a day, with most surface water claimed by crops).
Why it’s got our attention: as AI rewrites economic geography, Doña Ana’s bet is a referendum on whether clever finance and local ambition can alchemize low-density rural regions into magnets for digital megaprojects. Plenty of other counties are riffing on this formula to land AI data centers in their backyard (which produce a crazy amount of productivity per square foot). These high-value, low-headcount facilities long for cheap land, power, and flexibility.
For industrial facilities — fabs, factories, advanced manufacturing, and other specialized sites—the constraints shift. Proximity to talent pools, supplier networks, logistics arteries, and transit still dictate site selection. America is steadily sorting itself, with some rural and mid-sized regions rising as stealth hubs for digital (AI) infrastructure, while legacy manufacturing clusters (even those hollowed out) are reemerging as magnets for new facilities (case in point: Gary, Indiana). Not all megaprojects play by the same rules, or want the same ZIP code. This dispersion is drawing a new national industrial map and intensifying local competition with every new bid.
A Spectral Coup
This morning, SpaceX clinched key spectrum licenses from EchoStar for $17B, split evenly between cash and stock (valuing SpaceX near $425B). EchoStar, parent of Dish Network, secured the AWS-4 and H Block bands back in 2021 but never met its FCC mandate to cover 70% of the U.S. with 5G by 2023. With a rising debt load and technical and capital constraints, EchoStar faced increased FCC scrutiny and repeated clashes with SpaceX over the airwaves.
This transaction ends that standoff, settles the beef between the two, and rewrites the strategic calculus. For SpaceX, the new spectrum accelerates Starlink’s direct-to-cell (D2C) and 5G ambitions, enabling Gen2 satellites to expand capacity by more than 100× and push toward erasing mobile dead zones. EchoStar, meanwhile, offloads liabilities, resets its FCC compliance overhang, and can now offer Boost Mobile subscribers a Starlink-powered lifeline.
Per Aspera’s Take: This isn’t only about going after the ~50% of Earth’s landmass not reached by terrestrial services. It’s SpaceX muscling from one large market (global broadband, $500B+ TAM) into an even larger arena: mobile telecommunications, with a $1.8–2T TAM. And the markets noticed: EchoStar surged by 20%+ this morning, while shares in T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon dropped on the news.
Jobs Day: Factories Rise, Employment Drifts
Friday was jobs day, that monthly ritual when the Bureau of Labor Statistics drops its report and investors, policymakers, and operators parse the numbers like tea leaves. For us, the signal was in manufacturing: Friday’s jobs report showed manufacturing shedding 12,000 positions in August, pulling payrolls down to 12.72M (38,000 fewer than in December). Average workweeks and overtime softened, signaling slack on the floor.
This caution was echoed by the latest ISM Manufacturing Index, which confirmed contraction for the sixth straight month (PMI at 48.7; Employment Index at 43.8). The PMI’s New Orders component did nudge into growth, but weak demand, shrinking backlogs, and ongoing tariff pressures are keeping factories cautious.
And yet, capital spending remains off the charts. U.S. manufacturing construction spending hit a $223B annualized run rate in July, marking the largest industrial buildout since the 1970s. Megaprojects continue to pour concrete nationwide, with major ($1B+) new builds or expansions across chips, EVs, batteries, energy, biotech, and more. This paradox has four plausible explanations:
Asset-heavy, labor-light: Modern factories (epecially “AI factories” aka datacenters) cost billions but employ far fewer line workers.
Lagging indicator: Jobs often trail investment, and headcount takes time to show up. This is what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued.
Tariff drag: Higher input costs are quietly undercutting hiring.
Pipeline shortage: The limiting factor isn’t money, it’s people. America is short millions of machinists, welders, and process engineers, the very trades that turn capital stock into productive capacity. Without rebuilding that pipeline, new facilities risk running below their true potential.
Project Kuiper. Amazon’s Project Kuiper team recently demoed 1+ Gbps download speeds (1,280 Mbps, to be precise) using its newly unveiled enterprise terminal. Everyday users can expect up to 400 Mbps with the standard consumer dish. Kuiper’s fleet is still a smaller flock: just 102 satellites in orbit, dwarfed by SpaceX Starlink’s sprawling constellation of 8,000+ active birds. The regulatory clock is ticking for Amazon, which needs 1,615 satellites flying by July 2026 and full constellation deployment by mid-2029 to satisfy its FCC license. With another batch of 27 launching later this month, Amazon has also signed its first major airline, JetBlue, for in-flight connectivity services starting in 2027.
Kuiper faces a steep climb to match Starlink’s scale, but a real rivalry in LEO broadband is brewing. That’s a good thing for innovation, speed, and consumer choice! (And while we’re here: read our recent Antimemo on how Starlink is reshaping opportunity in rural America.)
And let’s close out with some good news: For all the talk about America lagging in critical technology sectors, and the very real challenges we face in many of these arenas, LEO broadband is a notable exception. China’s two ambitious megaconstellations are Guowang (planned for 13,000 satellites, with just 72 launched) and Hongyun (targeting ~80–156, with only 4 deployed so far). Here, American — specifically SpaceX — leadership is decisive, a point recently featured in the NYT, of all places!
What’d we miss? Have something others participating in the Renaissance should know? Hit reply and drop us a line at [email protected].
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