Outlook on tech: Gabe Mounce of the Air Force Research Lab

Interested in space? National defense? Even aliens?

The guest on this week’s podcast episode is Gabe Mounce, the director of the Technology Engagement Office for the Air Force Research Lab in New Mexico.

Business Outlook podcasts come out Monday afternoons on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Here’s a preview of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us a little bit about the Space Force.

“So the Space Force is now five years old, as of December. It’s the newest service within the (Department of Defense). It was basically carved out of the Air Force. ... It was established essentially to focus and to create focus on how the DOD and the U.S. government operates and maintains its national security through the space domain.”

So five years ago, the powers that be just decided that space needs to be its own entity, and it needs its own branch of the military?

“Essentially, yeah.

Basically in the general context of what’s happening in the industry sector, and just technologically, what we were seeing is a lot of advancements that actually made it a lot more affordable to get into space. So a lot of private companies now can do a lot of things by going to space for a lot cheaper than they once were able to.

So we’re now seeing access to space, the constraints on that come way down. And so just about anybody — private sector or governments — can get into the use of space for whatever purpose that they might have in mind.

And so what we started to see, if you just look at some of the statistics, there’s a lot more use of the space domain across the globe. So a lot of times, you’ll hear leaders within the DOD talk about how space is now becoming more congested because there’s a lot more things going on in space, but also contested, meaning there’s a lot more activity than just what was previously just nation states that could get into operating in that domain.

... In the past, the U.S. Air Force, to a large extent, was the main service within the DOD that conducted and facilitated and did everything for DOD purposes, national security purposes in that domain. But it was decided that there just needed to be a lot more focus. So they created a new service, essentially, to get after that.”

Who all is in space right now? I mean, there’s just a lot going on up there.

“I couldn’t give you, off the top of my head, the number of countries now that are pursuing activities in space, but it’s a lot. It’s a lot more than it used to be.

And then (you can) separate now the private sector out from that because these launch costs, for instance, have decreased. You’re now seeing this rush of entrepreneurship into what looks to be a new market. A lot of entrepreneurs think that they can create a business opportunity now that they never would have been able to afford in the past.

And so that’s what is driving a lot of this new energy and activity into what a lot of us are considering now, a space sector, a space market that really was previously only the domain of nation states because of how expensive it was.”

People every day are probably using some technology that is rooted in outer space, like whether you plug in your GPS or use cellphones. What are some of the things that just we, an everyday person, probably relies on something in space just to do their day to day life?

“Basically anybody who’s got a cellphone is automatically using space. In particular, the GPS system. The GPS system is actually a federal government system that, for the longest time, was an Air Force space system ... operating for mission purposes, for DOD purposes. But they are also utilized for worldwide navigation, essentially. So anybody who has a cellphone, probably their cellphone is receiving signals from that GPS system that is still a federal government system. ...

The timing signals from the GPS are also used in places like banking, who need very ultra precise timing for the transactions that they pursue in that financial sector. So GPS, by itself, is an incredibly important underpinning of just general society at this point.

But there’s other systems. There’s systems that are for what we call remote sensing. A lot of times it’s the observation of the Earth. A lot of that’s been across the the DOD and the civil sector, where you’re just trying to use that to understand, for instance, what’s happening with crops, and how farmers use that data, perhaps, to help them better farm. Or how do we use it to fight fires?

So that imaging of the Earth, some of the satellites that the government has provided, but now more and more the private sector is providing, are still incredibly important to our society and how we operate.”