Steve Kwast
speaker
426 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Kwast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I found you, I saw this clip, which I'll get into on X. Energy, the seed corn of all development, all growth, all survival, survival, energy. So energy, transportation, information and manufacturing. These are the things that change humanity, that will change world power. And they are descending upon us in ways that are very unique.
The technology is on the engineering benches today, but most Americans and most in Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what's going on here. But I've had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these engineers and these scientists. This technology
can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour, to deliver Wi-Fi from space where you never need a cell tower to connect, to deliver energy from space where you never have to plug your phone in, and it trickle charges, and you can use that energy over time.
It can be applied to cars, to houses.
But like any domain, if you do not have strength to be able to prevent conflict or strength to be able to...
and can do devastating things to everybody else in the area.
But it's no different than any other human activity moving into a new domain.
Right. And if we were all angels and nobody was weaponizing space, that would be true. But just because we have a 1967 Outer Space Treaty that states those very words, we have... great powers that are doing things in space that are going to threaten America and other countries as well. So we have to be open-eyed.
It would be like discovering an ocean and saying, we're not going to have any fighting on the ocean. And then we don't build a Navy and everybody else does. And we're the only victims of it.
It's a good question, though, because we want peace, and we want a future that trends with less violence. But the way to do that is not to ignore a new domain and new technologies. The way to do that is to usher in peace through strength that is consistent with human nature and history and culture.
Right. Well, like all new technologies, it is those countries that have the resources and the will to develop capabilities. Every country that is paying attention to these trends of technology and change are investing in space. If they don't have the money or the will, they aren't, but those are very few and far between.
But as I talk to leaders in countries around the world, they understand the power of space. It would be like a country not having an air force, and everybody else does, or not having a navy, or not having an army. It doesn't mean these things are built to perpetuate wars. We want them to be there to prevent wars.
And so, you know, you have India, China, Russia, America, Japan, you know, you just go down the list of nations that are investing in space. And it's not a bad thing. This is about evolving because of what space will be able to do to uplift the human condition.
But if we don't pay attention to it and design it with the wisdom of what we have learned about how humans evolved into a new domain, we will repeat the sins of the past. This is about understanding ourselves, understanding human nature, understanding technology and culture, and then ushering in a geopolitical evolution of nations that all benefit from what space will do for our economies.
Well, I would reframe the question and say that we need to pay attention to the technologies that are being developed and what they could do. Because every technology can be used for good or for bad. And you need to be able to play in that environment if somebody were to do something bad.
You know, one of the simple statements of somebody in my position as a national security professional is be prepared for the unexpected.
So as I watch, for example, another country developing solar power from space, which is the technology of capturing the sun's intense energy in space, where there's no night and day, there's no weather to get in the way of the sun, and then transforming that into a radio wave and beaming it to Earth to be able to turn it back into electricity on the Earth, which is one of the things I talked about in that Hillsdale speech,
that can be used for peaceful purposes. I mean, that can be used to immediately send electricity to the tribe I grew up in Africa that has no power plant, no power lines, nothing, because the topography is so aggressive. The transportation modalities are so insufficient that nobody would have the affordable business case to build them the electricity they need. But one satellite
could deliver electricity to that spot and a thousand other spots. But let's say if one of our competitors develops that infrastructure in space and they use that to uplift the human condition by providing electricity to people who don't have it, in a millisecond, they could turn it into a directed energy weapon to destroy the people. at that location. So let me give an analogy of air power.
If you read the literature after 1903 when the Wright brothers invented the airplane, it was like our Federalist Papers where there were some good arguments about the fact that it is immoral to develop an airplane because you could drop a bomb on somebody's head. And others saying it is moral to develop an airplane because you can transport a sick person to the hospital and save their life.
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