A Week Spent at the Value of Space Summit in Colorado Springs and What I Learned About the Commercial Space Economy

The Big Sky Between the Moon and Earth

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Before I ever went out west, I remember hearing the term “big sky country.” Having barely left the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, I thought that term was silly. I mean, the sky is the sky. Isn’t it the same size everywhere?

Absolutely not.

For the last three years, I’ve had the opportunity to spend time in Colorado each fall to speak at the Value of Space Summit put on by the Space ISAC in Colorado Springs. At this point in my life, I’ve traveled around the world and made multiple trips to many western states, but the sky still stops me in my tracks.

When I go to Colorado, I like to stay on east coast time. Waking up at 4am allows me to eat a hearty breakfast and drive out to nearby hiking trails before I start my workday. I love the feeling of pulling into the parking lot just before sunrise and feeling the biting breeze as I load up my day pack. I don’t need my sunglasses yet, but I bring them with me as I walk over to the trailhead. The sky grabs me immediately, but so does the silence. I hear the crunch of the gravel under my boots but if I stop, I hear nothing. The Aspen trees stand tall and are usually just starting to turn their leaves yellow as I pass by. The sunrise opens up and looking along the ridgeline, I understand what “big sky” means.

When I finish hiking, I make my way down the mountain to only 6,000 feet where another group of people are thinking about how big the sky is. The Value of Space Summit, or VOSS, was in its sixth year in 2025. The focus of the conference is to bring together government and commercial space leaders and thinkers for a multi-day event to share insights, discuss tech, strategize, and network. The Space ISAC is an Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a non-profit organization that focuses on facilitating communications between industry and government. As a member of the National Council of ISACs, the Space ISAC, along with 27 other industry-specific members, facilitates the movement of all hazards threat and mitigation information to asset owners through a member-driven process. For space, this is incredibly important as governments jockey for position in a newly minted economic and national competition domain and struggle to establish norms. Meanwhile, space asset owners and operators and expanding and investors are investing. This gives the Space ISAC an extra mandate. It must think big, study big problems, and provide frameworks for mitigation of issues in low earth orbit (LEO) all the way to cislunar space.

Mueller State Park. Photo by the author.

In my third run on stage at VOSS, this is what I was there to talk about. Insights from a new and unique offering from the Space ISAC. I was part of an exercise to better understand how we would respond to an incident in cislunar space and what I learned, what we all learned, was eye opening. For as big as the sky feels in Colorado, it’s much bigger between here and the moon and we have a lot to learn as we build, and invest, in technologies beyond our orbit.

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