We don't think about space until it stops working for us. The GPS in your car, the weather forecast on your phone, the bank transaction that clears in seconds — all of it quietly depends on hardware orbiting hundreds of miles over our heads, hardware most Americans have never had reason to think twice about. That's changing. As China races to catch up and the sky gets more crowded with debris and competing interests, the question isn't whether space matters to national security and daily life — it's whether Congress and the public are paying attention before it's too late.
Mark Dreiling is a retired USAF Space Operations Office and has served for nine years as the Chief of Staff for Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska. During his military career, Mark was a certified SBIRS DSP crew commander, Chief of Crew Force Management, and Chief of Operations Training. In addition, he worked with USSTRATCOM, the NGA, and was a Test Director for AFOTEC.
He is a graduate of the Naval War College with a Master of Arts with Highest Distinction in Defense and Strategic Studies, earned a Graduate Certificate in Space Systems from UCCS, and he completed his undergraduate education at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. In addition to his work in Congress, Mark served for several years as a staffer in the Nebraska State Legislature.
Dreiling is also the Awards Committee Chair for the Space Force Association.
The New Space Race Isn't With Russia. It's With China.
When most Americans think of the space race, they picture Cold War headlines — Sputnik, Kennedy's moonshot, the flag on the lunar surface. That race is over, and the country that won it is not the one Washington is watching anymore.
"We are in a new space race," Mark Dreiling told me recently, although this time it's not Russia. It's China. The distinction matters. The first space race was largely symbolic — a contest of prestige fought in full public view. This one is quieter, more commercial, and arguably more consequential, because it is being fought over infrastructure the United States now depends on every single day.
That dependence is the part most people miss.
The Satellites Overhead, Working for You
Ask someone what space has done for them lately, and most will draw a blank. Dreiling's answer was blunt: check your phone. The GPS signal that routes your commute, the timestamp that lets your bank process a transaction, the forecast that tells a farmer when to plant, the signal that connects a rural clinic to a specialist three states away — all of it passes through satellites orbiting hundreds of miles overhead.
Space, in other words, isn't a frontier out there. It's infrastructure here, embedded in daily life as the highway system or the power grid, and just as invisible until it fails.
That invisibility is exactly why the stakes are easy to underestimate. A nation that controls the space domain doesn't just win prestige points; it controls the plumbing behind modern commerce, agriculture, logistics, and communication.
Dreiling was emphatic that this isn't an abstract or futuristic concern — it's already the case, and the economic value of space has only grown as more of the economy has moved onto satellite-dependent systems.
Why the Military Learned This Lesson Early
The national security establishment figured out space's importance well before most of the public did. Dreiling pointed to the First Gulf War as a turning point — one of the first major conflicts where satellite-guided precision and space-based communications gave American forces a decisive edge, and a preview of how central orbital assets would become to how the United States fights and wins.
That lesson eventually produced the Space Force, a branch built on the premise that a domain this integral to both the economy and national defense needed its own dedicated institutional attention rather than being treated as an afterthought inside the Air Force.
Now overlay China's ambitions onto that same domain, and the reason for urgency comes into focus. Beijing has been explicit about wanting space-based capability that rivals or exceeds America's, for the same dual reasons the U.S. military cares about it: economic leverage and military advantage.
A space race fought over commercial and strategic dominance, rather than a flag-planting photo op, is a race with real consequences for whoever falls behind.
The Traffic Jam Nobody's Regulating
Dreiling didn't sugarcoat the mess in orbit, either. More satellites, more debris, and more countries operating in the same crowded lanes above the Earth have created a congestion problem with no real traffic cop.
The United States and its allies have a clear interest in establishing international norms of behavior in space before the debris field — or an unregulated free-for-all — creates a crisis nobody can walk back. It's a quieter version of the China competition: a race not just to build capability, but to help write the rules before someone else does.
What Comes Next — and Who Prepares for It
The conversation didn't stay confined to hardware. Dreiling raised the emerging role of AI and drones in this domain — technologies that promise real advantages but carry real risks if the country doesn't think carefully about how they're deployed.
What Does America Have to Do to Win the Future?
Dreiling circled back, more than once, to education and leadership as the actual foundation underneath all of it. Satellites and Space Force org charts don't matter much if the country isn't producing the engineers, strategists, and leaders capable of running them.
The education of many of our young people has and can begin with Space Camp. During remarks following his induction into the Space Camp Hall of Fame, Dreiling shared “Space Camp is a crown jewel not just for the state of Alabama but for this country and the world and is producing leaders for the future.”
That point connected to something more personal Dreiling shared: a case for resilience, and for a more serious, more respectful tone in how Americans argue with each other about the country's future and the need to reestablish trust in one another and our institutions.
Winning a space race — with China or anyone else — requires the kind of sustained national seriousness that's hard to muster when public discourse is this frayed. Maintaining American values and what Dreiling didn't hesitate to call American exceptionalism, he argued, isn't nostalgia. It's a prerequisite.
The Cold War space race ended with a flag and a photograph. This one will be measured in GPS uptime, supply chains, and whether the rules of orbit get written by Washington or Beijing. Most Americans won't notice the difference until the day the signal goes out — which is exactly why it's worth noticing now.
