In honor of our nation’s most recent birthday, I want to reflect on a question: what makes America great? There are many different answers. Will McAvoy has a long one for you.

Here’s my favorite: navigable inland waterways. The United States has more than 25,000 miles of internal rivers and canals suitable for transportation - that’s more than the rest of the entire planet, combined. For early Americans looking to move west, ship cargo, and unite the growing nation, negotiable rivers were critical (nonnegotiable, one could say). A single boat, with bodies to power it, could travel from Pittsburgh, down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River1 and on to New Orleans; or turn right and go up the Mississippi almost to Canada; or take a quick left at St. Louis and follow the Missouri River all the way up to Montana. A boat from New York City could travel up the Hudson, through the Erie Canal, into the Great Lakes system, and from there into the Mississippi watershed.2 Before railroads, cars, air travel, or rocket transportation, that’s an unparalleled network connecting 40% of the country.

In the 1600s, the earliest French explorers of the continent’s interior followed the Saint Lawrence River up through Canada, to the Great Lakes, and then via the short “portage de Checagou3” into the Mississippi River system - where they founded St. Louis and New Orleans. Lewis and Clark used the Missouri River to travel from St. Louis to the Rockies, then down the Columbia River to the Pacific. For centuries, these rivers were the most efficient way to transport goods and people.

In 1852, the first railroad bridge was laid over the Mississippi River. After nearly a decade of protest from steamboat companies, the completed bridge was damaged after a steamboat “accidentally” rammed into a support pylon. A young lawyer, former flatboat pilot and railsplitter named Abraham Lincoln4 defended the Rock Island Bridge Company, arguing:

"One man has as good a right to cross a river as another has to sail up or down it.”

While the railroad diminished the importance of our river systems, they never fully went away. Even today, 60% of all American agricultural exports and 14% of all intercity freight travels via inland waterways.

When our nation split apart, the Union’s war strategy depended on our rivers. As part of the “Anaconda Plan”, a naval blockade would prevent lucrative cotton exports from the southern states, while the Mississippi would serve as a highway for Union gunboats to penetrate all the way to New Orleans. Our lawyer / boatman / railsplitter, now President, upon receiving news of General Grant’s capture of the Confederate river stronghold of Vicksburg, waxed poetically:

“The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”

Entire histories have been written about our rivers and the trillions of dollars spent to improve them for navigation. Dams control water levels; locks raise and lower ships around rapids; snags have been cleared; channels have been dredged. For nearly a millenium, the Red River (in what is now Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) was blocked by a giant logjam called simply “The Great Raft”. Imagine a jumble of logs so thick that forests grew above, roots stretching down to the river. Buffalo herds stampeded across for hundreds of years. But it was no match for American ingenuity and taxpayer dollars. An engineer named Henry Shreve invented a contraption called the snagboat and, at the request of the US Army Corps of Engineers, began clearing the logs in 1829. For his effort they named a city: Shreveport, Louisiana. During the Great Depression, thousands of dams were built in the Mississippi watershed; and the US Corps of Engineers still spends billions every year managing river channels, banks, and levees. As they should - flooding costs the United States between $179.8 and $496.0 billion each year; 41 million Americans live in flood-prone areas; and every one dollar spent on river infrastructure generates $2.20 in economic activity. Yet, many of these dams are either unnecessary or detrimental to local ecosystems; parts of the nation are regularly wracked by catastrophic flooding; and we’re beginning to face a water scarcity problem across the United States. Space technology - another combination of engineering and tax dollars - can provide the tools and data to reach a solution.

Every year for the last twenty years, hundreds of lunatics have gathered on the morning of the first full moon after the summer solstice. They meet at the confluence of the Kansas River (the “Kaw”, to locals) in Kansas City, Kansas; board canoes, kayaks, or standup paddles boards; and then race 340 miles to St. Charles, Missouri, a quaint suburb of St. Louis. It is one of the longest non-stop river races in the world. Two hundred years ago, this route was the final stretch of the Lewis and Clark expedition. St. Charles was the furthest west one could reliably send and receive mail in 1806, and Meriwether Lewis was in a rush to notify President Thomas Jefferson of the journey’s success. A contingent was dispatched from their camp at Kaw Point to push ahead and announce their return. This year (for the third year in a row) I joined these lunatics, spending more than sixty hours in a canoe5, paddling through the day under blazing Midwest sun and by night under the light of the full moon, stars, and even the International Space Station passing overhead.

At one point late in the canoe race, I had the mildly hallucinogenic realization that traveling down a river is, in a way, just like a spacecraft in orbit. In both, gravity does the work. A canoe is slowly (or sometimes quickly) “falling” back to sea level; a satellite in orbit around the Earth is in perpetual freefall. To deviate from this orbit requires burning fuel for delta-V: just like burning calories to paddle upstream. A Hohmann transfer is a maneuver to change an orbit that generally requires the least amount of delta-V. That’s basically a portage6 - which are usually located on the shortest and easiest paths overland between two river systems.

Nebulous comparisons aside, there are very concrete ways that space technology impacts our waters. They range from recreational to lifesaving. I used a Garmin device to track speed and distance during the race, made possible using signals from GPS satellites. I partnered with U.K. space company Sen, which has a suite of HD cameras on LEO satellites and the ISS, to get overhead livestream footage of the river. I managed to spot the ISS itself a few times, made possible by the official NASA “Spot the Station” iPhone app. The race wasn’t all just gazing at the stars - we also had to dodge shipping traffic. Automatic Identification System (AIS) tracking data, collected and relayed by satellite, alerted racers to passing barges and towboats7, which leave standing wakes that could spell disaster for canoes and kayaks.

The Mississippi-Missouri is considered one of the most heavily engineered rivers on the planet. Without constant management, the Mississippi as we know it wouldn’t even exist - the flow would long since have been captured by the nearby Atchafalaya River. American waterways are also some of the world’s most observed - from space.

With satellites, a figurative drop of water can be tracked as from its beginnings as water vapor in the atmosphere, as it falls to Earth and travels through rivers and lakes, or as it trickles down into an aquifer. Missions like NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission uses a constellation of satellites to provide near real-time precipitation data every three hours. CloudSat uses cloud-profiling radar to study precipitation formation within cloud systems. NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) constellation provides real-time monitoring of storm development across North America. As far back as the 1990s, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint NASA-JAXA effort, established the foundation for space-based precipitation radar technology. Now, Commercial space companies like Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, Muon Space, and Tomorrow.io provide additional high-resolution weather monitoring services. Spire Global operates a constellation that collect atmospheric data for weather forecasting, using dual-frequency precipitation radar.

Once fallen, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite takes responsibility for tracking water resources. Launched in 2022 as a joint mission between NASA and the French space agency CNES, SWOT uses advanced Ka-band radar interferometry to measure the height of water surfaces in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. Emerging satellite technologies are even beginning to look underground. NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission detects subtle changes in Earth's gravitational field caused by groundwater depletion or accumulation, allowing scientists to measure aquifer levels. New synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques can measure tiny ground surface movements - called land subsidence - that occur when underground water is extracted, providing indirect but valuable information about aquifer health. Future missions are exploring the use of electromagnetic sensors and improved gravitometric measurements to create more detailed maps of subsurface water resources, potentially revolutionizing groundwater management. These capabilities couldn’t come soon enough - huge swaths of the country are facing a severe “water gap” as these groundwater resources are depleted.

One of these areas is the American Southwest, where the Colorado River flows through one of the most water-stressed regions on Earth. Decades of overuse, a two-decade-long drought, and rising temperatures have led to dangerously low reservoir levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell. This threatens hydropower generation and municipal water supplies, impacting 40 million people across seven states, into northern Mexico, and across dozens of Native American reservations. If slowly watching the water levels decline on the nation’s largest reservoir doesn’t quite hammer the point home, there’s another more visceral result of these trends.

At the break of dawn on July 4th, I started a ten mile hike into the Havasupai Reservation, a tribal community located inside the Grand Canyon. The tribe has lived within the canyon for hundreds of years, taking their name - “People of the Blue-Green Water” - from the crystal-clear turquoise of Havasu Creek. This tributary of the Colorado cascades over a series of incredible waterfalls. The trail to them passes through the village of Supai, which is considered one of the most remote in the United States, accessible only by hike, mule, or helicopter. The community carefully restricts the number of backpacking permits issued and photography is completely forbidden. I spotted nearly a dozen Starlink terminals during my visit. With the exception of the lush canyon floor, watered by the blue-green creek, the area is dry. Too dry.

At around 5 PM, a lightning strike less than a hundred miles away set off a small wildfire, designated Dragon Bravo. Within ten days, the fire swept through the major tourist areas of the National Park, destroying the iconic Grand Canyon Lodge. Less than a month later Dragon Bravo officially became the worst American wildfire of 2025. The “megafire” has now burned over 140,000 acres, destroyed more than 70 structures, and even damaged the already limited water infrastructure in the area. It’s currently the seventh-worst fire in Arizona history. And it’s still burning: as of writing, the fire is only 44% contained. Dragon Bravo is only the latest in a trend of worsening fires that can destroy local water infrastructure - making it even harder to fight the same fires. Remember the Los Angeles fires in Malibu? That was in January.

Satellites have become indispensible tools in wildfire detection and response efforts across the globe. NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) provides near real-time active fire data from multiple satellite sensors, including the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra and Aqua satellites and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NOAA's Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. The Landsat program, jointly operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, offers detailed before-and-after imagery for damage assessment and recovery planning. NOAA's GOES satellites provide continuous monitoring of fire weather conditions and smoke plumes, while NASA's Earth Observing System helps scientists study fire behavior and environmental impacts. Commercial space companies are increasingly contributing to fire management services: Planet Labs provides daily high-resolution imagery for fire perimeter mapping, Maxar Technologies offers rapid response imagery for emergency planning, and companies like Slingshot Aerospace and OroraTech (using satellites from Spire) specialize in AI-powered fire detection services using constellation data. Muon Space, in partnership with the Earth Fire Alliance, launched the first FireSat in March. Once completed, this constellation will be able to detect fires 1/400th the size of other early detection systems systems - down to 5x5 meters. These satellite systems enable fire managers to detect fires within hours of ignition, track their spread in real-time, assess burned areas, monitor air quality impacts, and coordinate firefighting resources more effectively, ultimately saving lives and property.

“The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.”

Let’s go back to my original question: what makes America great? Having an unparalleled network of rivers was a great roll of the dice for a starting location, for sure. But sorry, Peter Zeihan and Jared Diamond8, it’s not all geographic determinism. It’s about taking advantage of the situation presented to you. America is great not just because of our internal waterways, but because of our ability to leverage them. Without generations of American ingenuity, and a uniquely American appetite for risk capital, those rivers would not have been cleared and maintained for navigation; the ships to ply them not built; the companies to operate those ships not founded, funded, and grown; the pilots and captains and crews to guide them not trained; the systems to monitor and control their traffic not established. We must do the same for space exploration and commerce, to ensure these new tools can be used to solve the challenges of our time. It’s not just about winning space races back to the Moon or to the surface of Mars. We must effectively, responsibly, continuously, and sustainably leverage those resources to support life on Earth and fuel our further exploration. As we build more space infrastructure - like commercial space stations Haven-1 and Starlab - we can find novel ways to improve our world9. Where waterways were an indispensable part of our history, space is inseparable from our future. We’re not playing Chess, or Go, or even Monopoly. We’re playing Civilization.

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First came the Industrial Revolution, where we broke the Tyranny of the Wagon Equation. The steam engine, the iron-horse, shrank the world by rail and paddle-turn. The spread of information accelerated. Then, armed with the internal combustion engine, we took to the road and the sky. On July 16, 1945, in the deserts of New Mexico, we unlocked the power of the atom - a tool we still hesitate to fully employ (for peaceful purposes) due to fear of misuse or mishap. In 1961, fear be damned, Yuri Gagarin rode the fires of a chemically-fueled rocket to orbit as we slipped the surly bonds of Earth. Humankind has now set a new speed record. Last Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe passed within 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) of the Sun, reaching a top speed of 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph); 0.064% the speed of light. We’ve almost broken the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation by raw engineering and economies of scale.

Today, thousands of satellites orbit the Earth at faster than a mile per second. They photograph our planet, route our phone calls and cat photos, track weather systems, and help us navigate. Bigger and more powerful rockets bring more payloads and more people to orbit. Nearly unimaginable quantities of data, much of it gathered and transported by these satellites, stream via radio and fiber optic cable at the speed of light. Insatiable Artificial Intelligence models consume this data, bringing us new tools from automatic email summaries and meeting assistants, to increasingly competent software engineering and self-driving cars. These advances are paving the way for other new technologies that can help explore, monitor, feed, modify, and power our planet on a global scale. Fueled not only by vast amounts of energy and internationally-connected supply chains, these new endeavors require constant streams of capital, sourced from a worldwide financial community. Meanwhile, geopolitical upheavals threaten to roil the markets and disrupt the status quo - held relatively steady since the end of the Cold War - at a rate we haven’t seen in decades.

Space, the final frontier, is the latest step in integrating all other domains - physical, regional, digital, economic, political, and social. According to the Harvard Business Review, every company needs a space strategy. The two largest militaries, those of the United States and the People’s Republic of China, both operate independent space forces, while dozens of other countries are quickly developing military space capabilities. Space-based services have enabled job opportunities, economic development, and education for communities on remote islands and above the Arctic Circle. Commercial space companies now conduct operations previously on the scale of nation-states. Our modern world - from Global Navigation Satellite Systems to social media networks - is now inseparable from space. So is our future.

On the Kardashev scale, imagined by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, a Type 1 civilization is one that has harnessed all the energy available on its planet. We’re not there yet. But we do need a way to start classifying, discussing, and evaluating these technologies with global sources of finance and fuel, advancing at accelerating speeds, with impacts and networks that span continents, the heavens, and even the ocean floor. Let’s call them planetary technologies.

Tech is moving forward; as a society, we’re at a crossroads. In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan described a fearful vision:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

“Chaos” is derived from the Ancient Greek “kháos”, meaning a vast chasm, void, or the empty darkness of space. “Terrain” comes to us from the Latin “terra”, meaning Earth. Together the geological term “Chaos Terrain” refers to areas on a planet's surface where physical features are jumbled and enmeshed together into complicated, tumultuous patterns. Found on Mars, Mercury, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Pluto, these regions generally denote the presence of ice and could provide extremely difficult for future planetary explorers to navigate. In an etymological sense, “Chaos Terrain” literally combines space and Earth.

In this Chaos Terrain series, I’ll look at these planetary technologies: the companies and space infrastructure behind their development; their impact on life on Earth; and the geopolitical implications they hold in store. Our creations span the planet and the skies, and we stand at the threshold of a fundamental civilizational change. Will we cross it, or fall into the abyss?