Why are we launching small satellites into space on rockets? Longshot CEO Mike Grace has a theory: rockets are super-handy weapons of war – easy to manufacture, easy to hide and move around in the sleight-of-hand of international warfare.

Defense budgets paid for rocket development, but let other – potentially much cheaper – orbital launch technologies wither on the vine. The missile business put man on the Moon. Grace explains in more detail in a very entertaining and downright confrontational presentation made last month at the Foresight Institute's 2023 Space Workshop.