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VR Pioneer, Anduril Co-Founder Palmer Luckey Urges SSC Guardians to Adopt ‘Founders Mindset” to Meet Challenges of Space Warfare at “Guardians Everywhere” Series

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  • By By Lisa Sodders, SSC Public Affairs
El Segundo, Calif --  A Space Systems Command (SSC) “Guardians Everywhere” forum held Aug. 6, 2026, urged its workforce to apply a founder’s mindset to think creatively to meet the challenges of space warfare.

“Guardians Everywhere” is a motivational speaker series where prominent individuals from across the country come to SSC to share their stories of overcoming obstacles to achieve their goals. The Aug. 6 forum featured American inventor, innovator and entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, best known as the designer of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and the co-founder of the defense technology disruptor Anduril Industries.

“Today is about looking at the future of defense and asking not if we can move faster, but how we boldly elevate our acquisition mindset to deliver absolute overmatch,” said Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, SSC commander. “Our guest today is someone who built his career on disruption.”

“Palmer Luckey saw a defense ecosystem that had become comfortable… flat out refused to accept it, and built a company designed to bring Silicon Valley speed, software-first thinking, and autonomous capabilities directly to the warfighter,” Garrant said. “He, too, felt that exact same friction that we feel today. But friction is what sparks innovation. When a process stalls a great idea, that resistance shouldn’t stop us, it should drive us to find a better way.”

Luckey shared with an audience of SSC military, civilian and contractors that when he founded Oculus, he applied a forward-thinking mindset to solve a problem everyone else thought was impossible: the virtual reality industry kept trying to make a slightly better version of a type of product that had already failed. His approach: think outside the box to figure out what it would take to make virtual reality good enough that ordinary people would want to use it, and scale it to a consumer audience.

For example, Luckey chose to correct optical distortion through software, instead of using heavy, expensive lenses. While this move was unorthodox in the VR community at the time, Luckey believed the technology would catch up with the power demands of this software-based solution. His forward-thinking approach paid off as newer, more advanced processing units proved capable of correcting distortions in real time while using increasingly less power and saving weight in his VR headsets.

What is needed now, according to Luckey, are space-minded leaders who will spend the next five years shaping what the next 50 years will look like. In that, he offered some thought-provoking questions: "Who should hold the Lagrange points for civilian and military applications? How do we protect freedom of navigation in space, freedom of communications in space? What assumptions are we making about the nature of space power today that will not survive 50 years of hindsight?"

“(Oculus Rift) was one of those things where I looked to where the future was going to be, and I was able to start an architecture that was only going to work if that future arrived,” Luckey said. “A lot of space applications reward this exact kind of thought processes: not asking what’s the next iterative step, but where are things going to be in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years or even 50 years and what kind of architectures can we start building today that probably don’t make sense, are not going to pan out with current technology, but they will pan out, once enough time passes.”

“I believe that space is going to become a dominant part of the United States economy, if not THE dominant part of the U.S. economy, our trade as well, our diplomacy,” Luckey said. “I think if you look 50 years out, we’re going to have enormous amounts of industry and manufacturing, operating - not just in low Earth orbit but further out as well. I think we’re going to make use of the (asteroid) belts. I think we’re going to make use of pretty much everything in the solar system.”

“Once most of the American economy is above our heads, I think we’re going to have to protect it the same way that we would protect our energy, manufacturing and our civilian residential infrastructure here,” Luckey said. “And if that’s where the world is headed, then all the acquisition steps that we make today are even more critical, because they’re not just supporting some small part of a particular mission.”

Unfortunately, Luckey said, a lot of people don’t understand just how critical of a foundation this is. It will require people willing to spend money years before they see the results, investing in things ahead of time.

“We need to be looking towards what the world’s going to look like in 50 years, what the balance of power is going to look like in 50 years,” Luckey said. “We have to start investing in it today."

“To use a trope, our generation was born too late to explore the seas and too early to explore the stars,” Luckey said. “But we were born just in time to decide what we’re going to do in Low Earth Orbit and probably out to cislunar space. Let’s win the fight above the fight.”
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