BLUEMONT, Va.—From an overlook in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Dan Roelker gazed across the green splendor of the Shenandoah Valley. With the pleasant spring afternoon drawing toward evening, the Sun lazily crossed the sky, casting light all around.

The pleasing environs had put Roelker, who was drinking rye whiskey procured from a local distillery called Catoctin Creek, in an expansive mood to talk about one of his favorite subjects: light. “If you can control light, you can control space,” he said. “So it’s basically a race for who is collecting the most light.”

And Roelker, now 48 years old, finds himself firmly in a race to collect the most light. He has followed an improbable career path, moving from hacker to video game coder to head of software development at SpaceX, then into crypto and NFTs, and now, of all things, to building telescopes and advanced optics while writing the software that brings them to life.

As he sipped whiskey, Roelker shared his vision for the future of spaceflight. Since the dawn of our existence, humans have observed light from distant stars and galaxies to make sense of the Universe. Later, we devised telescopes for deeper observations of the heavens, and as we took to the stars, we used their light for navigation.

More recently, our telescopes have carefully tracked the movement of a growing number of satellites buzzing around the planet to ensure they avoid collisions. And now, engineers have harnessed laser light to dramatically increase the amount of data that can be beamed down from space, a technology all the more urgent due to the advent of orbital data centers.