Delian Asparouhov on China's lithography bet, lunar strategy, and why space tourism is the emperor's elephant

Summary

Delian Asparouhov, partner at Founders Fund, argues that the semiconductor supply chain is the most underappreciated vulnerability exposed by the Trump tariff escalation — and that China's lithography bet may be the sharpest threat the US isn't preparing for.

China's lithography gambit

Reports published roughly two weeks before this conversation suggest China has demonstrated a synchrotron-based energy source for lithography — using linear accelerators as a substitute for the tin-droplet plasma method that underpins every ASML extreme ultraviolet machine. The significance is strategic: the entire US export-control architecture around semiconductors assumes ASML as a chokepoint. If China has a working alternative energy source, that chokepoint dissolves.

Asparouhov's view is that the US can't simply pressure ASML to relocate manufacturing. The machines are extraordinarily complex to build, and ASML's primary customer is TSMC in Taiwan, not the United States — giving Washington limited leverage over a Dutch-to-Taiwanese commercial relationship. Trying to replicate ASML's existing technology tree makes even less sense. The more viable path, he argues, is a government-backed domestic linear accelerator program: start from a blank slate on a different technological approach, potentially co-opting Stanford's linear accelerator facility and building a foundry around it.

On the broader question of government R&D strategy, he draws a distinction between two models. The first subsidizes inputs or guarantees demand across a market without picking a specific technology — NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is his preferred example, where the agency commits to buying lunar payload capacity at a fixed price regardless of how contractors get there. The second funds a specific node in the technology tree where no private market exists at all. Linear accelerator lithography falls into the second category: no commercial player will enter without a government commitment, and there is arguably only one credible bet on that path. He suggests allocating roughly 10% of whatever budget the US assigns to domesticating foundries toward domesticating lithography via that route.

Nvidia's reported $20 billion per year in chip exports routed through Singapore — which Asparouhov describes as obviously destined for China — illustrates how porous the current controls already are, even before the lithography question becomes acute.

Space tourism as the emperor's elephant

On space, Asparouhov is direct that tourism is not the economic engine that drives frontier expansion. He reaches for a 15th-century analogy: China's Ming dynasty sent large ornate ships along the African coast to bring back elephants and gems for the emperor — spectacle without commercial foundation. The Portuguese built small merchant flotillas, established trading outposts incrementally, and eventually became the dominant naval power. The Ming shut down their program for nearly 300 years.

Katy Perry flying above the Kármán line on Blue Origin's New Shepard is, in his framing, the emperor's elephant. The contrast with Starlink — which generates billions in commercial revenues that compound into infrastructure — is what he thinks determines long-run outcomes in space the way merchant trade determined naval empires.

The White House's proposed NASA budget, released after Jared Isaacman's confirmation hearing as NASA administrator, significantly cuts science missions including future telescopes and Mars helicopter programs. Asparouhov notes a visible disconnect: Isaacman signaled different priorities in his confirmation hearing. The budget's logic, as he reads it, is that anything without a clear path to boots on the moon or an economic return is expendable.

The lunar race

On China's lunar ambitions, Asparouhov presents both sides and then takes a position. The bear case is that China is repeating the Ming mistake — impressive hardware, no commercial loop. They have no Starlink equivalent generating revenue in low Earth orbit, and without that commercial foundation, the program may fade. The bull case is more unsettling: China has landed on the far side of the moon and returned samples, is building toward a human lunar landing in the early 2030s, and a handful of craters with confirmed ice deposits represent a finite, claimable resource. Whoever mines that ice first can convert it to propellant, ship it to low Earth orbit, and turn a geopolitical foothold into an economic one.

Asparouhov says he defaults to the bull case. Never underestimate your adversary. His concern is that the US is currently distracted by the moon-versus-Mars debate and may cede permanent lunar presence while the argument continues.

On timelines, he thinks US boots on the moon before the end of the Trump administration is achievable — not through new programs but through Starship maturing, Orion continuing, and current lunar lander companies scaling up. He puts his personal probability of visiting the moon within 20 years at 30–35%, rising to roughly 98% on a 40-year horizon.

Lunar propellant production, he argues, is an end-of-decade problem — technically straightforward, with five or six groups already working on it. Water from lunar ice is a viable starting propellant even before more refined processes like liquid hydrogen conversion come online. The economic logic is compelling on a per-kilogram basis: launching water from the lunar surface into low Earth orbit is vastly cheaper than lifting it from Earth's surface.

Space geopolitics

China's National Space Day on April 24 is treated seriously by NASA and Space Force, not as a marketing event. China has largely delivered on the goals it announced in 2018 — a functioning low Earth orbit space station with regular crewed missions, international partners, and a coalition signed on to its lunar base plans. Asparouhov expects meaningful new disclosures given the level of US-China tension.

France's joint satellite program with China, he argues, traces directly to the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal, under which the US shifted submarine contracts from France to Australia. Macron responded publicly, and France has since moved toward China on space partnerships. Space geopolitics, in his read, is not a separate domain — it is an extension of every other geopolitical friction on Earth.