It’s official – space is a war-fighting domain. Who says so? The British, the Americans, Nato and, among many other nations, the Russians.
Already in that domain are satellites for spying, encrypting communications, guiding missiles and ensuring the smooth running of an advanced economy. And probably coming within a few years is military hardware. After all, throughout history we have taken weapons into every other place we’ve ventured. Space is no different, and the potential battlefield is beginning to take shape.
Several countries have Space Commands within their militaries including the US, India, Russia, China and the UK – the latter based at RAF High Wycombe.
For this decade at least, a war in space would primarily be about war on Earth. Given that technologically advanced powers now rely so much on space, it is central to modern military thinking. Without satellites, the commanders don’t know where to position their aircraft carriers, long-range missiles and troops. Nor do they know precisely where the enemy is.
More immediately, according to Everett Dolman, professor of space strategy at Johns Hopkins University School, any space conflict is likely to stem from mounting tensions in the Asia-Pacific region involving China, Taiwan, India and the US.
‘The ability of the US to project military power today is based almost entirely on space support,’ he says. ‘It is therefore a tremendous advantage for China to take out US space support prior to initiating a territorial military action that would be opposed by the US.’
In the light of these developments and the potentially catastrophic dangers they present, what we desperately need is a set of treaties to guide our behaviour as the new Space Race gathers pace and we prepare to return to the Moon.
Just last month, Harvard astronomer Dr Martin Elvis echoed this, warning that there was a ‘first-come, first-served’ approach to resources on the moon: ‘The big question is, who decides whether a site is going to be for astronomy or water mining?’ he said. ‘And there isn’t really an answer to that which is definitive right now.’
One problem that makes the need for guidelines in space more urgent is how crowded it is nowadays, comments TIM MARSHALL
Some people point out we have the existing Outer Space Treaty. However, this is a relic of the 1960s and has not been updated to reflect modern military technology – or the emergence of private enterprises such as the US’s Space X and Blue Origin, or China’s i-Space.
The treaty prohibits placing nuclear weapons in space, for example, but makes no mention of conventional weapons. Nor, given they had yet to be invented, does it even mention laser weapons. We also lack guidelines about how close one country’s satellite can get to another’s which, given that parts of some countries’ nuclear early warning systems are in their satellites, would seem imperative.
There’s another problem, too, that makes the need for guidelines more urgent – it’s getting crowded in space.
More than 11,000 satellites currently circle the Earth and conservative estimates suggest by 2030 there will be 30,000. Amazon alone wants 3,000 for its growing delivery service.
Satellites create junk. The more satellites, the more space junk, which means heightened risk of collisions.
There have been occasions when the International Space Station (ISS) has had to fire its thrusters to avoid being hit by debris travelling at 15,000mph. There have also been examples of spacecraft hitting each other in orbit such as the 2009 collision between satellites owned by Russia and the US.
Four countries (the US, Russia, China and India) have created debris by firing a land-based ballistic missile to destroy one of their own satellites in a ‘direct-ascent hit-to-kill’ test. The Russian test resulted in 1,500 pieces of metal accelerating towards the ISS, resulting in the seven people on board being moved into their escape capsules in case they needed a quick getaway.
According to Nasa, there are 23,000 bits of junk hurtling around our planet larger than 10cm in diameter – a tennis ball is about 7cm. Just a 1cm fragment would create as much energy as a small car crashing into you – or your spaceship. They propose the risk of a cascade of collisions wiping out thousands of satellites and crashing the global economy.
It’s an unlikely scenario, but one which grows more likely with each satellite placed in orbit and becomes more dangerous if, one day, we arm our satellites with the type of direct energy laser weapons now being deployed by Ukrainian forces against Russian drones.
The US is already building a ‘tracking layer’ of 100 early warning satellites in Low Earth Orbit (sitting 1,200 miles or less to the Earth) which will use sensors to detect heat signatures coming from high-speed manoeuvrable missiles. If a country arms satellites with lasers, then all major powers will follow suit. No country with satellites used for military purposes would leave them defenceless.
One recent attempt to write new ‘rules of the road’ is the American-led ‘Artemis Accords’. First drawn-up in 2020, and signed by the UK in that year, they now have 53 members.
They set guidelines for activity on the Moon, a place which will grow in importance in the second half of this decade and potentially become a source of conflict.
Huge quantities of water ice have been found at the lunar South Pole from which it may be possible to extract oxygen and hydrogen. Also near the Pole are thought to be deposits of the type of minerals such as titanium and lignite which are required for 21st century technology.
The Americans intend to land men and women on the Moon in 2027, and both the US and China say they will have bases there by the early 2030s.
However, 140 or so countries who have not signed the Accords are not bound by them – such as Russia and China. The US Congress bans Nasa from co-operating with China, and Russia has been frozen out. President Trump may be cosying up to the Kremlin for now, but Congress still gets a say.
The Accords purport to clarify the legal basis for establishing a presence on the Moon and mining it. They refer to the creation of ‘safety zones’ but don’t say what happens if an Artemis country declares one for itself – or if a non-Artemis country shows up and points out it didn’t sign the Accords.
More than 11,000 satellites currently circle the Earth and conservative estimates suggest by 2030 there will be 30,000 – which could exacerbate cosmic warfare
In 2020, the then head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, described the Accords themselves as akin to an ‘invasion’ of the Moon, which could turn it into ‘another Afghanistan or Iraq’. Moscow and Beijing subsequently signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly build a Moon outpost and invited other countries to join them.
Mining the Moon presents another challenge to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 – it states that ‘outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty’. But if you sell something you’ve mined on the Moon, you are saying you own it.
Nasa has a contract with the commercial start-up company Lunar Outpost for it to gather lunar soil. Lunar Outpost collects the soil and photographs it, at which point Nasa pays the firm $1 to own the sample. They are both mining, and undermining the treaty.
The economics of mining the Moon is mostly back-of-an-envelope stuff. The costs of getting there, building a base, digging out the rocks and refining the minerals before bringing them home are enormous. However, it has not stopped the planning. After all, which leading power can afford the gamble of missing out on what might be a crucial source of minerals and possible energy for the rest of the century?
There’s even a ‘Holy Grail’– helium-3. There’s lots of helium-4 here on Earth and we use it every day to fill party balloons and cool the magnets found in MRI scanners. But helium-3 is scarce.
Not on the Moon though. There may be millions of tons, created by billions of years of solar winds hitting a surface which has no atmosphere. If, and it’s a big if, scientists can crack nuclear fusion, helium-3 can be used to create non-radioactive energy. China’s top space scientist Ouyang Ziyuan has said there is enough helium-3 on the Moon to ‘solve humanity’s energy demand for around 10,000 years’.
First, though, is nuclear fusion. And before that, agreements on how to deal with the above issues. All countries are aware of the dangers of space debris, so why not at least draft a new treaty and clean it up?
But what if the treaty you drafted suggested using laser weapons to fire at small particles, or to push larger bits into the atmosphere where they would be burnt? Someone else will point out that the lasers could be used for more nefarious purposes.
The same can be said for technologies such as satellites which fire nets to capture debris – ‘you might use it to capture my working satellite’. Who would pay to collect the debris, and who would control the space refuse collectors? Who gets to see the data of where everything is?
More questions: If country A is using satellites from company B to help fire missiles towards the troops of country C, does that make company B’s satellites a legitimate military target? I ask because that’s what Ukraine has been doing with Elon Musk’s Starlink system to defend itself against Russia. Moscow responded by ‘dazzling’ some of Starlink’s satellites with lasers.
How high is high up and where does your country’s horizontal sovereign territory end? Countries disagree on where space begins. It’s a question worth asking and an answer worth agreeing on, especially in the light of a little-noticed statement issued by Nato in 2021. It expanded the Article 5 mutual defence clause to include ‘attacks to, from or within space… could lead to the invocation of Article 5’.
The word ‘could’ allows for flexible interpretation if an attack meets the Article 5 threshold – but also reflects that we are in new times. We can see that firing a missile into a Nato country is an act of war, but a direct energy weapon fired at a commercial satellite? No sovereign territory is involved here, and no fatalities caused.
Tim Marshall’s latest book, ‘The Future Of Geography: How Power And Politics In Space Will Change Our World’
Nato’s Article 6 implies that Article 5 might be triggered by an attack on assets when they are ‘in or over’ a member state’s territory. However, a Nato member’s satellite in space might well be above its territory when hit.
The idea that Space belongs to us all is eroding. The ‘regulations’ we have are not only out of date but also mostly drafted by the major powers, as indeed are the fledgling current proposals being circulated. This has led to a ‘first come – first served’ attitude which risks developing nations being denied the opportunities space will bring even if they eventually become rich enough to develop their own cosmic missions.
Elon Musk’s Space X has helped significantly reduce the cost of getting into space by developing reusable rockets. Eighty countries have a presence there, mostly in the form of satellites, but very few are space-exploring powers. That still leaves about 110 nations with no equipment up there at all. If, as may well eventually happen, the number of satellites allowed in both Low Earth and Geosynchronous Orbit (orbits where satellites match the Earth’s rotation) are restricted, those not already there would be for ever at a disadvantage.
Developing nations also risk being denied access to the resources and profits which may be found in mining the Moon and asteroids, or developing solar energy beamed from space. They are trying to ensure that any new agreements on policy must include their input and are made to benefit humanity, not just the rich powers.
There are many space-related issues which affect us all, too. A major solar flare could knock out a large part of the world’s electricity. In 1989, a billion-ton cloud of gas discharged from the Sun at a speed of a million miles an hour hit Earth. Electrically charged particles created a surge of electrical currents beneath North America, and every light in the whole of Canada’s Quebec province went off for 12 hours. So did every computer, fridge, lift and traffic signal. A global system where emergency transfers of electricity across continents could mitigate the effects, as would a system of quick-launch satellites to reconnect communications.
There’s also the danger of being hit by an asteroid big enough to send us the way of the dinosaurs. The solution to this problem lies with the major players. Nasa has already developed Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). In 2021, it fired a ‘Dart’ at a (non-threatening) asteroid 6.8million miles away. Ten months later, it hit Dimorphos and successfully changed its trajectory. It was proof we may be able to save ourselves if a planet-ending asteroid is on its way, and suggests we would be better off combining our expertise in monitoring dangers and deploying defences.
That’s the good news. But, overall, technology has outpaced regulation. As global tensions increase, we need greater commitment to transparency, shared resources, debris collection, freedom of navigation, space traffic management – and, of course, the reduction of the threat of conflict. Our guidelines are full of holes and urgently need defining and tightening if we are to avoid them crumbling like so much Moon dust.
Tim Marshall’s ‘The Future Of Geography: How Power And Politics In Space Will Change Our World’ (Elliot and Thompson) is out now in paperback £9.99.
