‘It’s the wild west up there’: space looms as the world’s next battleground
Australian experts are nervous – ‘who controls space will control Earth’ they say – so, why is the world so slow to respond to the threat China and Russia pose in orbit?
Look into the night sky with binoculars these days and you’ll soon spot fast-moving, unblinking points of light – satellites travelling solo or in vast arrays known as “constellations”. It’s a subtle reminder that space, once so dazzlingly pure, is now in a tangle. Many of the facets of modern life – the internet, television, GPS navigation, global communications and banking, among other things – are intimately tied to the 8000-plus active satellites orbiting Earth. But it’s a fragile, vulnerable dependency. And with commercial and military competition in space intensifying, the potential consequences for life on Earth are dire, from a domino-effect cascade of space junk to a nuclear conflict in the stars.
Houston, we have a problem.
Doomsday space scenarios took on a tangible form last month when Republican chair of the US House of Representatives intelligence committee, Mike Turner, claimed on the basis of US intelligence that Russia, in contravention of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, was planning to send a nuclear weapon into space.
When I reach Rebecca Shrimpton at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) to ask for her assessment, she sounds worried. The time, she fears, has passed when the international community could confidently restrain “bad actors” in space – chiefly Russia, China and North Korea – with a set of agreed norms of behaviour. “We don’t even enjoy the sort of rationality among today’s actors that made nuclear deterrence – or mutually assured destruction – work,” she says.
Shrimpton, a former senior ministerial adviser and now ASPI’s director of defence strategy and national security, believes the street-fight-like chaos of international politics is mirrored in space. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. “Who controls space will control the Earth,” she warns.
As she sees it, the Americans, as well as a coalition of European powers, are attempting to keep space free, open and secure. “It’s in the liberal West’s interests to thwart coercion in space – to keep unrestrained use of weapons out of space. But it’s not in China’s interest,” she explains. “If the Chinese can get something really threatening up there and if they can defeat US capabilities – capabilities that are superior to theirs at the moment – then they will. And it’ll be game over on Earth.”
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, of which Russia, China and North Korea are signatories, prohibits states from stationing nuclear weapons in orbit or on celestial bodies. Shrimpton warns, however, that it would be difficult to determine the presence of such a weapon on board a spacecraft until it was fired. There are “almost no rules” governing this area, she says. “It’s the wild west up there. The Outer Space Treaty has very limited prohibitions you could drive a bus through.”
Space experts immediately sought to calm fears unleashed by Mike Turner’s comments. One of these was Dr Cassandra Steer, head of the Australian Centre for Space Governance and author of War and Peace in Outer Space, who points out that Russia does not actually possess a nuclear space weapon – Turner was voicing fears based on a “potential capability”.
Steer joins me for a video call a few days after the US media blitz prompted by Turner’s remarks. She believes the Ohio Republican had likely seen intelligence relating to a Russian counter-satellite technology – anything from jamming, frying and hacking – in the pipeline.
Of greater immediate concern to Steer is the human impact on low Earth orbit, a region between 200km and 2000km above our planet. “The reason space traffic matters, the reason people should care about it, is because it threatens the services everyone depends on daily,” she says. “It’s just that most people don’t think about where their TV, internet, phone, Fitbits, weather predictions, GPS and banking gets serviced from – nor where the police, fireys and defence departments get their services from. Space-based services are everywhere, always, ubiquitous, and critical. And space traffic and debris is an issue that can impact all of us.”
Activity in space – commercial, scientific,military – is exploding. Last year the space economy grew by 8 per cent to US$546 billion, according to America’s non-profit Space Foundation. It is expected to reach the $800 billion mark in five years. The gold rush in space is spreading the benefits of communications technologies to more countries than ever thanks to the development of smaller, mass-produced satellites and lower launch costs.
Most commercial satellites are in a low Earth orbit, and “dual use”, in that their capabilities have both civilian and military purposes. In time, they degrade or become defunct, and many obsolete satellites are left in orbit, adding to the mass of space junk. According to NASA’s Astromaterials Research & Exploration Science division, there are more than 100 million objects larger than 1mm in orbit, about 500,000 objects between 1cm and 10cm, and 25,000 objects larger than 10cm. As of January 2022, the amount of man-made material orbiting our planet exceeded 9,000 tonnes.
In a report last year, the European Space Agency sketched a confronting picture of a planet surrounded by spacecraft in increasingly crowded orbits “churning with deadly, fast-moving pieces of defunct satellites and rockets that threaten our future in space”. The report warned of increasing numbers of commercial satellite arrays “in certain, economically valuable low-Earth orbits”. Not enough satellites in heavily congested orbits return to Earth at the end of their lives, and those that remain are “at risk of fragmenting into dangerous clouds of debris that linger in orbit for many years.”
What keeps Cassandra Steer awake at night is the dire combination of space commercialisation, militarisation, overcrowding and pollution. “It’s not just pollution from debris, it’s the amount of space traffic,” she says. “Defence used to drive the increase in space traffic. Now it’s commercial opportunity. Space as a result has become a strategic-competitive domain … There’s a risk of war in space. There’s a risk that someone will do something stupid in space that starts a war on Earth. And there’s a possibility that we’ll lose critical data in a crisis and civilians are in the dark, are disconnected or can’t respond.
“If a piece of debris the size of a pea hits one of the satellites we depend on, travelling at 7km per second in opposing directions, it can cause lethal damage and we risk having loss of service. Which can be inconvenient or catastrophic, depending on what the service is and what the damage is. Remember when everyone freaked out that Optus was ‘offline’ for a few hours? Scale that up.”
A loss of satellite connectivity would wind back time and sever the bonds of connectivity on which the contemporary world prides itself. Forget about cell phones, TV broadcasts (excepting those on wired networks) and internet services. Phone calls, texts and email would be things of the past. The city would be disconnected from the remote bush. Remote diagnosis and telesurgery would no longer be possible. Credit cards and cash machines would no longer work. In fact, the global financial system – including stock trading and online banking – would implode. Search and rescue missions would no longer be able to rely on GPS. Nor would ships and commercial aircraft. And the work of science in many fields – from the study of the ice caps to the impacts of climate change – would simply no longer be possible. Meanwhile commanders on the battlefield, so dependent on precision artillery strikes, would have to revert to maps, compasses and field glasses.
Scientists are especially worried about a catastrophic scenario with a suitably geeky name: the Kessler Syndrome. Named after a NASA scientist, it predicts “a situation where a single satellite failure could lead to cascading failures of many satellites”. With a cascading pile-up of satellite debris in low Earth orbit, nothing would be able to get into space, and nothing would be able to get safely down either. We would have turned low Earth orbit into a metal cage. The space revolution that mankind has made would be unmade.
The real and present danger posed by space junk has spurred new business opportunities in debris monitoring and collision avoidance – in effect, air traffic control in low Earth orbit. The Californian company LeoLabs was set up in 2015 when its CEO Daniel Ceperley guessed, correctly, that the space race 2.0 would be a “business revolution” as much as anything. “The risk of a collision is a lot higher now just because we’ve installed so much more hardware in space,” he says. “If you have a big collision, it creates a cloud of debris and now all the other satellites are flying through this whizzing mess of debris.” He says his company is sending 400 million collision alerts – by email – each month to companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which pay for the service.
In the 1960s only a handful of countries were operating in space; today there are more than 90, alongside a growing number of commercial players. As of February this year Musk had 5422 Starlink satellites in orbit – more than half the global total.
Musk, though, isn’t the only big player. Franco-British firm OneWeb has a constellation of 648 microsatellites in low Earth orbit, and plans for 250 more as part of its ambition to “blanket the world in broadband”, while Amazon’s Project Kuiper, also focused on broadband provision, is planning to launch a constellation of 3236 satellites into orbit. China, meanwhile, plans to launch a constellation of 12,000 satellites as part of its Shanghai-based G-60 Starlink – a rival to SpaceX. A separate 13,000-satellite constellation codenamed Guo Wang is under construction in China.
Australian space start-ups Fleet Space Technologies and Gilmour Space are also in the new space race. Fleet, a South Australian firm, plans to put a spider-like gizmo capable of reading seismic waves on the lunar surface by hitching a ride with US company Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander. The launch is expected to happen in 2026.
Queensland-based Gilmour Space is planning its first orbital test launch of an Australian-made rocket with a satellite prototype in April, pending Australian Space Agency approvals, followed by a commercial satellite launch within the year. The company, funded by venture capital, is launching with a few small defence contracts and hopes for more. Co-founder Adam Gilmour’s background in the finance industry is emblematic of the new space race.
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“I saw space as an industry that was going to grow rapidly in the years ahead, especially with the advent of small satellites needing different orbits and altitudes in space,” he says.
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“So you need smaller rockets for that. Thousands of satellites need to go up every year, needing hundreds of rockets. There’s a good market for this, and a place for Australian technologies.”
When the US journal Space News broke the story about China’s G-60 Starlink project in December last year, it offered a sober assessment of the pros and cons. “The emergence of competing communications megaconstellations brings potential for enhanced global internet connectivity, particularly in remote and underserved areas,” said the publication. “This development could bring numerous benefits in terms of economic activity and global health. It could also have geopolitical implications related to national security, surveillance and technological dominance. There are also unresolved issues relating to space traffic management. These include thorny issues of international coordination, setting rules for collision avoidance and deorbiting satellites. The proliferation of projects, launches and satellites in [low Earth orbit] also heightens issues of orbital space debris.”
Jonathan McDowell, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, spends his spare time tracking satellite launches. He publishes the details, along with cumulative information about the crowding of inner space, under the folksy title Jonathan’s Space Report. I reach McDowell, who has an asteroid named after him, the day after the release of his February 2024 update and it makes for sobering reading: “On Feb 3 the Chinese Long March Rocket Co launched a Jielong-3 from … the South China Sea. A new low orbit Russian Ministry of Defence satellite was launched on Feb 9. SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 on Feb 14 … with two missile tracking satellites for the US Missile Defence Agency. The second flight of Japan’s H3 rocket, on Feb 17, was successful. The ISRO [Indian Space Research Organisation] launched GSLV-F14 on Feb 17, placing the INSAT-3DS satellite in geotransfer orbit.”
Last year a record 2911 satellites were launched into orbit, according to McDowell. Of these, 2235 were American. In the first two months of 2024 the US launched 217 satellites and China 35, out of a total of 272.
McDowell’s greatest concern, he tells me, is the “unregulated commercialisation of space”, and that’s partly because it “impacts on sustainability among other things”. But he’s not hopeful of a fix anytime soon. “It would require a big change of attitude from both the US and China.” If the ambitions of Starlink, OneWeb and Amazon’s Project Kuiper come to fruition – and there appears to be nothing constraining them – McDowell fears for the near-Earth environment. “It’s going to be like an interstate highway at rush hour in a snowstorm with everyone driving much too fast. Except that there are multiple interstate highways crossing each other with no stoplights.”
Since the 1897 publication of HG Wells’ sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds, about the invasion of Earth by Martians – their “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” – fears of alien invasion have played out in fiction, film and even radio. It now appears as if the dynamic of space invasion has been reversed and we humans, or at least our technologies, have occupied the lower Earth orbits.
Rebecca Shrimpton hopes that Republican congressman Mike Turner’s remarks about a Russian space nuke, misleading though they were, will serve to spur and galvanise the US, much as the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch in October 1957 sent the US space program into overdrive. “As a global community we’re often so overwhelmed by the challenges facing us that we need something like this to jolt us,” she says. “Whatever it is the Russians are working on – most probably something designed to jam or blind US military satellites – the Chinese wouldn’t want it brought to the world’s attention. China doesn’t want anyone looking at this sort of behaviour. It doesn’t want the US getting active on it, seeking solutions to it.”
She points to reports that surfaced in Chinese media of a simulated “dirty bomb” test in space designed to decimate Western military satellite systems. “They claimed to have had enormous success in using that capability, with a level of precision that would affect some of their own systems for a significant amount of time but would give them a sufficient operational advantage so that the costs outweighed the benefits. The unsettling fact is that we have potential adversaries that are thinking of doing things that were once thought unthinkable, and if they acted on these scenarios the results would be disastrous.”
Chinese scientists are also working on technologies to disarm Starlink satellites, whose dual (military and civilian) capacity has already been shown to notable effect in Ukraine. “A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system,” declared a recent paper published in the Chinese Journal of Modern Defence Technology.
The advanced state of Chinese planning around anti-satellite capabilities was laid bare in a South China Morning Post story late last year that publicised a previously secret computer program able to simulate and game space combat. It quoted the system’s Chinese developers as saying it was not just a military planning aid but a tool for “shaping and sharpening the finest space warriors and commanders on a large scale”.
The system, developed by the National University of Defence Technology in Changsha, had already proved its worth in a “covert space mission”, the Post said. “It also played a pivotal role in selecting and moulding the space warfare elite earlier this year. From September, more than 400 military cadets formed more than 70 teams for a fierce two-month competition. Many participants agreed that these mock space skirmishes not only got them combat-ready but also gave them a first-hand taste of wielding weapons they had only read about in textbooks or technical documents.”
Deeply troubling to many Western observers, as both a signal of intent and a one-shot contribution to the problem of space junk, was a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test aimed at one of its own defunct satellites. The blast resulted in some 3000 pieces of golf ball or larger size pieces of space debris in orbit. “That debris field will be with us for decades to come,” says Kari Bingen, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Not to be outdone, Russia in 2021 shot one of its own dead satellites, resulting in another 1500 pieces of shrapnel in orbit.
America, for its part, has declared space a “warfighting domain” and set up a dedicated Space Force branch of its military to co-ordinate training, equipment acquisition and deployment for military operations in space. The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron, which operates within Space Force, is dedicated to targeting enemy satellites.
The US is far and away the dominant player in space, with the largest constellation of military satellites (239), although China (140) and Russia (105) together have more eyes in the skies. China has made dominance in space a key policy goal. “China has now a huge civil, commercial and military space sector, and its ambitions are largely driven by geopolitics,” says Shrimpton.
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“China wants to command, dominate and to control space. From a military perspective, space is the ultimate high ground.”
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But the wielding of military might in space isn’t the only thing we should be concerned about. Shrimpton sees the exploitation of mineral resources in space as the great game of the future. “All of Earth’s rare earth minerals – things that today we worry about and wring our hands about – are available in space. And they’re available on dead planets, without doing the damage we’re doing to Earth to get to them, in quantities you couldn’t imagine. It’s just a matter of who gets there first.
“If you’re able to get to a place like the Moon and extract water and minerals, then you start to put yourself in such a position on Earth of economic superiority that nobody can compete with you. And then you deny a competitor the capacity to do that. That’s what China is going for.”
Cassandra Steer, for her part, resists the temptation to attribute malign motives to Chinese advances in space, and in counter-space technology. “The Chinese don’t want to destroy the world,” she says. “They might want to dominate it. But they’re just doing what the Americans have done in space, what the Russians have done. In terms of their broader ambitions, they’re doing what the British did, what China itself did a thousand years ago.”
Her hope is that when the kerfuffle over Russia’s hypothetical space nuke dies down, people will want to know more about the intimacy of their relationship to space – its power, and its vulnerability. She calls this “space literacy”, and if there was more of it she would sleep better when the stars and more than 8000 active satellites light up the night sky. “Sometimes SpaceX’s Starlink satellites can be seen with the naked eye, because they are at a relatively low orbit, and travel in trains of about 20 satellites,” she tells me. “They are interrupting astronomers and our relationship with the skies.”
