Real-life Star Wars: Western nations ‘must build capability to strike back from space’ with tech like Trump’s Golden Dome plan

“It’s not science fiction, it’s real.” Military experts say supremacy in space is the critical next frontier of warfare on Earth – and the technology is much closer than you think.

Australia is being urged to counter devastating Star Wars-style weapons – that can fry satellites and obliterate them with nuclear blasts – by boosting defence spending to rebuild a sovereign space industry.

Defence strategy senior analyst Malcolm Davis said China and Russia were deploying weapons into space designed to attack US and allied satellites at the onset of any war.

These included satellites firing high-powered microwaves to take out rivals and others launching a nuclear blast to wipe out entire constellations, such as the Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service.

This could obliterate communications, GPS, navigation, timing and other vital components of modern society.

Dr Davis, an Australian Strategic Policy Institute space and future warfare expert, urged defence spending increase to between 3 and 3.5 per cent of GDP as soon as possible, to help fund the manufacture and launch of Australian satellites to defend against the threats.

“It’s likely that we are going to see space warfare in the next war, and we are going to see China and Russia utilising those capabilities. So we have to be prepared to defend against them,” he said. “It’s not science fiction, it’s real.”

How the US Golden Dome defence system would work.

Dr Davis said space warfare involved “soft kill” of rival satellites, involving “disabling, jamming, denying rather than physically destroying”.

“You have what’s known as a co-orbital anti-satellite system (ASAT), that approaches a target satellite and gets within range of say, one kilometre, and then fires a microwave burst against the target satellite and basically burns out the systems. So, the satellite is intact, but all its systems are dead,” he said.

“The other big worry at the moment is with Russia, is that they’re developing a nuclear weapons-based ASAT capability that, if they deployed it and used it, they would take out large numbers of satellites in one explosion.

“There is a real concern in the West that the Russians are going to go down this path and deploy this nuclear ASAT, that would then threaten these sort of mega-constellations of small satellites like Starlink, for example.”

In the Star Wars movies, the Death Star was an orbiting military base with the power to destroy planets.

This would be a “direct and deliberate violation” of a 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says nuclear weapons cannot be deployed in orbit.

“The key things I would emphasise for Australia is that we need sovereign space capability for satellites and also for launch. We have to have the ability to support the US and others in defending our critical space capabilities against counter-space threats,” Dr Davis said.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison has called for space to become a third pillar of the AUKUS security pact, of which he was a co-founder, and warned of Chinese and Russian technological advances.

Mr Morrison is also chairman of Space Centre Australia, which wants to open an international spaceport at Queensland’s Cape York, near Weipa.

A US Air Force ASM-135 ASAT (anti-satellite missile).

In a speech to Sydney’s 2025 Australian Space Summit in late May, Mr Morrison said Australia could augment strengths of the US, Japan, UK and Europe, by “creating a more robust collective space posture that deters aggression”.

In an example of allied co-operation, KBR Australian orbital analysts working from Adelaide monitored simulated anti-satellite weapons tests and unusual approaches to US, UK, Japanese, Korean and Australian satellites in a global exercise in the Indo Pacific, run by the United States Space Force.

The five-month operation, which started in January, involved the analysts using KBR’s Iron Stallion, a command-and-control technology being used by the AUKUS partners.

It delivers autonomous monitoring and alerts, as well as user-driven analytics and investigative capabilities in near-real time.

Iron Stallion allows users to understand and make sense of the wide range of data sources, turning that data into actionable information and boosting decision making.

KBR Vice President Australia Defence Security Solutions Nic Maan said: “Space has become an operational domain that is contested, congested and competitive. An agile and potent future force will rely on assured access to resilient and responsive space services.”

US President Donald Trump in May announced plans for the Golden Dome, a multibillion-dollar system using space-based weapons and satellites to intercept missile attacks.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space,” Mr Trump said on May 22.

He said the project would complete the job former President Ronald Reagan had started 40 years ago with his “Star Wars” program.

Newly minted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the time said his nation could help “complete the Golden Dome with investments in partnership (with the US)”.

Canada is buying the world-leading Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) as an early-warning system for incoming missiles, in a $6.5bn deal revealed in March – Australia’s biggest defence export yet.

The hi-tech JORN is a connected series of over-the-horizon radars providing surveillance at ranges up to 3000km. It is controlled and operated from RAAF Edinburgh, in Adelaide’s north, and maintained by BAE Systems Australia.

The technology was developed in northern Adelaide by the government Defence Science and Technology Group, stemming from experiments dating back to the 1950s.

Originally published as Real-life Star Wars: Western nations ‘must build capability to strike back from space’ with tech like Trump’s Golden Dome plan