WAR in space is a hot topic in the US government. Last year, Congress considered and rejected a proposal to create a standalone “space force” to deal with threats in orbit, and in March, President Donald Trump brought it up again.
“Space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,” Trump said at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego. “We should have a new force called the space force. It’s like the army and the navy, but for space, because we’re spending a lot of money on space.”
“We should have a new force called the space force. It’s like the army and the navy, but for space”
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The Trump administration’s position was further detailed last month with the announcement of its . It states that US “competitors and adversaries have turned space into a warfighting domain” and promises that any attacks on US space assets will be met with a deliberate response.
They sound like fighting words. But any space war won’t be like Star Wars – no humans will zoom around in slick spaceships, death will not rain from the skies and it is unlikely that anything will be blown up.
“It’s not fighter jocks, it’s not marines, it’s not special-operations guys,” says at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. “It’s a bunch of engineers sitting in a control centre and sitting in labs. The space domain is going to be dominated by nerds.”
We know this, because the US space force already exists. The Space Command has been around since 1982 and employs more than double the number of people at NASA, the US civilian space agency, to operate and protect military satellites. The space force proposal for Congress wasn’t really about creating a new branch of the military, but part of a long-running push to move the space command out from under air force leadership, making space a higher priority.
Plus, sending a human to fight a war in space is simply not efficient. “Humans are fragile and sustaining them in space takes a lot of support,” says at the Union of Concerned żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The Chinese and the Russians aren’t going to send marines to space either, because they know physics too.”
Physics also rules out orbital bombardment. Objects in orbit move at high speeds, so aren’t over a single spot on the planet for long. That means attacking a specific area at short notice would require placing hundreds of weapons in orbit to ensure one is overhead at the right moment. An aircraft carrier loaded with bombers or ballistic missiles would be much more effective.
Deadly debris
What war in space really comes down to is satellites – using them, destroying them and defending them. The US and Soviet Union started launching satellites in the 1950s and many were designed to spy on the military operations of other nations or to target nuclear weapons. This dissuaded any attacks on satellites, because one nation would instantly know that the other was responsible and probably attempting to disable its nuclear capability. Space war would swiftly become nuclear war, so satellites were a key part of nuclear deterrence.
Since the cold war ended, satellites have increasingly been used in everyday military operations. They enable weapons targeting, espionage, GPS tracking and secure communications, making them juicy targets. This proliferation has weakened the deterrence aspect of satellites – no one would launch a global nuclear war on the back of one destroyed piece of hardware. That makes space war more feasible. “We have these valuable space assets, and they’re fairly vulnerable because it’s hard to protect things in space” says Grego.
Disabling an enemy satellite has also become easier. Previously, the only options were shooting a projectile at it or smashing your own satellite into it. Such “kinetic attacks” tend to be seen as a bad idea. In 2007, China launched a missile to destroy one of its own weather satellites. This test created more space debris than any other event in history – thousands of shards more than a few centimetres across, and many more smaller ones.
“That debris stays in orbit, zooming around at high speeds,” says Grego. The resulting high-velocity shards endanger everyone’s assets, including those of the attacker and innocent bystanders.
That is why a space war is most likely to be waged more discreetly, with jamming, spoofing and hacking. Jamming a satellite is fairly simple: you just need a device that emits a lot of noise in the radio or microwave wavelengths used by the target satellite, so that genuine signals can’t be received. Spoofing is similar, but the attacker also creates a false transmission that masquerades as the target satellite’s signal.
Examples of satellite jamming and spoofing have been reported all around the world, from , to ships being sent fake location data, to private citizens jamming GPS signals so they can’t be tracked.
Actually hacking into a satellite and taking control of it is more difficult. There have been only a few reports of hackers taking over satellites, including one against a US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration satellite in 2014. in China reportedly temporarily took over the satellite’s command and control system but didn’t send it any directives.
“The Outer Space Treaty prohibits deploying weapons of mass destruction in space”
This is cyberwarfare on a new stage, and international law has yet to catch up. “In terms of legal restrictions on war in space, there is precious little,” says at the Nebraska College of Law. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits deploying weapons of mass destruction in space, but it doesn’t have any specific rules about regular weaponry. More importantly, because it was drafted in 1967, it doesn’t say anything about cyberwarfare.
In theory, countries could sign a new treaty agreeing to outlaw these technologies in space – the UN Disarmament Commission included discussions on preventing an arms race in space in its 2018 agenda – but in practice that may prove difficult. “The number-one conundrum of dealing with space policy issues is the dual-use nature of most space technology,” says at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Any satellite with thrusters intended for legitimate uses could also be manoeuvred to sidle up next to another satellite and crash into it. A laser normally used to track satellites could also dazzle one and prevent it receiving signals from its operators.
All or nothing
Of course, for a treaty to work, you have to get everyone to sign up. “The landscape of states with interests in space has expanded enormously, which makes it much harder to agree on a single set of rules,” says von der Dunk. “You need basically everyone to agree, because if you have just one outsider, that country is free to do what it wants and the whole system collapses.”
A robust space treaty would need to be enforced through diplomatic sanctions against any nation that breaches it, but identifying aggressors will be difficult. In space, everything happens so far away that it is hard to tell where an attack came from.
If a space war kicks off, this added confusion could be a major problem. “If one satellite goes out and there’s debris everywhere and it hits another satellite, was that debris or was it another country continuing escalation?” says Johnson-Freese. “Once it starts, it’s hard to stop.”
This uncertainty means even an accident mistaken as an attack could lead to extreme responses. With the US engaged in face offs with Russia, China and North Korea, tensions on the ground are high – meaning an escalation to orbit is looking increasingly possible. “Are we going to have a space war? Yes. It will probably be part of any major war we have in the future,” says Harrison.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The arms race in space”
