The Increasing Reality of War in Space

On December 20th, 2019, President Donald Trump established the United States Space Force. This was hilarious. Stephen Colbert had a field day: “Space force… spaaaaace force… [laughs.

]” And Jimmy Kimmel: “Space force… [laughs]… that was not a scene from a movie that was real. ” And James Corden: “The space force, I’m not joking [laughs. ]” And Trevor Noah: “Space force… [laughs]… I don’t even know, I don’t even know where to start.

” And even Steve Carrel in his Netflix show entirely dedicated to satirizing the Space Force: “Space force… [laughs. ]” But then this happened. That was a Russian A325 Nudol hypersonic missile.

It launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the nation’s far north, and what this moment represented was Russia’s first destructive test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon. Observers knew that it was always a question of when, not if the nation developed and deployed weaponry designed to destroy enemy satellites, but now that moment had arrived: even if they only destroyed their own satellite, the world took a step closer towards war in space. Six months later, it took another step.

A mere hour before Russian convoys crossed the border and began their invasion of Ukraine, cyber operatives used stolen credentials to log into a virtual private network run by satellite internet provider ViaSat—the very same satellite internet provider the Ukrainian military used for their battlefield communications. The operatives then used this access to push out a piece of Malware dubbed AcidRain to ViaSat modems around Europe, therefore disabling the network, and in consequence, blinding the Ukrainian military when they needed coordination most. This represents perhaps the most extreme instance yet of a military disabling space-based assets during a conflict.

Then, the year after that, in 2023, Houthi militants in Yemen fired a Ghadr-110 ballistic missile, almost certainly supplied to them by Iran, towards the southern Israeli town of Eilat. The Israeli Defense Forces successfully detected this launch so they fired an Arrow 3 missile to intercept it. The point at which this interception happened, leading to the destruction of the Houthi missile, was more than 100 miles or 160 kilometers above the surface of the earth meaning that this was the very first time in history that any physical aspect of any military conflict has ever occurred in space.

But it certainly will not be the last. Fundamentally, that’s because space is valuable. In particular, the part of space that is most valuable today—both economically, in a civilian context, and strategically, in a military one—is the orbit directly around earth.

And the reason why orbital space is valuable is really the same reason why towers exist: sometimes, for a lot of different reasons, getting a vantage point above the ground is useful. Earth’s orbit is a platform. Putting something further away from the ground means it has line-of-sight with more of it.

This allows this something to either observe more of earth or communicate with more of earth, and this has plenty of applications that now permeate through everyday life: weather forecasting, navigation, internet connectivity, TV broadcast. Crucial cogs of the modern world rely on the platform the orbit around earth provides. But it’s specifically orbit, not just space, that unlocks many of these capabilities.

And what a satellite can do has to do with where, very specifically, it is. An orbit 10,000 miles from earth will have entirely different characteristics than one 20,000 miles from earth. That’s because the closer an object is to earth, the higher the gravitational pull, and therefore the faster a rotational speed it needs around earth to balance out the gravitational pull—that’s how satellites avoid getting sucked in by earth’s gravity and falling through the atmosphere.

If a satellite is around 150 miles above earth, it needs to move at about 17,000 miles per hour. If a satellite is 22,223 miles away, however, it only needs to go 7,000 miles per hour. That particular speed translates to a very particular duration for the satellite to complete a full trip around earth: 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.

That is the exact same amount of time it takes for the earth to complete a full rotation relative to a fixed point, rather than the sun since earth is simultaneously orbiting around the sun. Therefore, with the same rotational speed as earth, a satellite 22,223 miles away will never move from the perspective of earth—as long as it's placed on the equator, it’ll always stay right above that point. This is extremely useful from an economic standpoint since getting satellites to orbit is extraordinarily expensive.

DirecTV, for example—the American satellite television provider—is estimated to have spent $300 or $400 million per satellite. But this could be justified from the get-go because they used geostationary orbits. When the company launched its first, DirecTV-1, it parked it exactly 22,223 miles above the Galapagos Islands—specifically, 91.

1 degrees west of the prime meridian. Notably, the mean center of the population of the US—as in, the average place Americans lived—sat approximately 91. 4 degrees west of the prime meridian in 1993, when the satellite was launched, meaning this very particular point in the sky gave the company the best vantage point to the most number of Americans at the time.

If geostationary orbits were not possible, the economics of this and plenty more satellite applications would never have worked since the company would’ve required multiple satellites circling the earth just to provide the same level of service in the one geographic region in which they operate. Predictably, this narrow slice of space is incredibly busy. ViaSat, for example, placed its first satellites in this orbit so they could initially focus on coverage for the high demand region including North America, Europe, and the ocean in between, rather than using resources less efficiently to cover regions with fewer aircraft, ships, and other customers.

Meteorological organizations like NOAA or the Japan Meteorological Agency use geostationary orbits to stretch their limited resources as far as they can, gaining observational coverage over the specific area of the world most relevant to forecasting in their particular countries. But what compounds the value of orbits is the optionality. Satellites have successfully orbited as little as 104 miles above earth—as in, a mere 200th the distance of those geostationary satellites.

This sort of low earth orbit is useful for applications where, rather obviously, one want to be close to earth. SpaceX’s Starlink system was able to pioneer more competitive satellite internet through placing satellites just 342 miles or 550 kilometers from earth. That’s because ViaSat’s geostationary orbits are so far from earth that it takes over 600 milliseconds for a signal to transmit from earth, to the satellite, to a ground station, to the satellite, and back.

That length of time is notable to a user and inhibits uses that rely on speed like video calls. Thanks to proximity, Starlink is able to do this same process in between 25 to 100 milliseconds which is almost imperceptibly slower than that of traditional land-based internet. But of course, there’s a lot of space between a couple hundred miles and 22,223.

That means there’s an incredible spectrum of capabilities possible. After sorting through the tradeoffs, one can get whatever vantage point on earth one wants. And if there’s anyone that loves a good vantage point, it’s militaries.

The very principles that make satellites so useful for widespread internet or TV or radio service make them even more useful for military communication. The very principles that make satellites so useful for meteorological observation or earth imaging make them even more useful for military surveillance. And perhaps most usefully, space is still such a frontier that what militaries do there is almost entirely secret.

The United States Department of Defense operates around 200 or 300 different satellites, but it’s notable that we don’t know the exact number. Any satellite can be tracked, meaning we do know the exact location of every single satellite, but that doesn’t mean we know who operates the satellite or what it does. But rocket launches are still rather newsworthy and conspicuous events so this knowledge can usually be gleaned through the correlation between a launch and the tracking of satellites leaving the launch vehicle in space.

But if the public isn’t told what a satellite does or who owns it, it just simply doesn’t know. On June 6th, 2022, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a communications satellite for the company Globalstar, but then something weird happened. The rocket’s first stage booster went and landed on the SpaceX Autonomous Spaceport Drne Ship, rather than returning to its original launch site.

But SpaceX only needs to use the drone ship when the booster doesn’t have enough fuel left to navigate back to the launch site, and it only lacks the fuel in the event of a heavy payload or a further destination. But in this case, the Globalstar satellite was a fairly light 1,500 pounds and it was only going to low earth orbit, so the booster shouldn’t have used so much fuel. Next, in the livestream, viewers noticed this—an extra payload adapter: as in, what’s used to attach satellites to the rocket during launch.

But nothing was on it, and the Globalstar satellite was still there. To confirm their suspicions, amateur satellite observers calculated a hypothetical orbit zone, went to their telescopes, and found them: four secret satellites. More than a year later, that’s still just about everything the general public knows about these four satellites: simply that they exist.

It’s believed they’re DOD operated under the designations USA-328 through 331, but we’ll likely never find out anything more. Eventually, they’ll deorbit, burn up in the atmosphere, and their secrets will die with them. And this is hardly an anomaly: about half of US military satellite launches in recent years have come with zero info on their purpose or function, while even with the other half, it's possible the military gave limited or misleading information.

This degree of secrecy, and especially the degree of confidence in the persistence of the secrecy, is simply unparalleled. But it does come with a fundamental trade-off. The public might not know what a satellite does, but they do know where it is, which makes military satellites so incredibly vulnerable.

Take, for instance, GPS satellites. And, take for instance, this specific launch on February 5, 2016. Propelled by an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, the launch of GPS IIF-12 went off without a hitch, just like the 11 IIF launches before it.

Today, eight years on, IIF-12, or USA-266, is still hovering at least 12,416 miles or 19,982 kilometers above earth in a semi-synchronous orbit that sees the satellite fulfill one rotation of the planet every 12 hours. That’s to be expected, as it’s still within its life cycle of 12 years. But it’s also an incredibly good thing, an incredibly important thing, because this satellite along with the other 10 functional satellites of its class are absolutely vital for the American GPS constellation—making up a plurality of the 30 GPS satellites that the US operates.

No matter where one looks, the global positioning system is serving a vital function: whether that’s synching the timing on financial transfers or guiding the machinery that harvests the food that we ultimately eat. And it’s used by practically everything: in 2019, there were 900 million GPS receivers in the US, a number that in 2024 must now be well over a billion. Yet to its operator, the US Space Force, these civilian applications are but an ancillary benefit of the system designed for their own military use.

GPS is just massively important. And yet, it hinges on the operability of just 30-odd satellites, making each the most critical of cogs. Out of sight, out of mind, and perpetually taken for granted, IIF 12 and its 10 remaining classmates aren’t only important, they’re also expensive.

Currently in the golden years of their lifecycle, the development and delivery of these 12 satellites cost $1. 4 billion, they took a decade for Boeing to deliver, and because of delays and cost overrun, there were only 12 ever built, not the 33 anticipated. At once they’re invaluable and extremely expensive.

They’re also sitting ducks. Unlike in traditional warfare, space has no defensive geography to maximize—no towering mountain ranges, no endless oceans, no impenetrable forests, no freezing winters. There’s only the matter of providing enough thrust to enter orbit, and enough communication capabilities to maintain control once in orbit.

From there, in the most literal sense, there’s no hiding: even the most secretive or dark satellites are trackable. Thus, satellites, whether high or low, geostationary or not, equipped with propulsion systems or not, represent the easiest target imaginable. This was always obvious.

So much so that we recognized where we’d end up today all the way back in 1967, during the height of the space race as the abilities of intercontinental ballistic missiles ascended, when the world’s nation’s came together at the UN to write this concise document: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It was a nod to the fact that as technology advanced, and as the world’s two major powers remained at odds, that warfare would extend upward. So it laid ground rules.

For issues of conflict, warfare, and nuclear weapons in space, there’s article IV, which outlines that no nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction shall be harbored in space and that there shall not be any military installments or maneuvers on the moon or any celestial bodies. It's a start; but the problem is article IV’s only two paragraphs, and says nothing about placing conventional arms in orbit. So, should the time come that tensions begin to rise between major world powers with increasingly advanced space programs, there’s really no ground work to limit any sort of build up, or protect any sort of orbital infrastructure upon which so much of society depends on.

For the United States, the world’s preeminent space power, such legal, technological, and geographical vulnerability has been masked by the fact that, for decades, it and its direct allies were the only countries with consistent access to space in the first place. But this is changing quickly. Most recently, space warfare has manifested in mainstream news through this story: a not-entirely clear, not entirely unclassified reference to a Russian satellite with a nuclear element of somesort, be it the power source or the payload.

While a captivating headline that’s stoked popular imagination, space has been on the way toward full militarization for well over a decade—transforming from the next logical battlefield in theory, to simply the next battlefield. Thanks to the mix of advancing technology, rising geopolitical tension, and easier access to space than ever, there’s now a big three in space: the US, Russia, and China. And all are building out their offensive capabilities.

This offensive space weaponry is split into two broad categories: kinetic weapons, those that physically collide with satellites, and non-kinetic attacks, those that render them unusable by non-invasive means. Now, we don’t know the full capabilities of any country’s space arsenal, kinetic or non-kinetic, as these are still highly secretive projects, but occasionally the world gets a peek behind the curtain with what the instigating nation calls a test, and the rest of the world calls a show of force. What became well understood with the launch of Russia’s direct ascent test in 2021 was that all the world’s major space powers—Russia, the US, and China had now proved proficient in earth-to-space attacks.

In the wake of the massive and dangerous debris left by the Russian test, the US declared that it would no longer test direct ascent attacks. But it did, for its part, successfully carry out such a test in 2008 when it launched a conventional missile into orbit to destroy its own malfunctioning satellite. China has also proved such capabilities when, a year earlier, it too intercepted one of its own satellites with a missile.

What’s less understood—thanks to the unparallelled secrecy afforded by the space frontier—and therefore more cause for concern between military planners, are the offensive capabilities of each nation’s satellites themselves. The US doesn’t have an explicitly titled and operational anti-satellite program of any sort, but it has proved it can attack from earth, and it can intercept such objects in space. As early as 1987, in low earth orbit, the US has shown the capability of co-orbit intercept—basically a space to space attack—when a second stage rocket was able to intercept another domestic satellite.

More recently, and far higher up, Chinese researchers tracking the movement of their own geostationary satellites noticed something suspicious: an American satellite hot on two recently launched Chinese satellites’ tails. While simply tagging along, the observation that US satellite’s have been tailing other far off ones shows that the US has the capability to maneuver and survey satellites at basically all possible distances. In this, the US is not unique, as China and Russia too have made close passes by one another’s satellites with their own Rendezvous and Proximity Operation, or RPO, satellites.

Of course, with machines as delicate and fragile as satellites, optimized for weight above all else, nearby observation can feel unnervingly like an attack as it just takes one aimed propulsion and one collision to turn a satellite into space junk. But ramming’s a crude, one for one proposition. So: satellites that can fight.

China’s Shijian series of satellites have come equipped with robotic arms—a function that US Defense reports say could well double as a possible offensive weapon. Not to be outpaced in the space arms race, Russia, in 2019, launched what the rest of the world deemed an offensive satellite in the form of Kosmos 2542. Seemingly an unspectacular launch of an unspectacular satellite, no one paid much mind to the November 19th takeoff.

That was until December 9th, when a smaller subsatellite, Kosmos 2543, launched from the vehicle while in space. Observational in nature, the satellite seemed, it still wasn’t a big deal. But then in July of 2020, the satellite launched a projectile.

While the object didn’t hit any satellite, Russian or otherwise, the international community labeled it a weapon on account of its rapid relative speed. Satellites inside of satellites, arms on satellites, and satellites as projectiles themselves have all taken to space in the last decade, and these are just the capabilities we’re aware of. Taken together, these offensive capabilities still seem fairly rudimentary—targeted strikes, ramming, grappling—out of context, this could be considered wrestling strategy.

But the implications of using any such capability are nothing short of staggering. Space warfare, from a strategic perspective, could easily devolve into a race to the bottom. Without any real defense, what's to stop a one for one response to an attack on a satellite?

More distressing, once one satellite is attacked, there’s really no saying what that now space junk is going to bash into. This is a graph of all known debris hurtling around in space. And these massive upticks, well, they just so happen to align with China’s direct ascent test here, a satellite collision here, and Russia’s direct ascent test here.

From just this Russian test, producing a relatively minor amount of debris in comparison to China’s, astronauts in the ISS were forced to take shelter and prepare to escape in two shuttles as a precaution that a piece of debris might rip through the station. With just this test, one expert estimated that the chance of a mission terminating collision in low earth orbit doubled. And should such a collision occur, well, then there’s even more debris to account for, creating not a one-to-one domino effect, but an exponential domino effect, where the debris from one satellite knocks out two, the debris from which, in turn, knocks out four, before eventually, there’s simply too much debris to possibly work around.

It’s exactly here where space warfare, rather than a less bloody alternative to traditional warfare, begins to develop parallels to nuclear warfare and rudimentary seeming weapons start to conjure ideas of mutually assured destruction. Much like nuclear warfare, then, offensive capabilities simultaneously act as defensive deterrence, but of course, so do defensive ones. And so in 2023, the US DOD developed and declared their “Strategy on Protection of Satellites.

” The core of it really is to just not worry too much about any individual satellite. Put another way, their focus is on so-called “architecture resilience. ” The Space-Based Infrared System, for example, is an absolutely crucial capability for the US military.

It’s their primary space-based system for detecting and tracking missile launches all around the world. But the constellation providing this capability is rather small and vulnerable: it’s made up of six geostationary satellites for primary coverage, and four in highly elliptical orbit to cover the polar regions. That’s why on February 14th, 2024, the DOD started replacing it.

A Falcon 9 rocket carried the first four missile tracking satellites of the eventually massive Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture system. They joined twenty communications satellites already in orbit—tasked with getting information of missile launches from the tracking satellites to relevant parties on earth—making this constellation already larger in quantity than its predecessor, but this is only what they refer to as tranche 0. The next phase of this project, slated to begin launching in late 2024, is expected to include 126 communication satellites, 35 tracking satellites, and another 18 just for testing new technology meaning, soon enough, just this one constellation will almost double the Department of Defense’s satellite count, and then there’s already a tranche 2 planned in 2026, a tranche 3 in 2028, and a tranche 4 in 2030.

With such a colossal constellation, no one part of it is crucial. In fact, it would take a massive, coordinated, costly attack just to meaningfully diminish its capability. Yet, the cost of this system is not dramatically different from that of its predecessors since it’s deployed in low-earth orbit which necessitates less powerful, less expensive, and more compact instruments.

In fact, each of the constellation’s satellites costs just $15 million to build and launch which, in military satellite terms, is astonishingly low. Therefore, low-earth orbits and massive constellation-counts are certainly the future of militaries in space. But ultimately, the militarization of space is just flat-out a bad thing, exactly because space is such a good thing.

We benefit so tremendously much from what satellites provide. Whole sectors of the economy could not exist without what global positioning services provide. Countless lives are saved through the added forecast accuracy meteorological satellites provide.

The urban-rural technological divide is flattening due to the connection internet satellites provide. And the benefits are only accelerating—with each year, as launch costs lower and technology improves, innovators find more and more ways to unlock the value earth’s orbit provides. Just last month, for example, the first test of automated drug manufacturing in space concluded with the capsule’s return to earth, marking the start of what many expect to be a pharmaceutical revolution thanks to the unique production capabilities made possible by microgravity.

Crippling these abilities would cripple earth. There is a theoretical point at which a given orbit is so polluted with space junk that it just becomes unusable. Earth could lose the ability to use low earth or geosynchronous orbits.

It won’t be doomsday—in the long term there will be ways to work around it at higher cost and with lower capability—but a shared asset of humanity will have been destroyed, and it all would have been entirely avoidable. The parallels with nuclear militarization are uncanny. It’s in everyone’s best interest to not arm militaries with nuclear weapons, but because others have, others believe they must.

If Russia has anti-satellite capabilities, the US believes, as a measure of deterrence, it must too. What the world is hopefully gaining an understanding of, as these risks shift from theory into reality, is that war in space is the metaphorical nuclear option. Just as we focus on nuclear non-proliferation, one must focus on the non-proliferation of space weaponry which is potentially even tougher since the technology used is just so conventional.

Countries can and have used conventional missiles to perform anti-satellite tests meaning there’s hardly even a way to ban the technology—as there is in the nuclear realm—only the practice. There are countries with which one simply can’t reason with, like North Korea, that have capable and growing conventional missile arsenals. So it’s just not that hard to start a war in space, yet the consequences are just devastating.

The answers on how to solve this conundrum simply are not there yet. One can merely hope that all understand the implications of letting earthly conflict stretch into the stars, and that mutually-assured-destruction in space remains a theoretical form of defense, rather than a devastating reality. I was personally amazed how interesting the growing reality of conflict in space was as a topic—I found it amazing how relevant such an inaccessible realm is becoming to earthly geopolitics… again, I suppose.

If you also found this interesting, then I’ve got a bunch of video suggestions for you. First and foremost, Brian and his team at Real Engineering just put out a stunning and fascinating three-part series about the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle was crucial in lowering the effective distance to space, and a lot of its technology is now getting applied to Chinese and American military Spaceplanes.

In addition to the three main videos, Real Engineering also released a full-length tour of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and interview with a former Space Shuttle Mission Specialist exclusively to Nebula. Next, I’d suggest watching Joseph from Real Life Lore’s three-part series on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At over 90 minutes of runtime, it goes into a level of detail you’ve almost certainly never seen and gives crucial context on what role the Russian cyberattack against ViaSat played.

The reason why Real Life Lore is able to cover conflicts in such depth is because Modern Conflicts is a Nebula Original—YouTube has rather strict policies about how you can cover conflicts in a way that restricts crucial depth. And it’s hard to blame them for that because they have advertisers to appease that don’t want to risk angering anyone, but Nebula doesn’t—it’s a subscription-based platform which we, the creators, believe is just a better economic model for video streaming. Not only are advertisements and sponsorships annoying to the viewer, but ad-supported platforms incentivize views at any cost, rather than the best videos possible.

In addition, with the subscription revenue, Nebula is able to commission these amazing, high-budget Nebula Originals from creators—there are already tons of great ones in addition to Modern Conflicts, and some of the most ambitious to-date are in production right now. Best of all, Nebula is genuinely the most sustainable way to support the creators—we founded it and own it, after all. When you sign up with our link, Nebula.

tv/Wendover, we’ll get a portion of your subscription fee for as long as you stay subscribed, but you’ll also get access to everything the platform has to offer—not just our stuff. And at that link, you’ll get 40% off an annual subscription which brings the cost down to under $3 a month meaning, not only will this be the most creator-friendly streamer you ever subscribe to, it’ll also probably be the cheapest. So, once again, head to Nebula.

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