Like we don't have enough to contend with.
From my new issue of Harpers.
All armies prefer high ground to low.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In late January 2020, in an orbital belt around 640 kilometers above Earth, two unmanned Russian spacecrafts coasted through the sky toward USA-245, an American reconnaissance satellite.
From this elevation a traveler would have seen the earth as a rounded slope of green and brown. One could have made out the rugged edges of mountains and the contours of lakes, our white atmosphere, bowed around the planet, darkening to blue and then black. Seen from a backyard telescope, the satellites would have looked like small glimmers in the night, with light from the sun glinting off their alloyed coating as if off a distant windshield.
The Russian crafts had positioned themselves unusually close to the American, in a near-identical orbit, and they had synced their paths with USA-245—a classified, multibillion-dollar KH-11 satellite, equipped with imaging systems on par with the Hubble telescope—such that one of them came within twenty kilometers of it several times in a single day. Satellites in the same plane may on occasion pass within one hundred kilometers of one another but far less frequently. The Russians, it seemed, were stalking an American spy satellite…
In mid-April, Russia tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon (DA-ASAT)—a missile launched from Earth rather than from a vessel already in orbit. The country had tested this weapon system—named Nudol, after a river near Moscow—multiple times before, and the UnitedStates, China, and India had all performed DA-ASAT tests in years prior, each demolishing defunct satellites of their own. The Russian weapon seemed intended for a target in open space: it sailed through the sky and then fell back to Earth, where it likely landed in the Laptev Sea. U.S. Space Command issued a statement the same day, declaring the test evidence of the growing threats to U.S. space systems and deeming it “hypocritical”: Russia had publicly called for “full demilitarization” in space. Space Command also took the opportunity to comment on the nesting dolls. Russia, the statement said, had “conducted maneuvers near a U.S. Government satellite that would be interpreted as irresponsible and potentially threatening in any other domain.” In a line attributed to Raymond directly, it warned that the United States was “ready and committed to deterring aggression and defending the Nation, our allies and U.S. interests from hostile acts in space.”…
In fact, the primary source for international law in space is a drastically outdated document from 1967 called the Outer Space Treaty, designed for an environment far simpler than the current field. In a September 2019 address at a conference for air, space, and cyber security, General Raymond put it this way: “The Outer Space Treaty says you can’t have nuclear weapons in space. That’s about what it says. The rest is the wild, wild West.”…
More than half a century later, this Cold War document remains the basis for all extraterrestrial law. It bans placing nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction into orbit—as Raymond noted—but it says nothing of Earth-to-space or space-to-space arms, nor does it speak to kinetic weapons or the many subtler forms of attack developed since its drafting. The agreement is silent on what constitutes hostile behavior, and though it states that international law extends into space, there is no ready translation of earthly rules to a realm without national borders or gravity, and with limitless potential planes of conflict. As the years have gone by and other nations have joined the United States and Russia in space, and as astronautic technologies have become vastly more sophisticated, the insufficiency of the Outer Space Treaty has become a significant danger…
Since 2015, Russia, China, India, Iran, Israel, France, and North Korea have all established military space programs. China’s and Russia’s space commands are close on the heels of the United States, and according to the Secure World Foundation, the United States has idled certain of its offensive-technology programs while China and Russia actively test the same capabilities. Over the course of the past two years, martial activity beyond our atmosphere has exploded, and in conversations this summer, many space and security experts told me that the pressure is rising. “We are watching tensions ratchet up,” said Jack Beard, a former Department of Defense attorney and a professor of law specializing in space.
In March 2019, India tested its first direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon, blowing up one of its own crafts in low Earth orbit. In April 2020, when Iran announced the creation of its military space program, it slung its first reconnaissance satellite, Noor 1 (“Light 1” in Farsi), into orbit. In September of that year, China successfully launched a reusable craft, dubbed a “spaceplane,” which cruises in low Earth orbit and returns to the planet in one piece, landing horizontally…
The U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is currently focused on establishing guidelines to limit the creation of space debris. Niklas Hedman, the committee’s secretary, told me that he thinks any new binding treaty in the current geopolitical environment is “impossible.” Green, the Space Force lawyer, said of new treaties: “I don’t see that as likely at this point.” Mike Hoversten, the lead counsel for space, international, and operations law at Space Operations Command, told me that he thinks it is “unfortunately probably going to take some kind of a significant event” in space for the international community to accept a new treaty…
Swell. Have to add another explicit exigency category to my current list.
#FreeBritney may be about to resolve.
ANOTHER NEW BOOK OF TOPICAL RELEVANCE I'M JUST STARTING
7: A SPUTNIK MOMENT
The object high overhead was not a bird, or a plane, or Superman. It was a metallic sphere the size of a beach ball, orbiting the earth at 18,000 miles an hour. Looking to the heavens, Americans could see the silvery orb streaking through the night; on the radio, they could hear its high-pitched beeping. The launch of Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, transfixed the world—and sent tremors throughout the United States. “Today a new moon is in the sky,” one newscaster intoned.
Under the light of that new moon, the United States saw itself differently. “There was a sudden crisis of confidence in American technology, values, politics, and the military,” wrote Sputnik chronicler Paul Dickson. Americans didn’t hang their heads, however. Within a few months of Sputnik’s launch, President Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency to keep pace with Soviet scientists. Then came the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. In 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, injecting over $1 billion to overhaul American science and engineering education. The legislation passed Congress overwhelmingly—with strong support among both Republicans and Democrats—tripling funding for science research, supporting and training thousands of new teachers, and revamping school curriculums. Those inclined to math and science flocked to universities, aided by funding that helped produce 15,000 new PhD students annually.
The specter of Sputnik hung over the ’60s, a celestial catalyst for terrestrial progress. Lockheed’s Sunnyvale-based Missile and Space division soon became the company’s largest and most lucrative, part of a tsunami of federal funding flowing into Silicon Valley. Eisenhower was succeeded by a young John F. Kennedy, who rode exaggerated fears of a Soviet-U.S. “missile gap” to the presidency and soon challenged the nation not just to match the Soviets in space but to beat them to the moon by the end of the decade. That goal was achieved in July 1969. Three months later, those two computer terminals were linked on the ARPANET, the first glimmers of today’s online world. And Sputnik was the spark for it all. In the estimation of historian Walter A. McDougall, “No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life.”…
Helberg, Jacob. The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power (pp. 232-233). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
UPDATE
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