Angry Planet - What a real war in space might look like

Episode Date: September 2, 2015

There are approximately 1,000 satellites currently in orbit, but how many of them are really weapons in disguise?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Nobody is actively mobilizing to fight in orbit, but all the world's leading space powers seem to be increasingly concerned that that could happen. I'm Jason Fields, Reuters opinion editor.

And I'm Matthew Galt from Waris Boren. And this week, David Axe, who is Waris Boring's editor-in-chief, is also here. And we're talking about an article he recently wrote about the potential for war in the highest battleground, space. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict

focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. America is the world's leading space power. But Russia and China are catching up fast. David, why is space important? We rely on space for a lot of things, things that you may not even be conscious of. And the United States, among world powers, relies on space even more than other countries do.

You count on space for your television signals, for your GPS on your phone and in your car. Space underpins communications by satellites underpins air travel and global logistics shipping packages. More things count on space by the day, and the space infrastructure that we count on is increasingly vulnerable to attack. So actually, just to sort of go back to a point we made a couple weeks ago we were talking about drones, most drone telemetry also goes through satellites, right? Right. So the military also depends upon space and in the same ways that the civilian economy does,

but maybe even more so. So yes, for example, the signals that American airmen send to control drones all over the world and then the video imagery that those drones send back to analysts back to the United States, travels via satellite. American military operations navigate via GPS, which is the same satellite constellation that civilians rely on on their phones and in their cars, but was originally a military program. And even the Air Force's most important bomb, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, is a GPS guided bomb. Without satellite constellations, the U.S. military could not navigate, communicate, it could not conduct operations all over the world.

So the infrastructure of the information age is built on these satellites? Right, there are roughly 1,000 active satellites in orbit, which is, I believe, a higher number than ever before. That number is constantly growing. About 500 of those satellites are American. Most of them commercial satellites, but at least 100 of them, military satellites. China and Russia are the world's basically tied for the world's second space powers with about 100 satellites apiece. It's a little bit harder in their cases to break down which satellites are military and which are civilian.

There's a phenomenon in space called dual use, where a satellite can do a whole bunch of different things. Some civilian functions, some military function. You can't always parse a satellite into strictly military or civilian categories. GPS is a great example. In a sense, the GPS constellation, which is dozens of satellites, is dual use because while it was originally a military system, today most of its users are civilians, but the military still relies on it for, like I said, navigation and even guiding bombs. So it's hard to tell exactly how much of the, how many of the thousand satellites in orbit

are military assets, but it's safe to say hundreds. So we've been lobbying satellites into space since 1957, right? Are some of the military satellites, have they been up there for a long time? Good question, Jason. No, satellites don't tend to last more than a decade, if you're lucky. Satellites break down, they run out of fuel, their orbits decay, and if they are low on fuel, they lack the ability to boost back higher up into space to avoid reentering Earth's atmosphere and burning up. So a satellite has a limited lifespan.

It's a good question on your part because one thing that the world's space powers are working on is the ability to repair satellites in orbit to extend their useful life and even change their mission while they're up there in space. and the satellites that do the spacecraft that do the repair work have a dual-use function. While they can function as sort of peaceful repair vehicles flying up into orbit and using robotic claws to manipulate and repair other spacecraft, it doesn't take much to command that claw to rip instead of fix. So a repair satellite, or they call them inspection satellite, they can be used to assess the health of a satellite, to repair a satellite, or to destroy a satellite. So any country that's putting an inspection or repair satellite into orbit is potentially also putting a weapon into orbit.

So are there weapons in space, period? Are there anything, is there any satellite that's just a weapon? Thanks, Matt. That's a good question. No, not really. The United States denies that it has any weapons in space at all, and it can make that claim because everything, every U.S. spacecraft that has a military, an attack function is also dual use and can do other things. In fact, the number of quote-unquote weapons in space, American weapons.

in space is probably pretty low. If the United States civilian entities and the government own 500 satellites, probably 1% of those, five or six satellites are weapons, are explicitly or not explicitly, because again, their dual use and the government denies that they're weapons. But five or six of them seem to be good at an attachment. attack kind of function. Well, so David, could you sort of explain when you're talking about a weapon in space? Honestly, my first thought is something that's going to lob death down onto the planet. No, Jason, I'm talking about battle within space. The idea of placing a weapon in space in order to attack the ground, that's certainly possible. Popular culture has a name for that. Rods from God,

for example, you could place a very heavy but small, inert projectile, just a solid lump of metal in orbit. And if you drop it, if you calculate the physics right and drop it, that thing, that rod is going to gain such energy returning to Earth that it would be as powerful as a nuclear weapon. But no fallout. Not necessarily. Right. So you could weaponize space in the sense that you could attack Earth from space.

But that is such a provocative move that no country has ever done it. David, why has no one put weapons in space? Why are we talking about this now? Has something changed politically in recent years? In the early space age, there was basically a gentleman's agreement between the United States and Russia that they would not weaponize space. And that agreement seems to have held. Again, this is in the sense of placing weapons into orbit

that could attack the ground. It's a very destabilizing move because the systems that we've built to monitor terrestrial strategic weapons, nukes, the radars and the communications, the infrastructure for telling when your enemy is prepared to attack you, with nuclear weapons doesn't work as well when it comes to monitoring space. Monitoring space is tricky, and it requires a lot of telescopes and radars and

infrared sensors both in orbit and on ground, and then all of the communications and command and control functions to tie all those systems together and keep an eye on what's going on in space. And there's just a lot of junk in space in addition to the thousand active satellites. So that's actually something only the United States does well, and only the United States can do all over the world. cross Earth's orbit. So monitoring space weaponry would be tricky and space weaponry could attack without a lot of warning. So it would sort of shatter the existing balance of power

between nuclear states where all of the world's major nuclear powers keep a very close eye on each other and have expectations for what it takes for a nuclear power to mobilize and attack. You can watch it, you can see it coming, and so that that's a sort of safeguard against one country attacking another. Start putting strategic weapons in space to target land, and you disrupt that system. So we haven't done that. The United States hasn't done that. Russia and China have not done that. Instead, we are quietly, and the Russians and Chinese are doing this as well,

placing systems into space that can – in fairly subtle ways manipulate other spacecraft in a way that could work as a weapon. You could disable or hijack or spy on other countries' satellites. Now, there's a second layer to this, which is ground-based or sea-based or air-based atmospheric systems that can also attack spacecraft from Earth. So the United States and Russia, both during the Cold War, developed air-launched anti-satellite rockets that fighter jets would launch into low orbit

that could destroy satellites. Both countries have dropped that kind of system because there's a better way. The same rockets that you use to launch satellites into orbit, you could use to strike satellites in orbit. If you can aim them accurately enough. Which, as you're saying, David, is not an easy task. you're saying that these things are not very well tracked, right?

So how many can we shoot out of the sky? I mean, is this actually, I mean, do we have a real capability for this? Good question, Jason. Thank you. The United States possesses the military means to, from the surface, to wipe out the roughly 50 satellites apiece, and I'm counting commercial and military satellites, that both Russia and China, they have about the same number, that they keep in low orbit. So orbit, we sort of divide orbit up into low orbit, which is just above the atmosphere, and then geosynchronous, which is way up there, you know, hundreds of, many, many hundreds, actually thousands of miles above Earth.

Sweeping low orbit is reaching low orbit with a ground or sea-launched or air-launched rocket is much easier than reaching a geosynchronous orbit. So we have, the United States has the military means to clean sweep Russia's and China's satellites from low orbit in a matter of minutes because we have a what's called a ballistic missile defense system that's mostly sea-based. So we have these missiles on board destroyers and cruisers, U.S. Navy destroyers and cruisers, that coupled with high-tech radars can target satellites in low orbit. We've actually done this. In 2008, the USS Lake Erie, a cruiser, fired a standard missile, that's with a capital S, it's a name of the missile, into low orbit, and struck a defunct U.S. military satellite. The satellite, according to the government, well, we know that it was defunct, it was malfunctioning, that's easy enough to see from the ground,

but the U.S. government claimed that satellite was in danger of decaying, its orbit, and returning to Earth, and it could spread toxic fuel and potentially hurt somebody. So the government said, you know what, we're going to just wreck this thing and prevent it from, you know, in a single big lump full of gas, returning to Earth and causing problems. But there's a better explanation for why the government wanted to conduct this operation, this test. A year prior, China had done the same thing. launched a rocket from Earth and struck a satellite, one of its own satellites, in orbit, and scattered thousands of pieces of, unannounced, did this unannounced, scattered thousands of pieces of debris across orbit,

debris that could even threaten the International Space Station, could strike it, and really irritated a lot of countries that have assets in low orbit. China put all of these countries' spacecraft at risk, and also brazenly entered the world's ranks of attack-capable space powers. The world was not happy, and so a year later, the United States conducted this quote-unquote safety-related operation to knock out a satellite, firing a rocket from this cruiser that reached low orbit and with an an incredible display of accuracy, actually physically struck. Didn't just blow up and catch the satellite in some kind of blast or something.

It physically struck the satellite and destroyed it. So in 2008, the United States, the U.S. Navy demonstrated that its warships with minimal modification could use the same weapons that we use to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles to also shoot down low-earth orbit satellites. And we have enough of these warships and enough of those standard missiles to wipe out every satellite, military and civilian that China and Russia have in low orbit in a matter of minutes. And that is an incredibly powerful and provocative capability. China and Russia now are deploying their own spacecraft with seemingly with attack capabilities

into low orbit to at least balance the capabilities that the United States has demonstrated. So let's talk a little bit about the killer satellites, just in terms of what they might look like. In your article, David, you mentioned specifically one that looks quite a bit like the space shuttle, but smaller and without people on it. Right, Jason, you're talking about the X-37B, which is a U.S. Air Force robotic mini shuttle. The X-37B Boeing makes it. It actually was originally a NASA program. NASA kind of handed it off to the Air Force a few years ago, and the Air Force has built two of them.

Pretty much at all times, one of them is up in low orbit. You launch it atop a rocket, much like the space shuttle did, resting atop its own boosters. So you launch it in the nose cone of a rocket, and it deploys into low orbit. It has little wings. It has solar panels, so it can, it has little thrusters, so it can maneuver around low orbit. I mean, many spacecraft can do that, but the X-37B is surprisingly frisky. So it can maneuver around low orbit. It has a payload bay, sort of like a space with a door on it, that the space is probably

about as big as the bed of a pickup truck. You can open and close the door. And the doors were basically in the same spot that you saw them on the space shuttle. Yeah, on top of it. Yeah, and so we don't know actually what the Air Force puts inside that bay. It rarely says. So for the past five years or so, we've always had one of these X-37Bs in orbit, and they can spend a year or more up in space without running out of fuel.

When they're out of fuel, they glide, they reenter Earth's atmosphere, and much like the space shuttle, glide to a landing. This is an extraordinary and weird capability for a government to possess, for anyone to possess, because it begs the question, why do you need this thing? So the X-37B, you can reuse it, but you've got to refurbish it every time it lands, because it takes a lot of wear and tear up there in space, and it's not entirely clear why you would want to reuse a spacecraft like that. you maybe save a little bit of money in certain budget lines by reusing the basic frame over and over again.

It's still expensive to build, expensive to maintain, expensive to operate. And it seems to be wickedly inefficient. Because it carries the bulk of an airplane so that it can land. And yet it spends most of its time in Earth orbit where wings don't help. So why do you need to put an airplane into orbit and why do you need to bring it back to Earth? Now, so the question then is, what are we putting, what is the United States Air Force and whatever industrial or government partners the Air Force is working with, what are they putting in this, the X37B's cargo bay? The Air Force claims the X37B is for experiments so that you can put an experiment, much like we can. conduct on the International Space Station where you could send something up into space, tinker with it

in orbit, and then send it back down on a capsule. So you can do the same thing with the X37B. You could stick some kind of small science experiment in the bay, fly it up into orbit, zip around, bring it back and see what happened. Check it out physically. Check out the... But the thing is, there are other ways of bringing payloads back to Earth. We've been doing it for 60 years. You just put it in some kind of durable canister and let it... fall back to Earth and parachute to the ground. So why do we have this expensive airplane that we send into space to zip around and then come back? Beats me.

In theory, you could weaponize the X-37B. You equip it with a laser, a mechanical arm. It's maneuverable. It has a lot of endurance. It can stay in space for a long time. You fly up close to an enemy spacecraft and you poke at it. You damage it in some way. Now, we have other spacecraft that aren't aircraft, that aren't also aircraft, that can do the same thing.

The U.S. military possesses around six of these, like I said before, inspection or repair satellites that can do that work. And in the past few years, Russia and China have also begun putting their own inspection satellites into low orbit. David, for years, science fiction has told us that space combat is going to look like naval combat. But what you're describing is more shooting missiles from the ground and tiny robots, or not tiny, large satellites poking at each other with mechanical arms. That's kind of what space warfare will look like. Right. So the key to understanding the way that space war could unfold is to appreciate that all those spacecraft we have up there support stuff that we do on Earth. You don't need a bunch of space marines with laser guns to disrupt the delicate infrastructure that we need to support these terrestrial functions.

You know, the GPS satellites, for example, you need enough of them to cover the entire planet so that wherever you are in the world, you can sort of triangulate your location. And so you're constantly communicating with this constellation of satellites when you're using your phone or the GPS in your car, you knock out enough of those satellites and you break up the network and there will be gaps in GPS coverage. So to wage war in space targeting the GPS network, which would be devastating to the U.S. military and to the American economy, well, actually devastated everyone in the world. To wage war against the GPS constellation, you just need to disrupt, you don't even need to totally destroy, you just need to disrupt a certain number of the

satellites in the GPS constellation. So it's not like a battalion of space marines deploying into orbit with James Bond. You're not storming space stations and things like that. Moonraker, yeah. Moonraker, yeah. That's, first of all, incredibly disappointing. Yes, it is disappointing. It really is. And second of all, more seriously, David, what does the U.S. military do to prepare for GPS outages or something like this? I mean, do they have contingency plans? You, good question, Jason. Thank you. You build resilience in space. So for a constellation of satellites that relies on sort of like numbers and coverage, you add numbers to it. So you've got some redundancy there,

and you can maneuver satellites around to fill in blanks. Satellites are expensive, so that's, you know, that's a costly undertaking, but it's a fairly easy solution to building resilience to your space systems. It's simply add more satellites. You can actually design satellites to be better protected. I wouldn't say armored exactly, but tougher built, satellites would be, would survive better during some kind of space war than a lightly built. Today we build satellites very light because we, the great expense in launching a satellite

is its weight. So you want the satellite to be as stripped down as possible. So you don't build them heavy and like armored, right? You could bulk up satellites to make them tougher. Satellites that can maneuver faster with their little thrusters could dodge enemy attack. in theory you could even equip satellites with lasers of their own to defend themselves, but then that then is a weapon that you've placed into space, and you kind of have to explain that to the rest of the world. You start fudging the definition of dual use when you start launching all of your satellites with, like, laser cannons bristling off of it.

So, you know, there's ways you can build resilience. One, the major way that the United States is trying to build defense, fences in space is by being able to more quickly launch more satellites that cost less. So it is not uncommon for a military satellite, an American military satellite today, to cost a billion dollars or more, including the satellite and the rocket to launch it and the cost of launching it. And that says nothing about the people you're paying and the infrastructure you're building to operate and monitor that satellite for the duration of its, you know, 10, 15, year life. These things are

incredibly expensive. They're big, they're complex, we pour a lot of resources into one spacecraft. There's another philosophy. Build it simple. Give it one use, one purpose, one mission. Build it small.

Build it almost disposable. Maybe a short lifespan. If you build it cheap enough and it's kind of disposable when it fails or falls back to Earth, just stick another one up there. Right? So you break the thinking that every spacecraft is a Lamborghini. Instead, you start building a bunch of Kia's. Yeah. And if you can launch them quickly and cheaply, then you're always ready to replace

or reinforce your existing satellite constellations. And the Air Force is all over this. So they have an experimental office called the Operationally Responsive Space Office in New Mexico, whose purpose is to oversee the development of tiny satellites. And industry, all over the world, but especially in America, are eager to get involved in this because the barrier, the cost barrier, lowers, and more and more people can do stuff in space. College students in, you know, admittedly well-funded science departments

at universities in the U.S. could launch their own experiments into space and now do that, actually. There's a thing called a CubeSat. So this is a big trend in the U.S. space industry, you build a very simple cube-shaped space frame. It's just a, looks like a big tinker toy box shape, like a skeleton. It's like the size, not even the size of a microwave oven, smaller than that. And it's a simple, cheap frame.

You pack into that thing all of the basic systems. You keep them as simple as possible that you need to function as a satellite. Say like a high-resolution digital camera, just like the kind you have in your iPhone. and some radio equipment to communicate with the ground, a power supply, pack it in that cube, stick it in a cheap rocket, and maybe stick it in there with 25 other cubesats, launch them all at the same time, and you suddenly, for the cost of maybe a million or $2,

you've put 25 satellites into orbit. And so we're doing more and more of that. And the military is looking at taking that idea of, smaller, cheaper, faster, and really baking it into the way that it conducts space operations. So DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the Pentagon's like fringe science agency. And actually is the originally creator of the internet, the ARPANET. One thing they're working on right now is a space plane, not like the X37B, which actually goes up in orbit, but an aircraft that flies very, very high. So, you know, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 feet in the air.

Okay. That's still suborbital, though, right? That's still in the atmosphere, but it's very close to the edge. And if you put a small rocket on top of that spaceplane, and then you put your satellite on top of that small rocket, you can fly the spaceplane up to 300,000 feet. You can launch the rocket from the spaceplane with the satellite. on top and it only has to travel a short distance, it only needs so much energy to get into low orbit.

What we do today is we use disposable multi-stage rockets. So the rocket blasts off, it burns all this energy and then it falls away and the second stage fires up and it gets the satellite up into orbit, right? Yeah. The idea is let's replace that disposable first stage with a reusable airplane. The idea of disposable versus reusable, one thing, one of them is not always just to be used to be. cheaper than the other. It depends on how you calculate it and how you use it. But DARPA and the military think that

if they have a reusable first stage, aka an airplane, that can fly very, very high, that they can save money and launch more rockets more quickly than if they use a traditional vertical multi-stage rocket.

So here's the idea. You build this thing, and the DARPA's already released, has already given out the first contracts, Boeing got one, for example, to develop this thing. should fly in about five years or so. So you have a fleet of these space planes, near space planes. You pile a rocket on top, you take off real quick, fly up to near low orbit, blast off your rocket,

launch your satellite, return to the runway, the next day you do it again. DARPA wants to be able, for one of these things, to fly a mission per day for more than a week. So you can imagine if you have a whole squadron of these space planes, you could put, if you're using CubeSats, the little ones, you could put hundreds of satellites into low orbit in a week. Let's say they do that, though.

You do have another problem, which is that space is already incredibly crowded. And there's debris. Well, I mean, that's what they always say. I mean, David's shaking his head at me. But, I mean, you know, you do actually read that. That's a problem. Right. Jason, you're talking about the idea of debris in space.

Yeah. Right. So there are tens of. of thousands of like meaningful, meaningful sized chunks of debris, you know, like the size of a coin or bigger, or actually probably smaller than the size of a coin. But anyways, big enough to damage a spacecraft. But I try to imagine for a minute how big the Earth is. Yeah, how much volume that Earth's orbit, which goes up to thousands of miles above the Earth, how much space that is, how much volume that is.

The problem is not that there's just like a thick cloud of crap in orbit. It's that all of those pieces of debris move. And so you need to be able to get out of their way if they come your direction.

So it's not that orbit is so cluttered that it's useless to us now. It's just that tracking all that debris poses a sensor and a computation problem. You need the sensors on the ground or in space, to keep track of all those pieces of debris so that if one of them is, say,

zipping toward your X-37B or your International Space Station or whatever, you can maneuver your satellite to get out of the way. You need enough lead time to get your satellite out of the way. So adding several hundred

cubesats to low orbit, from which they would decay pretty quickly anyway, that mathematically speaking doesn't really compound the debris problem all that much. But what it does do, is it gives you the ability to replace satellites that you use the lose in wartime, which builds resilience, which is a form of defense against space war.

So as more and more countries, the United States being the leader by far in this regard, as more and more countries put satellites into orbit that could function as weapons and build systems on the ground that could knock out satellites, countries are also working on the ability to replace those satellites. So you're seeing both attack and damage and defense systems being developed on Earth and in orbit as we prepare is maybe the wrong word for the possibility of war in space. Nobody is actively mobilizing to fight in orbit, but all the world's leading space powers seem to be increasingly concerned that that could happen and are

preparing for it. Okay, well, I think that's actually a pretty darn good place to stop. So I'd like to ask people listening to us if they can actually go to iTunes, like the podcast. If you want to comment on it, we'd absolutely love to hear what you have to say. The more ratings we get, the more people who get to see us. And hopefully that'll translate into getting even better guests. Not that there's anything wrong with David. Anyway, thanks very much.

Thanks, Matt. Thank you, Jason. Yeah, thanks, Jason. Thanks, Matt. It was a pleasure to be here. Next time on War College. If Iran's conventional forces were to, say, hypothetically, in theory, move into Iraq, they would find themselves fighting an enemy that fights a very different kind of style of war than they're accustomed to.