Main Engine Cut Off - T+201: Russia’s Reckless and Awful Anti-Satellite Operation

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Russia recklessly carried out an anti-satellite operation on a large, defunct satellite in one of the most heavily-used and most important sections of Earth orbit. I share my thoughts on the operation, Russia’s status in the space industry at large, and what the technical and political fallout may be coming out of this.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous—and 703 other supporters.TopicsRussia destroys satellite in ASAT test - SpaceNewsRussia Confirms ASAT Test, Denies Debris Threat – SpacePolicyOnline.comSWF Releases Updated Compilation of Anti-satellite Testing in Space | Secure World2021 Russian satellite intercept - YouTubeSpaceNav on Twitter: “Updated orbital element distribution from the COSMOS 1408 ASAT event.”Op-ed | Lessons to learn from Russia’s Nudol ASAT test - SpaceNewsWhy India’s ASAT Test Was Reckless – The DiplomatThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by NASA

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and it has been quite a week. Russia this past week carried out an anti-satellite operation that destroyed a 2,000 kilogram satellite at about 400 and something kilometers, 440 kilometers, something like that, and has sent debris everywhere in orbit from 400 and some kilometers all the way up to 1,400 kilometers. We'll talk more about that in a bit. A massive amount of debris and it immediately, like an orbit or two later, basically, led to everyone on the International Space Station having to take cover, and actually, as the Daily Mail headline put it, go into their escape pods, which I thought was

quite hilarious in its, I guess, accuracy. It's kind of hilarious, though, just to think of them as escape pods. But the cosmonauts and the astronauts on board had to go into their vehicles uh three went into the soyuz four went into the dragon vehicle on station to take shelter in case there was a debris hit from this anti satellite operation uh that had them have to abort and leave the iss because it was so bad uh thankfully they did not have to do that. But they did have to keep all the hatches closed between modules and between segments on the space station for a while. They were sleeping in different spots, basically, you know, huddling in the middle of the ISS and and closing off the radio ports so that any of the outside

modules if they got hit, they can keep them closed and they were safe inside. Thankfully, none of that happened. But this was an absolutely awful and reckless operation that Russia carried out and shows complete disregard for the entire space environment. So I want to talk a little bit more about different aspects of that. Russia's status generally in the space industry. And then also what this might lead to in the future that could be good, could be bad.

I just want to talk about some of the fallout here. And I'm sure this won't be the last show that I do on this. I've got some guests lined up that can talk more about this because I think it's such a big deal. But to start, give you my rundown there. And I want to go a little deeper on the fact that Russia has complete disregard for the entire space environment here. This anti-satellite operation, and I keep calling it that because I hate the term that you see going around, ASAT test, the anti-satellite test.

Test to me means you tested a thing, but it didn't have the exact fallout that you would if you actually used the thing in some real environment. So when you're doing nuclear testing, you didn't drop that on a city and completely obliterate a city off the map. You blew it up in the desert or under the ocean or somewhere and you tested the capabilities of it, but you did not completely annihilate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. That's a test. This created a massive amount of debris through almost every useful orbit in Earth orbit, other than the GPS constellations and other than geostationary orbit. But you completely messed up all of these orbits in between.

That is not a test. That is an actual anti-satellite operation. There is a satellite that was there a week ago that is now in hundreds of thousands of pieces in orbit today. So that is an operation, that is not a test. I really hate that term because I think it downplays the effects of this kind of thing. Now, Russia is not the first to do one of these. There has been tests historically back in the 80s and beyond. There was notably the Chinese test in 2007 that destroyed a satellite at 865 kilometers. Those pieces of debris are going to be up there for decades, if not centuries, because of how high that test was. The year later, the U.S. and I just use the term test. See, I fall for it too. A year later, U.S. shot down one of their satellites. That left debris up for a year or two.

There was, I think the last piece of debris that was trackable came down a year later in 2009. And there was like, I don't actually know where we landed on the reasoning of that. The reasoning given from the US was that this was a failed satellite that had a full tank of hydrazine and needed to be destroyed before it came back to earth because it could pose a hazard to people. I don't really know where we stand on if that was true or not. But nonetheless, that was an operation that the US carried out. Many saw it as a response to China's the previous year to just remind them that we can also do that.

A couple years ago, 2019, I believe it was, India carried out a test where they launched a 700 kilogram satellite, which is actually the same size as the Chinese test. That was about a 700 kilogram satellite at 800 kilometers. But India launched a 700 kilogram satellite to very low, actually, like 280 kilometers is where that one was sitting at so well below uh the international space station but they destroyed that with a a direct ascent test operation um that spread debris very similarly to this one which with the debris kind of bottoming out of that 280 kilometer mark but the apogees of some piece of debris were all the way up to 12, 13, 1400 kilometers. And then this test here that Russia

just carried out did basically the same thing with most of the debris targeted right around exactly where the ISS orbits. That is where this satellite was operating. But importantly, let's just talk about those altitudes that I was just mentioning. So you've got a bunch of debris right now that is either circular-ish or its lowest point in the orbit, the perigee, right around the International Space Station's orbit at like 400 kilometers. And then that climbs, that debris, the pieces of debris in elliptical orbits, because some of it picked up speed because of the nature of the test and actually ended up in an elliptical orbit with its lowest point around the space station, but with its highest point all the

way up to 1400 kilometers. And there's a pretty smooth gradient from 400 all the way up. So that means there is debris threatening the ISS and Tiangong, the Chinese space station, and literally all of human spaceflight at the moment. That is where we fly humans to space. You know, Inspiration4 went to 580-something kilometers. That was its highest point in the orbit, but it is in that same orbital regime. That is the cradle of human spaceflight at the moment, is right around that 400-kilometer, kilometer, 500 kilometer mark. Then that climbs up a little bit higher to where all of Starlink is operating. Thousands of satellites that are in the Starlink constellation. This debris intersects directly with all of that. Climb a little bit higher between the 600 and 800 kilometer range. That is the very important

sun synchronous orbit altitude. The varying altitudes in there, but that is where all of the sun-synchronous weather satellites operate. There's a huge amount of weather satellites from NOAA and from Europeans weather satellite constellation as well. That is where all the Earth imaging satellites operate, things like planets and things like Capella, SARS actually slightly different, but very similar altitudes. All the imaging satellites basically are in that range. And then you climb a little bit higher to the 1,000, 1,200 kilometer range. That is where OneWeb is deploying. And some of those constellations of communication satellites

that don't need to be as low as Starlink, but don't need to be as high as gelink, but don't need to be as high as geostationary. That's where all of them operate. So that is pretty much, like I just mentioned, other than GPS, GLONASS, Baidu, the navigational satellites that are out at like 20,000 miles, and then the geostationary belt, which is way beyond that even, all of the useful stuff is intersected by this debris, the cradle of human spaceflight, the cradle of megaconstellations. And if you look at those two things, if you're someone interested in the development of space, that's where the interest is right now. Megaconstellations is an economic driver

of the development of space right now. And human flight is if not if you're not in on human space flight being like a main purpose of space flight it is an inspirational driver of space flight and exploration so two of the most important industries right there not to mention all of the weather and imaging satellites that we have so this is just a massively disruptive operation that they carried out. And it was completely reckless. There's many things about it that are reckless. The selection of the target in that orbit, the selection of a target that is two tons, those two things alone, it's just like, you know, Russia knew what was going to happen from this test. They weren't surprised by this. They're downplaying the risk of the debris. They were even saying that's actually not the debris that the space station

was concerned about, even though NASA has very strongly said that. Roscosmos, which is the civil counterpart to NASA over in Russia, said that they were not aware of this test. And maybe that's true. It's probably true. But it doesn't matter. Roscosmos, at the end of the day, is subject to what the Russian government decides. And if the Russian government is showing this kind of total disdain for the space environment, Roscosmos is subject to that

as well. Yes, they put their cosmonauts at risk by doing this, so I'm sure there are people in Roscosmos and in Russia at large that are very angry about this. But, you know, when this comes up, the separation of civil and military comes up, Russia and other countries look at the US and say that in a lot of ways, NASA is inseparable from the military-industrial complex. And I get that. I get that appearance

because, I mean, hell, a year ago or whatever, we inducted somebody to the Space Force on board the ISS. That was a ceremony we did, right? And I get how that looks. I totally get how that looks. We've got satellites from the National Reconnaissance Office that have had these weird rendezvous with the ISS in the past, coming very close to the ISS. SpaceX is flying to the ISS all the time. They're also flying the most important military satellites that we have today. So I totally understand how that looks like cross streams as well if you're not from the US. But it's even more so in Russia. It's even more so in China. So that kind of thing really plays heavy on this whole environment. Because if you're somebody who's listened to this show for a while, if you've listened to

Off Nominal, my other podcast I do, there's been many times when it's come up that I am not big on Russia being a partner anymore in the ISS or being a partner really at all with anything that the coalition of parties that are working on the ISS today and are trying to go out to the moon with the Artemis program, I'm not interested in Russia being a part of that anymore. They've had a horrible track record over the past several years with hardware reliability, with the reliability of their spaceflight systems in general. That is thanks to a huge amount of brain drain from the program and chronic underpaying or non-paying of their engineers and the conditions that they're

working in there. That is not faulting the individual engineers, but that system is not creating reliable spaceflight systems anymore. There are leaks in the ISS. Their most recent module spun the ISS one and a half times in orbit. A Soyuz or a Progress vehicle just did the same thing to the space station not too long ago. There was an in-flight abort just past our short-term memory when one of the boosters of Soyuz was jammed in too hard that led to an issue with the booster that led to an in-flight abort with a cosmonaut and a NASA astronaut on board. There was a hole drilled in the Soyuz that led to another leak on the ISS. It has been a terrible five, six years for the Russian space industry. And it tops off with this, right? Not coming from Roscosmos,

like I just mentioned, but this is the Russian space industry at large. And the argument that I get when I say I would no longer like Russia to be a partner is that, well, you want to keep these kind of states close to you so that you can influence things and try to influence it in a good direction. And I would ask, how well is that working out? Because that doesn't seem to be working out very well here. And so if you are increasing your exposure to risk because of the state of that industry over there, and you're not able to convince them to not do what may be the most reckless

test or operation of an anti-satellite weapon that we've ever seen, I don't know where that leaves us. So I want to talk about some of the fallout that could lead to changes in the future. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 743 of you supporting the show every single month, and I'm so thankful for your support. That includes 40 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris,

Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Heymonth, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. If you want to join that crew, and if you want to get MECO headlines in your life, I do an entire other podcast for supporters at $3 a month or more over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. You can get a special RSS feed to drop that in wherever you're listening right now. And I do a show every weekend with all the headlines from the week, giving you some thoughts and breaking down all the stories that mattered. That's a great way to stay up on Space News, great way to support the show. So if you like what I'm doing, I would love if you check that out and join the crew. And thank you all so much once again. There was a great op-ed in Space News that just got posted yesterday, I believe, as I record this, maybe two days ago. It's from Brandon Kelly and

Brian Chow. And it's thinking through some of the lessons to learn from this operation. It's thinking through, you know, some of the reasoning that would have led Russia to carry out this sort of test. Because, by the way, this was Russia's first successful direct ascent operation for anti-satellite. They've tested this system several times over the past five years, but always with dummy targets or just, you know, point in space kind of stuff. This is the first successful actual operation they'd carried out. So it was trying to put together some of the pieces that might have led them to decide to do this. So it's really worth a read start to finish. I think there's a lot of stuff to ruminate on in there that makes you really think about this kind of

situation and the relationship that Russia has with other countries and why they would do this kind of thing. But I just want to read this one last piece here, which brings us to the final critical piece of the puzzle, the United Nations' upcoming Summit of the Future to be held in September 2023. A ban on destructive anti-satellite testing has garnered increasingly broad-based support, and this ASAT test will likely add further momentum. But what is especially noteworthy is that while Russia has thus far voted against such proposals, now that they've successfully tested a direct-descent anti-satellite weapon, they may no longer need to, or at least not as vociferously. Traditionally, Russia and China have demanded a treaty preventing the basing of weapons in space, which conspicuously lacked any

verifiable limitations on development of ground-based anti-satellite weapons. This is due to the aforementioned priority of limiting U.S. space-based missile defenses. Since 2008, Russia has exploited the opening left by the U.S.'s failure to advocate viable alternatives in order to claim leadership and deflect criticism. While likely to continue pushing the thing that would limit space-basing weapons in the background, it is also likely that Russia will seize the opportunity to disingenuously control the narrative by later flipping to endorse some version of a ban on kinetic ASAT testing. So that's effectively getting at the fact that now that Russia has carried out this operation, China's already done it as well. Both of them are, and by the way, China is one of the countries that has not, surprisingly, not come out and said anything critical of this test. There's been a pretty wide condemning of

this operation. The most wishy-washy that was still like a negative statement was South Korea that I've seen that didn't really name Russia by name, didn't really talk too hard against it. But pretty much everyone else has very, very staunchly condemned this operation. China has said very little so far. So similar to what this talking about in this op-ed here, now that both countries have successfully tested their direct ascent weapon, they're now going to be maybe incentivized to clamp down and ban that because they now have demonstrated that they can do it, ban it for everyone else.

And then they can sign on and say, look at us, we were finally here for this and it's great, we're signing this. It's kind of like the big state version of regulatory capture, if you're familiar with that term. That's when you get really large as a company and you're doing so much and you want to solidify your place in the market. So you then go and support a lot of regulations that lock in your lead by making it really hard for anyone to compete with you because you've upped the barrier to entry so high

that it's tough for anyone to get to your point and compete. You see that today with Facebook and Twitter and big companies like that. But this is kind of like the state version as well. Now that I've tested my thing, let's ban that so no one else can do this. When there's other countries out there that are definitely developing these systems today and definitely going to want to test them, that are going to feel slighted by that. But it's different when it was a huge, you know, current or past superpower that is feeling that. They have a lot more sway than countries that are up and coming with these developments. So maybe Russia will now support this ban, and maybe we

will get that finally signed. Does that mean this is the last anti-satellite weapon that will ever be used as a test in the verbiage of everyone out there that annoys me so much in the times that I've slipped in this, I've annoyed myself? No, certainly not. I can think of at least one country that would definitely carry out one of these operations, and that is North Korea. They don't really seem to care much about what we all think we should do in the world. They are testing the systems that they need to to maintain their positioning in the world stage and the regime's positioning there, that's kind of how it works. Just in the case of Russia here, right? They didn't get to test one of these yet. They didn't get to actually show everyone that theirs worked.

So they were not going to support this until they were. So what I'm getting at here is that there's a larger issue issue which is space debris management there is going to be things in the future that create debris and we need to figure out how to manage that stuff so if this is true if this op-ed is is correct that russia would now support this and they're now going to go along with everyone else that thinks we should ban kinetic anti-satellite weapons can you use this pressure on them to push a little further and get some agreements around what to do about space debris at large? And I want to illuminate that a bit because the way things work right now, if you have a defunct satellite or a

rocket body that was left over from a launch or payload deployment systems that were left over from a launch, those objects are still basically controlled. Even if they are no longer active, they are still the domain of the country that licensed that launch and actually carried out that launch. So the dead rocket bodies of Atlas Vs that are out there, those are all still under the control of the United States. The rocket bodies of any Russian launch vehicles or Soviet launch vehicles or Chinese launch vehicles are the domains of the countries that launched them. And that's a huge issue because when we are now getting into this era where we have companies working on capabilities that could manage that debris, it could go up

and deorbit some of it or even move it to less dangerous portions of space. We need to come up with some system to actually allow that to be the case that doesn't rely on, you know, a government explicitly hiring a company to go move one of their pieces of debris somewhere else, because that's kind of how it would have to work today. There was a study I was reading recently. I have to find the link to put it in the show notes. I'm not sure I'll be able to because I was trying to Google before the show, and I can't find it right now. But it was like over the last two weeks or so I was reading this report that they cataloged the biggest pieces of dead and defunct debris in space right now, and looked at the ones in the most heavily used sections of space.

And something like 80% of them were Soviet or Russian vehicles or Chinese vehicles. And both of those countries have shown very little interest in really discussing what to do about that from a, like I just mentioned, this aspect of geopolitics where we have these companies that want to manage debris. We need to figure out some projects to actually enable them to do that without breaking international law. And clearly, Russia does not seem to care about the sustainability of orbit per this operation they just carried out. So it's an interesting logjam right now, where we have the capabilities on the near horizon to take care of these issues and to prevent some accidental or chain reaction breakups in the future.

But I don't know that we have sufficient motivation to all sign on the same line or get together and create some sort of project to manage this stuff. and create some sort of project to manage this stuff. And certainly now when we see this with Russia, clearly we're not on the same page as Russia on that. But can you use this pressure that they're going to feel over the next year or two as these condemnations roll in, can you use that pressure to not only get this ban on kinetic anti-satellite weapons signed, can you use the pressure to push a little farther

and come up with some sort of architecture to allow us to manage the debris that hasn't broken up yet? Because that's an issue that I think once we start picking that one off, what to do about debris at large starts to get clarified a little bit. And I think, yeah, banning kinetic weapons would be great, but I don't think that means there would never be another one used. There's going to be some other events that trigger debris clouds like this, but maybe we can start making progress on the other aspect, which is managing the debris that hasn't been broken up yet.

And if we can clean that up a little bit, it does bring down the risk level because there's less things in space that debris fields could collide with at that point to make further to kick off the full on Kessler syndrome, that kind of thing. So that's just kind of some thoughts on how horrible this situation was. But could it lead to something that might make some progress in this area? I don't know. That's probably too hopeful. And clearly, Russia doesn't care. And that sucks to know. And it's a real bummer. So like I said, I've got some guests lined up over the next couple weeks to talk more about this, because that's something I really want to dive into.

And I don't really know what to say about it. It was a truly awful, awful thing that Russia did here, and I feel like we haven't seen the last of this, and that there will be some effect of this but I hope not I hope I'm wrong I hope this this now ring of debris can

remain not harmful I'm not that hopeful about it but I hope I'm wrong so sorry for the downer ending I feel like I've had a couple of downer endings lately I really gotta work on adding an upper but sometimes the shows are downers, you know? Not everything's Sunshine and Roses, so we'll figure it out. Hopefully the next show is Sunshine and Roses, but until then, thank you all so much for listening. Once again, if you like the show, if you want to get Miko

headlines, which typically is Sunshine and Roses, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Sign up there. I would be happy to have you aboard, and thanks again for listening. I'll talk to you soon.