Main Engine Cut Off - T+202: The Geopolitics of ASAT Weapons and Space Debris (with Brian Weeden)

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation joins me to talk about the technical and political fallout of Russia’s recent anti-satellite weapons demonstration, the history of anti-satellite weapons and testing, the geopolitical situation surrounding the topic, and what the future of space debris tracking and management looks like.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 712 other supporters.TopicsBrian Weeden (@brianweeden) / TwitterDr. Brian Weeden | Secure WorldPromoting Cooperative Solutions for Space Sustainability | Secure WorldGlobal Counterspace Capabilities | Secure WorldSWF Releases Updated Compilation of Anti-satellite Testing in Space | Secure WorldT+201: Russia’s Reckless and Awful Anti-Satellite Operation - Main Engine Cut OffThe 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'm Anthony Colangelo. I've got a special guest with me today to talk more about the Russian ASAT test. My last show was all my raw feelings of the test and some of my initial take on what happened. But I wanted to bring on Brian Whedon, who is the Director of Program Planning at the Secure World Foundation, a verifiable expert on space policy and a lot of the technical stuff that we've been talking about as well, because so much of it is rooted in the technical side. But I wanted to bring Brian on because he has a lot of interesting insight into the history of this kind of stuff and to the future. Not only does he know about what's going on in the future, but in many cases, he's in these conversations.

He's in these different rooms and these meetings at the UN and other organizations out there, working to fix the holes in our current policy as a world that allow these kind of things to still happen, and hopefully to actually address what is happening in the future. So it's going to be an awesome conversation, Brian, we're going to talk about the Russian ASAT test, we're going to talk about other countries and what they're working on, we're going to talk about space debris, tracking and eventual management. It's my intention is to be pretty wide ranging, because there are so many different angles to this. But I want to focus more on the fallout technically and politically than I was in my raw emotions just a couple of days ago on the podcast. So before we get to Brian, I wanted to say thank you to all of you out there who make

Main Engine Cutoff possible. There are 752 supporters of this show every single month, and I'm so thankful for your support. That includes 40 executive producers who helped produce this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. 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 SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Heymonth, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. You made this episode possible, and I could not do it without you. If you want to help join that

crew, help out the show, and if you want to get Miko headlines in your life, I do an extra podcast every week for $3 a month or more supporters over at managingcutoff.com slash support. I run through all the headlines of the week, give you my thoughts on them. It's a great way to stay up on space news to help support the show. I think you should check it out. You are going to love it, I promise. And anyway, without further ado, let's give Brian a call. All right, Brian Whedon is here with me. Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. More than happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I would love to hear a little bit from you on the pitch for what it is that you do day to day, since it seems to vary so heavily with topics and you're involved in so many different areas. So Brian Whedon,

tell me about Brian Whedon, tell me about the Secure World Foundation. What is it that you get yourself up to every day? So it's a good question. Actually, something that we still struggle with a little bit, because you said that there's a lot of different things we focus on. So primarily, Skibble Foundation is a private operating foundation. We're based here in the U.S. and our focus is the long-term sustainable use of space so that we can all continue to use it for benefits here on Earth. And that sustainability issue ranges from dealing with orbital debris and collisions and better information on tracking things in space, national, international space policies, space law, and of course, security issues. Because,

you know, conflict in space and a satellite task here to talk about today all have sustainability implications. So, you know, it sounds like a really narrow focus, right? Long-term sustainability of space. But wrapped in that are a whole bunch of different issues that we work on. Me in particular, I started out life as an engineer. My undergrad is in electrical engineering. I went on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. I then went into the Air Force and did not do engineering at all. I did nuclear and space operations. And that sort of gave me exposure to

space tracking and space operations, what goes on up there. These days, I still do a little bit technical stuff, but I'm much more in the public policy world and happy to talk about that more as we get along things. But essentially, you know, helping governments figure out what to do about all these kinds of problems. Certainly technical background helps a lot to convey what it is that's actually happening. As we're seeing with other stories, I didn't put this one on the rundown, but the FOBs situation out there. Exactly. Everyone's saying their own words and it's confusing as to what they actually mean.

Being able to technically diagnose what they're trying to get at is a huge part of what you do. Yeah, you're absolutely right. First, I would say, making the decision in the mid-90s to get a background in computers and software was a great life decision. And two, yes, a big part of what I do is translating between the technical world, the legal world, and the policy world. And I started off doing a lot of it from the technical to the others because that was sort of my foundation. But I've spent so much other time hanging around with policymakers and with lawyers, I can also do the other direction as well. Yeah, and that is the key to getting stuff done in this space and and so it's good to have people like you around so let's dig into the stuff that's

been happening lately uh the last show i did on the podcast was all of my feelings about the asat i am annoyed at calling them asat tests this is my thing i'm annoyed at i think test is a bad word for this and i hate that that's become the nomenclature because what it was an anti-satellite operation but we're not going to get into that soapbox. Now that we're a little bit separated from the event itself, I think we can drift away from like the raw feelings of the thing to talk more about the fallout of it, the political, the technical fallout. As we're speaking today, there was supposed to be an EVA up on the space station that

has been postponed because of some debris conjunction. We don't know if that was from the ASAT test, but it seems pretty likely that that was from the ASAT operation. But where do we stand with this? Russia is still kind of downplaying what they did here. What is the state of play with them engaging with the results of the test that they ran? with them engaging with the results of the tests that they ran? Well, on that, unfortunately, Russia appears to be adopting a strategy of denying that there was no trial problem or that, you know, if they're not default, somebody else's default, which unfortunately seems to be a common strategy that they've deployed across a whole range of space and non-space topics over the last decade or two. And also, that's sort of not unusual, at least the denying impact part of it.

You look across the last couple of major tests, the one the Indians conducted in 2019, the one the Americans conducted in 2008, both the U.S. and India sort of did a PR campaign to say, well, we're doing this in a responsible manner. This is totally being done with an eye to minimizing debris. And it's all great here. We're nothing like those really bad people, the Chinese that did that. China did this at 2007. But in both of those cases, there was more debris created than what either the US or India said would be. And it stayed around for a lot longer than either one of them said. So it makes you wonder whether maybe there's just a disconnect between what sort of the scientists, engineers are telling the policymakers when it comes to approving these

tests. Are they low-balling the debris? Are they not understanding? Is there a problem with their modeling this? Or is it just the potential impact is not communicated? Because again, we saw something very similar with the Chinese test 2007, where there was a week where they said nothing in large part because they were probably trying to figure out what they could say, which then leads to maybe there wasn't, maybe they didn't understand the amount of debris that would be created from that. So that, I think, is one big issue. And then, you know, the unwillingness of the Russians to sort of engage on this and sort of accept responsibility is a big challenge. to sort of engage on this and sort of accept responsibility is a big challenge because,

you know, that sort of gets to how do we address this? It's going to require all of these countries to, the term of art is consent to be bound, right? States are sovereign in the international system. No one can force them to do anything unless you, you know, roll in an occupying army and we want to start a war. So you have to convince them. But you have to convince all these countries to not do this. And that is the real difficult challenge. On the risk piece of it, we're still trying to figure that out. At the moment, you know, there's these estimates of 1,500 or so pieces bigger than 10 centimeters. They're going to softball being tracked.

Lots and lots and lots more smaller than that that we can't currently track that are sort of whizzing around. As far as I understand, there's, you know, the U.S. military, which sort of is one of the big tracking sources, still has not published any of that data on the space track catalog, probably because they're still trying to figure it all out. It's just a massive operation. A lot of human resources go into trying to figure out what observations go with what object and how to string them all together to make a track. with what object and how to string them all together to make a track. And then it takes a lot of tracking time to get a good enough orbit to be able to kind of put it in the normal conjunction assessment process that we have. So that's going to take time. And unfortunately, until we do that, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty over what the risk actually is to the

space station, as well as other satellites in low-earth orbit now russia had been leading up to this for several years they've been doing all sorts of different tests of the actual launch vehicle they used they've even i think it was last year the year before that they ran basically a dummy test uh that we could tell based on what was published that they they simulated it by you know hitting a point in space that sort of ran alongside a lot of focus on, uh, it seemed like there was this growing groundswell to ban kinetic ASAT operations. Um, was that something you were tracking alongside those efforts and how does that interplay? Because, you know, there have been attempts in the past to ban this kind of thing that russia and china have

sort of like offered counter proposals that didn't really address the actual connecticut side of things so what were those parallel tracks like and how did they interplay so there has been a discussion within the other nations since the 1980s on what is known as preventing an arm trace in our space, or the acronym is PEROS, because Space Board loves a good acronym, right? And that's been going on for several decades. And unfortunately, it hasn't made much progress, in part because of what you just sort of got at is that there's differences in approaches, and a lot of that is driven by geopolitics.

differences in approaches, and a lot of that is driven by geopolitics. Russia and China, on the one hand, have primarily focused on banning the placement of weapons in space that could be used to attack things on the Earth. That has been their primary interest, and they want a legally binding treaty to do that. The United States and its allies, on the other hand, are much more focused on threats to space objects coming from the Earth, like what we saw with the Russian satellite test. And they're much more focused on starting at least with voluntary measures, norms of behavior, and then maybe in the future working towards legally binding. of behavior, and then maybe in the future working towards legally binding. So you have this disparity between what the problem is and this disparity in how to approach it. Do you start with something softer and built towards legally binding, or you start with a big new legally binding treaty?

And that's really why there's been this disconnect and not a lot of progress. And that's really why there's been this disconnect and not a lot of progress. And, you know, Russia and China, they're primarily concerned about U.S. space-based missile defense, i.e. the good old-fashioned Star Wars program. They see that as a threat to their nuclear deterrent, which they see as the only thing keeping America from steamrolling them and doing to, you know, what happened to Saddam and other regimes that America has toppled. So their primary interest is keeping their nuclear arsenal still a threat to preserve their sovereignty. On the U.S. side, of course, the U.S. is the most country that's most reliant on using satellites and space capabilities for not only its, you know, economy and things, but its military power. So there's not a military operation in the world the U.S. does today that doesn't rely on space. And so the U.S. sees, well, if we're going to try and counter a Russian movement in Ukraine

or something China's doing in the South China Sea or Taiwan, that's going to require space. And so the US is motivated to try and, you know, limit the threats to its satellite so it can do those things. So we're also looking at sort of differences in what both sides have as their interests. So all of that is sort of the geopolitical background for this. And then you add in a whole bunch of other things with, you know, the great power competition and what happened to you know the the the ukraine crisis from 2014 which threw things up in the air trade war you know trade wars here and there and it just all gets kind of messy over time um oil and gas supplying to europe making two strongly worded statements exactly all of these non-space things that unfortunately get wrapped up into the geopolitics of this. There has been some brief progress on this in the last year or two.

In 2020, there was a resolution passed by the UN that was sponsored by the United Kingdom that called on countries to provide reports on what they saw as threats to space systems and what to do about it. And there's a couple dozen countries put in reports along with some NGOs. We did one, International Union of the Red Cross, Ram Corporation, a couple others. That then went into a report. And then based on that report, just a few weeks ago, the United Nations First Committee voted to hold what they call an open-ended working group. It's a very kind of wonky term, but essentially the countries are going to be getting together starting in February to talk about this issue of threats to space and what to do about it. And they're supposed to meet a couple of times in 2022,

a couple of times in 2023 with an eventual report that then may be, here are the ideas we move forward on. That may not sound like a lot of progress, but unfortunately it is the most progress we've seen in like the last two decades on the stricter question. The issue is going to be, does what we saw with this anti-satellite test sort of spoil all that, right? In terms of derailing the conversation? Exactly, exactly, exactly. So you started by saying, are the two things linked, right? Are the potential growing groundswell of interest in banning these sort of testing linked to the testing itself? I think there's a chance there is. We know in the case-

It's putting pressure, Russia's feeling that pressure to do this before- Yes. You know, the ban would take place or- I think that's a possibility. Absolutely. So we saw that definitely, I think that was a role with India. You know, we've looked back another topic on nuclear testing um the indians did not do their nuclear tests before the non-proliferation treaty the nuclear test ban treaty what trees went into effect they then tested and and got a lot of you know condemnation for that they you know lots of writings that they didn't want to get locked out again of sort of being artificially what they saw as being held down out of the great power status on nuclear weapons.

They did not want that to happen on space weapons. There may be something similar going on the Russian side. Now, obviously, Russia has tested a lot of anti-satellite weapons in the past. They had operational programs during the cold war they did not have uh they did not demonstrate this specific capability before of a ground launch missile hitting a satellite everything else was satellites put into space that could then attack other satellites so i think that's certainly a possibility. It's a little chicken or egg, though, because a big part, I guess the better question is, like, how much does that ban that the UN is working towards rely on Russia also signing on? Or would it be not totally a sham, but would it be totally useless without them signing on? And therefore, they're not going to sign on until they're able to do this. You know, it's a real quagmire. First of all, there is not a specific proposal on the table yet. There is just the idea to come together to talk about what the proposal should be.

Sorry, I lost you there for a second. So a couple of, there have been some rumors that a couple of countries might float a kinetic ASAP ban, which are absolutely right. Getting back to this, like I said before, the consent to be bound, right? Countries would have to willingly say, yes, we're going to abide by this ban. And I think that's where this comes in to say. So, you know, there's now perhaps more political room for India to say, sure, we can go ahead and abide by this. We've already done our test. We've proven we can do that. We don't have anything else to prove. We can go ahead and agree to this ban. Maybe. But then there's also the question of, as you sort of were hinting at, the good faith, right? You know, if countries are going to continue to do this, how do we know India, Russia, China, the US is not going to do it again, right? And that's where the challenge of verification comes in, right? If you got a legal agreement, how do you verify people are

complying with that agreement and not breaking it? And to that point, right, I don't know where we currently stand on how we feel about Operation Burt Frost, but we didn't test the system. We were actively using it to prevent harm down on the ground, right? So a ban on testing is not a ban on the use of kinetic anti-satellite weapons. So now we get to the wording, right? And the really difficult wordsmithing of what actually are we talking about? Because the other complicating factor is missile defense. Lots of countries, including US, Russia, China, and much of NATO and Japan, all have a political interest in developing missile defense. There's no technological difference between a hit-to-kill missile defense interceptor going

after mid-course, right, where the things are flying through space, and what Russia tested, we call it direct-to-sent ASAT weapon. So how then do you put in place a ban on testing of the asat weapons while allowing these countries to test missile defense weapons right i think the answer may be in the target right don't test against orbital objects yeah the state of orbit exactly orbit is just and this goes to the same basing of weapons in our space you know if you launch a nuclear weapon that's going into space and it's coming back down it's exactly so it's in space it's just not based in space is that the word that's the key there i i think i i think that's that that's possible right because then because it's when you destroy an orbital object you create orbital debris

and that's the harm we're trying to avoid um So I think that is certainly possible. But now we have a whole other discussion about what placed in space means and what orbit means. And I had a long Twitter thread a few weeks ago about that in regards to the existing definition of the Outer Space Treaty when it comes to things like fractional orbital environment systems, which I think we might get to in a little bit. So that's the other consideration there. When it comes to banning use of, that's a much harder thing, right? Because now you're getting on to armed conflict, rules of war, those sorts of things.

We do have law of armed conflict. We do have certain types of weapons where even their use is prohibited. Things like chemical weapons, biological weapons, certain other types of weapons that either have indiscriminate harm or cause undue suffering. This is all the stuff on the Geneva Conventions. stuff on the genomic inventions right now there's there are some discussions going on of what that might look like for space but we're a pretty long way from having that sort of agreement on let's say space weapons or things in space that might fall into those same categories the other interesting thing to track is uh everyone's going after constellation these days so the utility of taking out a singular target is is less and less certainly there's giant spy satellites that can see what you're eating for breakfast and those are things

that are still targets but in terms of of taking out you're going to launch you know hundreds of satellites to take out all of gps like go for it but it doesn't seem very feasible to actually deny in that way that single capability. So it's tricky in that, like, you know, is the amount of time it's going to take to solve this, does that outpace the utility of these things existing? You're absolutely correct. 10 years ago, the U.S. issued a national security space strategy that said, we're going to focus on increasing the resilience of our capabilities against exactly this kind of attack, right? Shifting to distributed constellations of more satellites across different orbits with backup systems. The problem is we've made pretty much zero progress on that, right? Problem is we've made pretty much zero progress on that, right? If you look across all the existing major, you know, U.S. National Security Space capabilities,

I can't think of a single one of them that has actually accomplished those goals, right? Now, there's a bunch of commercial systems coming online. Think of Planet for their remote sensing constellation, Starlink and OneWeb for their communications constellations that are achieving this goal. But there's a whole other set of problems if it comes to the military using them or relying on those things for some national security military functions. If you look back at sort of the core things like GPS, there's only 32 GPS satellites and the U.S. military

is not going to use GLONASS or BADAL or anything like that, even though I think they should. There's only a handful of satellites used for missile warning. There's only a handful of satellites used for hardened, protected military

communications. The NRO still relies pretty heavily on some very large, expensive sitting ducks, to use a term that other four-star generals have used. So I think you're exactly right. But the issue is the U.S. has not done a very good job of moving in that direction. Now, even if there is a ban that comes in place in the next decade, I don't think this is the last ASAT test the world will ever see. Are there countries out there today that are actively developing stuff like this or that are the next ones to develop

the capability? I have a couple in mind, but where should our eyes be looking there? It's interesting you mentioned that. After the Indian Air Satellite Test 2019, I ran a Twitter poll on who's next in line, right? And the options I put in there were Russia, France, Israel, and the U.S. So let's go back to what I said earlier about the technological requirements for this. You need a ballistic missile capability of at least, let's say, IRBM range or longer. And you need hit-to-kill interceptors. Um, so any country that is working on mid course missile defense and also has a robust ballistic missile program could probably do this if they so choose to. Hence why I came up with my list there.

Um, you know, maybe other countries like Japan also could have the technological capability, United Kingdom. Um, you know, the list is. Those pesky Kiwis could have a technological capability, United Kingdom. You know, the list is... Those pesky Kiwis could have a nice small one. Let's not go to the Kiwis so far, right? So far, they're pretty much opposed to all this kind of stuff. The Peter Beck's anti-satellite company who's starting, yes.

But, you know, unfortunately, the list is not small, right? The list is maybe a dozen countries if you really wanted to go through who has the technological capability to do something like this. Now, I think the list of those that might actually do it is probably smaller than that, because I think, you know, it comes down to who would see value in a public demonstration. You know, that's probably, I think, the key consideration, because from an engineering standpoint, you can probably do it all without hitting an orbital target, right?

If you look at what happened with what China did, right, their direct SNASAT capability, they did flight tests in 05, they did a flyby in 06, they did an actual intercept in 07, they did a flyby in 06 they did an actual intercept in 07 and then they had a whole bunch of additional intercepts in 10 13 14 15 and at least a couple others but all against suborbital targets that didn't actually create any orbit debris so they were able to test you know the software make sure it all works, demonstrate the capability, work out the kinks without creating any debris. And no one really said anything. Right. So, so I think, again, it's all about this issue of the debris aspect of it. So yeah, that's unfortunately not a, not as short a list as I would like. But maybe not as long as some people fear. but maybe not as long as some people fear.

Let's talk about the debris side of things. There's many different aspects to this. There's tracking, there's eventually dealing with it. I would love to touch on both of those. The U.S. military says we can only track things down to 10 centimeters. I think Leo Labs, during the whole swarm debacle, said, we can track two centimeters no problem i'm sure the u.s military can do better than 10 centimeters and just isn't telling us but no they can't uh but we'll get into that all right well at least leo labs says that they could

have tracked the small side of those swarm satellites i don't know if that was true or not i don't have the technical insight into what they were doing but what do we even need to do to up the game of tracking space debris? I see Wozniak's out here talking about how he's going to launch satellites to track debris in orbit. There's other ideas like that. Are any of these things actually what we should be looking towards to develop? And how important is that to even getting to the management side? So let's start with where we are today, where we've been historically, right? So historically, this has been a mission today, where we've been historically, right? So historically, this has been a mission

done by the militaries, primarily the US military and the Russian military. And that's because they were concerned about the other side putting nuclear weapons in orbit that they would de-orbit over their countries. So they said, let's track all the stuff in space. And then the mission shifted to missile warning i having radars that can track incoming nuclear warheads missiles

cruise missiles and we we built a whole network of those generally around the northern periphery of the united states um sitting on the russian. And those Rose radars, day in and day out, they're not tracking nuclear missiles because there's no nuclear missiles coming, right? But they can reach up far enough into low Earth orbit, they're tracking satellites and space debris. So that is sort of the core of the background capability that the U.S. military has is this network of radars primarily designed for missile warning that just kind of do tracking space stuff while they're waiting for a nuclear attack. Very peaceful thing to think about. And that's honestly why they had this limitation, right?

So these radars are not originally designed for space track. They're not primarily designed for that mission. They're designed for missile warning. They're operating, you know, UHF, VHF, primarily at least the older ones or C-band, which, you know,

limits the sort of the, what sizes they can detect. A lot of them are pretty old, right? You know, a whole bunch of them predate modern computers. We're talking like, you old, right? You know, a whole bunch of them predate modern computers. We're talking like, you know, predate solid state electronics, which is kind of a challenge, right? You know, the communication channels predate the internet or the invention of TCP IP, which is again, pretty challenging. And we're talking, you know, massive investments,

so it costs a lot of money to replace and upgrade them. So the other issue is that when they were looking at how to do all this, the primary thing was keeping human spaceflight safe. And the ISS is armored against collisions of up to, let's say, 10 centimeters. That may not be that exact boundary, but up to that. So then the focus became on tracking the things 10 and bigger to then avoid them so that the smaller stuff, the ISS could theoretically take the hit. That also played a little bit of a factor into all this. But of course, things have changed quite a bit,

as you pointed out. So the U.S. military, they actually can really only track down to about 10 centimeters. What's the deal with space fence these days? Because I go to Topgolf over here in Jersey, and it's right across the street from the space fence subscale. And I know there's bigger ones out there now. So a few years ago, there was a big push to create this new space fence that would replace one that the Navy put in place decades ago that was strung all the way across the United States, sort of on the southern latitude. This new fence would be operating the S-band, which means it could track a lot smaller stuff. And they spent a billion dollars and

they built one on Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific. And it's up and operational. The problem is you can't get really good tracks to sustain a prediction model with only one sensor observation per orbit. You need more than one. So if we spend another billion dollars to get a second S-band space fence, then the military can probably do a better job of actually tracking stuff because it's not about just detecting it. It's about getting a good enough estimate of the orbit so that you can predict where it'll be in the future so that you can pick it up again.

And if you're only seeing part of one orbit once per rev, that's really hard to do. Right. So that's why you need a second radar, a third radar to do that. And that's where legal labs comes in. So one of the big changes in the last decade is the emergence of the private sector when it comes to doing this stuff. And that started really 2014 after the DOD made a call for this. Companies like AGI, which is now Comspark, ExoAnalytics, which operates telescopes. I mean, look at the geo world.

And then, of course, Leo Labs, which is the biggest operator of radars looking at low earth orbit. They're rolling out a network of newer ones or or S band radars that are going to do exactly what, what, you know, the military did only for several less zeros, right. To,

to be able to track this, but still it requires a network and it's, and it's not easy. You know, there's, there's a huge software component of this trying to sort through the signals and, and,

and do the pattern matching and all kinds of complicated stuff that is difficult. But we're getting a little bit better at it. It used to be that the US military was the only game in town. Now you've got a whole host of private sector entities. You've got a bunch of scientific stuff. You've got other countries that are getting into the game. So I mentioned Russia earlier. They still have a significant capability. The European Union has something called the Space Surveillance and Tracking Program, SST,

that is combining a bunch of European radars and telescopes. They're working on stuff. Of course, China has its own product. Japan has made a really big push in the last several years to do more tracking. So there's a lot going on on this

we still got a long ways to go now the trickier side in my mind is you know these are technical problems that humans are pretty good at solving eventually given enough zeros as you pointed out the political side of this is is a lotier, especially when you have countries like Russia kind of flaunting their disregard for space sustainability in the target selection. A big part is that per the old school Outer Space Treaty, anything that was launched and licensed by that company to be launched remains basically under their ownership. What do you see the future of that going in terms of salvage? Now we have companies that are actually doing rendezvous and proximity operations on commercial satellites. They're able to do some of this kind of servicing. Eventually, there's going to be some tests of actually deorbiting. You know, Europe's got a couple of contracts out right now for these

deorbit demonstrations. A lot of it's going to take though, these companies, these countries being okay to kind of mark different things as salvageable, uh, or I guess be left to have those countries hire someone to deorbit their old upper stages and things like that. Yeah, it's a great question. What is the future of that? Uh, uncertain. Um, so first of all, even this term, this term salvage, that is a unique term from the maritime world that relates to this legal regime that was created in the maritime domain for this ability to salvage things. It doesn't exist outside of there. We sort of use that as a shorthand because we think there should be something similar in space. But I just want to note that it may not be exactly like there is in the maritime world. But you're exactly right.

Under the existing Outer Space Treaty, the launching state that puts something in orbit is liable for it in perpetuity and also controls it in perpetuity. There's a lot of nuances there, but in general, those are pretty broad statements. So if I was running an American company and I wanted to go up and grab a dead Russian upper stage and pull it out of orbit, I would need to get permission from Russia to do so. And the reason this is the problem, if you look at the breakdown of debris that's up there, of debris that's up there. By numbers, it's roughly 30% American, 30% Russian, 30% Chinese, 10% rest of world. But if you look at by mass, and remember mass is future debris. So we might want to remove the most massive stuff to kind of limit the generation of future debris. It's more than half of it is Russian by mass. They've got a lot of dead upper stages. They've got a lot of dead satellites in high LEO orbit, let's say, you know,

700 to 1200 kilometers. They like building big things, right? So that is a real, real concern. So then you get to what you just sort of proposed. Either the situation is that countries fund removal or do themselves removal of their own objects, and then you just kind of hope everybody else removes their own stuff. Or maybe they can agree to go do something where a U.S. company gets permission from Russia to go grab something. That's a really complicated political situation. I've been involved in these discussions for quite a while. I remember 10 years ago having some workshops on this issue. And part of it is that the Russians are pretty proud. They've got a lot

of capabilities. I think they would rather have people pay them to remove their own stuff rather than them paying somebody else to remove their own stuff. That's part of the consideration. The other part of the consideration is that some of these same technologies can be used for bad things. And so there's a lot of political concern over, well, if you're approaching my satellite, are you really here to remove it or service it or refuel it? Or are you here to do something nefarious? And that is sort of complicated by the other anti-satellite testing we've seen going, which is we call co-orbital anti-satellites, you know, satellites that are weapon systems that get close to other satellites and do something bad.

They fire a projectile, they explode, creating shrapnel. They've got an arm that does something. They've got some electronic warfare capability. There's a lot of different ways you can do that. But U.S., Russia, China also appear to be testing all of those things as well. So that's really difficult. I think, A, we first got to be testing all of those things as well. So that's really difficult. I think, A, we first got to have the technology. So you mentioned the European Union is funding a removal.

Japan has announced that it's going to be funding a removal demonstration. And just in the last couple of weeks, the Space Force has announced they've got a program under their Space Works, Space Prime, Space Force has announced they've got a program under their Space Works, Space Prime, that is going to be funding some sort of a debris removal demonstration mission. So those are all good signs. That's where you start. commercial cargo and crew program, but for orbital debris, where NASA, it would be my preference rather than the Space Force, helps fund an R&D development program. And at the end of it, there's a service contract, right? Because that's going to be the commercial incentive to get the companies on board. And at the end of the day, the US government and other governments

are just buying these like a contract, right? Hey, go remove four things this year, go remove these two things this year. I think that would go a long ways. There are other people who are looking at how you might do some sort of international broker service to, you know, if there was a handful of commercial companies that could do this, how countries could broker for their fees, how to handle some of the regulatory liability issues? That's all kind of sticky at the moment. There's a lot of complication there, but there are people certainly thinking about that. There are cooler ideas like that. One particular seems up Jeff Bezos's alley, which is to like get all of this stuff and keep it in space, but harvest the materials out of it, which I would be like, that would be way more interesting to me because we'd then have a lot of materials in space that we

already paid to get up there challenging though right absolutely yeah i mean you know recycling you know aerospace grade titanium and things here on earth is challenging trying to do that in space is challenging and then it's a 70 year old soviet upper stage that you don't have the documentation for anymore right and it's been exposed to the space environment for decades with hot cold hot cold cycles and radiation the materials degradation would be at least a museum let's at least do a museum oh you're right it totally makes sense but man the i the little bit i know of material science suggests that's going to be a very difficult problem i'll stick with the museum we'll put hubble there we'll put iss there afterwards we'll put nauka the chaos agent that it

is so we'll just make a nice little museum to take cruises so there was actually a darpa program a few years ago called phoenix and and what they proposed was to go up to the geo graveyard go rendezvous with a a disposed commercial communication satellite snip the antenna arrays off it because the antenna shape is pretty big and doesn't really, it's not really a technological component that would degrade over time. And then attach a bunch of small little modules that would be, you know, brains and thrusters and batteries and stuff. And basically Frankenstein, a new satellite, really cool. Fortunately, it didn't, didn't actually get a chance to fly. Not DARPA, you don't say?

Well, but, you know, it was a whole bunch of other reasons that that didn't fly. It sort of morphed into the current program for RSGS, which is to demonstrate some other servicing capabilities in geo. But people have been thinking about this, right? Absolutely. Well, that was an awesome conversation. I think we'll leave it there to get some time back in your day. Thank you so much. Oh, before we leave, I want you to put some plugs in too. If people don't know you or your work, where should they be following along with what you're

doing? Sure. Well, from our organization's work, if you're interested in space sustainability, our website is swfound.org. We've got a ton of resources on there covering everything from debris to security issues to tracking things to how we use space for benefits on Earth. If you want to know more about the anti-satellite testing, if you do swfound.org counterspace, that is our annual report we put out that documents what everyone is doing as far as testing and development of counter space weapons. And then finally, you know, I've got a pretty, pretty active on Twitter. I cover this, but a whole range of other of other topics. So, you know, fair warning, come from the space and maybe you might decide to stay in for other

things as well. But it should be interesting no matter what. We'll have to have you back sometime to talk more about fobs once there's more fobs. Everyone's talking about fobs again. Once we actually know what happened, right? Once there's stuff to talk about and not just who said what. Yeah, no, more than happy to.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. My pleasure as well. Thanks again to Brian for coming on the show. It was an excellent conversation. Everything that I hoped it would be, and he's just a pleasure to talk to and very insightful.

I hope you agree. I'm sure you do. Until next time, that is all I've got for you. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter at WeHaveMiko or on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. And as always, help support the show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support

and get Miko headlines in your life. Until I talk to you again, have a great week.