Off-Nominal - 61 - Santa Claus is Hypersonic

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

Brian Weeden, Director of Program Planning for Secure World Foundation, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about the recent ASAT testing ban announced by Vice President Harris, and the effects the space industry has been having on the war in Ukraine.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 61 - Santa Claus is Hypersonic (with Brian Weeden) - YouTubeDr. Brian Weeden | Secure WorldPublications by Brian Weeden | Secure WorldIt's Time for a Global Ban on Destructive Antisatellite Testing - Scientific AmericanU.S. declares ban on anti-satellite missile tests, calls for other nations to join - SpaceNewsU.S. ASAT ban meant to support U.N. discussions on space threats - SpaceNewsOpen-ended working group on reducing space threats - UNODAFollow Brianbrianweeden (@brianweeden) / TwitterSecure World Foundation (@SWFoundation) / TwitterPromoting Cooperative Solutions for Space Sustainability | Secure WorldFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, welcome to off. Hello. I got very dark there. Like, the way that music, real spooky start to the show there. Foreboding. How's it going, Jake?

Are you creeped out by our intro? Yeah, I'm like a little like, what are we going to talk about today? I was teasing this is going to be like, I was teasing this is going to be like maybe a little bit of a scary show just by the nature of our subject matter. I tried to hit the music loop at a different point in time each day so that it is different, right? I don't want to show up at the same time every day hit play, and it's the same song at the start. So I apparently nailed it for the spookiness because we're here with Brian Whedon of the Secure World Foundation. How is it going, sir?

It is going great. Happy Thursday, everybody. It's a chill week for you, I'm sure. There's very little topical stuff going on in your world. Actually, well, I mean, So I was traveling last week in Europe, and I came home on Saturday with a little present, as in COVID. So it's been an interesting start to the week, but it would be a very mild case. So I didn't have to see anybody.

I got to stay home all week. It was great. You don't get a lot of work done. It was pretty useful. That's that imported. Imported European COVID, too. Yeah, yeah. It's a good, it's a good vintage.

Well, you decided to come here and drink a beer with us and talk about. about all sorts of topics that Jake's very curious about. So you must be feeling right. What is that that you're drinking over there? So this is from a local brewery here in Cerberlesbury, Maryland, called Astrolab. And it's one of their seasonal. It's called Irish Goodbye. And it's sort of a riff on a Guinness.

Fairly tasty. Nice. I'm trying to come up with an Irish Goodbye joke, but I wasn't fast enough. I got my 23 of me says I can make those jokes it's fine yeah you're good you're good I'm like 0.1% Italian I think as a mindset so is that enough or no no

especially not for Irish jokes oh I got lots of Irish jokes okay that's the problem I've got a thing from Dock Street Brewing that's called a Futura. It is an Italian Pilsner

with this sweet, futurist-looking car on it. I've been watching the Giroz Italia this week, so I'm feeling like this was the right choice for me. My camera will focus. There we go. It's pretty tasty. It's very refreshing. It's a Pilsner season. I have...

I've noticed a lot of my hardcore beer friends have gone full circle from like the hopiest, maltiest thing you can get to like the clear light refreshing pilsners. I don't know if it's kind of

the circle of life or what, but they seem to be like a new thing out there. They're going to like a try seltzer for a day and then bail out on that and then go back. Yeah, yeah. No, it's definitely like like the trend really, really, it's like the whole like low weighted

high weighted jeans thing. It's just like overnight. It's just like changed. And everyone's like, no, I don't want any more IPAs. But speaking of IPAs. Yeah,

I was going to say what you got. So I found a new, um, I found a new space-themed brewery. So it's in Monterey. And so it's called, what the hell is the brewery called? Principia, I guess. So this is Spectra, India, Pailel.

It's got a really nice label. And then I have a backup one here, which is, I guess that's the name of the thing, Prince of Pia. They just name it all the same. Yeah, I can't. Mathematica? Who knows, man. But they got cool labels.

And there was like 10 of them. This is all the beer store had all these things. So it was like pretty cool. So I'm excited. Did you take a trip recently? I did. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So you realize that's when I was like Newton reference, right? Principia Mathematica, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he just can't really read today.

So that's the main problem with Jake. No, I just, I can't tell what's the, what's the brewery name and what's the beer name. And I thought it was because the other one says Principia too. And I'm like, okay, so is that the brewery? because they both say that, but then the other one, but one doesn't even have other name. So anyway, this is where we're at with this episode so far. We're really good.

It's all to a great start. Yeah, and I did a very, very poor, poor. Oh, my God. You can't read, you can't pour. But what you can do, Jake, is be a still a citizen of a country that recently, to the world's relief, joined the U.S. in an anti-satellite test ban. The whole world is like,

Thank God, Canada went in on this with us. Yeah, I laughed at that too. It's like, yeah, we're going to not blow up any more satellites. I was like, well, hang on, were we? They're like the one country that got a satellite that landed on them, and there was like a whole international incident that that satellite crashed into Canada. So it's a little. Yeah, them in Australia, like, it's a shocker that Australia has not instituted some like

space station deorbiting ban, you know, Like, that's, they are just, just barely missing all those. But anyway, should we start here? This was, this was, I feel like, Brian, you were on Miko a couple of months ago, probably in the run-up to, you know, right after the Russian incident. We kind of had a sense that, you know, and you obviously haven't been working in this direction for a long time through all the things that you're doing. So the vice president coming out and announcing the U.S. is instituting a self-band on these direct

dissent tests. How did you take that news? How do you think that plays into the overall picture of things that is unfolding right now? Well, I mean, it was something that's been in the discussion for a while. It didn't just happen overnight, right? And honestly, it's something that really kind of percolated up from within the Department of Defense and from within sort of the parts of the government that use space. And my sense is that was driven by a couple of things. One was, you know, we, We had just, you know, last November, Russia tested an ASAT weapon, blew up a satellite, created a whole bunch of debris, created some problems for the International Space Station just a couple of years ago.

India tested an ASAT weapon and blew up a satellite. And a few years, several years before that, everyone kind of remembers the 2007 Chinese ASAT test blew up a satellite, created a bunch of debris. And my sense is, you know, and at one time that the U.S. used it because it was definitely a necessary situation that was. Well, yeah, right, right, right, right. You know, 2008, we followed the Chinese, and it was completely for safety purposes, obviously. You know, nothing else going on.

Sometimes I like to drive my car 100 miles an hour just to see that it can if I need to do it, you know? Case I need to escape some situation. I need to go 100. Engine check, right? Yeah, just making sure. Yeah, yeah. So I think the sense was, you know, looking around, you know, talking to around the building, you know, are we ever going to do this? Probably not, right?

Because, you know, we made a big fuss when people did that. It was a bad thing and create a lot of debris. So it's probably something America's not going to do. And if we're not going to do it, there's no real advantage to it. Then why don't we put some pressure on the countries that are doing it and say, look, we're going to say we're not going to do this. We think this is what's responsible to do. Who's willing to say along with us, right? And to me, it was sort of along the lines of the nuclear testing.

You know, in the 50s and 60s, we were blowing up a lot of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. And then after a while, we realized, you know, why that's maybe not the best idea in the world. It harms us. It harms everyone. We're probably not going to do that anymore. And eventually, the Soviet society, yeah, that's probably a bad idea. And now we have a global ban on that, right? That's sort of the war we got to.

And also, I think it's important to point out that, you know, this is not a ban on all kinds of space weapons and use in testing. It just talks about a specific type that creates a lot of debris that lasts for a long time and poses the problem. The United States is not disarming itself. It's not unilaterally, you know, saying, you know, we're weak, come attack us. In fact, part of the reason the military felt it could back this was they have lots of other ways to achieve their objectives that don't involve blowing up a satellite, creating lots of space debris. So, you know, it was something that we had kind of, you know, we had, we thought was in the works for a while. It's an idea that's been around for, for a while.

And we were, we were pretty thankful the U.S. had kind of, kind of came out and said it. The question is, what comes next, right? I were sort of joking about, you know, Canada's pledged, you know, while we were joking about that, we do, that's kind of what we're looking for. We're looking for who else is willing to go out there and say, yeah, we agree. We think this is not a responsible thing to do anymore. There's a big meeting going on in Geneva this week, talking about space security between a whole lot of countries. There've actually been, you know, a dozen or so countries that may not have made explicit policy statements, but have voiced support for it and said they're working on something similar for themselves. So the hope.

is, you know, we'll kind of have everyone sort of agree that's an irresponsible thing to do. And then maybe we'll actually, you know, get some legally binding teeth behind, behind this eventually. One hopes. Okay. So, so here's my big question. And it's, and this is like, this is probably a cynical outlook, but I don't know, there's a lot of cynicism required in this stuff, I think. But how, how actually, you know, impactful is this going to be? Because, so you You mentioned, well, A, there's not, there needs to be more legally binding stuff behind it, but that's fine. But the other thing was that, you know, it just bans the test of this one kind of weapon. So you can still use these weapons operationally, I guess.

You just can't test them. So there's that. And then the whole timing of this is obviously very non-coincidental, right? So we have this Russian test at the end of last year, right? Which was, you know, I think to me it sounds like it was putting something on record that said, hey, we can do this as they prepare to go into Ukraine. And then the ASAD test happening right after Ukraine, or the ASAT test ban happening right after Ukraine. Like, is this more, like, is this more about the posturing of getting, you know, the groups of countries against each other than it is

actually about preventing debris in space? So I, you know, as far as the timing of this announcement, my sense it was much more linked to this big UN meeting than it was specifically linked to Ukraine. Really? Yeah. Just timeline-wise, I feel like that's a necessity, right? Like, there's a reason that all the other countries are saying we're working on it because it takes a while. No, we, it's exactly. You know, outside of certain recent presidents who just announced stuff, most governments have like formal processes that they go through,

where they have the National Security Council or the National Space Council or the Homeland Security Council or what they meet for weeks and months and they bring together all the different departments and agencies and they kind of hash something out and then they present something to the president to sign. That's normally how this stuff kind of works and most decisions are output of that process or not just announced at the drop of a hat, right? another great example of this is the Artemis Accords, right? We've seen over the last couple of years kind of a steady every few months that another country joins on. A lot of that is because it takes months for that government to kind of get its own house in order and then it enters in negotiations in the United States government because while there's a kind of a part of the accords that are the common principles for everyone,

there's another piece which is sort of the bilateral, what are they going to be contributing to Artemis? What are they getting exchanged? That was all that stuff. So all that's got to be worked down. That can take months. So when you're seeing these public announcements, that's just kind of the tip of the diplomatic iceberg,

if you want to put it that way. So in this case, the announcement, I mean, I'm sure, you know, there was probably a little bit of, you know, we want to make a point about Russia here. But I think it was more driven by this, you know, this meeting going on in Geneva that is explicitly talking about space security and what to do about threats to space and the U.S. wanting to kind of get a position ahead of that. Now, as far as the timing of the Russian ASAP test, you know, this was the

11th or 12th test of this system since 2014 or so. So it's not like they just did it out of the blue, and it's sort of just the latest and a series of tests, each one kind of building on the other. So, I mean, it's certainly possible that they timed it to send a signal ahead of the invasion of Ukraine. But I think there's two things working against that. One is, again, this is just sort of the next test in the series. And two, they didn't actually, you know, they've actually used any of those weapons in Ukraine, right? Except they've all these satellites, you know, from NATO and other countries that are flying overhead and taking pictures and causing a lot of problems to Russia. Finding large ships occasionally. Exactly, right? You know, helping them target,

helping Ukraine target actual assets to go kill Russians. And so if it was a warning, then it kind of backfired on them, right? Because they're not actually using those weapons, in part because they can't, they wouldn't really have much of an effect. And I say that because the satellites that are being used like commercial imagery and stuff, there's lots of them, right? So firing a missile to go take out one of them, you need to do that dozens and dozens and dozens of times to have any kind of a real effect.

You can take out a nice keyhole satellite, but... Right, right, right. Try to hit every planet set. Planet doesn't even know where all their satellites are. So like... I hope they know where all the satellites are. I mean that roughly, you know, general sense. Let alone the more than 2,000 Starlings that are providing coverage, right?

So this gets to another thing we've been talking about in our world, and that is this concept of resilience, right? So how does the U.S. protect its space capabilities against the tax, one way is to make them more resilient, i.e. make it so that if you blow up a couple of satellites, it's not going to be that big of a deal. You're going to have a way for the system to degrade gracefully. And as you pointed out, you know, the way you don't do that is by having three or four or five or six very expensive sitting ducks that you can't replace. That is what you don't do, right? You go to this

distributed model. You go to a model where you have lots of other backups. And that's how you deter these kinds of attacks because they're just pointless, right? They don't have any real military effect. That would be an interesting thing. So like, you know, it is weird to consider 10 years ago how different this conversation would be because there wasn't this huge number of satellites that give you reasonable enough data. But there's still like, you know, after the, after the ASAT test originally, there was that offhanded comment that I forget who it was in the Russian government. It was like, we could take

out every GPS satellite. Like, you know, which is just typical bluster. But I mean, that would be the one that is numerically possible. Like there's 20, 30 some, right? Well, not really, right? Because, so you're right, there's about

there's about Fullerborn 30 GPS satellites. But there's been an agreement in place for more than a decade now, for all of the GNSS constellations to all broadcast the same civil signal, right? So those satellites broadcast multiple signals, right? They broadcasts GPS broadcasts five different signals.

Two of them are military, generally, and three of them are for civil use. And you're right, so Galileo and Beidou and GPS all are moving towards broadcasting a common civil signal, which means if you take out all 30s GPS satellites, you and I would probably be okay once we get to that phase, right, because our phones aren't going to really notice. U.S. military is in a bit of a hole, right, because they're the ones that are using that dedicated military signal. But the Russians, as we've seen, are using GPS, right?

There's all these sorts of, you know, commercial old school garment receivers, you know, duct tape to the consoles of tanks and planes and stuff. They're all like recording on Strava as they drive their tanks around. Right. So, you know, again, the question is why, if they could have, and it'd be such usually impactful, why haven't they? Well, that suggests something is not right in that calculus, right? Either maybe they can't or maybe they decided, you know, it's not worth it because starting blowing up GPS satellites, that would be an attack on the U.S.

that would be an attack on NATO. They've suddenly just opened up this door that, you know, although they've made a lot of noise about, Russians really don't want to open that door. Yeah, the effect that would have on the war is they would lose immediately. Yeah, instead of very slowly. Like that's an accelerant. I mean, let's not kid around. I mean, it's get bad for everybody, right? Because now we're talking about, you know, armed warfare between NATO and Russia.

Nuclear weapons are now in play. Taptica mutes are in play. that's a really big deal. But you're right, you know, they're struggling just to kind of, you know, get some minimal gains against Ukraine, let alone the combined forces of NATO.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not really a fair fight as we've seen. Huh. Okay. Yeah, so as I, I affected, there's a lot more to this than just my read of the space news articles. Yeah, well, what we are seeing,

We are seeing them use space weapons, right? We're seeing them use cyber weapons against space assets, and we're seeing them use electronic warfare, i.e. jamming. So the day of the start of this latest phase of the Russian invasion, because remember the Russia is actually invaded Ukraine in 2014, right? Well, now, and it's Crimea. So the day of the latest, you know, reinvasion, there's a commercial stockcom company called Viasat,

and they had thousands of their customers in Europe lose action. access. The modems went offline. And it turns out, somebody hacked into the terrestrial ground network and use that to upload a malicious set of firmware to all of these modems in Europe that brick the modems. So that's a, that's kind of a space weapon in the sense that, you know, you just took this space service offline. The satellite is perfectly fine. It's flying around, you know, no problems, but the people that actually need to use it in Europe, including potentially Ukrainian government, Ukrainian military,

can't use it. So that is what we're seeing happen. And there's also a bunch of jamming of GPS and jamming of SATCOM that's going on. We saw the Russians are pretty good at that. We saw a lot of that in Syria. We saw a lot of that in other parts of Ukraine since 2014. It's relatively easy to do, at least for the civil signals, the military signal is a little bit more difficult, but the civil signals are relatively easy to do. Now, even that, though, we have not seen the degree of electronic warfare that a lot of us had suspected. And that, again, might be because the Russians are having to use the Ukrainian cell phone network, the Ukrainian, you know, or GPS itself, right? So maybe they, maybe they don't want to totally take it out

because they have to use it, unfortunately. That's interesting. Yeah, it's a lot cheaper to do it that way than it is to blow the satellite up. Right. That's exactly the point, right? You know, we put out this annual report on global counterspace. And while everyone kind of focuses on the big flashy things like blowing up satellites and high powered lasers and all that kind of stuff, you know, the militaries are going to use what is cheapest and most effective. And oftentimes, that is, you know, a lot less tech, a lot lower tech or a lot, you know, less flashy than what most people might think is going to be out there, right? How do we find Osama bin Laden, talk to the guy who, like, took his laundry out or whatever it was? It's like, oh, yeah, we tried that.

We tried a lot of that, right? Yeah. The Starlink situation, you know, there's a lot of hype around it because it gets clinks because you can put Elon Musk in your headline and that's super great and all that. Have you been following that storyline and, you know, especially everyone always gives me crap because I say via set. And you said via set, which makes me feel like I should say via set. And now it's in my brain. I think it's via sat.

I think everyone tells me it is, but I can't make my brain work that way. But in the wake of that, you know, I saw some talk that Starlink was being used for some sort of like fire control systems. Is that some hyped up stuff? Do you know anything about that side of the story there? So well let's back up a second Just kind of give an overview what's happened here right

So Starlink has a constellation of more than 2,000 satellites and low Earth orbit that are just orbiting around the world If you can pull up one of those There's a whole bunch of like Starlink's tracker sites

You can pull up one of those There might be an interesting Like Starlink I got it The SX That's the line Yeah so the satellites are flying around the world Right

Now, in order to provide service in a country, they've got to have two things. They've got to have a ground station that can provide coverage for that country. And then they have to have permission from that government in order to actually broadcast signals, what they call a market access license. So for the last few years, Starlink has been going around negotiating all those agreements, as well as putting in place all of these ground stations. And the ground stations are there because when the Soutrelandlander's, comes overhead and you send packets up to the satellite, the satellite relays the packets

to the ground station, which then connects them to the internet. And then when the packets come back, the ground station goes back up to the satellite and back down, right? That's how the whole system is sort of working. And so when it comes to Ukraine, Starlink had been talking about with the Ukrainian government about licensing the market access lights for a while, but hadn't finished that. And then at some point very early in the war, you know, the government made, it was a public tweet or something saying, you know, we want Starlink. And next thing, you know, Elon's like, it's on the way, right? And there's photos of the truck showing up with all the, this was the president. You were talking about that tweet stuff and makes announcements. Is this the one that you're

talking about? Well, in a war, in a war time, you can do, that's kind of good, right? And there's some war time situations where you might want to cut it on all that red tape, right? And for a while, some of us weren't sure whether or not they actually had the ground stations to cover it. But they don't have any in Ukraine that I'm aware of, but they have some nearby that is good enough, right? It just kind of has to be basically field of view to be able to do it. So now they're provided that. Well, what does Starlink do, right? Starlink provides Internet access.

And so for us, you know, maybe that means we can, you know, go watch Netflix or we can, you know, play online games or something or whatever. for Ukrainians, it's important because, you know, there have been disruptions to the Ukrainian internet. Now, it's not, the Russians didn't take it totally out. In fact, one of the early Ukrainian engineers that was retesting out the service concluded his thing by saying, well, I'm actually going to still use my fiber because it works really well and it's still up. And I kind of broke my dish, right? I think he had a completely hacked apart dish that wasn't doing so good. So for some people, they can still get, you know, landline internet in Ukraine.

But for others, this is a great option, right? This is going to work. So long way to get around to your other question, the military. Well, remember the beginning I said that there were some reports that Ukrainian government had access to Vyazat, right, which would have done something similar using Sassad. satellites in geo orbit as opposed to satellites in Leo. And really, you've got military forces dispersed around the country. How do they communicate is the really big question?

Now, I don't think that, you know, it's hard for me to think that, you know, for example, they're flying UAVs directly off of that because the UAVs probably have a Wi-Fi connection. right. And that means they have to be within Wi-Fi range of a terminal, of a Starlink terminal. That doesn't make a lot of sense. What I have heard is they're using it maybe to connect the people looking at the satellite imagery and doing the targeting to kind of connect them to the people that are flying UAVs or doing targeting. So that to me sounds more plausible. Again, there's not a lot of public details on this. There's probably stuff going on. We don't know because, again, the middle of a war zone. And obviously the Ukrainians are not going to give away, you know, all of their tactics and all of their ops.

But I think it's safe to say it is having an impact. And, you know, to the comment one of you guys made earlier about, you know, this is sort of a whole new thing. We've had commercial space before and that's been used in conflicts before, but not to this level and not this sort of ubiquitous kind of access, right? the amount of satellite imagery that's on everyone's front page about what's happening is just, it's incredible. Yeah. Right. I have control.

I guess so much. Yeah. Well, right. Right. And, you know, pretty much most people can pick up their smartphone and they can order 30 centimeter imagery of pretty much anywhere they want. That's amazing. Five, ten years ago, you had to be a national government with a lot of money in order to do that.

And now most people can do that. That's pretty crazy. it does make me think though that like is the utility of that making I'm trying to figure how to phrase this properly but when the U.S. government talks about we need to create these proliferated constellations I feel like five, ten years ago when that was a thing that people would

start talking about it was phrasing a way that it was like it should be a thing oh absolutely but my point was that like when they started talking about it I think they were thinking like our current capabilities in a huge huge constellation. We need 300 keyhole spy satellites or something like that. Do you think that there's any bit of a shifting focus there that like maybe we don't need 10 centimeter constellations, but 30 will do fine? Is there any calculation going on internally there about that? I really hope, given how much my tax period money they're spending. Exactly. So this is always been

the problem. I got a couple of PPP dollars left. I saw your tweeting about the PPP program earlier. This is one of the problems with this notion of resilience is people keep saying, oh, well, that doesn't work for my application or my constellation. When you talk about resilience, you're really talking about a basket of different solutions. Maybe it's lots of small satellites, right? We call distributed constellations. Maybe it's taking one big satellite does five things and splitting that up among five different satellites. just what called disaggregation.

Maybe it's putting satellites in different orbits. Some in Leo, some in geo, some in Mio, right? All that makes it more difficult. Maybe it's a mix of government and commercial. Maybe it's a mix of space and terrestrial, right? So maybe there's like non-terrestrial solutions. The point is to look at all these different options and come up with what makes sense for that particular capability. Because there's some that it's really hard to get away from it.

You keep talking about the spy satellites, right? You know, there's a limit, there's a physics limit of, you know, how big your optic needs to be in order to get a certain ground resolution at a certain distance. And, you know, theoretically, yeah, you can do a lot of, you know, you can do some, some virtual interferometry. You can have multiple little ones you put together, but that's really hard to do. You need to know where they are very, very, very precisely to do that. So if you want to get really great images, you kind of got to have a big piece of glass.

So we're not saying replace those entirely. We're saying maybe don't use only those, right? You know, combined planet plus those, plus, you know, the high resolution, you know, 30-semm-metre maxar stuff. And now you've got a lot more options. And plus there's not only visible, there's infrared, there's ultraviolet, there's hyper-spectral, there's radar image, SAR, there's, there's ELID, so electronic intelligence, right? So what Hawkeye is doing, where they're actually just sensing the electronic signals being emitted.

And so they can say, oh, look, there's somebody over there who's got a Wi-Fi hot sped. Oh, look, over there, there's somebody who's, you know, got some sort of a 5G connection. Or, look, right there. There's a GPS jammer right there, right? All of that stuff is now possible in a commercial sense. And that's really, really different. Yeah. I mean, it strikes me as really, so this is that I was telling Anthony.

It's like I really feel like space and military is like having a moment, right? Because like this is one of this seems this feels like one of the most like high tech conflicts that we've seen in a long time. Like where where we're getting all, you know, it's not just the the satellite images of the, of the pontoon destruction we saw or the or the or the. ships getting destroyed or or seeing, you know, all the columns of tanks and, and like almost real time, basically. But we also have like, um, we also have like this sort of, uh, internet connected live stream of it. Like, you know, like there's like Ukrainians on TikTok being like, here's how you

hijack a tank and like, boom, up it goes through through star like, you know, like the European farmer. Right. You know, the Ukrainian farmer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want a tank, right? They've all got tanks now. It's crazy.

Exactly. Like here, look, look what I found in my yard of Broken Tech. Let's go inside and pull the levers and see what happens. It's live stream, right? And then you also have all this like really crazy intelligence sharing that's happening. So like we're seeing like we're almost able to visualize in real time of like here's a picture from a planet sat that goes out to here. And then the government is combining their knowledge and then off it goes to Ukrainians and then boom, a ship gets blown up. And it's like, wow. Like this is happening like this is like neurons. firing in a brain, just all connects together. Or in the other direction, right, where we see photos of Bucha on the ground and then they're like, oh, it was fake? It was fake? And then it was it, New York Times that did that whole piece where they literally used satellite imagery, be like, nope, these are the bodies that were in that footage, here they are. And like, is that crazy?

It's such a wild. Like both directions are wild. Oh, the 40 mile convoy. Oh, here it is, you know, on TikTok. The bodies on the ground. Here they are from space. You just, it's a new era. And it makes you think like how different this would have been.

years ago. So I completely agree. Especially if TikTok got banned. If that whole thing where Trump was going to ban TikTok, man, we would have never known about the tank. I'd never known about that. Well, everybody else would have known about it, right? The Canadians would have been fine. It's just, you're not here in America, right? We would have been getting Starlink and using Starlink to route around and get TikTok things of farmers get stoned tanks. Yeah, it doesn't work that way because Starlink's got to get the license from the government, right? So it's right. It's right. It's a lot of you.

All the good TikToks make it to real. And then he would have pumped it right into Starlink. Also, you know, you're right, it does feel like a very tech war. And I think a lot of that has to do with the, with the social media kind of connectivity side of it. But also keep in mind, a lot of the weapons are used. They're old weapons. Yeah.

You know, like the stingers. They were talking about how, you know, they're trying to make more of them, but they're, they use a bunch of obsolete ICs. And now they're like, do we redesign the whole thing to use modern computer ships? and components or do we just try and keep buying old ones off eBay so we can make more, you know, stingers. That's kind of crazy that, you know, the stingers and the javelins and even all the tanks that are there.

I mean, that's 20, 30 year old technology. Now, it seems modern, maybe because sort of our public vision of some of this is World War II, maybe I guess, I don't know. So maybe that's why it seems so modern. But some of this is not all that modern. And to me, that that's something else. I look at all the all the hype going on about, you know, AI and quantum this and quantum that and hypersonics and stuff.

I'm like, man, look what you can do with a commercial drone and a cell phone camera and, you know, some high explosives, right? You can actually do some really cool stuff. So, yeah, we're spending all this time. If you give a shit, it really matters. Yeah, well, exactly, right? And yet we're spending a huge amount of time. a lot of taxpayer money on all this extremely complicated kind of, you know, chasing the front end of the curve technology.

And I don't know, part of me is just like, is that really going to be worth it? Or are we just kind of, you know, chasing what the latest hypey thing is, right? Well, and in a way, I kind of see that as like analogous to what happened in the World War I and World War II. So, you know, and let's say if you think about weapons development through the 80s. 90s, 2000s, when there wasn't like this huge space thing, they had to be like self-sufficient weapons. Like you had to be able to get one device in your hand that could target something far away, fire the missile, use its own guidance and find its way and hit that thing. So it had to be this super

complex thing, right? But now that all this other cheap space tech is coming in, you can literally just have two guys who fly the drone over the car with a hand grenade top to it, blow a little clip and it falls in the window and they take out like a, you know, like this. The human body has not changed in thousands of years. It's still just as easy to kill a guy now as it was 5,000 years ago. But it's just easier to find them now, right? If you pitched that idea as an acquisitions contract, right? So the military's got like a requirement.

We've got to go kill some tanks. And you're like, hey, hey, here, we're going to go buy some, like, DGI drones. And we're going to duct tape, you know, some like, you know, some, some, some high explosives at the bottom and fly overhead and drop them on there. You get laughed out of the building, right? They're like, oh, that'll never work. It's stupid. We're going to buy this, you know, billion dollar around thing that comes from, you know,

this, you know, the defense contract over there. That's sort of what I'm getting out, right? I want to be clear. We are independent podcasters. So if we were good at selling this to the military, we would probably not be independent podcasts. But I agree with you. Let me take that analogy further, though, right?

If you had told someone in World War II that they need to stop buying the big fancy battleships, they also would have laughed you out of the room, right? If you're like, no, just build 100,000 cheap, shitty planes and it'll be just fine, right? Like, and that's a game changer, right? So is this the sort of thing that's happening where this like interconnectivity, is that the new aircraft carrier that is like completely making a whole bunch of weaponry obsolete? Yeah, I honestly don't know, right? Because that's kind of what we didn't remember it to, right?

You know, the, you know, pound for pound, some of the German, you know, leopard tanks and some of the other stuff, they, was superior. But, you know, we were cranking out 10,000 fighters a week, right? And we were just drowning them in pure numbers of material. We were dedossing them with B-17s or whatever. So there's a little bit of that there. And also, I think we forget today just. just how ancient some of that technology was, right?

So if you go like to an air show or something, museum, my favorite museum here in the D.C. area is actually the, the Udbar-Hazi extension to the Air and Space Museum. It's just got just, you know, a huge hanger, just full of all kinds of planes and the space shuttle and stuff. But, you know, it's just metal and like cables, right, covered in canvas and maybe some wood. And it's all, you know, literally fly by wire as,

and I pulled this, right? And the little cable moves and that tugs the aileron. It's extremely low technology. Just the notion you had a radio, that was high tech. That was like cutting edge stuff at the time. It's pretty crazy. Anyways, but back to your point, it is a different kind of a situation going to war for us to be able to see it and

also just kind of how it's been evolving. And also, we talked about earlier, this is the first time that I can think of where there's been an armed conflict where, you know, at least one of the combatants had the ability to kind of shoot back against space. You know, the Russians have some pretty sophisticated counter space. And as we said earlier, you know, we're seeing them do the cyber. We're seeing them, you know, use some of the electronic warfare. But that's about it. And that's going to raise a whole bunch of questions and lots of kind of papers and articles and debates afterwards of kind of why, right? You know, were they deterred from doing it?

Maybe it's not as effective. Maybe they decided not to. Maybe they said, well, we have to use that stuff ourselves. Maybe we don't want to destroy it all. I don't know. It's an interesting question. Do you think that shifts to bring it all the way full circle, you know, a lot of the positioning around the bans on anti-satellite weaponry

is this chess game with China and Russia to be like, well, they're floating this ban that is like a ban around stuff that nobody's really interested in and we're banning this stuff they are interested in? do you think that the seeing it on this scale might and maybe less so with russia because that's now it's a whole different situation with them but when we go and talk to china about this kind of stuff now and we can point to this example as like those weapons aren't useful russia didn't use them at all they had them and they didn't use them does that come into the to what's going on in those rooms that where they're negotiating yeah it's a really big it's a big question so um just to

kind of feel we want what what he's getting at right is i talked about a couple of times um at this This week, there's a meeting in Geneva of lots of different countries, something called an open-ended working group. And the open-endedness refers to any country that wants to participate can. So there's a lot of countries there. And they're talking about space threats. What do we do about space threats? What are, you know, kind of what should the world do about those?

And the reason this debate is hard is because there's no agreement really even what the problem is. As you hinted at, you've got sort of, you know, the U.S. and most of the West are focused on threats to satellites, you know, space weapons, you know, missiles being launched up destroying satellites as the big problem we need to deal with. Russia and China, however, are more focused on things in space that can threaten things here on Earth. So space-based missile defense, you know, the Star Wars dream that Reagan had, maybe some other types of, you know, rods from God kind of, you know, the theorized weapons of space to Earth. That's what they're focused on. And the other, there's also another axes here, which is,

should we be looking to put in place kind of, you know, norms of behavior, voluntary measures, or should we be going for a legally binding treaty? And there's differences. among those things. So that's the debate happening right now between all these different countries, is, you know, where is the majority going to fall? Is it on the threats to space systems, the threats from space? Is it for a legally binding solution? Is it for some, you know, voluntary norms and stuff? And at this point, it's kind of hard to see. I've got a couple of colleagues that are over there that are participating. They actually let some of us, civil society, NGOs, participate and make statements, which I think was really good because that's not always allowed in some of the official multilateral discussions.

It's going to, so this meeting is happening this week. It's going to happen again later this year and they're supposed to meet a couple of times next year and then provide a report to the UN. So this topic is not going away anywhere anytime soon. But at the same time, this is the first time we've had these formal discussions in 10 years, something like that. So it is kind of a real opportunity to actually, you know, try and do something. Is there something about, I mean, say the last two years that is like, is there something that's maybe like shocked you or surprised you about like, you know, the use of space in the military and conflicts and all this kind of things. What's like really got you like not necessarily concerned, but like, wow, I need to learn

more about this because I did not see this coming. So it wasn't for me in the last couple of years. I mean, this is sort of my profession. I've been doing this for quite a while. And I was in the U.S. Air Force for for seven, nine years working both nuclear weapons and then working space situation awareness. So I was part of the unit that tracks all this stuff when it used to be located in Shine Mountain.

You know, we did have a shift around 2014. There was a significant shift, at least here in the U.S., where that was when we started to see people in the U.S. government, people in the U.S. military, start talking about space being a warfighting domain. And the thing we saw at that point was, you know, I kind of got it because I'm one of these nerds that studied this stuff. And we're kind of deep in a lot of it. But a lot of the information was classified, right? A lot of it was happening behind closed doors. And so people would say, oh, if only you could, you know, get a clearance and go over to the skip,

you could see what the real problems were, right? And just how bad things were. And we felt that was suboptimal for something that has a potential to impact all of us because we all use space, right? So that's why we started our chemistry report. was to see what information could we find in the open source, in the public domain about what these different countries are doing. And can we put that together? Can we put that out there to then inform a more public debate about what we should do about this? And it's been kind of a long

four years to get to that point. I think we've made a positive impact in that. You know, we do have occasionally governments sort of, you know, saying, well, we can't really talk about it, but maybe go read this document kind of the thing, right? So, so I think that's helpful. So for me, it was more of kind of helping others understand this, right? That was sort of what I was trying to get at. There's occasionally, you know, cool stuff that happens. I should say, you know, as a formal mechanics nerd, right? And, you know, kind of this stuff. And you're like, in the right circle to say, cool in this case. Yes. For example, back in January, well, China launched a satellite, the S.J. 21, that went into a geotransfer orbit and then moved down to the geo-belts, rendezvoused with a dead Bay-Dao satellite, and then towed it to the satellite graveyard. That was kind of cool, right? I mean, first, you know, so when they launched it, they said it was going to be doing orbit debris mitigation, and everyone sort of didn't really pay attention to what that meant.

although we should have because it launched into a seven degree inclined geotransfor orbit, which is not the normal inclination for a geo, but it did line up with the inclination of this dead satellite. And they went up and grabbed it and towed at the geo. And I mean, that's the first time a government's done that, right? And, you know, kind of signals that maybe they wanted to get rid of it. Now, maybe they also wanted to demonstrate the ability to do that. and there's a whole lot of dual use implications of that kind of technology.

But that is sort of the cutting edge of space, right? We'll call satellite servicing, the ability to get close and repair, refuel, inspect, you know, assemble, swap out components, tow to a different orbit. You know, that is the cutting edge of where space stuff is. And there's a huge amount of promise in that. Okay. I got lots of thinking. You got a lot of reading. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I don't know. I mean, this is, I'm really glad we had this conversation because it just feels like, I don't know, it really feels like there's, it's new. And, and, you know, there's, there's people outside of, of my space group that are like, wow, like, I can't believe we saw this picture of this. Like, you know, they're noticing the impact, like, right in the. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right. And I'm kind of blase about this because, again, this is what I do. This is what I study. But you're absolutely right.

Even like one of the political issues right now in Canada is, well, I mean, obviously it's all about NATO spending and increasing. That's kind of like normal across the board for any NATO country right now is talking about military expenditures. But like big, big thing on the table right now is NORAD. And like, is Canada doing its part and contributing? to NORAD and are we working well with the United States to to look for these threats and like like I heard that on like the CBC's like mainstream podcast they're talking about about missile defense.

I was like what is this 1960? Yeah, like NORAD and it was funny because they had they had the American ambassador on it and he was talking. He's just like so let's talk about NORAD and I know that most of your listeners probably when they hear NORAD they think about is that the group that tracks Santa Claus. Totally. Yes, it is. But they actually do more than that. And so I thought that was like a really

They were actually formed a track A little bit more dangerous thing, right? You know, Soviet bombers and ICBM is coming over the pole. Santa Claus does move a little faster though. So if you have, if you can do Santa Claus, you can do our ice again. It's really funny. He's hypersonic.

Yeah. He's definitely hypersonic. Hyperspace. But you're right. You know, and also that's interesting. because, you know, we had this whole thing for 20 years, right? It's all about terrorism, counterterrorism, terrorism, right? We kind of forgot about that. Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, it's all about China, China, China.

And then all of a sudden it's like, wait, right? Russia's still a thing, right? It's like, whoa, hold out here. Bring out the old playbook. Back up a second, right? Where's top one to at? It's still time to like make it Russia again. Did we have to make it China this time or what?

Wait, isn't that coming out in a week or two? Two weeks? Yeah, like, yeah. weekend, I think, finally. I might go back to the movie theater for Top Gun, too. I'm going to be pretty fun. But that's where my wife and I met, right? So I got stationed in Shion Mountain in Colorado Springs in early 2000s.

My wife was a major in the Canadian forces, and we both got stationed in the same unit there together because we were both working for Nora at the time. And, yeah, I was 100% sure you met your wife at Top Gun, like original Top Gun. 100% sure that's where that story was going. Yeah, that would be a totally different kind of story, right? Yeah, no, no. We're both space nerds. We met inside a mountain.

It's great. But it's because there are still people to this day in Colorado Springs who are watching 24-7 for potential Russian and now Chinese missiles coming up over the North Pole, you know, presenting a threat to the U.S. and Canada, more of the U.S. in Canada. But, you know, I mean, was that, was that old joke about how Canada's just there to kind of absorb the ones that fall short, right?

Yeah, we have already done that. We've already for sure. It's a great service. It's a great service. Mexico takes the, uh, takes the comet impacts. Canada takes the space to bring in the ballistic missiles. It's a partnership, right? The comet impacts. Oh, man.

Directly on Jake's house at the moment. Oh, my goodness. Brian, you mentioned the CounterSpace report a couple of times. I just pulled up the executive summary on this sucker, and it says, 04, 2022. So is this like frequently updated, or was this a very recent official release?

Annually. We've been doing it annually since 2018. Because it's a, if you get one in person, and we do have some that are amazing looking, it's up over 200 pages. That's a beefy, beefy volume, right? It's kind of challenging for us to take them anywhere because they've gotten so big. So we do it annually, and we put it out both electronically and in print.

We also translate the executive summary into Russian, Chinese, French, and Spanish, mainly because we want the countries that are talking about this stuff to have access to this kind of information, right, to help inform their, inform their discussions. The other thing I'll point out that your listeners might be interested in is, if you go to the website there, there's a link to some YouTube videos that show animated gabard plots for a whole bunch of destructive ASAT tests. A gabard plot is a way of graphing the spread of debris objects that are created from a from an incident.

You simply just plot the apogee and the perigy. Right. And what we had is we had somebody that went through and did that. And then for every point in time, and then we animated them. So you can see, you know, this satellite was destroyed at this altitude. And boom, here's this spread of debris that goes up pretty high in apogy from the initial impact. And then slowly comes down over time. as it decays out of the atmosphere.

And part of the reason we did that was to drive home that, you know, there's no such thing as a responsible anti-satellite test. You know, we joked earlier about the one that the U.S. did back in 2008, right? So we whacked one of our dead Neroa satellites at an altitude of about 220 kilometers. And the public explanation was that it was full of frozen hydrazine, which is really bad stuff. and they were afraid that the hydrazine would survive re-entry and then pose a threat to somebody on the ground.

So we hit it with a missile from a ship. But there was debris that got thrown. Right, right, mission accomplished, right. So the intercept happened about 225, but there was debris that got thrown more than 1,500 kilometers in apogee. And it took a year and a half for all that to come back down. And as you can see on here, the color, the big colored dots, those represent the International Space Station. They represent the Starling constellation.

They represent the Chinese Tangang Space Station. And so all this stuff is going to get thrown up past all that human spaceflight stuff at 400 kilometers, the large constellations hanging at around 400, 500 kilometers and other altitudes. That's why, you know, there's sort of this push to make this stuff, you know, kind of outlaw of this stuff. because even a low altitude, you're going to throw debris high and it's going to pose a problem for everybody. Hmm.

And of course, these plots named for Tulsi Gabbard. Just the... No. No. No. A NASA scientist who first came up with this as a way to show... And usually they're static.

This is sort of a newer invention is animating him. But to show sort of the... the spread of a debris field. So usually get like this plus sign kind of a look to it, sort of with the origin at where the intercept happened. And it kind of spreads out in Perigy and it spreads out, it spreads out an apogee and spreads out in Perigy. Some cool stuff.

That's Jonathan McDowell. That's what he dreams about. Just. John's a global treasure. That is a true family. Literally. He has the best catalog of stuff in space better than any government. He has the best one.

We did a whole episode on his list, don't worry. Yeah, totally. Yeah, he just wants to make a list. It's a life project, right? Just wants to finish his gap at the list. No, he's his life project is a book of every object humans have put into space. Yeah, yeah. Which is kind of hard, right?

The book never ends. And he's starting with like the V2 experiments, right? It's crazy. Boy. Oh, man. Brian, where should people follow along with you if they are not partaking at the moment? Well, a few different places. I mean, you can stop by our website, SWfound.org, which you've been shown periodically.

That's where we have all of our work stuff. And, you know, my foundation is secure world. Our focus is the long-term sustainable use of space for benefits here on Earth. So we care about things like orbit debris and congestion and a satellite testing and space traffic management, all that kind of stuff to try and make sure we can use space for all these great benefits. So you can get all kind of the stuffy formal stuff there. I'm pretty active on social media, both Twitter and LinkedIn. So if you want to follow me at Brian Whedon, it's not just space stuff for warning. I kind of talk about all the stuff I find interesting and cool.

and but you know happy to answer questions or kind of you know follow up in any stuff we think about here so those are the two main areas to kind of follow up on what I'm what I'm up to and these topics in general and there's a whole community of people working on this issue on Twitter from multiple countries there's policy nerds there's you know legal nerds there's you know actual nerd nerds right you know it's pretty interesting group actual nerd nerds, yeah. As in the people do like, you know, orbital calculations

in their head and stuff, right? And, you know, think kerbils easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rich part of the world, right? Jay, are you taking a sabbatical after your Casey Dreyer, Casey Dryer week that happened? Maybe like, just a shorty.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I had Casey on to talk about the planetary Decatal survey, and it was a gone. It was a long conversation. So we, it was a lot of airtime. So yeah, I'm taking maybe just one extra week for what I would normally post. But I should be digging into some more follow on stuff from the Cato, getting deeper into some of the specific areas, whether destinations or missions.

So keep an eye on the only Martian's feet for that. I'm pretty excited for that. Anthony, what are you working on? I've got a topical one tomorrow. I'm going to be talking to Mike Gold about the Artemis Accords. So this is very relevant to what we're talking about here. Make sure you ask him why they're called Accords. I wasn't going to ask you about the Accords part.

I was going to really harp on the Artemis part because I felt that was a really high risk, high reward scenario for that. Make sure you ask about both Artemis and Accords. Make sure you ask him why they're called the Accords. I'm pumped because he convinced Eric Berger to. send me an email to get him on Miko. And so I'm like, all right, this is going to be great. Mike's a friend of mine.

Mike's great guy. And, you know, he deserves a ton of credit for the success of the Artemis Accords. But make sure you ask him why they're called Accords. All right. Sweet. Well, you're going to hear that probably Monday, I guess. Monday on the main engine cutoff feed is where I'm going to put that. So that's a little teaser that Brian's going to.

Maybe I'll call you while we're talking and you can give him some crap. be a quartz part or something. No, I think it's good. It's great. It's a cool story. Jake, what are you doing on Off Nominal next week? Because I'm not going to be here. Yeah, it's next week you're away.

So I have a guest host joining me. So if you remember Anna from the But It is Rocket Scientist. But It is Rocket Science podcast. She's going to be popping in to help me. And we're going to be interviewing Dr. Pamela Gay, who is an astronomer. She does the very popular and long-running astronomy cast podcast with Fraser Cain. So we're going to talk a little bit about astronomy and making space podcasts and all that kind of fun stuff.

So I'm pretty excited for it. Another really light news topic this week when you have people focused on astronomy on. No news about that. There's going to be probably some black hole talk or, yeah, Sagittarius A, right? That's the one. Another episode way out of my depth, by the way. Yeah, yeah, you're just going on this voyage of self-improvement, I guess. I don't know.

Career broadening. That's the one. There you go. Jake's other career was making Discord bots. We should mention this. People have been suggesting topics or titles for this episode in Discord. Yeah, yeah. So we rolled out a prototype today of just allowing the listeners in our Discord to, you know, catch funny things that we say during the episode and suggest them as an episode title.

and that's all collected. It like kind of worked. It almost, there's a couple bugs, but like it worked pretty well. I'm really surprised that my coding skills worked. But if you want to be a part of that,

you should definitely join for a membership in the channel because that gets you access to the Discord. It's a great bunch of people and you can pop in there and, you know, be a part of the episode in aiming, which is pretty fun. All right,

everybody, Brian, thanks again for being here. You are the best. Yeah, thanks, Brian. My pleasure. Appreciate the invite. Bye. Bye.