School of War - Ep 147: Frank Ledwidge on War in Space

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Frank Ledwidge, Senior Fellow in Air Power and International Security at the Royal Air Force College and author of Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies, joins the show to talk about warfare’s next frontier, space.  ▪️ Times      •      01:40 Introduction      •      03:24 Thinking about space     •      09:09 More than a conduit     •     14:15 ASAT      •      19:55 Space domain awareness     •      26:20 Directed energy and nuclear weapons     •      31:16 Congested/competitive/contested      •      39:44 36,000 earths     •      42:15 Commercial incentives     •      45:05 Who has the advantage? Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

When the first shots are fired in the next direct Great Power War, it is very possible, maybe even likely, that they will be fired at targets in space. We're going to talk about that today, about the history of the militarization of space, and about what the future may hold for space warfare. It's pretty mind-blowing. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live. in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back. to the show today, Frank Ledwidge. Frank is senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. He also teaches at the Royal Air Force Academy. He's the author of aerial warfare, losing small wars and investment in blood. He is also, of course, amongst his many claims to fame, was a guest here in School of War on episode six, which Colin, if I'm not wrong, takes us back to the fall of 2021 when, well, I'm going to take these numbers to my grave, but let's just say we were a startup

Enterprise at that time. And Frank, I got a lot of very positive feedback about your episode back then. And now I'm delighted to report. We actually have a couple of people listening to the show. It's a quiet. You're a part of that. So thank you. Thanks, Aaron. It's a real honor. And yep, I can definitely see you have more than a few loyal audience now. And it's an honor to be here again. In 2024, that is the case. Yes. So look, your episode, and I commend it to listeners who are new to the show and haven't come back to the start of things, but Frank gave just a phenomenal high-level overview of the history of aerial warfare, the strategic thinking behind it. It really was, you know, sort of the one-stop shop

45-minute or so introduction tied to his book on the same subject, of course, which people should also check out. And you made a comment, I think, because we were kind of wrapping up that conversation, which is the spur for what I would like to talk about today, which is space. You made sort of offhandedly said, well, you know, it's not clear that as space becomes a more and more developed warfighting domain, that the logic of the aerial domain will simply transfer into space. It may be that the nature of space changes how we think, that we simply can't take the logic of air strategy or air tactics or what have you and transfer them to space directly. There will be changes. And in some ways, and this is the thing that has been knocking around in the back of my brain since we talked,

in some ways it may end up looking more like naval strategy and naval thinking up there than aerial thinking. I thought that was fascinating. I've always wanted to explore it. I'm glad that you're back. And so, you know, let's just start very big picture. You know, you can address that comment, but I think it might be best to start at the start, which is to say, when do people start thinking about space as a domain of war?

Who are the key thinkers? How does this all get going? Great question, Aaron. And it's an infinitely large subject, both figuratively and literally. To answer your last question, the Space Force only last year defined its domain of operations, finally, although it was implicit in any event, which was from about 62 miles up, which is 100 kilometers, and that's known as the Carman line, K-R-M-A-N, it's a Hungarian name, defining the limits of space essentially into lunar.

and beyond. So it sees Space Force, its domain as everything outside the air. And from a conceptual perspective or doctrinal perspective, that's very important because it defines the difference between air, where air ends, where aircraft can fly, let's say, and where space begins. There was some controversy about that for some years in various countries take different views, but most of them are pretty much settling on that. Back to though the analogs with air power, first of all. But the air power, fathers of air power, your duet, an Italian general from the First World War, Billy Mitchell, highly influential for decades,

although he didn't live beyond the 20s. In US thinking of air power, both regarded the air, of course, as then the ultimate or the high ground that was necessary. to dominate. And they conceptualised several different ways of using that domination, which we discussed last time. Now, this idea of high ground, it clearly isn't finite in terms of their part, I suppose it is. We've now known that to be 100 kilometers, that's been known for some time. But another great thinker, an American thinker, in terms of space power, was General William Schrever, or Shriver, I think, who whilst not the father of space power thinking,

he came up with the framing of the ultimate high ground, and that's that space. And I'm sure he wouldn't claim that to be his idea, but he conceptualised it in that way. And General Shriver is or was a very major player during the Cold War. In terms of sort of fathers of space power, there isn't really a thinker that compares within the sea, in the maritime domain, Mahan or Corbett, Corbett, or Duet, Trenschard, Mitchell in the air.

No thinkers yet emerged. I'm not surprised really in that sense because there's so much, so much thinking to be done. And we're at a very, very early stage. And I think we're in the sort of early early 1900s in terms of air power conceptually. But there are some key thinkers, and just to summarize that may be, and these are technical. thinkers. These are the people. So for example, Tjolkovsky, it was a Russian scientist, he came up with, and whilst not perfecting, experimented with liquid-fueled rocketry. We have, of course, von Braun, the German rocket scientist who invented the V2, or rather farther V2, a very controversial person, of course, using slave labor to do that and to recruit it in the United States space program. The V2 itself still forms a basis of missiles such as the Scud missile. used still throughout the world. We have von Oberst, who was another early 20th century scientist dealing with the basics of space technology. So we don't really have yet a theorist. What we do have, though, is a great deal of conceptual thinking. And you can find that,

I think, the best, if anybody wants to go and look, and you won't be able to find it in detail because it's limited distribution, it's space power, the Trinal Document 314, which came out last year. It's a Space Force document, and that conceptualizes where the Space Force, and by extension, other international armed forces dealing with space, and many now will look at space operations going forward. And there are plenty of other documents like that.

But I think that pretty much founds the doctrinal discussion. You can also look at Space Force Capstone. I think they've changed their name now. Space 101, they call it, which is a very, very basic interest. introduction to what space force and other space powers actually do. I'm certainly my way in the dark here with these questions, so feel free to sort of revise them and mess with the premises as you see fit. But I'm curious to know when thinking about space as its own domain really begins.

And I mean, specifically, if you think back to you mentioned V2s and Bon Brown, and, you know, we can obviously see in the Cold War, you know, once you know about ballistic missiles, you are on some level talking about space. And then, of course, we have the famous U.S. Soviet space race in the Cold War, which clearly has military dimensions. I mean, a lot of it is about demonstrating rocket technology, right? But the point of my question is ballistic missiles and rockets and things like that in those early decades, they're all about hitting targets on Earth, I think. So you're looking at space in those terms as not to be silly, but, you know, as warring prehistoric tribes might have looked at the river as a place to swim for a few hundred meters. to achieve some advantage on the shore just down the river or like get into a canoe.

Like everything's still very tied in their military thinking to the land itself because they're not seasoned maritime warriors yet. They don't have the technology. They don't really know how to how to plan. Similarly, space is just a kind of littoral for Earth, right, in those first few decades. When does it start to, whether in theory or in practice, start to push past that? Early 60s on, when the U.S., I mean, we've spoke, you know, Implicitly, you mentioned there, Sputnik and various other US exploratory technology,

but the US started to use space as a bit more than a conduit, which it still is, of course, for missile warfare. We might get to that because missile warning, for example, is a major roller space power at the moment. But they got to it in the early 60s, I think 61 was the first corona satellite. They're quite interesting those. and very early forms of reconnaissance satellite. Because one of the advantages that space has over-air power is what it is, there's a disadvantage attached to this, is ubiquity.

You know, you can cover the entire plan. It's not too much until quite recently anyone could do about that. And not too much that people have done about denying space to people as yet. So the Corona satellites, they would be taking film or pictures of the Soviet Union. And the way, one of the big problems, even now, of the use of space power and particularly reconnaissance, is getting your signal from space to Earth, the latency problem. In other words, how long is it between the time that the, let's say, the photograph or the signal is identified and preserved and getting that back to Earth? And the Corona system initially, what they would do is they would take film in essentially a film camera, an ordinary film camera. it would be then placed into a canister

and the canister would be rejected from the spacecraft, it would re-enter the atmosphere, and then it would be collected usually by an aircraft with a sort of dragnet. And there were amazing photographs of these transport aircraft catching the canisters on their parachutes. And that went on into the 70s or late 60s, I think, when we started to see digital signals being set down

with photographs, but they were very primitive. By that time, of course, the US had politically, talking at the late 60s now, with the landings on the moon, politically won the space race. The USSR had several major mistakes in the 60s. Their key engineer, the equivalent of Furner von Braun, died Khoroliev, who was every bit von Braun's equivalent, a brilliant man. There were a few disasters and explosions. The Soviet space race essentially, as a manned endeavor, didn't collapse, of course, it. It's just saying today, but it lost the space race. And that was politically really important. Just to jump forward, if I might, I think what we're seeing now is a real risk that the US could fall behind China in the next, paradoxically, paradoxically in the next race to the moon. Maybe we'll get to that.

And then moving through into the 80s, we have the deployment of GPS global positioning system, a couple of dozen satellites, and everybody knows. knows what they do, but what people don't necessarily, not everybody knows is I think that lots of GPS controls your phone in terms of, or other, assist your phone and banking systems and supply chain and all that kind of thing. It was designed and still its primary role is precision attack. In other words, navigation to a very, very precise degree of rockets, missiles and bombs, which brings us to the military use on the ground, which the first war, where that became crucial was the first Gulf War in 1990, 1991, where precision-guided munitions really took the heart out of Iraqi defenses. Now, we're only able to deploy that precision

because of GPS. So just to summarize a couple of things that you said, you know, space begins as a space, if you'll forgive the poor expression, for things to move through to get back to Earth, namely missiles. So that's sort of step one. And then you move into a phase. These are the purely military aspects. Obviously, you have going to the moon and things for political purposes, but not necessarily expressly military purposes. Then you have the deployment of persistent assets, satellites in space, things that stay up there. And these are used for reconnaissance, for communications as well. I mean, the communications have to be part of it in the first place, because otherwise you're never going to get the pictures back. And then, as you point out,

really critically, in terms of just understanding the history of warfare writ large for the last half century plus GPS. And I suppose equivalence, right? There are competitor geolocation regimes up there. And so now you have all this stuff up there by the end of the 20th century, still operating today that's taking pictures, that's communicating, that's helping you geolocate such that it's hard to imagine warfare. Warfare today depends upon high-end warfare, sort of warfare conducted by major nation-states,

depends on all this stuff. when does the question of going after stuff in space anti-satellite efforts just to pick the most obvious and straightforward example, when does that become, when does that enter into the conversation? Thank you. Just one thing to pick up there. The term used for positioning and precision is P&T. So one of the key roles of space force now is to preserve that P&T positioning, navigation, and timing. You, of course, have obvious extensive military roles that you've already addressed. But to come back to your question, that's a great question. It's a very interesting one. So the answer is that in the early 80s, the US Air Force received information that the Soviets were trying to develop anti-satellite missile systems, ASAT, ASAT.

And there's various forms of ASAT, as we might get to. There's kinetic, of course, which is firing missiles at things, non-kinetic, electronic, and cyber. Because, again, just to sort of build on the conceptual basis, there are three segments to space, and you can attack any one of them, which will collapse the lot. On the ground, there's the ground segment, which are the ground stations, the receivers and transmitters. Then you have, in the words of a, well, I think great words of a general bender, who was a CDUS commander, I think this comes from the, sort of 2010s, those ones and zeros upon which everything else depends. So that's the data link. That's the second segment. You've got the ground segment,

the data segment, and then you've got the space segment, which are the spacecraft themselves. So clearly you can attack any one of those three, and all space forces aspire, sorry, or refraise, all major space forces aspire to have some influence in each of those segments. You know, you can bomb a ground station. That's the simplest thing. But attacking spacecraft is the most difficult to mitigate. It's so expensive and, well, maybe not so much recently, but the problem of replacing a spacecraft is extremely difficult. So what can you do? You can attack these things with missiles. And the US Air Force conducted its first of very few kinetic anti-satellite tests from an F-15A in 1985. It took down a satellite called Solwind. And it did so, it took a year or two to develop

the technology to do that, but they did it and they did it successful, and they did it without causing too much damage to the space environment. So let me just continue on that route, if I might. Then we'll jump forward now to 2007. I think it's seven, it might be eight, seven, I think. When the Chinese did a similar thing, that was the next major landmark in kinetic anti-satellite technology. So the Chinese destroyed one of their own satellites, Fenyang, seven, I think. Anyway, so an old, weather reconnaissance satellite. And in so doing, they created a vast cloud of debris

which still comprises a significant proportion of space debris, orbiting the Earth and still a threat to satellites in low Earth orbit. So that was the Chinese ASAT test 2008, Fenyon. India has also conducted a test, and so has, Japan has demonstrated the capabilities, has not carried it out. The US, in response to the Chinese test, simply put up their own, called Burntfrost the following year, and did so without causing a great cloud of debris. And finally, most recently in 2021, November, the Russians did it. And just to highlight the lack of command and

control and coordination, the deterioration of Russian space capabilities, the Russian space forces or aerospace force that now calls its air force, managed to do that without, informing Roscosmos, the Russian equivalent of NASA, with the result that the International Space Station went into an emergency state of warning and the astronauts inside, including one Russian, had to repair themselves to the life, the lifeboat essentially, whilst the clouded debris that they created caused,

was cleared, whilst the ground crews cleared the space station from the risk of debris hitting it and compromising its indeed. integrity. So that's the last one in 2000, yeah, 2021. The US in 22 declared itself, declared that it would no long, it would never conduct any further kinetic anti-satellite tests trying to establish a norm and many other countries, several other countries, I've signed on to that. So we'd hope not to see this kind of thing again. It's extremely dangerous and presents a risk of something called the Kessler syndrome. I'll just finish with one analogy, some of you listeners and viewers might,

might know or a demonstration of this. You see the film Gravity at one point, as in that film, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are hit with a cloud of satellite debris. And in the film, it creates a belt of debris, which a chain reaction of debris, which denies space pretty much to everybody. And that's called the Kessler syndrome. People are really afraid of that. It wouldn't take much for that chain reaction to take effect,

denying space and its advantages to us all. And it happened very quickly. And that would not need not be a military, with the result of a military test, it could simply be a collision or several collisions. Well, not to get off track on this question of debris, but it's really interesting. Have there been incidents, I suppose,

nothing with manned. You talk about the International Space Station astronauts going to their lifecraft just in case, but have there been incidents where unmanned satellites have actually been lost to this debris? And then related question, what is it about the American way of shooting down satellites that generates less than the Chinese and Russian methods.

Yeah. As far as I know, no satellites have been compromised or destroyed by this cloud of debris, but it's so difficult to predict that I think analysts are not at all certain at the various clouds, small and large. The Indian one, I think, is mostly deteriorated. The Russian one hasn't, and the Chinese one certainly hasn't. The calculations by the space domain awareness people, which is another role of space power, is understanding what's going on in space and deconflicting orbits.

and trying to keep spacecraft safe from debris, that's one of the big roles of space domain awareness of ground stations. One of the big roles of Space Force and our own RAF and indeed every space force has this role of space domain awareness to avoid exactly what you're speaking about, which is the loss of satellites and a potential chain reaction. What was the second question on Aaron and the second part of it again? Why did the American test not result?

I mean, how do you blow up a satellite? light without getting a bunch of debris. Yeah, more competent geometric awareness and an accurate calculation. And of course, a lack of recklessness of the kind displayed by China in its test, and indeed Russia in the more recent one. And I think the Americans did burn frost in 2008 simply to show and demonstrate that it could be done. So the debris from that particular destruction deteriorated into and reentered the atmosphere in very short order, leaving no debris at all.

I see. I see. And then last question on anti-satellite capability specifically. There are such things, and I guess this could lead us into a question of other weapons in space, maybe persistent weapons in space. But there are, you know, killer satellites, right? There are persistent objects in space now that can kill other objects in space. How does that work? What is the origin of that? I'm going to take us back to conceptual things in a minute, but I am kind of fascinated by killer robots hunting each other in orbit. Yeah, I was talking to an RAF space operator quite senior one a few weeks ago, and I did not know this, and I thought I'll have had it confirmed, but he was pretty well informed. He said that the first anti-satellite weapon in space on a spacecraft or on orbit, he would call it, was a machine gun on one of the early. I guess to him at the salient, he said he didn't know which one it was, but the Soviets had put a machine gun in one of the amounted machine gun in one of their space stations, just in case. So that's the first example of that, if it's true. And I suspect it is. He wasn't, it was a rather dry character. But now the main risk from space, from objects or spacecraft in orbit is a capability

called RPA RONDIVAN proximity operations or inspector satellites. Various, the Russians have a different term for them, so do the Chinese. But again, just to come into a bit into a bit of cinematic culture, if anybody's seen the Netflix series Space Force. There is one element to that, which is absolutely true. And what happens is in that case, the Americans launch a spy satellite, everybody's very pleased. And the night of its launch, the two protagonists are looking through a telescope and they see pride and joy up in space. And then a Chinese satellite marked with Chinese symbols comes close to it and snips off its solar panels, thereby rendering it useless and then one is off.

And that's called a rendezvous proximity operation or an inspection. Call it what you like. But the whole purpose of it is that another satellite will come close in and some form or another will interfere with your systems. And that could be electronically. It could be with directed energy weapons and lasers or dazzled. It could be destroyed by microwave radiation. Or it could simply be crushed or indeed moved to another orbit or forced to reenter.

So that's a real risk. And indeed only last year, the major Western space forces warned, and this is quite rare of the warnings, because this kind of thing happens a lot, by the way. Mostly the Russians and the Chinese doing it to French, British and American assets. What they do is in this particular case, which was last year, November 23, there was a joint announcement by Western Space Forces, a Russian, particular Russian satellite, which had been launched quite a while ago, actually, had been reactivate, apparently reactivated. It's called Luch.

as the Russians call it, or Olymp, which is the official title. And it seems that this satellite started tracking and approaching very closely. Now, close in space can be 10 kilometers, but it's very much nearer to that to French, British and, or French, particularly, and American commercial and military satellites. Now, it's very hard, and I'm sure the space operators who are listening to this, of course, well ahead of me and all this, but they will tell you that moving around in orbit is a very complex and difficult task. A lot of it is very counterintuitive. If you move faster, for example, you tend to go lower in orbit, that kind of thing for reasons that they could explain.

Perhaps not me or not quickly anyway. So the point is that maneuvering the space is really difficult. But if you can do it and you can get close to your adversary satellite, you can compromise, destroy or indeed steal the enemy satellite in theory. The US and China both have what look like small space shuttles, for example. And we're not told what they're for. They belong to the military. One of the conjectors is that their role may be simply to, in the event of conflict,

open the cargo base and take something home. That's also possible. We don't know. At the moment, as far as I'm aware, nobody, there's been no public announcement of any satellites that are armed with, for example, laser weapons or directed energy weapons. But it is assumed that there are such platforms. Well, you mentioned radiation at one point. I mean, we had a whole kerfuffle here in the United States this past spring, I believe, where some classified information became public to the effect that the Russians had a, I can't remember every detail, but it was the effect of the Russians had a nuclear

capability in or deployable too. I can't actually remember which one, which seems significant, which one it is in space, that would sort of indiscriminately render a large area of satellites, when employed. Yeah, that intelligence was revealed, I think, by a congressman on one of your defense committees, whose name escapes me for the moment. And it does seem that probably deliberately and entirely properly, it was somewhat ambiguous. And some commentators took it to mean, I think, as you hint, that this would be a nuclear weapon, deployable.

I don't think there was any hint at all that there's any such weapon at the moment in space. and I would think it'd be unlikely to be that. The other possibility is that it might have been a nuclear-powered facility now for what purpose perhaps. Certainly if you had a nuclear-powered generation in space, the kind of directed energy weapon that could produce would be quite fearsome. The use of nuclear weapons in or from space is one of the very few things explicitly prohibited by the various,

indeed, there's only one international legal convention on military space activities. So this would be, that's the one known. no go, actually, is nuclear weapons when you come in space. But as I say, it was a bit ambiguous. And whilst there was a lot of commentary on it, much of it, I think, was conjectural. One of the issues, one of the hypotheses, which is really frightening, actually, is the possibility of adversary, for example, Chinese, and we really are talking here about China when we talk about peer adversaries.

Russia is no longer a peer adversary in space. It's an irritant. It's an irritant. Peer adversary, China most certainly is. And one of the really frightening hypotheses is the use of a nuclear weapon in space as a not as a destructive or directly kinetically destructive weapon, but as the source of an electric magnetic pulse over a key area, which would, let's say, such a weapon is detonated over London,

everything would crash immediately. It would be utterly disastrous. All the systems of living would collapse within two or three days because space is so important, and of course, keyless to say, electrics and electronics are so important. And such a weapon would have the capability without directly killing people of causing very, very great and serious damage to an adversary to an enemy. So there's that possibility.

Frankly, a lot of these things are so frightening that I've rarely spoken about. Yeah. Well, so, you know, our conversation so far leads me to frame things in the following way, and this will take us into the second part of what I hope we could discuss. On the one hand, the history of space as a domain of war thus far, including today, here in September of 2024, it's an environment that feels sort of crazily in a way, crowded and mature. It certainly contributes to a mature regime of war fighting on Earth,

mature in the sense that the United States and China are both pretty well caught up with each other, the way in which they're going to use space if there's a conflict, And then we could predict in the event of a direct U.S. China or U.S. Russia conflict, for that matter, that there will be a space dimension to that. Assets will disappear. There will be knock on effects on Earth not only militarily, but to civilian life. Because we, civilian life, obviously, so dependent on space for communications and just GPS alone. You know, it's just, it feels crowded and claustrophobic and difficult to think through how it will iterate once the balloon goes up. It won't just be that every capability disappears, and all of a sudden we're back in 1960 and just have to figure it out.

Like, it won't be as simple as that. You know, it'll be a cat and mouse, and some capabilities will disappear and presumably new ones will be deployed. It's just really, I mean, interesting if you have commentary on that. So, but that's on the one hand, and then just quickly, on the other hand, we're obviously, as you pointed out at the start of the episode, still a kind of dawn of things. You know, we are still, you know, my prehistoric tribes standing on the, the riverbank looking out to sea, thinking, gosh, there's a lot out there. Wouldn't it be interesting

if we could get our canoes to go a little bit further, maybe build a boat with a sail on it? And as we start to move further out into space, as we start to do more on the moon and further beyond in the solar system, unfortunately, and you wrote this in an article just earlier this year, I think, it seems likely that the human capacity and proclivity for war is going to continue on with us out there. And that's the area where I think your comment from our first conversation about how things start to look a bit more maritime when you start thinking in those terms. That's just unexplored, both in a literal sense but also in a conceptual sense. So I don't feel free to comment on either or both of those dimensions of things. On the one hand, it's just hard to think about how the chaos is going to iterate once we start fighting in the regime as it exists today.

And then two, how do we even begin to think about military operations on the moon or in what you call in your article cis lunar space, space leading up to the moon? Please, help us understand, Frank. Okay. So, first of all, space is congested, competitive, and contested. So as the relatively new saying goes. And it's the job of, I'm just going to speak about space force, but various other aerospace forces have dealing with the same. same thing. Space force is by far the most significant in the West. So the purpose of space is to ensure that a kind of pearl harbour in space does not happen. And if it does, there'll be

the resilience and proliferation or, well, perliferation, one element of resilience, to be able to preserve the assets needed to continue the fight. What plans are extremely frightened of in orbit is a surprise attack by, let's put it, who it is, it's China, on targeting, positioning, navigation, and timing assets, GPS effectively. China has its own, Beidu, so do the Russians, so do the Europeans, and, you know, various other nations are planning there, GNSS, global navigation satellite systems. But, of course, your enemy is trying to take those down. And if they do, well, there goes most of your precision capability. So that's a nightmare scenario. But then on top of that, So that's denying the US, in that case, many capabilities.

But if you can preserve your own capabilities in space and so much the better. And one of the major concerns of US planners in the Western Pacific, the Indo-PAC region, is that China now has, I think this is not controversial. For the first time since 1995, the US faces an adversary that's able to have persistent surveillance across the Western Pacific. So Chinese capabilities themselves present a real threat when combined and integrated with their, and this brings us back to space's impact on ground operations or assisting ground operations, when combined with China's extremely formidable missile system. So what the Chinese have done is leverage their space capabilities to have a surveillance

and targeting, let's say, ascendancy over US naval assets in the Western Pacific, which is the first time we've faced that since 45. So they're concerned about that. But as you say, look, we've been talking about orbit, you know, that riverbank, if you say, if we can put it like that. All of these are most of these capabilities are in low Earth orbit. They're 100 to 3 or 400 miles up. There are other orbits as well. There's halfway between.

There's medium Earth orbit, which is a bit further out with different roles. And there's geostationally orbit, which is 36,000 kilometers out. And what the capabilities that those satellites have is that they can sit over one area at any time. So we're now moving out of orbit into the XGOs. It's called the extra geostation orbit, 36,000 kilometers sphere around the Earth. And that's where things really change. That's where your analogy, others analogy, of the difference between, say, a river and an ocean starts to make sense. Except an ocean isn't really a sufficient analogy.

So let me just give you some figures, which I find astonishing but true. So you can fit within that geostationary sphere, hundreds and hundreds of Earths. So just within that's 36,000 kilometres, I think it's 1,000 cubic Earths in that area, right? So we have enough problem exercising domain awareness, which is to say situational awareness in orbit, right, in low Earth orbit. Now imagine that expanded out to hundreds of Earth volume sizes, spheres. Now, that's just the Earth at geostation orbit. So what we're trying to do is maintain awareness of our adversaries and indeed potential other issues like debris out to that far.

That's a vast task. And it requires, of course, huge amounts of processing capability and indeed platforms. But that's nothing. Right. So let's go out now to the moon, which is 250,000 miles, 360,000. kilometers. And then we're talking about tens of thousands of Earths to survey just in that sphere of a quarter of a million miles out. Tens of thousands, that's just the way the maths work. So just over 200,000, I think. My maths are right. And again, look, I don't wish to over-egate,

we are talking about space here. And what we're now looking at is trying to exercise adequate surveillance of adversary capabilities beyond there. And there are certain areas in lunar and extra lunar space, which is beyond that, which will become very important in the medium term. We're talking here not, you know, 50 years, talking in the next 10 to 20 years. They're called the Lagrange points, where you can place a spacecraft in a stable orbit. And that's a long way off. Those are sometimes millions of miles away. So just to bring this back to today and why this has become a key issue

and why a lot of space planners are concerned about cis lunar space, the moon is going to become a contested, not necessarily in terms of armed conflict, we hope not, but it's going to become a contested domain because of the, not so much the political aspect, but because of now of the resources elements, which will dwarf any other continent and say. China is going hard for the moon.

Last year, a spacecraft called Changi 5, once it had completed its mission on the moon, then departed to one of those Lagrange points I was mentioning to you, 100,000 miles away, and it got lost, right? The US did not know where it was and it came back, and they were not expecting that. As a result, rather this turbotcharged efforts now for space force to really start examining, looking out to the moon, to be aware of what our versus might be doing out there that we don't know about, And some of your listeners and viewers may remember something called Chips, the California Cornea Highway Patrol.

And Space Force had been planning their own cis-luna highway patrol system for some time or some years. Last year, got re-eatings last year, now 22, it was renamed Oracle. So we're now going to have a cis-lunar highway patrol force, part of Space Force, essentially comprised of ground assets and a few spacecraft, to try and extend that situation awareness way beyond orbit. And then, of course, we've got the moon, which is a whole literally new area of potential conflict. And already we see not visionaries really, but strategic planners looking at areas on the moon, which might become a strategic interest.

So shadows with shadow, craters in permanent shadow, with one called Shackleton, the lunar South Pole, for example. Why? Because that's where the water is likely to be. And water is essential, of course, for all aspects of life, but also for fuel and and sustenance, aside from sustenance, and where certain minerals may be. And right now, in terms of surveilling the moon and being aware of what's on the moon, the Chinese, unfortunately, are way ahead of us.

And this Chang'e program that they've just done Chang'e-S-6, trying its sevens going off next year, will conduct, will enable the Chinese supposedly civilian space force, but there's really no difference between its civilian space missions and military ones to have a really good awareness of the moon. And we're way behind them on that, notwithstanding the art of the system, which some of you may have heard of, which is well underway.

But we're getting behind now trying on this. And they're looking out decades. We're looking out years. You're kind of blowing my mind here, to be honest. There's a lot in what you just said, and I think we can spend the time we have remaining, just unpacking different pieces of it. Can we start with the observations on scale that you made?

That's the first time anyone has made that point to me. I don't really know how to process it. I'm trying to think. No, no, do I. In my tragolitical way, just sticking with my earth land to land to maritime analogy. I don't actually know what the number. Obviously,

there's more ocean than Earth on the planet, but it's what is it? It's like one to ten or maybe less than that. I'm not sure what it is. It's an order of magnitude at most, right? 1700%. Yeah. Okay, so one to five.

Or one to four, rather. 17. One to four. Maths whenever my strong is two. One to four ratio of land of water on Earth. And you're telling me that just beneath the moon, what did you say? It's one to 200,000 or something like that?

Look, the mathematicians will have to make the calculation. I think the lowest number I've come up with, well, that I've heard is 36,000 Earths. I did a calculation today with the help of a certain AI, which comes up to 219,000. But as you say, it just blows him on either way, even if it's 50. But it's not 50.

It's tens of thousands of Earths to surveil and be aware of. But look, these guys are very capable, and they have the tools they think to be able to do. that if they're given the resources to be able to carry it out. And people may say, well, look, what's the point of this? Right now? Very little, but you might say tomorrow, there's still nobody on the moon. China is going to have a moon base. It's absolutely declared that as a target officially by 2030. The US, of course, is hoping to have people on the moon in 26, I think, but it's all looking a bit shaky. And as I can't remember now, maybe it was Elon Musk said, the world's first

trillion air will be made in space and probably an asteroid mining. Now, we're getting close to trillions anyways anyway, but asteroid mining 20, 30 years out, will present all kinds of risks and opportunities, because that's going to happen for obvious economic reasons. And there are space force leaders who are visionary and are saying, look, we need to be looking out this far to preserve our national interests. And I think they're quite right in that. Because if you get behind on it, you'll never going to recover. Well, why don't we actually just stick with private enterprise for a second, just because it came last and it's been something we haven't really explored the whole episode,

even though it's always been relevant or has often been relevant to space so far. Musk, of course, Starlink has been very important in Ukraine, amongst other situations. So private enterprise in space plays a big role here. And, you know, if we go back to the age of exploration and maritime strategic thinking in operations here on Earth. Profit making is a motive. It's always been intertwined with military operation.

Help us understand, is it just going to be an extension of that but into space? And I confess a certain skepticism. You talk about water on the moon and asteroid mining, and I'm willing to concede that, sure, there's stuff up there that's probably valuable, but how expensive must it be to make any use of it, whether it's to bring it back to Earth

or somehow leverage it for further use in space. I mean, we have to be some way off from the juice being worth the squeeze in a commercial perspective, no? Okay, then let me. So we'll come back to Ukraine in a second and dual-use technology, which is to say technology that can be used by commercial, civilian, or military. And as you say, Starlink is the paradigm example. I might as well mention it now.

So the one, I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine over the last two years. I don't think anybody would argue with the, including talking about space with them. Anybody would argue the toss with the statement that the one game changer for the Ukrainian armed forces was and remains its space-based comm system, namely Starlink. Nothing would happen without that. They would have been defeated very early on because the Russians compromised the communication system with the Ukrainian army on very early on. And it was Musk stepping in with a thousand or so terminals and now US, the Pentagon's taken over that capability. but of course inherently dual use because Starlink is not a military, subtle-like constellation.

There will be such constellations quite soon, but not yet. But look, Aaron, just to return then to the incentives of commercial space exploration and to one fact here which might leverage this. So helium-3, which is very rare on Earth, is still rare on the moon, but it's far more plentiful than here. Now, Helium 3 is used in all kinds of applications, but specifically in, I think it's nuclear fusion technology, which is very cheap and which might could provide very cheap, how cheap, of course, who allows a monopoly and safe power for anyone who has it. So if you have access to the helium 3, let's say People's Republic of China and someone else doesn't, maybe in the United States, who gets nuclear fusion technology first, there you have, kind of.

Of course, all of this is based around ultimately, isn't it? I say all of this. Much conflict is based around resources, and those resources themselves contribute to energy and power. If you have unlimited power, very cheap, it doesn't take much to extrapolate from that who's got the edge. So that's just one of hundreds of potential advantages of the juice being very much worth the squeeze if you're willing to take the risk.

And from what you say, it seems that the Chinese, who certainly don't suffer from the disadvantage of disaggregated decision-making systems, if the top of the Chinese power pyramid wants to go, they go. It sounds, from what you say, like, they've decided to go. They've decided to go. They've decided to move into the lead here. In the United States, in the West, broadly, Britain, we're not quite as well organized. Are we losing? I mean, give us, give us, step back for a bit and just give us an overview. You say there's a threat that the Chinese are going to get out ahead of us here. What does that mean? How serious is it, how serious are we in catching up? I think in orbit, if I can make an assessment, it's highly likely, I think, that the West has the edge over China, not just in numbers and capabilities of spaceborne assets, namely satellites and ground systems, and indeed operators. And it's the operators, of course, that are key here. And the development foundation of space force was absolutely, first of all, absolutely essential,

providing a core for the human capability for the US armed forces by far the most capable in the world by order of magnitude even now, I think. So that was absolutely essential. I think provided a driver. The problem for Space Force now is it could do with a lot more in the way of resources if to provide a military foundation for the kind of developments we're talking about, then that's a bit conjectural. But in terms of the dual-use capabilities of the West and potential of the West,

we're miles ahead. And you only need to look at the kind of equipment that's directed towards Ukraine every day. Most of it is actually not military. So you have imagery, you've got signals, take, you have, and of course the communications element. Starlink imagery, Maxar, Black Sky, Black Eye, Ice Eye, these young but very vibrant companies where they're providing Ukraine with capabilities, the Russians cannot match. Russia, as I say, is stagnating. Now, China's not involved in this yet.

What China can do is it can damage at the moment. It doesn't have save over the Western Pacific, I understand, the kind of global reach that Western military and dual use assets have. However, when we look outside orbit, and this is only my view, and it's not particularly better informed than anybody else, but I would concur with those who say that the vision that China has at the moment, which is very clearly set out and currently resourced is, I think, highly dangerous to the Western and the US specifically, which leads us.

So to put that in concrete terms, I think it's unlikely that the US is possible if you develop the kind of will that we had in the 60s. But what I'd be fairly willing to bet on that China will have a moon base somewhere in the southern regions or perhaps the polar regions of the moan with human beings in it by 2030. And whilst the US may get their first or first woman is supposed to be walking in them on the moon by 26, I don't see a program beyond that in the public domain. Now, there is one exception, I think, and we've just touched on him once, and that's Musk and the amazing potential of the Starship program that he's being tested by SpaceX all the time.

And a lot of, as you know, a lot of US space expertise is centered down there in Texas on that project. And if that works, if we can get Starship with its huge lift capability of over 100 tons, its reusability, don't forget that the difference between an airline and a space shuttle, you can reuse an airline, you can't reuse a space shuttle. You have to, the launch, the lift capability of space shuttle was not essentially reusable. Starship will be entirely reusable. And if we can gain economies of scale that SpaceX's wants to have, we could see the U.S., and particularly commercial U.S. in the fore of Musk, accelerate way past China by the early 30s. But we'll see.

I would hazard a fair old bet that they will do that. But that's not a state effort. That's a commercial and private effort. And only last week, Elon Musk announced, look, he said, next year is the next transit window for, for Mars. So he's sending a mission to Mars, which will be unmanned, but in preparation he says for a manned mission. Okay, look, visionary dreaming, yeah. Isn't that why you exist there in the US because of visionaries and dreamers 600 years ago getting to the Americas before China, whose visionaries and dreamers were sultified by a regime preferred to look inwards? Because

China was way ahead of the West in the 1400s. and they lost that advantage. And that's why you and me probably are speaking English, though. Yeah. Yeah, lucky we are, too. On the manned aspect of everything, you talk about the Chinese ambition for manned persistent presence on the moon in 2030. How important is it that it be manned?

That is to say, is it political signaling, or are there real advantages to having human beings in the base? It seems to me that right now the advantage is essentially political. And presentational, the optics, of course, are very good, provided you can preserve those people there. And to some extent, again, this is my opinion. Everybody listening will have their own view on this. But it's somewhat analogous, isn't it, to return to the start, in one sense, to the difference between crude aircraft and crude aircraft. People, I take the view for what it's worth, that essentially the reason we've got crude fighter aircraft now is because the leader's

ship of our air forces are aircrew. And that's a culturalism. I don't see that in them, there are some very serious theorists, and we're moving way out now beyond the moon, who, and practitioners, astronomers, and very, very famous and significant thinkers who say that the idea of sending crude crude craft

beyond the moon, or even to the moon, is a waste of time and energy, given the amount of effort, needed to keep your wetware as one. Royal Air Force engineer once called it your wetware alive, say the human element. But then, of course, we are humans, aren't I mean? I'm pushing my rather limited perspective into philosophy now. But I think there's very little that machines and machine learning will be able to do by

the early 2030s that human capabilities would be able to exceed. Let's put it that way. Well, what an amazing time to be alive. Let's hope we all survive, I suppose. So if we can just make it through the next few decades, you're describing a new age of exploration with it's much like the last time around with commercial components and military components, strategic components. It does. I mean, it makes sense to me now what you said a couple of years ago on the show that it involves bases, right? It's going to involve patrols and lines of communication and persistence in a way that aviation strictly speak.

I mean, there are obviously elements of those things in aviation, but it really does feel more like the Navy. Yeah, yeah. And with the sort of infinite aspect to it as well. But you could also argue, and I would argue quite strongly, actually, that it's a totally new domain. And there are analogies with maritime exploration, maritime warfare, whether you focus on your bases or ports,

or you look at sea control, or whatever the other analogies may be, or control of the air is analogous to space control. control and we all look for these analogies and read across from one to the other. But what space practitioners are beginning to argue, and I think rightly, is that, look, all that's really useful. But now we're in a completely different, literally, completely different domain. And that domain is infinite.

And we'll be learning a lot more by doing over the next decades than theorizing. Frank Ledwidge, thank you for a genuinely fascinating conversation. about a subject that outside of the small band of professionals and visionaries that give this stuff serious thought, I don't think a lot of people think about enough because it is obviously going to be something that is more and more significant in our lives with every passing year. I really appreciate it, and hopefully we can have you come back again and keep talking.

Oh, and it's an absolute honour. Thank you very much indeed. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.