The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Kessler Syndrome and the Future of Space || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Space debris recently struck China's Tiangong space station. Given the congested nature of the ~350km altitude band, this collision is a warning of what might come to low Earth orbit (LEO).Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4435jWp

What if this was someone in your family that had a chronic illness that they could not get away from? Millions of Americans live with a disease that has no cure. I was diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma. The most immediate findings indicated that I should lose my leg. It ended up taking four clinical trials in 25 years to get me to this point. Cures are within reach. if we invest in funding for life-saving medical research that's needed to find them. Even if they're unsuccessful in my treatment that they will have learned from my treatment

that will be able to allow others to stand on my shoulders to be able to be helped. Join the Fight for Cures. Tell your elected representatives to support American medical research. Visit UnitedforCures.org slash action to send a letter today, paid for by Unified United for Cures Action. Hey, I'm Peter Zine here, company from Colorado, and today we're going to talk about space. Now, you may have noticed in the last couple of weeks there's been a little bit of drum around the Chinese space station. It's called the Tianjiang. Short version is it got hit by a piece of space debris.

Now, the Tian Gong is in low Earth orbit at about 350 kilometers of elevation, and it's a very, very, very busy shell around the world. back during the Cold War when we didn't have particularly powerful rockets this is where almost all the satellites were so there's a lot of old Cold War debris especially Russian debris that hasn't been maintained or even really kept track

of on the Russian side for a few decades now and it's just obstacles in addition this is where Starlink does most of their operations and there's about 6,000 Starlink satellites there more than everything else put together Starlink plans to do another

three or four thousand over the next few years and other entities, whether they're European or Chinese, that are talking about building their own satellite network for broadband, are talking about using the same band. So it's a very, very, very, very busy area, and that's before you consider the Fengyang, which was the satellite that the Chinese had, that they shot down their own about 10, 15 years ago now,

yeah, 15 years ago now, without understanding orbital mechanics. And so it generated 15,000 pieces of debris, of which 2000 are still up there and they regularly intersect this elevation at 350 kilometers. Now, why would the Chinese put their station there? Short version is they didn't have a choice. One of the things that people forget when they compare American technology and Chinese technologies is that Chinese are in almost all sectors more than one generation behind.

And when it comes to things like aerospace or space travel or ships, that means all of their vessels are a lot heavier. And so the sheer throw weight that they need to get to get into orbit requires a lot more powerful rockets, which they don't have. And so they can't go as high. They just don't have as much of a mass budget as, say, the International Space Station and its sponsors do. The Russians, intelligently, have chosen to not share rocket technology with the Chinese

because they know they would be a target of it. Anyway, so the Chinese are a generation, maybe two generations behind, and that leaves them stuck down here. So what happened was this piece of space junk hit them. And it's a couple things to keep in mind here. Number one, in addition to being very, very busy, there is a lot of tracking up there, but it's clearly not perfect.

And just because you see something coming doesn't mean you can get out of the way of it. So luckily nobody was killed. Luckily, they had a replacement vessel that they could send up. Luckily, they could bring everybody down safely. There's no reason to expect that that's going to be the new norm, though. Oh, by the way, the ISS is over about 400. kilometers so we've got a little bit more wiggle room in the international system there okay

why am I bringing this up couple things number one my broadband out here in the mountains sucks I have a Starlink corporate account which is supposed to give me 25 to 30 mpbs every second and instead I get closer to 10 so this video I'm recording right now will probably take me over four hours to upload for you the reason is very simple Starlink has sold a lot of subscriptions to support the satellites that are up there, and what they're discovering is that the profit curve is not what they had hoped it would be, because the more people who sign up, the lower the bandwidth is for everybody else, which means the more satellites they need to send up,

but to send up the satellites, they need more subscriptions. Whether or not this is a long-term model that is viable remains to be seen, but it is certainly not the cure-all that a lot of us thought it was going to be a couple of years ago. And the only solution is more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more satellites in that same band. Because if you put the satellites higher, number one, it takes a lot more energy to get them up there. And number two, if something does go wrong with a satellite in a higher altitude, it's a lot harder to deorbit it. And instead of staying up there for two to ten years, it stays up for 15 to 20. And the reason that gets really important for everyone real quick is something called the Kessler Center.

If you've seen the movie gravity with Sondra Bullock, you have some idea what I'm talking about. Basically, a satellite blows up for whatever reason, sends all kinds of debris out, and then that debris hits other things and causes more debris and more and more and eventually all of low Earth orbit becomes non-functional for purposes of space exploration or satellites of really any type. Because slow-moving pieces in low Earth orbit move at about Mach 25, and a paperclip at that speed It is more than enough to ruin the day of any satellite and generate a lot more paper clips. So we're in this interesting catch-22, and that the only way to deepen and improve space technology is to put more stuff up there,

which puts us at the risk of ending everything that is up there. And now we've got the Russians who are one of the best space powers, suddenly being hostile to everybody else, the Chinese refusing cooperate in international fora, and the United States, to put it mildly, is becoming a little persnickety about a great many things. It adds up for an incredibly dangerous and crisis-prone environment in low-earth orbit. About the only bright side I can tell you is that if we do get a Kessler in low-earth orbit, everything will probably de-orbit in under a decade, and then we can try again. So perhaps, just like with everything else in the world right now,

as de-globalization kicks in, we're going to be taking about 10 years off from everything. What if this was someone in your family that had a question? chronic illness that they could not get away from. Millions of Americans live with a disease that has no cure. I was diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma. The most immediate findings indicated that I should lose my leg. It ended up taking four clinical trials in 25 years to get me to this point. Cures are within reach if we invest in funding for life-saving medical research that's needed

to find them. Even if they're unsuccessful in my treatment that they will have learned from my treatment that will be able to allow others to stand on my shoulders to be able to be helped. Join the fight for Cures. Tell your elected representatives to support American medical research. Visit Unitedforcures.org slash action to send a letter today, paid for by United for Cures Action. Behind the delivery trucks that keep your life stocked, thousands of employees at BP go to work every day. People bringing a new offshore production platform online.

People making our refineries capable of more, like making renewable diesel from agricultural waste, people trading and shipping fuels to our customers, and people helping truckers fill up and get maintenance at our convenient locations. They're part of almost 300,000 jobs BP supports across the country. Learn more at BP.com slash investing in America.