At the beginning of this year, President Trump released a National Defense Strategy that prioritized fighting terrorism, but added that “great power competition … is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”
Yet while foreign policy observers look at places such as Russia and China and see the potential for tumult, they could also find it miles above the Earth, where uneasy alliances threaten to give way to full-on competition.
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But it’s not as simple as us vs. them. Technological advances have forced world leaders to rethink their assumptions about how space affects geopolitics, even in a post-Cold War world. The universe buzzes with more human activity than ever. More than 70 governments have established space agencies, while private-sector companies aspire to take tourists into orbit and bring precious resources and technology down to Earth.
If that activity holds the prospect of forays to new worlds and unprecedented discoveries, likewise it has opened space as a theater in this era of renewed great power rivalry. China and Russia have put a hard edge on that competition, developing a battery of anti-satellite weapons that threaten the linchpin of the American military and economy. U.S. officials are thinking about how to counter such threats, through military or diplomatic means, without constraining the new captains of industry who could shape economic landscape on Earth.
“Space shows a hopeful future; it shows us what’s possible and what we could do together, but space is not the driver,” Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the U.S. National Space Council, told the Washington Examiner. “Space cooperation follows from politics.”
International Space Station
You’ll see no more visible proof of that axiom than the International Space Station, the most impressive science laboratory built by human hands. Launched in 1998 through the combined efforts of Russian and American experts, “the third brightest object in the sky” is a habitable environment in low-Earth orbit, once considered a gleaming image of the hope for peace following the Cold War.
Yet 20 years later, the aging platform doubles as a reminder that rival powers could seek to eclipse the United States as a superpower in space and on the ground. Russian rockets carry American astronauts to the platform, despite the cratering of diplomatic relations between the two governments, while China prepares to launch an alternative space station in the coming years. And yet, NASA Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier has told the Senate that the administration plans to decommission ISS by 2025 in order to focus on deep-space exploration. But lawmakers in both parties dislike the proposal.
“That would be a serious mistake,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who chairs the Commerce subcommittee on space, told the Washington Examiner. “[The ISS] is able to continue well beyond 2025.”
Cruz worries that NASA is repeating the mistake at the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, which has left the U.S. unable to put humans into orbit without Russian help. Boeing and SpaceX have contracts to develop replacement vehicles, but both have run into delays, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. Even NASA Inspector General Paul Martin, the space agency’s in-house auditor, has tapped the brakes on the plan to decommission the ISS. “Candidly, the scant commercial interest shown in the station over its nearly 20 years of operation gives us pause about the agency’s current plans,” Martin told Cruz during a recent hearing.
If Martin is correct, NASA’s plan could have the unintended consequence of ceding low-Earth orbit to China in the next decade — an outcome that some members of the administration seem to expect. “They’re going to be the only country that has an orbiting, habitable facility,” a senior administration official, discussing space policy on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “At some point, the scientific community — not only within the United States, but also around the world — is going to start asking questions about how do we work with the Chinese to take advantage of that capability.”
Pace doesn’t want China to play gatekeeper in low-Earth orbit, even if he sympathizes with NASA’s efforts to transition away from the ISS. “That would be a bad outcome,” he said. China is waging its own “cold war” against the United States, according to the CIA, spurred in part by the theft of American intellectual property. So U.S. officials in the administration and on Capitol Hill don’t want to depend on China, just as they don’t want China to get the first crack at the scientific discoveries that can take place only in orbit.
“To fly humans in space and do it successfully, you have to master every field of technical endeavor — chemistry; physics; every form of engineering; medicine; you name it, you have to be a master in it,” Pace said. “And by operating in a literally-alien environment, you learn things that you would not learn if you simply stayed at home.”
That puts pressure on policy-makers to ensure that the U.S. government and private sector can make progress both in low-Earth orbit and deep-space exploration, independently of Russia and China.
“What would NASA do if Russia announced they wouldn’t carry astronauts to the International Space Station, or, even worse, would not carry our astronauts back from the space station?” Cruz asked. “We cannot allow ourselves to be vulnerable to any adversary in that way.”
Race to space
Of course, the International Space Station cannot function forever. U.S. officials hope to replace it with “a modified ISS program, commercial platforms, or some combination of both,” as Gerstenmaier told Cruz’s Senate panel in May. And the emergence of private rocket and satellite companies has inaugurated a “Second Space Age” with major implications for international commerce and security. “Asteroid mining could crater the global price of platinum,” according to a 2017 Goldman Sachs report. What’s more exciting than platinum from outer space? Water, because it “is easily converted into rocket fuel, and can even be used unaltered as a propellant.”
That makes a return to the moon, or a trip to the asteroid belt, more than a point of pride in the decades to come. “Ultimately being able to stockpile the fuel in [low-Earth orbit] would be a game changer for how we access space,” Goldman Sachs predicted. Or, as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross put it in May: “You’re going to end up with the moon being a type of gas station.” In the nearer-term, Ross also expects the number of operational U.S. satellites to skyrocket from about 850 (there are fewer than 2,000 internationally) to 15,000, as he told the Hudson Institute.
China has the same idea, and more. President Xi Jinping’s regime hopes to build a space-based solar power station, an array of solar panels placed in constant sunlight and designed to transmit solar electricity “via microwaves or lasers” back to Earth.
“Whoever obtains the technology first could occupy the future energy market,” a leading Chinese rocket designer is quoted as saying in a recent issue of Air University Press’s Strategic Studies Quarterly. “So it’s of great strategic significance.”
Or it could be, if the technology bears out. In the meantime, the end of the first space race left the United States in a powerful position relative to the rest of the world, with hundreds more satellites in orbit than any other nation. Those assets have vast public and private-sector ramifications; the same satellite-based GPS technology guides both an Uber driver and the Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missile to their respective destinations, all while enabling a chronicle of the billions of financial transactions that take place at ATMs and in stock markets around the world.
That expertise hasn’t gone unnoticed. China and Russia have spent the last decade or more developing anti-satellite weaponry that could turn the great strength of American society and the military into an Achilles’ heel. The loss of satellite imagery and communications services would force U.S. military personnel to revert to World War II tactics. They’d be rusty, according to Cruz, who sits on the Armed Services Committee.
“We are training in that environment, but not nearly often enough, because it’s a vulnerability that we have that is profoundly dangerous,” he said.
China used a ballistic missile to shoot down one of their own weather satellites in 2007, a test that had the unintended consequence of creating a huge debris field in orbit. China and Russia both seek non-destructive technologies, such as jammers and lasers, that could interfere with U.S. satellites. And they are testing “co-orbital” satellites that have the ability to make direct contact with other satellites, perhaps for intelligence collection purposes or for a physical effort to move the satellite off of its established orbit.
“You could have something on orbit that, for all intents and purposes, looks like a communications satellite, when in actuality, it is also a weapon,” retired Gen. William Shelton of Air Force Space Command told CNN.
Threats from China, Russia
Those threats have sparked an interest in a dedicated Space Force within the U.S. military. “Now we have to figure out how to defend those satellites,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, told CBS in 2016.
These kinds of discussions were verboten in U.S. government circles until recently and they continue to cause discomfort in much of the space community. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 sought to preserve space as a peaceful domain by banning the stationing of nuclear weapons in orbit, stipulating that “the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes,” and identifying astronauts of all nationalities as “the envoys of mankind.”
Fifty-one years later, the technology exists to violate the spirit of those prescriptions, but not the letter, with ease. “Our adversaries are weaponizing space whether we like it or not,” Cruz said. “The only question is will we be prepared to defend ourselves?”
The co-orbital satellites are especially alarming for lawmakers and analysts, who fear a scenario in which China or Russia position enough satellites near American assets to execute the kind of crippling first strike that could prevent the United States from defending an ally.
“China could deter U.S. intervention without firing a single terrestrial shot, or even a shot from space stalkers, as merely being too close for comfort would suffice,” Brian Chow of Rand Corp. wrote in the summer 2017 edition of the Strategic Studies Quarterly. “This outcome may well be the ultimate goal of China’s counter-space strategy.”
Russia could present a similar threat, as evidenced by a so-called “space apparatus inspector” launched last year by the Ministry of Defense. “[I]ts behavior on-orbit was inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities, including other Russian inspection satellite activities,” Yleem D.S. Poblete, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, said at an August conference on disarmament in Geneva. “We are concerned with what appears to be very abnormal behavior by a declared ‘space apparatus inspector.’ We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it.”
Treaty options
Arms control negotiations haven’t offered much relief. “There’s been no evidence yet that the Russians and Chinese are ready to have serious discussions,” Pace said. “They continue to pound on treaty proposals that have been unacceptable for decades.”
Notably, Russian and Chinese draft treaties don’t cover ground-based systems, such as the ballistic missile that China tested in 2007. They would also restrict only those weapons that are obviously intended to have a destructive effect. So, their proposals would preclude U.S. ambitions of having a space-based missile defense system; yet they would not hamper the Roaming Dragon, for instance, that China touts as a debris-removal satellite.
“A robotic arm can be for repair-and-servicing or it can be a robotic harm that can try to hurt you,” Pace said. “There is not a good definition as to what a weapon is or how would you know it if you see it.”
That cuts both ways, insofar as on-orbit repair of satellites figure to emerge as a valuable industry within the space sector. U.S. officials don’t want to hamstring American technological advancements with a hastily-written treaty.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do before we can provide ideas to the international community,” another State Department official, who discussed prospective negotiations on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner.
For his part, Chow proposes an international agreement that would set restrictions around “tailgating.” Major satellites from different countries would have to maintain a certain degree of separation, for instance, and they could deploy only a few “tailgating” devices. By making those restrictions public, the United States could put the rest of the world on notice that the Pentagon “has the right to exercise self-defense even before any actual attacks begin.”
Pace respects Chow’s proposal as an example of how negotiators should focus on regulating “behaviors” in space. But even modest gestures in that direction have failed due to distrust and pique between the rivals. U.S. officials have proposed a series of guidelines to the UN Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, but they excluded Russia’s proposals from the document because it was “challenging to find out what the Russians really wanted,” a State Department official said. Russia blocked the adoption of the guidelines in response.
Persistent ambiguity in the international law governing space could slow some of the private sector expansion into orbit, but not forever. Absent a meeting of the minds, great powers could go their own way in space — perhaps China, Russia, and other authoritarian states work together on a Chinese-backed space station — with one eye on the advances made by their rivals. And the utopian hopes of the space community would be forced back down to Earth.
“If we have a situation where there’s different groupings of great powers pursuing their interests separately, that seems like normal power politics, but updated with modern technology,” Pace said. “This is the thing that space people don’t always want to understand: that we cooperate in space after we’ve decided it’s in our interest to do so from the ground.”
