Trump’s call for a “Space Force” escalates a quiet, dangerous contest between the US, China, and Russia—one whose consequences no one really understands
N THE MIDAFTERNOON of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military’s “situational awareness” in space—and the situation, at the moment, seemed to be deteriorating fast. One phone connected Shelton to his boss, the head of US Strategic Command, in Nebraska; the other connected to Shelton’s operations center, a windowless room full of analysts just next door. In front of Shelton was a can of Diet Dr Pepper, and arrayed around the table were the members of his increasingly nervous senior staff.
FOR DAYS, US intelligence had been picking up indications that China was about to conduct a missile test aimed at outer space. The analysts next door—and their counterparts around the world—were tracking ground-based radar signals, monitoring infrared sensors, and poring over images from telescopes in space. All of them were briefing Shelton on what they were observing in real time. At 2:28 pm (PST) their readouts showed a ballistic missile taking off from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center, located in the wooded mountains of Sichuan province. The missile rose into low Earth orbit, about 500 miles above Earth’s surface, and appeared to close in on an aging Chinese weather satellite.
Then the telescopes showed a bright flash.
Minutes later, the radar screens began to track a growing cloud of debris—at least 3,000 pieces of shrapnel that would each, Shelton knew, spend the next several years slingshotting around Earth at speeds that could far exceed that of a bullet. Shelton was stunned. The Chinese had just shot a satellite out of the sky.
Not only was this a stupendous technological achievement—to launch a missile from the ground and hit a celestial target moving as fast as 17,000 mph—it also showed a level of audacity not seen in space for decades. “We couldn’t imagine they would go against an actual satellite,” Shelton recalls. “Because of the debris something like that creates, it’s almost unthinkable.” It felt like a wake-up call.
In the conference room, Shelton exhaled, set down his two telephones, and pushed himself back from the table. “This changes everything,” he said to his staff.
For decades, America’s satellites had circled Earth at a largely safe remove from the vicissitudes of geopolitics. An informal global moratorium on the testing of anti-satellite weapons had held since 1985; the intervening decades had been a period of post–Cold War peace—and unquestioned American supremacy—high overhead. During those decades, satellites had become linchpins of the American military apparatus and the global economy. By 2007, ships at sea and warplanes in the air had grown reliant on instant satellite communications with ground stations thousands of miles away. Government forecasters relied on weather satellites; intelligence analysts relied on high-*resolution imagery to anticipate and track adversaries the world over. GPS had become perhaps the single most indispensable global system ever designed by humans—the infrastructure upon which the rest of the world’s infrastructure is based. (Fourteen of the 16 infrastructure sectors designated as critical by the Department of Homeland Security, like energy and financial services, rely on GPS for their operation.)
Now, Shelton feared, all those satellites overhead had become so many huge, unarmored, billion-dollar sitting ducks.
In the decade since China’s first successful anti-satellite missile test, Shelton’s premonition has largely come true: Everything has changed in space. A secretive, pitched arms race has opened up between the US, China, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, North Korea. The object of the race: to devise more and better ways to quickly cripple your adversary’s satellites. After decades of uncontested US supremacy, multinational cooperation, and a diplomatic consensus on reserving space for peaceful uses, military officials have begun referring to Earth’s orbit as a new “warfighting domain.”
On the ground, the military is starting to retrain pilots, ship captains, and ground troops in fail-safe forms of navigation that don’t rely on GPS—like celestial navigation. The US military must relearn how to fight “unwired” and defend itself in space. “We knew how to do that, and somehow we forgot,” General John E. Hyten, the head of US Strategic Command, said in 2015.
When former director of national intelligence James Clapper left office at the end of the Obama administration, he told me that the increasing sophistication of America’s adversaries in space was one of the top three strategic threats he worried about. Clapper’s successor, Dan Coats, warned last spring that “Russia and China remain committed to developing capabilities to challenge perceived adversaries in space, especially the United States.”
Since he took office, President Trump has dropped numerous hints of the warnings he’s evidently getting from military and intelligence leaders. During a spring livestream with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, he alluded, obliquely and without context, to the “tremendous military applications in space.” And he has repeatedly floated the idea of creating a new branch of the armed forces specifically for celestial combat—culminating last week with a speech out-and-out ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin developing plans for a new “Space Force.”
But if space is indeed becoming a war-*fighting domain, it’s important to understand the stakes, not just for America’s strategic standing but for the species. A Russo-Sino-American space war could very well end with a crippled global economy, inoperable infrastructure, and a planet shrouded by the orbiting fragments of pulverized satellites—which, by the way, could hinder us all on Earth until we figured out a way of cleaning them up. In the aftermath of such a conflict, it might be years before we could restore new constellations of satellites to orbit. Preparing for orbital war has fast become a priority of the US military, but the more urgent priority is figuring out how to prevent it.
https://www.wired.com/story/new-arms-race-threatening-to-explode-in-space/
N THE MIDAFTERNOON of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military’s “situational awareness” in space—and the situation, at the moment, seemed to be deteriorating fast. One phone connected Shelton to his boss, the head of US Strategic Command, in Nebraska; the other connected to Shelton’s operations center, a windowless room full of analysts just next door. In front of Shelton was a can of Diet Dr Pepper, and arrayed around the table were the members of his increasingly nervous senior staff.
FOR DAYS, US intelligence had been picking up indications that China was about to conduct a missile test aimed at outer space. The analysts next door—and their counterparts around the world—were tracking ground-based radar signals, monitoring infrared sensors, and poring over images from telescopes in space. All of them were briefing Shelton on what they were observing in real time. At 2:28 pm (PST) their readouts showed a ballistic missile taking off from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center, located in the wooded mountains of Sichuan province. The missile rose into low Earth orbit, about 500 miles above Earth’s surface, and appeared to close in on an aging Chinese weather satellite.
Then the telescopes showed a bright flash.
Minutes later, the radar screens began to track a growing cloud of debris—at least 3,000 pieces of shrapnel that would each, Shelton knew, spend the next several years slingshotting around Earth at speeds that could far exceed that of a bullet. Shelton was stunned. The Chinese had just shot a satellite out of the sky.
Not only was this a stupendous technological achievement—to launch a missile from the ground and hit a celestial target moving as fast as 17,000 mph—it also showed a level of audacity not seen in space for decades. “We couldn’t imagine they would go against an actual satellite,” Shelton recalls. “Because of the debris something like that creates, it’s almost unthinkable.” It felt like a wake-up call.
In the conference room, Shelton exhaled, set down his two telephones, and pushed himself back from the table. “This changes everything,” he said to his staff.
For decades, America’s satellites had circled Earth at a largely safe remove from the vicissitudes of geopolitics. An informal global moratorium on the testing of anti-satellite weapons had held since 1985; the intervening decades had been a period of post–Cold War peace—and unquestioned American supremacy—high overhead. During those decades, satellites had become linchpins of the American military apparatus and the global economy. By 2007, ships at sea and warplanes in the air had grown reliant on instant satellite communications with ground stations thousands of miles away. Government forecasters relied on weather satellites; intelligence analysts relied on high-*resolution imagery to anticipate and track adversaries the world over. GPS had become perhaps the single most indispensable global system ever designed by humans—the infrastructure upon which the rest of the world’s infrastructure is based. (Fourteen of the 16 infrastructure sectors designated as critical by the Department of Homeland Security, like energy and financial services, rely on GPS for their operation.)
Now, Shelton feared, all those satellites overhead had become so many huge, unarmored, billion-dollar sitting ducks.
In the decade since China’s first successful anti-satellite missile test, Shelton’s premonition has largely come true: Everything has changed in space. A secretive, pitched arms race has opened up between the US, China, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, North Korea. The object of the race: to devise more and better ways to quickly cripple your adversary’s satellites. After decades of uncontested US supremacy, multinational cooperation, and a diplomatic consensus on reserving space for peaceful uses, military officials have begun referring to Earth’s orbit as a new “warfighting domain.”
On the ground, the military is starting to retrain pilots, ship captains, and ground troops in fail-safe forms of navigation that don’t rely on GPS—like celestial navigation. The US military must relearn how to fight “unwired” and defend itself in space. “We knew how to do that, and somehow we forgot,” General John E. Hyten, the head of US Strategic Command, said in 2015.
When former director of national intelligence James Clapper left office at the end of the Obama administration, he told me that the increasing sophistication of America’s adversaries in space was one of the top three strategic threats he worried about. Clapper’s successor, Dan Coats, warned last spring that “Russia and China remain committed to developing capabilities to challenge perceived adversaries in space, especially the United States.”
Since he took office, President Trump has dropped numerous hints of the warnings he’s evidently getting from military and intelligence leaders. During a spring livestream with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, he alluded, obliquely and without context, to the “tremendous military applications in space.” And he has repeatedly floated the idea of creating a new branch of the armed forces specifically for celestial combat—culminating last week with a speech out-and-out ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin developing plans for a new “Space Force.”
But if space is indeed becoming a war-*fighting domain, it’s important to understand the stakes, not just for America’s strategic standing but for the species. A Russo-Sino-American space war could very well end with a crippled global economy, inoperable infrastructure, and a planet shrouded by the orbiting fragments of pulverized satellites—which, by the way, could hinder us all on Earth until we figured out a way of cleaning them up. In the aftermath of such a conflict, it might be years before we could restore new constellations of satellites to orbit. Preparing for orbital war has fast become a priority of the US military, but the more urgent priority is figuring out how to prevent it.
https://www.wired.com/story/new-arms-race-threatening-to-explode-in-space/
