Security threats from space are closer than you think

The former head of the NATO military alliance, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said that politicians should not ignore security threats in space. Mr Rasmussen - who also served as the Danish leader between 2001 and 2009 - wrote in Politico recently that the “military threat in space is real, and it is growing” and that Western policymakers need to react. Joining me to talk about these comments is space scientist, author and former BBC science editor Dr David Whitehouse…

David - I think the Ukraine conflict has brought into focus a lot of the feelings and worries about space-based warfare that have been around for a long time. It is said in space warfare history that the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first space war in which space assets were a real importance to finding out what was going on on the ground and directing conflict. Ukraine is the first two-sided space war in the sense that Ukraine is not a space power, and yet it's been able to use space resources to aid its fighting in a much more efficient way than Russia has. I mean, Ukraine has used communications and it has used commercial satellite observations to find out what's on the battlefield. Russia, you would've thought, would have a space advantage, but it hasn't because it's outdated and it's not been able to get its systems to work. So for future conflicts, and people are talking in this respect, not about Russia, but about America and China, there are a lot of lessons to be learnt about the importance of protecting space, the infrastructure of space, during a conflict.

Chris - What sorts of legislation treaties, pre existing agreements are there to safeguard space, if any?

David - There are two that come to mind. The first thing that Russia did when it invaded Ukraine was hack the Viasat satellite system to disable Ukraine's communications. Ukraine responded by using a different set of communication satellites, the SpaceX satellites launched by Elon Musk. Legally, that actually means in terms of international law, that SpaceX is a participant in the fighting in the Ukraine. Under international law, Russia would have the right to attack a third party, which is aiding its adversary. That worries people a lot. But also the recent announcement by Russia that it was thinking about some form of nuclear powered weapon in space did force people to think again about the outer space treaty, which was signed in 1967, which prohibits the use of nuclear weapons or the kinds of weapons of mass destruction in space. And people realise that actually that wording in 1967 is rather loose, and that there are ways that Russia could put a nuclear powered weapon in space by not violating that treaty.

Chris - The other thing, of course, is that space is becoming quite crowded and there are predicted to be more than a hundred thousand satellites in space within the next decade. As some people have pointed out, you don't actually even have to put a weapon in space to weaponise space because all you'd have to do is to knock a couple of those satellites off kilter and there'd be potentially a runaway collision effect where everything would smash into everything else. You could cause a catastrophe and a major problem for everyone on the Earth's surface because of our reliance on space without actually having to fire anything anywhere

David - You are quite right. We are all vulnerable. There is a worry in the future that, particularly if a nation like Russia would get desperate, it could sabotage the whole space ecosystem for everybody. Because as you said, if you blew something up in space, you could create a self-sustaining cloud of debris which might achieve your military objectives, but it would blind you. It would blind everybody else. It would interfere with communications, with positioning television, with not just the military, but the whole space infrastructure. Satellite navigation in our cars might be affected by this. That would be a brute force, last resort strategy that military space planners don't rule out in extreme circumstances. As you imply, there is a whole space ecology on which society relies which needs to be not only investigated in terms of how vulnerable it is and how it could be attacked in space, but needs to be updated. It's very interesting to see the United States Space Force which is charged with protecting the American space system and developing ways to attack the Chinese space system in the future. They've been disappointed by the fact that they've got slightly less budget this year because they're going to spend a lot of money on upgrading, updating, and modernising all their space systems so that they could be more immune against attack. But you're right, if somebody blows something up and scatters shards of debris everywhere, there's no protection against that. So people need to talk.