Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  Cordesman’s warning has come true. America’s “shock and awe” campaign gave way to the disintegration of modern Iraq, the renewal of sectarian conflicts, and the emergence of regional jihadi armies. Even today in parts of the country, going to the market for a kilo of rice can be a gamble with death, and going to school an impossibility. In the wake of the war, aside from the role of reconnaissance and remote-sensing satellites in detecting the hidden presence of ancient ruins and the looting of ancient sites, America’s formidable space assets did little to improve the lives of the people of Iraq.49

  As for America’s forthcoming wars, they will be waged with even more formidable space assets, fewer ground troops, more autonomous aerial vehicles, more nimble satellites and drones, more remote control, more cyber sabotage, and less blanket physical destruction. Space power and cyber power will produce less messy, less bloody results, which will also be less dangerous to those who impose them. Relying on satellite data to pinpoint the presence of purported or actual enemies such as Osama bin Laden, and to obliterate them and their associates or at least their families and neighbors, will become ever more commonplace. Video-gaming the destruction of a building will become ever easier and ever more removed from the torments of the battlespace.

  Meanwhile, even if the costs of warmaking in dollars might diminish, the human costs on all sides will continue to defy restitution. Some of America’s formerly cutting-edge space assets will “fade to black,” as one space-tech advocate put it, as those of other space powers supplant them. At the same time, continued refinements in cyber sabotage could make calls for physically destructive space weapons less convincing. Analysts who have been withholding their use of the term “space war” until such time as weapons are launched from Earth orbit or until space-to-space attacks begin to occur may have to wait a lot longer. Space-based aggression amid mounting orbital debris will become an ever less sane approach to conflict, while space-based surveillance could become an ever more potent or invasive means of defense. As waged not only by America and its allies but also by jihadists and their social-media propagandists, war will likely remain more space-enabled than space-situated for some time to come. Milspace—the warfighter’s segment of space, the site of surveillance and communications platforms, the locus of easy entry and easy control, so unlike the astrophysicist’s vast and vastly hostile expanses—will foreseeably remain restricted to near-Earth orbit.50

  All told, the space economy worldwide—encompassing military, civil, and commercial spending, both government and nongovernment—is pushing past US$330 billion, more than the current GDP of economic powerhouses such as Hong Kong and Singapore and more than fifteen times the annual budget of NASA.

  The biggest chunk of the world’s space economy is the fast-rising level of commercial activity, which amounted to more than three-quarters of global spending on space in 2016. Included in this category is everything from telecommunications satellites, satellite TV and radio broadcasting, launch services, insurance, the manufacture of spacecraft, the satellite monitoring of long-distance food shipments, high-res Earth-observation imagery, and space tourism to position/navigation/timing (PNT) support for the delivery of your latest unnecessary Internet purchase or the optimal location for your imminent fishing weekend. In other words, a lot of freewheeling space power and profit looks ready for the taking—or, as the Space Foundation puts it, “the ongoing process of integrating space technology into all aspects of life” has spawned companies that “seek to monetize the growing torrent of information flowing from and through space systems.”

  Which is not to say that the governmental side of space activity is peripheral. Fifty-plus space agencies now exist around the globe, some of which are in nations handicapped by poverty, debt, inadequate infrastructure, and other ills. Yet in 2016, most countries increased their space budgets.51

  Today no country can achieve or preserve economic viability and national security while ignoring space as a source of data, a channel of communication, and a domain of potential threats. Connectivity is key to modernity, to participation in the global economy and the global polity. No connectivity means no access, no presence, and no power. As Joan Johnson-Freese writes, “The imperative for connectivity to avoid being roadkill in the globalized economy makes access to the benefits of space a matter of national security that countries will not be denied.”52

  Consider China and India. Together, they’re home to more than a third of the planet’s population. Neither, despite the tempests that buffet their economies, treats space R & D or S & T as dispensable.

  China’s space program began in the 1960s, with a first successful satellite launch in 1970. Mao Zedong saw missile and space research as a bulwark against the Cold War superpowers, and so the excesses of the Cultural Revolution did not kneecap the space program. Subsequent leaders have given it far more than token support. China is the third global space power—the chronologically third nation to send its own citizens into space in its own spacecraft, launched by its own rockets from its own space center. Having achieved this status, it has, in the words of one Chinese general, reached a “new commanding height for international strategic competition.” The rhetoric and emphasis have been military, though pure science has been gaining ground of late. China’s space agenda has reached well beyond mastery and on into inquiry. Between 2016 and 2030 Chinese space-science missions will address two fundamental questions: the origin and evolution of matter, and the relationship between the solar system and human beings. The “strategic goal,” as presented in the official publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is “great scientific discoveries and . . . innovative breakthroughs.”

  Among China’s recent breakthroughs was its August 2016 launch of the world’s first quantum satellite, Micius (named for an ancient Chinese philosopher), which uses fiber optics to beam signals to stations on Earth in the form of “entangled” photons. Entanglement involves pairs of photons, simultaneously born and subsequently separated. Measuring one of them instantly grants information about the other, no matter the distance between them. Long viewed as a curious laboratory experiment across laboratory-length distances, this frontier method of quantum communication may one day establish a hack-proof global Internet.53 And Micius is only the beginning of a larger program of satellite physics called QUESS, Quantum Experiments at Space Scale. As of this printing, the Chinese hold the entanglement distance record: photon pairs sent by Micius to two receiving stations on mountaintops in China, twelve hundred kilometers apart.

  India, though still afflicted by what its first post-Independence prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called “the problems of hunger, insanitation, and illiteracy”—problems that China has been more successful in alleviating—has had a space agency since 1969. India’s emphasis has been more civil than military, with a dash of scientific research: the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans, for instance, to study the Sun’s coronal mass ejections and their impact on space weather. But as the space program’s founder, physicist and industrialist Vikram Sarabhai, put it, “If we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.” In 1980 India joined the small community of nations to have used its own carrier rocket to launch a satellite. Soon India began to build the satellites themselves, dedicated mainly to two tasks: telecommunications, bringing its people not only Bollywood productions but also educational and public-health programming; and Earth observation, providing data on flood and drought threats, availability of freshwater, pest infestations, ocean conditions, arable land, mineral resources, and so on. But as we’ve seen, there’s a paper-thin line between Earth observation and military reconnaissance. Any satellite that does the one can do the other, too.

  India has also become a provider of launch services, and in mid-February 2017 staged a spectacular deployment of 104 satellites—most of which weighed just ten pounds—from a
single rocket within the span of eighteen minutes, displacing Russia as the world’s record holder, based on Roscosmos’s 2014 launch of thirty-seven satellites from a single rocket. And as night follows day, January 2018 saw India successfully test a long-range ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to a target three thousand (or, according to Chinese sources, five thousand) miles away. An editorial in the Delhi Defense Review heralded the achievement, saying it “marks the arrival of India as a missile power.”54

  By way of comparison, consider the space histories of two wealthier nations, Canada and Japan, in which literacy is high, hunger is rare, access to affordable health care is a birthright, and life expectancy exceeds eighty years. Unlike China and India, Canada and Japan are partner states of the International Space Station. Also unlike China and India, their military expenditures, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, constitute less than 3 percent of government spending, compared with China’s 6 percent and India’s 9 percent—not to mention the even greater military expenditures by the two traditional space superpowers, the United States (more than 9 percent of government spending, but 36 percent of global military spending) and Russia (15 percent of government spending).55

  For decades before the Canadian Space Agency was established in 1990, Canada had partnered with other countries on space initiatives, especially with the United States. Among the many early partnerships were an Ontario-built storable communications antenna used during the pioneering US manned flights in 1961–62 and Québec-built landing legs for Apollo 11’s lunar module, the vessel that safely landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Canada was the third country to build its own satellite and the first country to have its own communications satellite in geostationary orbit. More recently, Canada has made high-profile robotics contributions to the US space shuttle and the International Space Station. First came the highly versatile Canadarm, the robotic arm whose main job during the entire three-decade span of the shuttle program was to maneuver space stuff in and around the shuttle’s payload bay. Then came the much more complex and versatile Canadarm2, which can move around and latch onto power and data fixtures throughout the International Space Station and which has not only maneuvered hundreds of tons’ worth of payload but has also helped assemble most of the space station itself, docked and undocked visiting spacecraft, and given astronauts a foothold on more than a hundred spacewalks. Most recent is Dextre, a precision “robotic handyman” capable of executing delicate tasks on the ISS that Canadarm2 can’t do. Eight Canadian astronauts have collectively logged more than eleven thousand hours in space, primarily on the ISS.56

  All of the above are civil S & T efforts, which is not to say that Canada eschews military space capabilities. Together with the United States, Canada is responsible for aerospace warning and control through NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Its duties include monitoring artificial objects in space as well as detecting, validating, and warning of any attack against North America from air or space. But as late as 1997, Canada had no official military space strategy. And as late as 1998—years after the American assault against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm had decisively demonstrated the uses of space systems in warfighting—a Canadian colonel would complain politely in print that “our military forces do not seem to be forward-looking in an attempt to make full use of space,” that “Canadian space doctrine is virtually non-existent,” and that the “lack of direction on the use of space at the operational or strategic level of war is striking.”

  Not until 2013 did the country’s armed forces have their own surveillance satellite, Sapphire, built in Canada and launched in India. This satellite, however, takes no part in warfighting. It serves to guarantee the safety of the world’s, not merely Canada’s, space assets by monitoring every piece of space junk larger than ten centimeters across. Think of it as an eminently peaceable example of the military’s traditional obligation to protect and defend, as well as the opening salvo in Canada’s amplified space capabilities. Beginning in 2014 the Canadian Air Forces Space Cadre has provided Joint Operations Command with 24/7 support, which includes missile warnings, launch notifications, GPS status updates, and detection of any electronic interference directed at satellites. Today Canada’s space operations are often joint efforts—for instance, its partnership in the US Air Force Space Command’s secure communications constellation-in-progress, AEHF (Advanced Extremely High Frequency). An important independent Canadian space capability is the rapid processing of data from maritime radar surveillance, combined with a satellite system enabling automatic identification of ships.57

  Now take Japan, which in 2016, spending triple what Canada spent as a percentage of GDP, was one of the world’s top five space spenders.58

  While JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, was established in 2003 as a merger of three pre-existing aerospace organizations, the country’s space history spans well over half a century. From the 1950s onward, Japan deployed scores of continually improved suborbital rockets to measure high-altitude phenomena such as electron density and ozone-layer depletion; by 1980, these rockets were powerful enough to serve as launch vehicles for payloads of several hundred kilos. The Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science at the University of Tokyo (absorbed into JAXA in 2003) launched its first satellite in February 1970, making Japan the fourth nation—after the Soviet Union, the United States, and France—to succeed in a satellite launch, with China becoming the fifth less than three months later. The following year Japan launched its first scientific satellite into orbit. Over the following decades, the Japanese orbited dozens of satellites dedicated to Earth observation and local positioning as well as astronomical observation and lunar and planetary exploration. These satellites have investigated tropical rainfall, greenhouse gases, global changes in Earth’s climate and water, lunar minerals and topography, Venus’s climate, and more. In the fall of 2005 Hayabusa, a self-navigating Japanese spacecraft that had left Earth in the spring of 2003, efficiently propelled by ionized xenon gas—a plasma ion drive—became the first to visit an asteroid, scoop up some of its surface material, and, five years later, return to Earth with the samples intact. Most notably, as its contribution to the International Space Station, Japan operates a large science module, Kibo (Hope), which has its own robotic arms and can simultaneously accommodate as many as ten experiments inside the module and about the same number outside, exposed to the space environment.59

  Like Canada, Japan delayed its involvement with military space, but for different reasons. The delay was caused by the constraints of Article 9 of the country’s constitution, which was drafted in 1946 by American occupation staff and presented to the Japanese as a fait accompli. It states, in part: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” This approach was reinforced in 1969 by a resolution that the country’s space program be restricted to peaceful, nonmilitary, non-nuclear purposes and that it be dedicated to the principles of independence, democracy, openness, and international cooperation.

  Openness notwithstanding, space surveillance began in the 1980s, in the form of information-gathering satellites, which were presented as garden-variety technology that would assist the Self-Defense Forces and hence not be a blow to peace. But it was the test-firing of North Korea’s first intermediate-range ballistic missile, Taepodong-1, in the airspace above Japan in August 1998—combined with a series of high-profile Japanese space failures in the 1990s and 2000s—that slammed the door on the idea that Japan’s space program could continue to dedicate itself solely to peaceful purposes. Taepodong-1 triggered defensive rearming and created pressure to develop further military cooperation with the United States, Japan’s longtime space supplier and arbiter. The succeeding decade of rethinking and institutional rearrangements led to the 2008 Space Basic L
aw, which was passed by the Japanese parliament after a mere four hours of discussion. Watching China increase and diversify its military space capabilities, highlighted by its 2007 test of an antisatellite kinetic-kill missile, provided splendid motivation to pass that law. National security concerns about the proximity of a nuclear China and a nuclear North Korea moved to the foreground. In 2016 Japan released its fourth Basic Plan for space, the nation’s first fully funded national-security-focused space program—a central element of which is an emphasis on space cooperation with the United States.60

  And what about the largest country on Earth: the twenty-two-million-square-kilometer Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, succeeded by the still-largest, seventeen-million-square-kilometer Russian Federation? From the end of World War II until China, North Korea, Iran, Latin American drug cartels, and Islamist terrorists arose as threats to US national security, Russia remained America’s primary adversary and space competitor. As treaty partner on disarmament and, in the post-shuttle era, America’s sole means of carrying astronauts and supplies to and from the International Space Station, Russia became America’s frenemy. But the gradual increase of US–Russia conflict zones around the world—along with widespread evidence of Russian cyber intervention and Internet-based fabricated news stories, some amounting to state-sponsored propaganda targeting the 2016 US election—has resurrected the political atmosphere of the formerly dead-and-buried Cold War.61