18 TheEconomistJuly 20th 2019
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eep within Vandenberg Air Force
Base, a rugged 50km stretch of Ameri-
ca’s Pacific coast which is home to rolling
fogs, sporadic wildfires, the odd mountain
lion and the 30th Space Wing of the usAir
Force, sits the Combined Space Operations
Centre (cspoc), a windowless area the size
of a couple of tennis courts that could be
mistaken for an unusually tidy newsroom.
The men and women in it, mostly Air Force
but some from allied countries, guard the
highest of high grounds: space.
In one corner sits the 18th Space Control
Squadron, tasked with “space situational
awareness”. Using a worldwide network of
radars, telescopes and satellites (see map
on next page), it tracks the 2,000 satellites,
American and otherwise, that are currently
at work in orbit, and a larger number that
are defunct, derelict and partially de-
stroyed. All told it tracks some 23,000 ob-
jects down to the size of a softball moving
at enormous speed and predicts when they
will come close to something valuable. In2013 cspocsent satellite operators 1m “con-
junction data messages”—warnings that
something else was going to pass nearby. In
each case, the risk of an actual collision is
minute; only very occasionally will the or-
bit of something valuable be tweaked to
keep things completely safe. But as time
goes on, space fills up. Last year cspocsent
out 4m messages. Photographs of the three
astronauts aboard the International Space
Station hang on the wall, as a reminder of
the human stakes.
Cosmic fender-benders, though, are not
cspoc’s only interests. This is, as a sign on
another wall declares, the place “where
space superiority begins”. Those standing
watch look not only for accidental colli-
sions, but also for threatening manoeu-
vres. “I came into the Air Force 27 years ago
as a satellite operator,” says Colonel Jean
Eisenhut, who leads the development and
deployment of defensive and offensive
space systems for Air Force Space Com-
mand. “If there was a problem with our sys-tem or our satellites, we would think some-
thing on the satellite broke, that space
weather was probably the actor that caused
it. We did not think at all that something
might be caused by some other actor in
space.” Today, “the mindset that we are in-
culcating into our space warfighters is dra-
matically different.”
The people in the converted Titan rock-
et facility that houses cspocare not the
only ones concerned with such matters.
China and Russia established new units for
managing war in space four years ago. On
July 13th President Emmanuel Macron said
that he too had approved the creation of a
new space command within the French air
force. In 2007 China tested an anti-satellite
missile; earlier this year India did the
same. “Space is no longer a sanctuary,” Pat-
rick Shanahan, then America’s acting sec-
retary of defence, told a space-industry au-
dience in Colorado Springs in April. “It is
now a warfighting domain.”
The idea of war in space is hardly new.
As soon as German V-2rockets started trav-
elling through space on the way to Belgium
and Britain in 1944, military minds turned
to what could be done with weapons that
tarried there. To date, though, most mili-
tary operations in orbit have not been
geared to war in space; they use tools in
space to help them fight wars on Earth.
Satellites enable modern war in three
ways. One is to spot things below, in orderUsing the force
COLORADO SPRINGS, VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE AND WASHINGTON, DC
Attacking satellites is increasingly attractive. It could also be very dangerousBriefing War in space