The EconomistJuly 20th 2019 BriefingWar in space 192
1to answer strategic questions. What forces
does the enemy possess? And tactical ones.
Twelve missiles just launched! Spy satel-
lites also eavesdrop on communications
and radar emissions.
The second is to tell troops, and bombs,
exactly where they are. This is where Amer-
ica’s 24-satellite Global Positioning System
(gps) and some of its lesser competitors—
China’s BeiDou, Europe’s Galileo, India’s
navic, Japan’s qvss and Russia’s glo-
nass—come in. From a rarity 30 years ago,
precision-guided bombs have become, for
America, the norm.
The third role is to get information into
and out of desolate warzones. Getting data
from a single Global Hawk drone like the
one shot down by Iran on June 20th re-
quires at least 500 megabits a second of sat-
ellite bandwidth—five times the rate at
which all America’s armed forces used sat-
ellite communications during the 1991 Gulf
war. The Pentagon’s bandwidth consump-
tion rises by around a third every year.
America outspends the rest of the world
on military space capabilities by a ratio of
three to one. This makes its satellites at-
tractive targets. Knocking some of them
out is the surest way to blind, deafen and
disorient America’s armed forces when
they are far from home.Blunderbuss, shiv or photon torpedo
Perhaps the simplest way to attack a satel-
lite is to hit it with a missile from Earth.
This is what China did in 2007, taking out
one of its own weather satellites, and what
India did this March. Such attacks are easi-
er to do when the target is in a low orbit. But
China has tested missiles apparently capa-
ble of getting all the way to geostationary
orbit—the altitude where satellites take 24
hours to get round the Earth, and thus
seem to stay above the same place all the
time. These orbits are popular with satel-
lite broadcasters. They are also vital for ear-
ly-warning systems, since they allow an
eye to be kept on a whole continent in the
search for missile launches.
One problem with this approach is
shrapnel. Just as nukes produce fallout,
anti-satellite weapons which explode, or
simply hit their target at orbital speed, pro-
duce large amounts of debris. An anti-sat-
ellite campaign waged with Earth-
launched interceptors could leave huge
swathes of space unusable for generations.
Deniability is another problem. A country
with satellites will probably be able to spot
a satellite-killing missile’s launch site.
An alternative is to pit satellite against
satellite. Recent years have seen a surge of
interest in “rendezvous and proximity op-
erations”—getting one satellite close to an-
other. Such operations are necessary if sat-
ellites are to be repaired or refuelled. But
the delicate orbital shimmies and robotic
arms that allow one satellite to help anoth-er could also be used without consent or
goodwill. It might also offer ways to kill
them with the equivalent of a shiv, rather
than a blunderbuss, thus limiting the de-
bris problem.
America, Russia and China all have sat-
ellites that carry out manoeuvres close to
other people’s spacecraft. America’s gssap
satellites have conducted hundreds of
manoeuvres in geostationary orbit since
2014, many close to Russian and Chinese
satellites. The Secure World Foundation
(swf), an American think-tank, says that
some of these encounters have been timed
to occur in the Earth’s shadow to prevent
telescopes on the ground from getting a
good look at what was going on.
This is probably simply snooping, rath-
er than rehearsal for skulduggery. Brian
Weeden, a former American Air Force
space officer now at swf, says he is not con-
vinced that satellite-on-satellite violence
is a good basis for a weapons programme.
Targets in low orbits would have hours of
warning; those in higher orbits, days. And
unless satellites get stealthier, it would
probably be possible to tell whose hand
was behind any dirty deed. But the fact that
a neat idea may also be a bad one does not
always stop military planners. Recent stud-ies by swfand the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, another think-tank,
suggest that some of Russia’s proximity op-
erations are connected to an orbital-weap-
ons programme code-named Burevestnik.
Regardless of whether administered
from another satellite or from Earth, vio-
lence in space does not need to be a matter
of physical force. Spy satellites can be
blinded with lasers. If the lasers are power-
ful enough, they can do damage to the rest
of the spacecraft, too, as might microwave
beams. Signals can also be jammed. In June
Israeli pilots lost gpssignals around Ben-
Gurion airport for three weeks. Last No-
vember natoforces on exercises lost their
gpssignals in northern Norway and Fin-
land. Both incidents were almost certainly
a result of Russian electronic warfare.
Satellites are also vulnerable to hack-
ing. Many commercial satellites are “rid-
dled with security vulnerabilities”, says
Gregory Falco, an expert at mit. In 1998 Rus-
sian hackers reportedly took control of an
American-German satellite and pointed it
at the Sun, thus destroying its instruments.
One way to respond to all this is deter-
rence: you destroy my satellite, I destroy
yours. But at present no one knows what a
given sally would earn by way of riposte,
which makes deterrence disturbingly des-
tabilising. Is hitting a satellite like bump-
ing into a frigate, or bumping off a city?
A better option is to avoid taking blows
in the first place. But this raises problems
of its own. Colonel Devin Pepper, com-
mander of the 460th Space Wing at Buckley
Air Force Base in Denver, says that the nec-
essary tactics and techniques remain a
work in progress. “What does the right of
self-defence look like in space?” he asks.
“What do chaff and flares look like in
space?” Matthew Donovan, the acting sec-
retary of the Air Force, draws a comparison
to the position air-power advocates found
themselves in after the first world war.
They hankered for new tactics to match
their new capabilities; they wanted a dedi-Radar TelescopeGuardians of the galaxy
United States Space Surveillance Network*
July 2019ATLANTIC
OCEANINDIAN OCEANPACIFICOCEANPACI F I C
AirVandenbergForceBase OCEAN
HawaiiAscension
IslandDiego
GarciaShemya
IslandMarshall
Islands
Space
Fence
( in testing)Space Surveillance
Telescope
(under construction)Peterson Air Force BaseSource: US Air Force*Excluding space-based sensors2,062 space odysseys
Operatingsatellites,March 31st 2019Source:UCSSatelliteDatabaseMilitary Other
1,Japan
Britain
India
OthersRussiaChinaUnited States