Space has become a hotly contested battlefield. And I don’t mean that just
metaphorically. Space stations with cannons mounted on them, satellites with lasers,
missiles for destroying targets and missiles for intercepting them have literally been not
only envisioned but also constructed and launched into our orbit by the great powers of the world.
Some have even been fired. And although all-out war has not begun to take place
between nations in space, countries have prepared for the eventuality of violent
conflict above our atmosphere for decades. They have designed guns and contingencies,
and even the occasional doomsday weapon. Would you like to take a look at what’s been created?
I’m Alex McColgan, and you’re watching Astrum. Join with me today as we discuss the past,
present and possible future of military weapons in space, in the hopes that it will give us some
insight into how a space-based war between nations might go, and what needs to happen to avoid it.
From as early as the 5th century BCE, writers imagined vehicles or structures capable of
entering space, with weapons capable of raining down destruction. Hindu texts spoke of Vimana,
flying chariots or palaces with flying-saucer-like qualities, that transported their occupants into
the heavens, and could destroy entire cities with their weapons. In the second century,
Syrian author Lucian of Samosata wrote a short novel containing such elements as travelling into
space, and an interplanetary war between denizens of the Sun and the Moon. But it has only been in
the last century or so that these imaginings could actually be shaped into a reality. As the first
liquid-propellant rocket began to be launched in 1926, suddenly it became possible to reach higher
as a species than we had ever done before – to not just enter the skies, but to pass beyond them. And
of course, the technology was almost immediately turned to militaristic purposes. Nazi Germany
quickly saw the advantages of rocketry, and began developing their V-2 rockets, which skimmed the
edge of space (reaching 80km) before raining down destruction from the sky. Fortunately, this
breakthrough came too late in the war to change how it ended, but V-2 rockets became at least
the progenitor of the first human space weapons. They may have only skimmed space themselves, but
their descendent, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of 1959 was able to enter space truly.
It's fortunate that the war ended when it did, as Nazi scientists were considering other,
more imaginative weapons that could be used from space. Some of what they were contemplating seemed
the sort of thing you might watch in a James Bond novel. As early as 1929 Hermann Oberth,
a Transylvanian Saxon-born physicist and engineer who later became one of the founding fathers of
German rocketry, was chalking up designs for a 100-m wide concave mirror that could be placed
in space to concentrate sunlight into a single destructive point. This “Sun Gun” (Sonnengewehr)
idea was picked up by German scientists who dreamed of making the superweapon a reality.
They hoped that its power would allow them to burn entire cities with its heat.
Again, fortunately, the war ended before that particular vision could be made a reality.
The birth of rockets had a two-fold effect on modern space conflict. The first was the increased
development of further and further-ranging rockets, which gained increasingly powerful
payloads, culminating in the nuclear missiles the superpowers of the world hold on standby today.
But the second was the development of the more commercial use of space.
When Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched in 1957, humanity began to realise
that space could be used for more than just a place to fire weapons from. Since then,
we have launched over 8,000 satellites into orbit around the Earth. They contribute hugely
to modern society. Through satellite guidance, our phones can know where we are currently,
and can guide us to any destination by the shortest route. We can communicate in an instant
with people on the other side of the world. With this, economies flourished… and nations
began to realise how devastating it would be if we ever lost them unexpectedly. And so, a new
front opened up in space conflict – the satellite war. Nations began trying to figure out how to
protect their own satellites, while inhibiting the satellites of others should the need ever arise.
Different nations took different approaches to this. The Soviet Union in the early 1960’s
sought to protect their own space interests while threatening others’ by launching the secretive
Almaz space station. This manned space station was unlike any other in history that we know of,
as it came with a built-in cannon attached to its forward belly, capable of firing thousands
of rounds a minute. It wasn’t perfect – recoil on such a powerful weapon was a big issue for
the whole space station, and it had to be aimed manually by turning the entire space station to
point at its target, but this weapon was actually tested in space in 1975, firing about 20 shells at
a gas canister target. The results of the test are classified, so we don’t know exactly how it went,
but a few years later project Almaz was scrapped on the grounds of being too
expensive and inefficient. So, you can draw your conclusions yourself. However, one of the greatest
weapons of satellites is not in their destructive power, but in their ability to gain information.
Satellites can capture footage of events on the ground in incredible detail,
as well as having the ability to listen in to stray signals for espionage purposes.
While in 1966 the United Nations General Assembly signed into international law the Outer Space
treaty, making it illegal to place weapons of mass destruction into orbit and encouraging the
peaceful use of space, using satellites to spy on your enemies appears to have been deemed fair
game. Each superpower makes use of satellites to conduct reconnaissance on sites of importance.
About 1/5th of all satellites are military owned and are used for this purpose . Many,
such as the large American-owned Orion satellites, can hoover up all the telephone calls and signals
that telephone towers radiate into space using their massive 100m diameter antennae.
Since phone calls stopped running through wires and started being broadcast wirelessly, it has
become much easier for military organisations to intercept every single communication.
Tapping into wires is a thing of the past. Your privacy? Likewise.
Naturally, countermeasures to this have started to arise,
as nations and groups object to their privacy being invaded like this.
One interesting modern-day facet of this can be seen at play in the Russian-Ukraine war right now.
Satellites play a powerful role in modern conflict, allowing military forces to track
enemy combatants and relay that information back to units on the ground. However, this is much less
effective in Ukraine ever since large swathes of the battlefield became subject to GPS jammers.
GPS jammers work by flooding the bandwidths used by GPS satellites with noisy radio signals of
their own, drowning out the vital positioning information, or spoofing it. Attack drones have
played a prominent part in the Ukrainian conflict. If you convince GPS that your city is miles away
from its actual location, drones will attack the wrong site, getting confused about where they are
supposed to go. This is an actual technology that is being employed in a war setting today.
It represents space technology being used as an asset in conventional ground warfare.
That said, at the time of writing, no space war where a space target attacked another space target
has ever taken place. But that’s not to say that nations are not preparing for the eventuality.
America and Russia have been developing anti-satellite missiles (ASATs) since the 1950’s.
Some have even been fired. The US has launched only one test ASAT, which took down a failing
commercial satellite in 1985 using infra-red heat seeking as guidance and then crashing into it at
24,000 km/h to destroy it – the kinetic energy alone being enough to knock the satellite out
of the sky. Russia destroyed one of its own satellites in 2021 with an ASAT of its own.
Unfortunately, that particular test ended with the satellite splitting into 1,500 pieces of
debris that started orbiting the planet. Debris got threateningly close to the International Space
Station, and Russian astronauts had to shelter in place to avoid a life-threatening situation.
This is the great difficulty of modern space conflict, and is perhaps a reason
why it is not more common. Destroying an enemy satellite might simply turn it into
a ball of debris that then crashes into other satellites, perhaps even your own,
which then disintegrate and hit other satellites, in a growing cascade of destruction that closes
off space for everyone. This is known as Kessler Syndrome, and it could take centuries before
space is safe enough to travel through once it happens. For this reason, there are growing
calls for ASATs to not be similarly banned from use – no-one wants space shut down for everyone.
That’s about the current state of space warfare. However, there is one future technology that
might not actually be so futuristic that might change just about everything; lasers.
Yes, you heard me right, lasers. Pew pew indeed. While this might sound like something out of Star
Wars, real life companies like Lockheed Martin have developed working prototypes that have
real implications for future conflict. Unlike sci-fi lasers, real life ones focus on a target
with incredible precision, superheating whatever enters its gaze for too long.
They come with a multitude of advantages. Shooting in wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, they
are both silent and invisible – you’d only know you were being shot by the fact that the engine
of your vehicle was suddenly a melted puddle. They are precise – only your engine might be melted.
They come with unlimited ammo as long as they’re on a suitable power grid,
and they can take out missiles from kilometres away on a clear day. Of course,
they come with one major disadvantage – they don’t necessarily work if it’s not a clear day.
Scattering of the laser in atmosphere significantly reduces its effectiveness as
the particles lose their coherence the further they travel, and if it’s a foggy day or if the
enemy target throws up a smoke-screen, the laser can be neutralised completely.
It would be unfortunate if you failed to take down an enemy missile because it was cloudy.
But this might not be an issue for space conflict, as there is no atmosphere in space.
A satellite equipped with such a laser and a suitable solar panel array could potentially
bore through the heart of other satellites with ease, leaving their internal components
as molten slag without creating a dangerous debris field. It would be extremely difficult
to see what had done the damage, meaning the secrecy of your satellite would be maintained.
Your satellite would never need to be reloaded (provided it didn’t need to vent gas), as it
gained its power from the Sun, and its range would be vastly increased due to the lack of atmosphere.
The only downside would be the need for a powerful enough battery pack, which given its size and
bulk might be a limiting factor. A few attempts have even been made at creating a laser weapons
platform in space that could attack ground-based targets. Again, the appeal of such a threat is
great – imagine that a nation had the capability to instantly assassinate a target, invisibly
and without warning, the moment they stepped outside? There would be no room for interception.
The US was working on space-based lasers in 1987 with its Project Zenith Star, and although that
never made it past ground testing, their military has continued to toy with the idea in the decades
since. The USSR nearly actually launched such a laser – the Polyus Spacecraft – in 1987,
only for USSR President Gorbachev to forbid firing it in case the Western Governments saw this as an
aggressive act. As it happens, the launched Polyus space laser never reached orbit – an
error caused it to burn up in the atmosphere during launch, so the question of whether to
test-fire it or not was thankfully moot. These are the attempts we know about. Still, I would not be
surprised to learn that one nation or another had secretly put a satellite with a laser into space.
We’d likely not know for another 30 years or so, or until it was used.
Fortunately, space conflict to date has mostly been about hypothetical preparation,
more than actual battle. Even during the cold war, no nation actually has gone so far as to
attack another nation’s space assets, although many have sought the capability to do so,
and more than a few sabres are rattling. This may be because if we actually started warring
in space in earnest, we would be unleashing some of the most devastating forces known to man.
Weapons from space are perhaps the most destructive humanity will ever bring to bear.
It wouldn’t take a Nazi Sun Gun. All it would need is the force of gravity, and the realisation that
with a little maths you can redirect one passing space rock to have it become a multi-kiloton nuke,
as it releases its kinetic energy in one frantic moment. But like the gun on the space station
Almaz, such weapons have a habit of recoiling. Taking down enemy satellites might sound like
a tactical advantage, but Kessler syndrome bringing down the global economy would be
bad for everyone. Tactically targeting any enemy with a space-launched asteroid might sound nice
and useful, until you remember the dinosaurs, and realise we only have one single fragile
rock to live on. Ultimately, the risks that come with space conflict are perhaps the strongest
reason it may never happen. I certainly hope so. After all, it would perhaps be a terrible irony,
and a failure of evolution, if humanity’s struggle for survival against each other
ended in nobody winning, and the ruin of us all. What a cosmic own-goal that would turn out to be.