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10/31/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/31/2024 08:46

From the Space Age to the Anti-Satellite Age

From the Space Age to the Anti-Satellite Age

Photo: NASA

Commentary by Jim Cooper

Published October 31, 2024

This series-featuring scholars from the Aerospace Security Project, non-resident experts, and the broader space community-explores key space trends, challenges, and policy issues that will confront the next administration as well as offers recommendations for how to navigate them.

We are so accustomed to the Space Age that we assume it will last forever. At least 5 billion people benefit from satellites every day-for internet, communications, shipping, banking, electric grids, and so on-and the remaining 3 billion want access. Everyone wants a smartphone, but those phones are dumb without satellites.

There is increasing evidence, however, that we are living in an Anti-Satellite (ASAT) Age, a time when nations are no longer confident that their satellites are safe, or that they can add as many satellites as they want. Today, nations fear that their satellites will be subtracted. Space is no longer a sanctuary. This is why Congress and the White House took the extraordinary step in 2019 of creating a new Space Force. Unfortunately, this was years late, after rival nations had created their own space forces.

Kinetic threats, those taken through physical means to destroy or damage, are the most obvious. China's first ASAT launch in 2007, then its geosynchronous ASAT launch in 2013-not to mention its flagrant hypersonic test in 2021-prove that China is perfecting kill shots. Its first test was also the most irresponsible. That test put a target on every single satellite and sharply increased debris in low Earth orbit, putting all satellites at risk.

Russia resumed its ASAT testing in 2021 after a decades-long pause, creating even more space debris. Russia's apparent coordination with China on space policy is another worrisome development. The two nations seem more aligned than ever, stymying U.S. efforts to keep the Communist superpowers apart.

Why are China, Russia, and other nations pursuing such destructive ASAT capabilities so eagerly? These are the most expensive weapons in the world.

Non-kinetic threats are much more likely. Whether jamming, hacking, dazzling, or spoofing, China, Russia, and many other nations-even individuals-regularly interfere with satellites. It is important to remember that satellites have three parts: the "bird," the ground station, and the user device. Interference with any of these is an attack on a satellite. So far, most electronic attacks have been temporary and reversible, but they are also increasingly frequent, sometimes occurring hundreds of times a day.

These attacks are cheap and limitless, as well as difficult to attribute. They can be "launched" from anywhere, by anyone.

The hardest thing for a policymaker to admit is ignorance, even when that ignorance is justified. There is no way of knowing what is going on at the highest levels of China's decisionmaking or in the minds of terrorist groups. We cannot trust their propaganda, so the easiest path is assuming the worst, but that is not necessarily correct.

One example of mistakenly jumping to conclusions is the tragedy of the shootdown of the Korean passenger airliner by a Soviet interceptor in 1983, in the midst of the Cold War. I was in my first year in Congress and thought it was an open-and-shut case of Soviet aggression. I wanted revenge.

What I did not know-and what is revealed in Max Boot's new biography of Ronald Reagan-is that the United States, prior to the shootdown, buzzed a Soviet airfield in the region with six Navy F-14 Tomcats while conducting a three-aircraft-carrier battle group exercise nearby, inside the Sea of Okhotsk, the armpit of the Soviet Union. Even during the Taiwan crisis, the United States only sent two aircraft carriers. Boot also reveals that, on the night of the shootdown, a U.S. RC-135 Cobra Ball spy plane was near the stray airliner over Soviet airspace. This does not justify the shootdown, but it does put the tragedy in context. Due to this tragedy and two false alarms of nuclear attacks, 1983 was perhaps the most dangerous year in modern U.S. history, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. World War III could easily have started.

The United States stopped its own ASAT testing in 1985-a test in which the current secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, participated-but the United States responded to China's 2007 test with one of its own in 2008 to remind the Chinese that the United States maintains the capability. The United States targeted a satellite that was already deorbiting, one that could have posed a risk to people on the ground. Any fragments created quickly burned up in the atmosphere.

More and more space norms and treaties are being challenged. Russia's announcement that they are pursuing nuclear payloads is alarming, even raising the specter of electromagnetic pulse weapons. Is the 60-year pause on such weapons over, along with the four decades without ASAT weapons?

One distressing possibility is that both China and Russia are preparing for preemptive war because the United States has more space assets than any other nation, and these assets are largely unprotected. If an attack were launched, the consequences could be devastating. Neil DeGrasse Tyson described it this way: "True space-age war would be sanitized, emotionless, thorough, and likely brief. Nations would fail in a day." Novels like 2034 by Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman help us imagine it.

What is the appropriate response for the United States when so much of life on Earth depends on functioning satellites? No nation has more at stake than the United States does, but much of the world also depends on satellites, not just us. Why would anyone focus on subtracting satellites when the goal since Sputnik in 1957 was to add them?

Why would anyone want to start an Anti-Satellite Age?

Jim Cooper is a former U.S. representative from Tennessee and sat on the House Committee for Armed Services.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

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