Orbital Collisions

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:24

And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from a very warm Philadelphia. It is officially spring here. Was it spring in Paris, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey 0:35

Oh, it was, well, it was spring in Paris the first day when I had lunch next to the Arc de Triomphe. And then the second day, it just rained like cats and dogs. Or would that be chat and chien? I can't speak French.

Aaron 0:52

You know, if you spoke French, you would not be keeping up in your hosting duties of the arms control.

Jeffrey 0:57

I can say, ooh la la.

Aaron 1:01

We're going to talk about space weapons today, but given our last podcast and the continued sort of disquiet on the Western front, let's put it that way, about the future of the US-European relationship, what were you doing in Paris and how are the Europeans feeling about our current administration?

Jeffrey 1:21

So the Federation of American Scientists convened a meeting with the Foundation for Strategic Research funded by the Lounsbury Foundation, HAMAX. And that meeting was a U.S., U.K., French meeting of nongovernmental experts. To broadly discuss whether arms control has a future. Short answer, no. Some of my American colleagues tried to, you know, were like, well, you know, someday, and I am also a, you know, well, someday.

Aaron 2:02

Someday we'll all be dead, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 2:04

Yeah. I mean, my French colleagues, I thought, were very clear-eyed about the nature of the threat at the moment. And so I found myself trying to referee this battle saying, I don't think the French colleagues are wrong. And I don't think that they are unalterably opposed to arms control. But I do think that they are very realistic about both this threat Particular Russian government and the ability of this particular administration to reach meaningful arms control agreements in the near future.

Aaron 2:42

I mean, if we hadn't patented the name Arms Control Walk Podcast, of which we collect hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per year, we would have already changed the name.

Jeffrey 2:54

Those Micronesian dollars?

Aaron 2:55

Yeah, some sort of dollar, right? We would have switched to the Arms Racing Podcast long ago, long ago, because I think we're at the start of an arms race. Or maybe we're past the start now. Where are we on the mountain?

Jeffrey 3:12

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I will say what I said in the meeting, and then maybe this will move us on to the space bit. But, you know, what I do try to remember is that if you picked any period in the Cold War and you projected out 10 years from it, whether it's sort of the nadir of the Cuban Missile Crisis or that terrible year of 1983, you know, 10 years later, things look really...

Aaron 3:41

Different.

Jeffrey 3:42

So 10 years is a long time. Not clear to me Vladimir Putin will be alive in 10 years. Not clear to me Donald Trump will be alive in 10 years. Not clear to me Xi Jinping will be alive in 10 years. That doesn't necessarily mean who comes next is better, but it will be different. And so it is, I think, always a challenge to Focus the appropriate amount on the current moment, which is, you know, the moment in which you all get killed, but while at the same time having a little bit of perspective that, you know, when you make defense decisions, you're making them for a period of time that will outlive a lot of the people making those decisions.

You know what concepts that have outlived many things in this world. Oh, boy. There we go.

Aaron 4:24

Do you like that transition? This is why we get paid the hundreds of thousands in micronesian sort of ETFs is space weapons, baby. They're back. We're bumping. We're grinding. We're reaching. We're grabbing.

Jeffrey 4:38

Grappling. We're grappling.

Aaron 4:39

Grappling. It's like a bad club from Las Vegas in 2001. Wow. That wasn't too good. But that's okay. I'll let the joke slide. All of the space concepts that were in vogue in the Cold War are starting to come back, a lot like the themes we're talking about in this podcast.

Jeffrey 4:57

Well, I mean, do we want to talk about this news story? Because while I think it makes good copy, and I'm sure the reporters are accurately reporting what they were told, are you sure it's true?

Aaron 5:15

Well, let's talk about this. So I was on Blue Sky as one is, and I saw in the Colorado Sun headline, Trump's military is quietly pursuing attack weapons in orbit. Here's how that could affect Colorado. I think the real core of the story is that the concept, among other elements, includes military satellites designed to grapple, bump, or disable enemy spacecraft, according to four senior Trump advisors, industry officials, or former high-ranking uniformed officers.

Others who have reviewed portions of the plan say they also encompass techniques to warn commanders when U.S. satellites are under potentially hostile tracking or targeting. These people, blah, blah, blah, spoke on the condition of anonymity. And so it's this concept of bumping, grabbing. I guess maybe one of the newer elements of this is that the U.S. would have the ability to know when one of its satellites is being messed with.

Jeffrey 6:18

Yeah, I mean, I guess one of the reasons I'm slightly reacting to this is, you know, there's a lot of spin in what the sources are saying. So there's this sort of claim that any kind of space control activity was essentially banned under the Biden administration, which is... I mean, the Biden administration wanted to pursue a ban on a specific thing, which is debris creating tests of kinetic energy anti-satellite weapons, which, you know, like literally fell under the category of don't do stupid stuff in space.

Aaron 6:57

Yeah. And the context there was the Russians. Was that 2020? Yeah.

Jeffrey 7:02

Oh, the noodle? You know, I can't even keep track. But, you know, the Indians did it, the Russians did it, the Chinese did it.

Aaron 7:08

We did it.

Jeffrey 7:10

So, yeah. And those things create a lot of debris, but... Certainly, space surveillance and space control, whether it's using ground-based electromagnetic interference or other technologies, I would not say they were prohibited under the Biden administration. That said, you know, maybe the vibes are different. I mean, it's a little hard to tell because I think we have two things happening, which is A lot of the Trump people want to be very transgressive.

And they want to exaggerate how differently they're doing things. And they want to imply that they're doing things that are really upsetting. They enjoy owning the libs. But then the flip side of that is you have what I guess used to be resistance Twitter, but is now whatever it is on Blue Sky, which is libs who are focused on being owned.

And it's actually not clear to me how much... Policy change there really is, other than the Trump people like the idea of being really transgressive and Democrats really like being upset by how transgressive the Trump people are claiming to be.

Aaron 8:31

Yeah, well, there's another story that came out in Breaking Defense, where the Space Force, the Chief of Space Operations, General Chance Saltzman, He sort of fleshed out what he means by space control. I'm just going to read it. He goes, space control encapsulate all the activities required to contest and control the domain. These activities range from reversible to non-reversible effects, scaling from interference to degradation to destruction via kinetic and non-kinetic means.

In practice, we refer to such activities as counter space operations, which we conduct across the orbital link and terrestrial segments of our architecture. Yada, yada, yada. A lot of DOD speak. But the thing that I came away from that is how it does actually dovetail with that Colorado report, which is they're talking about destruction via kinetic and non-kinetic means in order to control space operations.

Jeffrey 9:26

Yeah. I mean, there has long been a focus on non-kinetic means. There is a debate about kinetic means. I guess it just remains to be seen whether that really means like dusting off debris, creating anti-satellite weapons, or whether that means exploring the ability to do proximity operations where maybe one of the options is actually to, you know, grab a satellite.

All of which, you know, raise some interesting questions and we can talk about what they might necessarily mean for space security. But again, I don't know. I feel like the proof will be in the pudding. It really depends on what they are going to actually do. I think if you went back and read you know what was it called?

It was called like vision 2020, or there were a bunch of space power documents from the late 1990s that would, you know, like peel the paint off your house if you read them. That kind of language, I think, often doesn't necessarily end up in an actual program. So I still kind of want to see where this is headed.

Aaron 10:39

I will say this. As I'm reading this, and tell me if you disagree, it seems like they're talking about rendezvous and close proximity operations. It's less on the ground base, direct ascent, kinetic kill, anti-satellite weapons. So in that respect... That is maybe a continuation of the Biden administration. They're leaning into these other things because they're hyping up the Chinese threats to do the same.

And obviously, this comes on the heels of the Russian testing of the nuclear weapon in space.

Jeffrey 11:10

I mean, yeah, I think a lot of this is about autonomous proximity operations, right, which are getting more and more common. And I want to dig up a little paper here. Here it is. Ah, yes. Some person wrote in December 2004. Is that 20 years ago, Aaron?

Aaron 11:34

I think I know who this person is, so maybe you don't want to date it.

Jeffrey 11:38

Well, I'm old, Aaron. I might have written a paper called Autonomous Proximity Operations, A Coming Collision in Orbit.

Aaron 11:49

That's a good title.

Jeffrey 11:50

Yeah, I thought it was not too bad, in which I made the point that there were all of these proposals to develop the capability to do proximity operations. And one of the things I said was I talked about the proximity operations the United States was doing. And I said, given growing suspicion about the motives of other spacefaring states, a proximity operation might lead to serious incident in space.

And then I sort of described some of the different programs under development. And then I kind of concluded by saying the launch of a Chinese microsatellite with the capability of, and then I listed a couple of US programs. I said, would generate concern in many quarters of the United States. If the Chinese were to conduct a proximity maneuver near a U.S. satellite, the reaction would be apoplectic.

Aaron 12:52

Well, what if somebody told you the Chinese were dogfighting around U.S. space satellites, which is the news. It came out in Breaking Defense on March 18th by friend of the pod, Theresa Hitchens. The literal title of the piece, Five Chinese Satellites Practiced, quote, unquote, Dogfighting in Space, Space Force says.

Jeffrey 13:15

Yeah, so I want to read the quote. I mean, what the vice chief of space operations said was, there are five different objects in space maneuvering in and out around each other in synchronicity and in control. That's what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.

Okay, I just... I'm not a lawyer, but I think the phrase dogfighting would be sort of rejected in court as conclusory. I don't know, man.

Aaron 13:48

I think they watched a lot of Top Gun in 1986.

Jeffrey 13:51

What makes a proximity operation dogfighting as opposed to servicing, observation, repair? And like, yes, I mean, the thing I pointed out in 2004 is if you can maneuver – And by the way, I think dogfighting gives, I think, a dramatic misinterpretation of like how much maneuvering things can do.

Aaron 14:11

We should explain what we mean by this because there's half the people going on this list in this podcast is going, what the F are you guys talking about with proximity operations? Right.

Jeffrey 14:21

So when you're in orbit, you're falling, right? You are falling in an ellipse around the Earth forever.

Aaron 14:31

Fast enough to where you never come back down to Earth. Right.

Jeffrey 14:35

It says, you know, you are falling, but you are moving so fast that you fall over the horizon, and you are constantly falling over the horizon in an ellipse. And you can change your velocity and altitude, and you can With a lot of propellant, change your orbital plane. I guess you could, you know, there are a few other things you could do.

But that's why it was so hard, for example, for the United States. And the Soviet Union to do kind of that rendezvous that they did in the 1970s. And that's why it's kind of a big deal when you bring up a payload to, say, the International Space Station. Like rendezvous and docking is, you know, pretty complex. And the idea that you could do it with smaller satellites that are basically that are autonomous, not basically that are autonomous.

That's that's really useful. And that's a technology that everyone wants to pursue, and everyone wants to pursue it because it does allow you to do things like take a look at an ailing satellite. So, for example, when the space shuttle Columbia Had the tile damage, right? One option would have been, and I think they did try to take a look at it, but you can take a look at a satellite and see what's wrong with it.

You can refuel a satellite, which would extend its life. You could arguably repair a satellite. Solar panels or something like that. Sure. And so in a very simple way, this is what the space shuttle did, but it wasn't autonomous. It had people. So the space shuttle had a giant arm.

Aaron 16:36

The Soviets did not like that arm. Made in Canada, by the way.

Jeffrey 16:40

That's right. And we use that arm to do things like grab the Hubble and fix the lens. You could use it to grab a satellite and take it back down. And of course, the Soviets were like, are you sure that's not just to grab our satellites and take them out of orbit like Moonraker?

Aaron 16:54

And the answer is like, well, we promise we won't do that.

Jeffrey 16:58

Potato, potato, man. So for sure. One implication of this technology is they also make absolutely fantastic anti-satellite weapons. And a sustainable use of space requires... Thinking about this. But I do think there is this decision to securitize all of these technologies. And so were those satellites dogfighting in space? They were maneuvering. And that's a useful capability for lots of different things.

It raises a really interesting question of, is the Can you win some race where you just make your satellite more maneuverable somehow, which I think you probably can't? Or do you have to start thinking about like, you know, I don't know, man, some rules.

Aaron 17:53

Well, and I think we should say this is always tied up into strategic stability because of the role that satellites play in early warning, particularly in the United States. So in the Cold War, it was always about could the Soviets, as part of a strike on the US or part of a war for a NATO that may no longer exist in a couple months, use an anti-satellite weapon as part of a first strike or something along those lines.

And I think the Chinese are viewing it in much the same way. Which is, you know, hinder American access to space or global connectivity with a small number of satellite weapons against key US satellites that are very important for the things that we do around the world.

Jeffrey 18:33

Yeah. I mean, I think everybody fundamentally is aware that both there are useful civilian purposes to this technology, there are useful military purposes. And even if you don't want to do the military purposes yourself, you need to understand what those possibilities are. And so it's got to be investigated. And I also think, you know, there is this interesting question of How much is driven by a desire to target strategic systems?

Right. And how much is it desire to target systems that are engaged in routine intelligence, which is basically hoovers up everything, right? You can't tell if... If an imaging satellite in low Earth orbit is looking at, you know, missile silos or if it's, you know, looking at conventional military capabilities, but you can't distinguish that. Or whether it's going to go, it's going to be used to target, you know, communications assets.

So, you know, I do think if we step back, you know, the dogfighting in space is designed to be alarming, right? But the reality is, is that space is an increasingly crowded environment because you have more countries operating there and you have private entities operating there. It's an environment that's changing dramatically because satellites are lighter and cheaper to launch and you can have these big distributed constellations that allows you to do new things in space.

Aaron 20:07

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 20:08

But it also gives you different kinds of military capabilities and satellites because there are autonomous can actually engage in these kinds of proximity operations. And so it's not surprising that like you're getting this huge new opportunities on the civilian side, that there are also these huge new opportunities on the military side. And the natural consequence of that is we're all starting to think about how we negate those, whether it's, you know, Chinese satellites, maneuvering dog fighting, if you insist Or are the Russians reportedly planning to put up a nuclear weapon to just mass kill things?

Aaron 20:43

I think they do do different things, right? So the mass kill I always view as it's basically mass. It's smaller numbers of weapons for larger kill effects, and that's for mass satellite constellations, where the Chinese things that they're messing around with, and the Russians are too, right? The Russians have constantly messed around with this stuff. Is more for going after individual strategic assets.

I mean, there was obviously overlaps between the two, but if I had to break them into categories.

Jeffrey 21:10

Well, and we do too. I don't believe this claim the Biden administration prohibited all of these things because there are plenty of reports on US satellites that are capable of doing monitoring and inspection, and those capabilities are You know, really indistinguishable from the ability to target things. And I, you know, I think there are some, you know, I think the French have been very clear that they're interested in this.

And so, you know, I think we're being dragged into this world because of technology.

Aaron 21:38

Yeah. Well, that's the other difference. There's so many private companies that are not doing this as well. Sorry, I'm going to cut you off.

Jeffrey 21:45

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's right. So I guess, you know, for me, the question ultimately is in a world in which satellites are capable of Doing this kind of maneuvering and in which you can sort of distribute capabilities across small satellite constellations and in which, you know, because of the nature of orbit, if you were to like shatter a satellite in orbit, you're going to create a debris problem that's persistent and poses a threat to other satellites.

You really have to ask the question, like, what is a sustainable use of space look like? And I think that's why the Russians are starting to look at mass kill because I don't think you're going to be able to do like an anti-satellite hit here, an anti-satellite hit there. I think satellites themselves are pretty fragile because they're pretty expensive to put up.

They need to be pretty light. You can't really – Armor them given the speeds that things are moving at. You can't really maneuver them because that requires lots of propellant and they need to sort of, you know, like, like if you're maneuvering, then you're not flying over the thing you want to take a picture of. And that's functionally a mission kill.

And so I, I feel like offense against assets in space is always going to be easier than, than protecting those assets. And I, And that leads you to an era in which if you don't have, I think, some kind of rules about the use of space, it's going to be really tempting on day one of the war for the weaker party, whether it's the Russians or the Chinese or, you know, I mean, depending on how things go, maybe us getting really excited about just mass kill as a way to offset this advantage.

And I think we don't want that.

Aaron 23:35

No, but you can see the attraction to mass kill because when you had, let's say, a couple, let's say you had 150 satellites in orbit, right, on the US side, you only had to build 150 kinetic kill basic ASATs. But if you have 7,000 satellites in space... Building 7,000 kinetic kill anti-satellite interceptors doesn't make any sense. Where you can replace the cost or input cost of direct anti-satellite weapons with just one, right?

It sort of floats above them, right? I know we're not floating here. And you can take out two-thirds of the constellation right away.

Jeffrey 24:16

Yeah, Sam and I were doing some of the calculations for space-based missile defense interceptors because, you know, to a first approximation, you'd need a Starlink-sized constellation.

Aaron 24:28

Don't give away our research, Jeffrey. Don't give away our research on the pod. No, it's okay. You can go ahead.

Jeffrey 24:36

I think financially it's not doable, but you could actually put enough satellites in orbit. Yeah, you could. Well, I'll save later why it's not doable. But Sam and I were just sort of starting to play Sam Lair, a research associate here at CNS. We started to design countermeasures. And we were like... What if you put a high-yield nuclear warhead on like a modified – like a new modern version of like Sprint?

Aaron 25:10

You just – as soon as you got up above the clouds, you just – I mean you sprint that fucker right into space and like you're good to go. It's about timing. We know about that. Yeah.

Jeffrey 25:21

Anyway, so I guess for me the big takeaway is I really want to see what programs are being proposed because I think there are a lot of underlying technologies here. About proximity operations that are useful and good and that don't have anything to do with anti-satellite weapons. And that might be why the Chinese are doing this. And it's certainly why how we justified the programs that we started doing in the U.S. We have always known they have this other capacity, including if you put an arm grabbing them, just like the space shuttle did.

But when we get to a point where we understand those technologies, then I think we are going to be at kind of a path. We're going to have to choose a path Because I think in the end, we're going to conclude that defense in space is always disadvantaged with regard to offense. And so you're either going to end up in a situation where you get catastrophic mass kill of systems in orbit early on in a war, or you're going to do some kind of arms control or some kind of rules of the road.

I don't call it arms control if you hate that word. But I think we're going to have a real choice to make about How to use space, which, by the way, is not a function of like anything other than just the way orbit works. You can't really see space, right? You're falling through it. And that is the thing that makes satellites, I think, just inherently fragile and vulnerable and pushes you to a universe where either everybody gets access to space or nobody does.

Because functionally, I think it's a commons because of the properties of orbits.

Aaron 27:04

You know, you'll get our Russian and Chinese listeners, all three of them, who'll be, you know, that Vladimir has been putting forward this space treaty since when? 2007? I mean, they've been floating this thing for a while, and it is not a good faith effort. I want to put that out there. It is certainly self-interested.

Jeffrey 27:21

Well, and I think it was a way to try to talk about missile defense. You know, it wasn't really about space. It was just like they wanted to limit missile defense, and this was a way to do it. That's true. Yeah. So it was the backdoor way to get to missile defense.

Aaron 27:34

I guess we'll see. I think the other aspect here, of course, is that the Space Force is jockeying for their portion of the new defense budget.

Jeffrey 27:40

Hey, everybody needs a slice of pie.

Aaron 27:42

You know, you got to cut it up the way you cut it up. But I think we hit it all. Did we miss anything?

Jeffrey 27:50

No, no, I just, you know, some idiot wrote this paper 20 years ago. So forgive me if I'm nonplussed. But, you know, we have had like 20 years to do something about this problem. But I guess it's like the climate. It just keeps on getting hot, baby. A little bit each year. A little bit each year. And we could jump out of the boiling water if we wanted.

Aaron 28:14

I'm just saying. I don't know.

Jeffrey 28:16

It's an option.

Aaron 28:16

You were talking off-pod about how much you like your sauna. So maybe you're just trying to sort of imbibe in it all the time. But now this is where we go off the rails. Every single day at the end of the podcast. For listeners who can't see Jeffrey, we are road testing getting this show up on YouTube.

And we're testing your background. And speaking of synchronicity, And sort of like you have the North Koreans doing their synchronized moves right behind you as we're workshopping our background ideas. So maybe the satellites are a bit like your other pleasures, which is watching North Koreans parade and perform. But with that, thank you all for listening. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast.

If you want to join, $3. If you're a student, $5. If you're not, join the Slack channel where everybody's always in close proximity. Digitally. And you can talk about all of these things with the coolest group of people in the world. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast. Jeffrey, stay cool. Enjoy the sauna.

Jeffrey 29:10

It was a pleasure, Aaron.