PassW0rd – 18 December 2025 (Space Cold War 1)

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. And in this month’s program, the final frontier. Yes, we’re talking about space. Space is, according to a recent report from the House of Lords, a place of opportunity for the UK. Somewhere where we have an industry that’s actually going somewhere, but one that the UK has to improve in. Unfortunately, the report did not mention one of the most alarming developments, a rapidly escalating space war that has seen cyber attacks and physical intimidation of satellites by other satellites. An investigation by the Cyber Security Research Institute, a sister organization of Future Intelligence which makes the Password Radio programme has uncovered a systematic attempt by foreign powers to attack satellite systems and communications as part of a new conflict to control this new area. The attacks, according to those monitoring the developments, have been extensively used during the Ukrainian war and are now being used to apply geopolitical pressure as part of a coordinated attempt to demonstrate an ability to threaten vital global communication systems. Here’s Clémence Poirier, a senior researcher at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich University Center for Security Studies, Europe’s leading researcher on the issue.

Speaker C: Not yet. There is an increase in hostile maneuvers, unwelcome maneuvers, unannounced maneuvers. But there is not fully yet a war in orbit. So as researchers, we like to define and categorize stuff. And we distinguish between the militarization of outer space, which is use of space technologies to support military operations on Earth. This is not new at all. Always been there with space, starting with the— at the same time as development of nuclear nuclear weapons, and then space being used systematically in military operations since the Gulf War. This is not new at all. It has intensified. Now it’s also including a lot of commercial space services as well, used by belligerents. But it’s not happening in orbit, the fight. So we distinguish that with the weaponization of outer space, which is the use and placement of weapons in space. And this is slowly emerging. It’s not fully there yet. There are like things that states have been observing, such as development of counter-space capabilities, anti-satellite tests, but they are not conducted against adversary satellites, but usually against old satellites just to prove that you have that capabilities. Some states are also projecting hardly identifiable subsatellites. So that means that one of their satellites is ejecting a subsatellite. So we discussed about this kind of like Russian doll type of space systems that then maneuver space or deploying space planes that are highly maneuverable. There’s also development of civilian technologies that can be turned into weapons potentially, like robotic arms that can grab a satellite to remove debris. So it’s a civilian mission, but if you can grab the debris, you can also grab an adversary satellite. So all those things are slowly developing. There’s not really an armed conflict in space in the orbital environment, but might happen.

Speaker B: You seem to be caveating. You’re saying there isn’t a conflict yet. If I were a human being and people were doing those sorts of things to me, I would feel more than a little annoyed. I would feel more than a little irritated. I would feel as though somebody was trying to wind me up.

Speaker C: Yeah, and states are indeed annoyed. They are calling out some of those maneuvers. They are attributing those maneuvers to adversary states, sometimes releasing data about the approach, unwelcome approach of adversary satellites, publicly stating that there’s attempts to eavesdrop on them in those moments, or publicly attributing cyberattacks against satellites or electronic warfare against satellites. So states are a bit preparing themselves for conflict in outer space right now.

Speaker B: So, at what frequency is this? How often does this occur? How often does one satellite circle another? How often does one satellite put out its arm to try to intimidate another satellite?

Speaker C: It’s a very good question. So it’s not something that happens every day. A lot of these things are just capabilities development at the moment. So it’s— they’re not yet deployed. Some maneuvers like inspection missions to one satellite going around an adversary one trying to eavesdrop on them and so on. This has been occurring more frequently in the past decade, let’s say. It’s not an everyday thing that space operators have to face where they have to constantly maneuver to avoid these things. So it’s not like daily occurrence, but this is something that they have to monitor with radar data to see what’s going on in space so that they can avoid collisions, that they can cut communications to avoid being eavesdropped on, this kind of thing. So it’s, yeah, slowly developing, increasing, but not an everyday life thing.

Speaker B: One assumes that this occurs at times when there’s some geopolitical tension on Earth, that the incidences of this this sort of activity tends to reflect what’s going on back on the ground.

Speaker C: Yeah, indeed. Actually, if you look at just before the war in Ukraine, so in November 2021, there was an anti-satellite test that Russia did on its own satellites, but that created a lot of debris in space, and it created a lot of debris at an altitude where Earth observation satellites are. So at that moment where there was a military buildup at the Ukrainian border, that meant that a lot of those satellites that were taking pictures of Ukraine, they had to maneuver to avoid those debris. And while a satellite is maneuvering, it cannot conduct its mission, like taking pictures of Earth. So that means that at that moment, they captured less images of Earth than probably they were supposed to. It doesn’t excuse some states completely missing out on the war and misinterpreting the military buildup, but it kind of started this way. And then on the eve of the invasion, there was a cyberattack against satellite network that was used by Ukrainian armed forces, which prevented them from satellite communication to coordinate and respond to the invasion. It also prevented them from accessing data from sensors that they had, for example, in the Donbas, like CCTV cameras and so on. Of course, during moments of geopolitical tension, you have an increase of attacks or interference with space systems. And then in my research, I tried to investigate whether there were other cyber operations against the space sector as part of the conflict, and I found, uh, 161 cyber operations on both sides. So there’s definitely a target on satellites back.

Speaker B: Somebody is trying to give you a picture. Somebody is trying to send you a signal. There is a message that is occurring in all of this, isn’t there? Because if if somebody is intimidating a satellite, if somebody is carrying out a cyber attack, they’re not doing it for no reason, are they?

Speaker C: Yeah, it’s a good comment because a lot of those, for example, cyber operations, most of them are not destructive, so most of them have limited impact. So there’s a lot of strategic signaling. It’s a lot of interest from hacktivists also to target satellites or the space sector because it’s kind of seen as an ultimate target or something that could be cool to do and that would generate media attention, even if their operations don’t have any kind of impact on space operations. So you have a few attacks that are very sophisticated and have impact, but most of them don’t really have any effect on the battlefield for long periods of time.

Speaker B: The researcher Clémence Poirier from the Swiss University’s ETH Zurich on intimidation tactics that bear an uncanny similarity to the ongoing incidents that we’ve seen both Russian and Chinese ships use to damage undersea communication cables. The extension of that activity to space has been ongoing. In January 2007, China successfully destroyed one of its own defunct weather satellites for the missile in a major anti-satellite test. As Poirier pointed out, a similar tactic used by the Russians immediately before the Ukraine war started led to a debris field that forced monitoring satellites to take evasive action. The 2007 Chinese test was not the first time anti-satellite capability has been demonstrated. In September 1985, the United States destroyed the Solwind P78-1 satellite with an ASM-1 F-135 anti-satellite missile that was released by an F-15 Eagle. The plane was flying at the speed of Mach 0.9 and an altitude of 11.6 kilometers. The satellite was orbiting at 555 kilometers above the Earth. Perhaps more alarming than this kinetic capability is the potential for the satellite networks that we increasingly depend upon to be interfered with by cyber operations. Appoint Tom Pace, a former United States Marine and the founder of the cybersecurity company Netrise Lakes.

Speaker E: It seems most people are saying that most future conflict is at least going to have some component of space involved. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen because that will be a disaster for us all. Number one, all satellites have to communicate with what’s known as like a ground air station. You know, there’s some infrastructure on the ground that they’re communicating with. And there’s what’s known as like an uplink that is essentially the invisible channel that it uses to receive information and update itself or whatever. And there’s certainly been, there’s certainly units within the federal government who are responsible for assessing the probability and likelihood of satellites to be compromised using various approaches. I mean, you have electromagnetic pulses, you have kinetic weapons, you have any number of things that could be used. I mean, for certain satellites, I mean, we have aircraft that can reach certain levels of satellites depending on how high or low they are in orbit. So there’s a number of ways that you could knock things out of the sky. I’m sure someone somewhere has done something in space that the public’s not privy to. But here’s hoping it never gets that far because the world relies on that infrastructure in a very significant way for any number of things.

Speaker B: So what you’re saying is you can hack a satellite. If you’re hacking a satellite, what do you want to achieve? What’s the aim?

Speaker E: I mean, you want to remove whatever the set of capabilities are that that satellite is providing to whoever is reaping the benefit. So, you had whenever, you know, Russia invaded Ukraine and that whole thing kicked off, forgive me if I get the details not perfect, but essentially Russia did something that made ViaSat just not possible. Like that infrastructure was basically taken down. And so, if you’re using a satellite phone and you had a ViaSat subscription, that phone was a brick, that phone did you no good. Then Starlink came around and was able to be more resilient to those types of attacks for whatever reason. Or you might want to knock a satellite out of the sky or, you know, cause a denial of service attack against it that is like a GPS satellite. Or you might want to knock out a satellite that’s broadcasting TV channels because you want that portion of the population to not have rapid access to information for whatever reason. I mean, it just depends what your goals are and what those satellites are providing, whether or not you would want to remove their ability to do what they’re doing.

Speaker B: Okay, so would you be able— you’ve mentioned that there’s this huge flow of information that satellites are coming up with. Would you be able to be able to poison that flow of information? Would you be able to distort that flow of information, give out false parameters and false analysis information?

Speaker D: Sure.

Speaker E: There was a recent story around— I can’t remember. I think it was like cell phone power satellites or satellites that were owned and operated by the big mobile carriers, but they found out that everything was being communicated in plain text. Basically. And so, I think the assumption was everything was encrypted. That wasn’t true, and so then you would have to imagine what other assumptions have we been making that maybe aren’t true. So, the challenge would be you’d have to determine is there some level of integrity checking going on between the messages being sent and the messages being received. That’s a normal part of modern networking, but if you were able to somehow spoof certain things and make a satellite receiver believe it was something that it wasn’t, you would be able to essentially man-in-the-middle that traffic just like you can man-in-the-middle any traffic and then manipulate the payloads and have it say something that’s happening that isn’t happening.

Speaker B: And as NetRise’s Tom Pace, an expert on the security of the internet control systems that run our lives due to his experience at the US Department of Energy, adds, it’s a conflict that is becoming increasingly perilous.

Speaker E: Is my assumption. So, and there’s also just this element of mutually assured destruction in outer space, which is, I mean, we have the most space infrastructure by far. It’s not even close. One has to imagine, I mean, I think we’re the only country with a Space Force. Maybe China has one now. I’m frankly just not sure. They probably do actually. But we almost certainly have the most advanced space military group So it would seem to be unwise for some other nation state to target our space infrastructure, knowing that the response would probably be not in kind.

Speaker B: Why is a Space Force then, Tom? What is this Space Force? It’s not lots and lots of science fiction-like devices, is it?

Speaker F: Well, I mean, Space Force is just a branch of the Air Force currently.

Speaker E: It’s a subset of the Air Force. Remains to be seen if it ends up getting its own, its own branch of the military. Currently, that’s not the case. I mean, I just think, I mean, Space Force is just a set of people in a mission that is distinct, you know, so that you can have a group of people that are focused on a particular area of operations, right? It’s the same reason we have a Navy.

Speaker B: But what I was asking was, what sort of vehicle? What does it look like? Are these drones? Are these very high-altitude airplanes? Are they— what does a Space Force look like?

Speaker E: Well, I mean, I don’t know that you’re not— you’re getting into a territory I think that is probably not known by anyone publicly. I don’t know that they have a well-defined set of like vehicles in that sense. I mean, there is like some Boeing space vehicles that are, you know, well-known and established out there, but all the vehicles that are moving up and down through space are SpaceX now.

Speaker B: NetRise’s Tom Pace and his echoing of the Cold War phrase mutually assured destruction regarding attacks on satellites was not the only time it has been mentioned. Several of those interviewed for the CSRI report mentioned electromagnetic pulse weapons, a terrifying new development of weapon systems based on a discovery that a side effect of nuclear weapons was a pulse of energy that will wipe out all electrical systems, including the power grid. It’s something that the US in particular is very worried about., and it has set in place measures to upgrade its military communications network to proof itself against such threats. Just how lethal they can be to satellites and ground infrastructure has been warned about by William Fortune, an expert on warfare and the author of the apocalyptic book One Second After, now being made into a film about the immediate aftermath of an EMP attack. Fortune is one of the world’s leading experts on EMP.

Speaker D: Let’s start at the beginning. EMP, electromagnetic pulse, for some of your listeners who might not be up on it, is created by detonating a small nuclear weapon out in space 200 miles up. When the weapon explodes, it sets up an electrostatic discharge called the Compton effect, which cascades down to the Earth’s surface. It’s an electrostatic discharge Once it hits the wiring, the millions of miles of wiring out there, it feeds into the power grid, shorts off major stations, and also blows power lines off, off the pylons. So there was a Department of Energy study about 10 years back that said 5 years after such an event, 80% of our power grid would still be offline. That’s catastrophic.

Speaker B: So why are we worried about this now? If it’s been around for, as you say, since 1962, then that’s about 60 years or so that we’ve known about this. Why is it suddenly coming to people’s attention?

Speaker D: Well, I call it the expectation normality. Everything worked yesterday. I mean, when you got up today, for example, where did your water come from? Question to you: where’d the water go?

Speaker B: The tap.

Speaker E: The tap.

Speaker B: It always comes in the tap, Bill.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, it’s that magical tap that we all have in our house. It worked yesterday, expectation, normality, it works today, it’s gonna work tomorrow. That’s the scary part of this. We’ve known about it, but we’ve sort of been whistling in the dark. And the same way basically with nuclear weapons. It will be 80 years come August that the one— the two only times that a nuclear weapon was used in combat killed at least a quarter of a million people. For 80 years we’ve been stockpiling these weapons, but we’re always saying, no, no, no, we’re never going to use it. The Russians are never going to use it. The North Koreans are never going to use it. Well, how long are we going to go like that? Another 80 years, or maybe tomorrow.

Speaker B: So what you’re saying is that— and I’ve been speaking to a number of military experts about this who are saying that they are worried about people using a limited nuclear device. Obviously, it’s not going to have the impact that the nuclear device may have if it’s dropped on the ground, but when detonated in the atmosphere, As you say, it will wipe out the power grid.

Speaker D: Yeah, you know, I suspect that you might have been, uh, a kid during the Cold War. I mean, I was. I was born in 1950. And throughout the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, it was called Mutual Assured Destruction. Man, I love that acronym. MAD for Mutual Assured Destruction. Russians hit us, we hit them. We were always thinking in those days of massive hundreds, thousands of missiles hitting. Well, EMP is a game changer and has been all along. Worst case scenario for the United States is only three: you detonate a weapon over eastern, central, western United States. One second after— title of the book, but it’s also real— one second after, everything starts to shut down. And then I’ll pull down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Where did your water come from? Well, food supply— average town only has about 20 days worth of food on hand. The trucks aren’t running anymore, gas stations aren’t working anymore, this isn’t working, medication isn’t working. All of these factors together start creating a massive die-off within a matter of weeks.

Speaker B: The EMP expert William Fortune on an EM pulse attack, and as he says, it would be mutually assured destruction. Such consequences are not lost on those developing offensive systems in space. Many of those we spoke to mentioned other more conventional types of weapons that could be deployed without inflicting such massive global damage. Two very surgical technologies in particular stood out. Lasers, and high-intensity radio frequency guns, a glorified microwave oven that can fry all of the circuitry that have been hit by overloading electronic circuits and causing them to either burn out or overheat. HRF guns are already being developed to take out drone swarms as a response to the use of the remote technology in the Ukraine. Both technologies are already being deployed by navies and armies around the world, with HIRF guns being spotted on naval vessels to deal with drones and incoming missiles, and the UK’s Royal Navy announcing its development of a £300 million system called Dragonfire, a laser-directed energy weapon that provides a new layer of ship self-defense against threats like drones, missiles, and aircraft. Dragonfire uses a high-power laser beam to heat and damage a target at long range, delivered with very precise tracking and beam control so that the energy stays on a small spot. Demonstrations have shown accuracy sufficient to hit a target the size of a £1 coin at about 1 kilometer, which is a key to making the weapon effective without enormous power. So why? Why has space suddenly become this contested— well, space? As ever, the answer is depressingly simple. Space is power and riches. Here’s Netrice’s Tom Pace again.

Speaker E: One of our investors has an investment in another satellite company, and they use them for insurance adjustment purposes. They use them to take pictures and monitor big swaths of forests and national parks to attempt to predict where they would expect to see fires break out and stuff by, you know, the dryness of the environment and things like that. Yeah, I mean, there’s just countless opportunities to It’s a totally new paradigm. So we’re probably not even capable of properly understanding all of the use cases that are going to be available to us.

Speaker B: I mean, that’s going to be— that’s a bit of a shock to people, isn’t it? Because they think about satellites as being up there and remote. And to actually be providing information like that, I mean, you can use satellite data to actually work out whether crops are ripe or not and whether you should send in the combine harvesters. You can divine so much information from so far up.

Speaker E: 100%.

Speaker A: I mean, the federal government’s known this for a long time.

Speaker E: They created entire government agencies and military systems for it. You have, in the United States, you have the National Reconnaissance Office, you have the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, obviously you have NASA. It’s not been lost on certain elements of the federal government how important these things are. It’s just becoming— the technology has come down in cost so people can access it. The ability to attach yourself to a private space corporation like SpaceX— there’s others too— that allows you to get your private company payloads into orbit is something that just was not available to people. You’d have to somehow have, what, like some connection at NASA for a rocket that’s going to go up, what, once every 3 years or something crazy? And so, anytime you give people more the ability to transport more supply, in a capitalist economy at least, you’re going to get more demand just kind of automatically. And that’s what’s happening.

Speaker B: NetRise’s Tom Pace.. And as both he and the Zurich University researcher Clémence Boerrier have mentioned, interfering with that flow of data is of even more value than the last resort of taking out a satellite with more conventional weapons. A point realized by Estonia, one of the most technologically nimble countries in the world, which according to Paul Lias, the head of space at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, is why they can see cyber gold in the stars.

Speaker D: It might sound strange that why should a very small country with 1 million, 1.3 or 1.5 million people go to space. Actually it makes sense because one of the challenges Estonia and Estonian industry has been facing is that we don’t have that many products to export and to be on the high level in the supply chain. And what we have discovered in the space sector working together with European Space Agency, for example, is that space helps and motivates our industry to invest more into R&D activities. And not only our companies themselves, themselves, but also attract venture capital, for example. So we see that we can develop technology, and with this technology we can of course be more higher in the supply chains and be more efficient in what we are doing. So not only doing the subcontract manufacturing for others in Europe, for example, but be the owners of our own products and services. And of course If you are talking about the space domain, then it doesn’t mean always that we are developing scientific missions or launchers, but it’s also the spin-off effect, for example. How these space technologies could be used in other domains. For example, there have been examples of developing supercapacitors for the space domain, but today, of course, the main customer and the main market is not in space domain, but it’s in the automotive industry. So investing into space means that we are going to really develop the high-end technologies which can be used in other sectors on the ground. And then, of course, there is the other aspect, the spin-in effect. So how we can use the technologies what we have developed on ground, how we can use them in the space domain. For example, Estonia is very well known for cybersecurity, and when we were working on the Estonian space policy more than 6 years ago, then we were exactly looking for the right fit for Estonia. Because how should Estonia enter the space domain, for example, and should we compete with existing industry in Europe or US, which is— maybe not profitable. It was one of the questions, how to enter, what are the niche opportunities. And then we discovered that actually we are already very good and we are well established in IT and cybersecurity. And then we started to look into the area. So in which direction the cybersecurity market, also in the space domain, will develop. And together with the European Space Agency, For example, we started to work on the Estonian industry to get the cybersecurity experience also used in the space domain. So of course, if you’re now listening, then of course maybe 6 years ago, cybersecurity and space, I was heavily criticized about it because one of the questions back then, it was a very human and easy question. So why should someone attack the CubeSatellite. So what’s the economical benefit? And back then it was also a valid point. So what’s the value of the space services? What people did not realize is that how dependent actually we are on our daily lives. GNSS is one of the easiest examples. So for all the applications on our phone to deliver food and get the card, right? But now if you are in a crisis or in a war situation even in Europe, then you can see that all the operations starting from weather to drone attacks, they need data about to be aware of the situation or in which direction we should go until connectivity. So we can get information from the field and, or even not only during war but in times of crisis, for example heavy storms which, and due to that we have no connectivity. So with satellite connectivity it’s rather easy to set up networks in the area to establish connectivity. So I think, and so it also points now out that space services and space infrastructure both on ground and in space are attractive targets for someone who wants to mess up your daily life.

Speaker B: Estonia is very well known for making— for very deliberately electing to get involved in technology. They thought that as a nation, it’s all right, we don’t have huge amounts of raw materials, what can we do? What’s the key component about developing a high-tech economy? What’s the key component to get wanting to get involved in space?

Speaker F: What is it that you need?

Speaker D: Or what is it that you have? I think if you’re developing a technology industry, then the most important component is not the natural resources, but it’s the human. Resources, to have smart and educated people who are also very well motivated. For me, because just by my own example, because my life is very much connected with the Estonian space sector, and so when I was a small kid, then it was more— I was more fascinated in aviation, for example. It was a very cool era in my opinion, but somehow I ended up in the first Estonian student satellite team. Because it’s— how cool is that? You can really build the first Estonian satellite mission from scratch. And it was 2008 when we started the project. And it was basically a team who had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea about space technology, but we had this will and urge, okay, we want to do something cool. We started doing it and in 2013 we were able to launch it and it was a very successful mission. And it was successful because we had no one who helped us.

Speaker B: Paul Lias, the head of space at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, proving, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s immortal line, that while many of us are in the gutter, some of us are looking to the stars. Estonia is not alone in such lofty sentiments. Many have already begun to decry the spoiling of space. Dr. Bledwyn Bowen is a lecturer in international relations at Leicester University and the author of War in Space, and he says that we should really be pragmatic about why we ventured into space in the first place.

Speaker G: Well, space is used for military purposes and always has been from day one. So ever since Sputnik went up into space, it was more about its demonstration as the Soviet Union’s ability to launch nuclear weapons towards the United States rather than putting a radio beacon up in orbit. Similarly, the United States was able then to put spy satellites onto its long-range rockets and ICBMs to spy on the Soviet Union.. And what you get from the 1980s is an increased reliance on satellites for military systems to start targeting each other, especially long-range strike capabilities. So what you have today is that continued maturation of those technologies that first really came about in the 1980s in terms of tactically relevant space-based intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance systems. And what you also have is the spread of those technologies to non-Western militaries. So you have Russia and China who have modernized their militaries in the last 25, 30 years. The Russians picking up where the Soviet Union left off in the 1980s, because Russia went through quite a lot of economic distress in the ’90s and their old systems fell apart. But Russia’s rebuilt a lot of those, and China is modernizing its military power across the board., and its military space reconnaissance systems are part and parcel of that modernization and expansion. In terms of waging modern warfare, it’s not a done deal if you don’t have space support. It very much depends on the situation at hand, so, and, and the actual war that you’re talking about. So, for example, the United States still had a very tough time, putting it politely, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite having an unchallenged dominance of outer space, it still couldn’t beat the Iraqi insurgency indefinitely. It still could not defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. We’re still dealing with those problems now. Resistance is still ongoing because they managed to find ways to adapt to the way the Americans fight their wars and deploy their military forces and conduct long-range strikes or drone strikes. There are always countermeasures to the weapon systems you want to employ. And we’re seeing that a lot now in the Nagorno-Karabakh clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where, you know, you can have all the drones you want and all the satellites, but if you have good air defense systems, you can start swatting them out of the sky if you want. If you have the right sort of systems, you can also start denying your visibility to the enemy as well. Al Qaeda in the, in invasion of Afghanistan 2001, got very creative in hiding their forces from American space-based sensors, and made life increasingly more difficult for long-range precision weapons for the United States. It’s a different case, however, if you’re looking at, say, China versus America over Taiwan, perhaps, where there’s a greater dependency on satellite support systems for waging maritime and air warfare against a better-equipped adversary that also has its own space systems, but there are still always options and adaptations that you can have towards enemy space systems and also mitigations if you also lose your own satellite support systems as well. So some of the things I try to tease out in my book is, is to think through the push and pull of how dependent are you on space systems and when do you actually need to deny space support to the other side. And what mitigation measures can be in place to make sure that you can get by in a pinch without space systems. So I wouldn’t write off anyone just because they might have some problems in space. It can make life more difficult, but it’s not a done deal.

Speaker B: Who actually owns space?

Speaker G: What governs what people are after in space? Well, nobody owns space, so there’s no territory that’s owned by by any state, and it’s not the right of any state or authority to portion out any territory in space. So when it comes to governing outer space, the only things that’s written down on paper really is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and then 3 other subtreaties that are building on, on various principles in the Outer Space Treaty. And that sort of sets the broader principles and the broader legal philosophy around providing access to space for all, or the right of access to space for all, for space exploration and peaceful purposes. But it also does not contravene the right of states to defend themselves according to Article 51 of the UN Charter. So it’s, it’s very loose, it’s a very broad framework, and the only things that are sort of properly outlawed is the appropriation or claiming of territory. So you can’t make a sovereign claim on any territory. You can’t place weapons of mass destruction, loosely defined, in Earth orbit or on celestial bodies like the Moon or asteroids. And you can’t build military installations on celestial bodies like the Moon and asteroids or any other planet. So, so that in a nutshell is sort of the international legal framework around outer space activities. And it was basically a fairly easy one for the Soviets and the Americans to agree upon in 1967 because there was very little to be gained for either side in trying to put any military installations on the moon. It really wasn’t that relevant, and it still isn’t that relevant in military strategic terms today. It’s— the moon is pretty much relevant for science and exploration still. The Moon Treaty, or the Moon Agreement, which was put forward in 1979, hasn’t really been ratified and even signed by most countries in the world. And that was a treaty that was unpopular because it tried to resolve the problem of how to equitably distribute the potential resources of the Moon when only very few states have the capability to do so. And that is a debate we’re seeing now with all the high hype and hot air now about lunar resources or asteroids. But we have the United States, Luxembourg, and possibly China who have written domestic laws which will allow companies to go to the moon or the asteroid and, and take the minerals or regolith and then sell it in those states. So they don’t claim the territory, but they can sell what they find.

Speaker B: So this is mining of the moon, mining of asteroids.

Speaker G: That’s what we’re beginning to talk about now. Well, so some people are beginning to talk about, which I think is very premature because nobody knows what the real bounties of the moon are, if there are any to be had, and it’s still massively expensive to get there. So it’s one of the few areas where the legal discussions are far in advance of the actual problem actually needing to be resolved.

Speaker B: So in that makes sense. It’s good. I mean, they are talking about helium-3 on the moon, aren’t they?

Speaker G: Oh, they’ve been talking about that for a generation already. So, I mean, there’s nothing significantly changed that makes it more accessible now. And the helium-3 bubble burst a while ago. So now it’s about utilizing the lunar regolith to make rocket fuel for rovers and other space probes that might launch from the moon. So you only need to send them to the moon and then refuel them at the moon, which is far cheaper than giving them more fuel if they want to go to Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune or the outer planets, for example. What is regolith?

Speaker D: The soil, the surface matter.

Speaker G: And we can make fuel out of that? Well, that’s some scientific sort of proposals anyway. It’s not been proven, but if you can distill hydrogen and oxygen from what you find on the lunar surface, then you can theoretically make rocket fuel out of synthesizing, so mixing the compounds. But that’s— this is very much scientific exploration. This is not stuff that’s relevant for the global political economy or military power. It’s very much science and exploration, their sideshows, their prestige. It’s not actually altering, you know, the balance of power on Earth because it’s still so expensive to do anything in space, and we still don’t know enough about what the moon is actually made of to know whether there’s anything worth actually mining on a large economic scale there. Well, it’s cheese, isn’t it? Yeah, I don’t think Wallace ever figured out what sort of cheese it tasted like in the end.

Speaker B: Dr. Bledwyn Bowen, a lecturer in international relations at Leicester University and the author of War in Space. On the competition for raw power in the skies above our heads. It’s a battle that in a sense was foreseen at the start of the superpower space race of the 1960s, when legislators must have felt a little surreal debating the subject of who owned space and who had rights to it. Here’s Professor Stephen Freelander, the University of Western Sydney in Australia, from an interview for Password in 2020. On owning space. Freelander is also the co-chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which discusses the exploration, exploitation, and utilization of space resources.

Speaker H: There are 5 treaties, but they, they have quite a few fundamental principles around the fact that space can’t be colonized The fact that there’s an overall notion of peacefulness, peaceful uses of space. There are limitations on certain types of weapons. There’s a liability regime if things go wrong and there’s collisions. There’s a responsibility regime so that the UK is responsible for all of its citizens’ actions in space and what they do in space. You know, fundamental principles that work really well. Cooperation and taking account of others’ interests and all of that.

Speaker A: So those treaties—

Speaker H: and so that was the 1967, we know it as the Outer Space Treaty, it’s got a longer name, and that’s a fundamental framework principle treaty. Like the Geneva Conventions are for warfare, like the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea is for the law of the sea, this is the fundamental one with the fundamental principles. The subsequent 4 treaties to essentially add some flesh to that. The last of those treaties was in ’79. We know that as the Moon Agreement, and that was a treaty about mining the moon. So the discussions that are sexy now were also on the agenda then, and that really highlighted this notion of how do we get the benefits, because only a few people could actually do that. And in that treaty, through weight of numbers with all these newly independent countries. It says, you know, if we set up a regime to exploit these resources, we have to do it safely and sustainably, and benefits somehow have to be shared on an equitable basis amongst everybody. And those discussions were going on, because it’s all politics, at exactly the same time that the same discussions were going on with the same diplomats about mining the deep seabed in the Law of the Sea. So the Moon Treaty is 1979 and the Law of the Sea Treaty is 1982, and even though there’s 3 years difference, they’re essentially simultaneous, and the negotiations for them were simultaneous, and the same people were going from meeting to meeting. And so the same issues come up in the Law of the Sea, and the Law of the Sea also says, sure, if you’re going to mine the deep seabed, You’ve got to do it safely, sustainably, and you’ve got to share the benefits. And so exactly the same thing happened in both treaties. The big boys and girls said, OK, well, we’re not going to sign up because we don’t believe— we’re spending all the money, effort, R&D, etc. Why should we share the benefits? Even though the underlying notion is about cooperation, but geopolitics, it was all about geopolitics and ideological logical differences.

Speaker B: So in terms of those countries that haven’t signed up then, I understand it’s the big players that haven’t signed up.

Speaker H: So the UK, the US, the Russia. Correct, correct. To the Moon Agreement. In fact, there’s only— there, that group. The US, Russia, China. There’s only 18 countries that have signed the Moon Agreement, right?

Speaker A: Ratified it. Including my country, Australia.

Speaker H: So I’m very proud of my country. So the Moon Agreement, and the United States has already said this, they don’t regard that as part of any basis for discussion in the discussions that I’ll be moderating, and there’s lots of other preliminary discussions going on. But there are lessons to be learnt from some of the things there. So we don’t have any more treaties since ’79 because that treaty brought this raw difference, right? But we have lots of— since then, you know, technology is racing ahead, so we have lots of other types of instruments that are not traditional law binding, but they’re codes of conduct, they’re guidelines, they’re UN principles about a whole range of different things that— and law, especially when it comes to space, it’s all about regulating behavior and leading to behavioral norms which are responsible responsible to allow us to move sustainably forward.

Speaker B: Professor Stephen Freelander at the University of Western Sydney in Australia and the co-chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. But is this really about ideas like Elon Musk’s and others of setting up colonies on Mars and the moon? Have we not really evolved beyond the depressing end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove? Where even in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse, the characters discuss a post-nuclear winter conflict? Perhaps, but one of the most compelling attractions of space for our modern age is ironically due to its harsh conditions. It is perfect for the building of data centers to develop massive AI processing without some of the attendant water and energy issues. Space is cold, so the cooling needs of current data centers would not be a problem. The data centers could be solar powered. Solar panels in space are massively more efficient than they are on Earth. A solar panel on an orbiting data center is 5 times more efficient than a solar panel on Earth. It is 50% efficient. Sounds like science fiction. So much of what you’ve been listening to once was, and data centers are already happening. Over a year ago, Lumen Orbit, now renamed as Star Cloud, announced its plans for data centers in space and has received funding to do that. Its solar panels are apparently 90% efficient. Developments that make securing space even more important. There is though an issue that might go beyond computer viruses. We are throwing so much material into space that 2 satellites now come down a day, and we work on the principle that what goes up must come down. But that’s not true of biological microbes that we send up on our devices. According to Bill Miller, a former NASA scientist now with the commercial company Deep Space, we could be sending alien life forms out into deep space.

Speaker F: The singular reality is that we’ve become what’s called an agent of panspermia. Let me explain because it sounds like a complicated term, but it’s not really. One of the many theories of the origin of life on Earth is that it’s come from outer space. I think many people are familiar with that. And of course we don’t know. It is possible that the planet was seeded by pre-existing life that is coming in from outer space, and then the planet, the theory is, was a fertile location for life. So life may be abundant out there. And it starts from either multiple places around the universe or perhaps even just one central location and disseminates outward. And one of the reasons that this is a very prominent theory is because of the mystery of why we can’t find any life. Scientists for decades and decades have believed that life is prominent throughout the universe simply because on a statistical basis spaces. The hundreds of trillions of stars and the even many more exoplanets mean life should be everywhere, and yet life is nowhere to be found. Panspermia is the thought that life has come from outside. Now we are doing it. How did it happen? Well, it began from the very first moment we started to put spacecraft and propel it up into space.

Speaker E: Here’s why.

Speaker F: NASA was serious about the possibility of sending germs out into space. They didn’t think it was a good idea right from the very beginning. The engineers were aware that this was a problem. And so they developed what were considered highly vaunted clean rooms. These clean rooms, they felt, were utterly sterile. So they would go around with their little swabs and they would culture on these plates and look for microbes. And then they would report back to their supervisors, the spacecraft is clear, no problem. Well, here’s what’s happened, Peter. In the ensuing decades, we now have genomic techniques that are identifying forms of microbial life that were completely invisible. So how inaccurate were this old culture technique?

Speaker D: Me.

Speaker C: Wildly inaccurate.

Speaker F: Not just a little bit. In fact, we probably were not culturing 10% of the total microbes that were in and on those spacecraft. We weren’t being negligent at that time. We simply didn’t know better. We didn’t have the technology to know better. When I was in medical school, I was taught that the insides of our body, except for our our guts were sterile. My pancreas, my spleen, my brain, these are all sterile compartments. Well, now we know that’s not true. That’s not because of cultures. That’s because of these new enhanced genomic techniques. So inadvertently we have been propelling microbes out into space. Here’s Here’s the issue though. Back then we didn’t understand how hardy microbes are. They’re just unbelievably resilient. There’s a whole category of life that’s called extremophile microbial life. There is no nook or cranny on Earth, going down as many miles as we can dig, to the very top of the stratosphere, that does not have its companion microbial life. When you go down many miles beneath the Earth’s surface where there’s no light, where there’s no oxygen, it was long believed that no microbe could survive. Well, microbes are so intelligent with respect to their metabolic processes that they actually live off electron flows. They live off uranium emissions, radioactive emissions. They have all sorts of tools in their kit to survive that are very unlike the way we humans conduct our own metabolism. They can also go into spore states. These are dormant states in which their metabolism drops to virtually nothing. So you can combine a microbe who has a life cycle that can be measured in 1,000 years with a spore state. And a recent paper talks about a retrieval of a set of microbes from strata that are 100 million years old. Rock sediment that’s 100 million years old. There were living microbes that could be found. They could be brought, re-germinated, and brought back to life. So, We sent microbes into space without knowing. We sent microbes into space that are incredibly hardy without realizing. Now it’s different, Peter.

Speaker G: Here’s why.

Speaker F: Now we’re doing it on purpose. Two ways. One is, we have private industry, and I’m not against private industry in the slightest. It’s just that the rules can be different. So, remember the Tesla car ad? The astronaut in the red Tesla, and it was— and on the dashboard it says, “Don’t panic.” It was brilliant advertising. It was magnificent. But Tesla said right off the bat, they don’t care whether or not it was sterile.

Speaker B: They didn’t even try. Bill Miller, the NASA scientist now with deep space on human microbes. The human debris that we don’t think about that may be beating us to the stars. Cyber warfare, germ warfare, wherever humans go there is always conflict. When will we ever learn? We’ll leave you musing on that while you look up at the stars. Password is brought to you on Resonance FM by Future Intelligence. Research for this program was based on a report for the Cybersecurity Research Institute. The program was presented and written by me, Peter Warren, and edited by the imperturbable Blue Buffery. Password is now also available as a TV program via TechTV, www.techtv.live. If you’d like to know more about the war in space, go to the Future Intelligence website. Www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening and goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.