PassW0rd – 14 January 2026 (Space Cold War 2)

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Speaker C: Hello and welcome to Password with me, Peter Warren. And in this month’s programme, 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 didn’t mention one of the most alarming developments: a rapidly escalating space war that has seen cyberattacks and physical intimidation of satellites by other satellites. A report from the Cybersecurity Research Institute, a sister organization of Future Intelligence and Tech TV, which make The Password program, has uncovered a systematic attempt by foreign powers to attack satellite systems and communications as part of a new cyber conflict to control this vital 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 coordinated attempts to demonstrate an ability to threaten vital global communication systems. That a conflict has been ongoing has been starkly underlined on the internet YouTube program UnHerd by the economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren. Malmgren, who is a former advisor to President George W. Bush, is also one of the foremost experts on Arctic politics. And according to her, this space war is the reason for the US’s saber rolling over Greenland and Donald Trump’s unsettling demands for the US to own the country?

Speaker D: I think the number one reason is never mentioned, and that is space. So you’ve gotta understand that we are in a massive space race between the United States and China in particular, but Russia as well. And why? Because space represents unlimited energy, unlimited resources, and unlimited internet connectivity. Now to do space, you need to be in the Arctic because in simple terms, if Earth is spinning, this part is stationary. And so all of the communications that really matter, especially for strategic security purposes, from the mega constellations of satellites, the data feeds to really one main connection point. And that is Svalbard in Norway, which is inside the Arctic Circle. And that is why when you go to Svalbard, it’s mobbed with NATO ships. And if you recall, recall in recent years about this, we’ve had a number of attacks on the subsea cables there because the place where the satellites connect to ground stations is also where they connect to the subsea cables. So if you want your phone to work so that Uber Eats actually functions, you need that umbilical cord of data flowing from space around the world via these subsea cables. So the Arctic has become central to the global digital economy. Now, We’ve just appointed in the United States Jared Isaacson to run NASA. He has been crystal clear that space is no longer about just scientific discovery. It’s about strategic security dominance. And the Pentagon has said the most important warfighting domain is space. By the way, let’s not forget Ukraine is our first real space war because there’s no way Ukraine could manage the offensive or defensive actions without the help of Starlink, which is why the Chinese, for example, have said, well, we’re going to designate Starlink as a military entity, not a private company. And they’re building satellite networks that have the capacity to damage or destroy Starlinks. So suddenly space is central in every way.

Speaker C: The economist and Arctic politics expert Dr. Pippa Malmgren speaking on the YouTube channel UnHerd on the satellite motives behind the US’s war of words over Greenland. And as she says, it’s a battle that is all about data, hence the reason for attacks on undersea cables and attempts to jam that we have seen so much of in the Ukrainian war. And as she says, polar ice caps are an essential part of this. Clean skies, no radio noise, no light pollution, perfect for the data transmission into those cables Dr. Malmgren is talking about. But in a war, you can’t have that. You have to be able to interfere with that flow. As a result, we are now seeing attempts to jam ground stations, the hacking of satellites that are unprotected against cyber attacks because people never thought they could get to them, and physical attacks on the vital network of communication spacecraft orbiting our planet. Here’s Clémence Poirier, a senior researcher at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich University’s Center for Security Studies, one of Europe’s leading researchers on the issue.

Speaker A: There is an increase in hostile maneuvers, unwelcome maneuvers, unannounced maneuvers, but there is not fully yet a war in orbit. So us researchers, we like to define and categorize stuff, and we distinguish between the militarization of outer space, which is the 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 weapons and then space being used systematically in military operations since the Gulf War. So 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. Those tests, 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 a 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 debris, you can also grab an adversary satellite. So all those things are slowly developing. So there’s not really an armed conflict in space in the orbital environment, but might happen soon.

Speaker C: You seem to be caveating. You’re saying there isn’t a conflict yet. If 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.

Speaker E: I would feel as though somebody was trying to wind me up.

Speaker A: 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 cyber attacks against satellites or electronic warfare against satellites. So states are a bit preparing themselves for conflict in, in outer space right now.

Speaker C: But what frequency is this? How often does this occur? How often does one satellite circle another?

Speaker E: How often does one satellite put out its arm to try to intimidate another satellite?

Speaker A: 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, of 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 those things. So it’s not like daily occurrence. But this is something that they have to monitor with radar data to see what’s, 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 C: One assumes that this occurs at times when there’s some geopolitical tension on Earth, that the incidences of this sort of activity tends to reflect what’s going on back on the ground.

Speaker A: 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 the 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 this 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 a satellite network that was used by Ukrainian armed forces, which prevented them from using 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 161 cyber operations on both sides. So there’s definitely a target on satellite spec.

Speaker C: 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 somebody is intimidating the satellite, if somebody is carrying out a cyber attack, they’re not doing it for no reason, are they?

Speaker A: 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 activists 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.

Speaker C: The researcher Clémence Poirier from the Swiss university ETH Zurich, who spoke to me at the tellingly named Software Defined Space conference in the Estonian capital Tallinn near the Russian border on the intimidation tactics that bear an uncanny similarity to the incidents that have seen both Russian and Chinese ships damage undersea communication cables in the Baltic. The extension of that activity to space has been ongoing. In January 2007, China successfully destroyed one of its obsolete weather satellites with a missile in a major anti-satellite test. The Chinese missile had a noblehead and was the equivalent of an extremely high-speed Arrow. As Poirier pointed out, a similar tactic was used by the Russians immediately before the Ukrainian war had started and led to a debris field that forced battleground monitoring satellites to take evasive action. Though the 2007 Chinese test was not the first time that anti-satellite capability has been demonstrated. In September 1985, The United States destroyed its Solwind P-78-1 satellite with an anti-satellite missile fired by an F-15 Eagle fighter jet flying 7 miles above the Earth at just over 700 miles an hour. The satellite it hit was orbiting at 345 miles above the planet. Just as alarming as this missile capability Is the potential for the satellite networks that we increasingly depend on to be interfered with by cyber operations? A point Tom Pace, a former United States Marine and the founder of the cybersecurity company Netrise, makes.

Speaker F: Number one, all satellites have to communicate with what’s known as like a ground air station. There’s some infrastructure on the ground that they’re communicating with. And there’s what’s known as 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, uh, the world relies on that infrastructure in a very significant way for any number of things.

Speaker C: So what you’re saying is you can hack a satellite. If you’re hacking a satellite, what do you want to achieve?

Speaker E: What’s the aim?

Speaker F: You want to remove whatever the set of capabilities are that that satellite is providing to whoever is reaping the benefit. 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 any, if you were using, if you were 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, 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 C: Okay, so Tom, 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 poison that flow of information? Would you be able to distort that flow of information, give out false parameters and false analysis information?

Speaker F: Sure. You know, there was a recent story around, I think it was like cell phone tower satellites or, you know, satellites that were owned and operated by like the big mobile carriers. But they found out that everything was being communicated in plaintext, 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 of 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.

Speaker C: NetRise’s Tom Pace is an expert on the security of the internet control systems that run our lives because of his experience at the US Department of Energy. As Pace adds, the space war is becoming increasingly perilous.

Speaker F: There’s also just this element of, you know, mutually assured destruction in outer space. 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 C: 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, 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, 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 C: NetRise’s Tom Pace and his echoing of the Cold War phrase mutually assured destruction regarding attacks on satellites was not the only time that it has been mentioned. Several of those interviewed for the CSRI report mentioned electromagnetic pulse weapons weapons. A terrifying new development of weapon systems based on the discovery that a side effect of nuclear weapons was a pulse of energy that will wipe out all of the globe’s electrical systems, including our essential power grids. 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 Furchin, an expert on warfare and author of the apocalyptic book One Second After, now being made into a film about the immediate aftermath of electromagnetic pulse attack. Furchin is one of the world’s leading experts on EMP.

Speaker E: We’ll 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— millions of miles of wiring out there— it feeds into the power grid, shorts off major stations, and also blows power lines off the pylons. So there was the Department of Energy study about 10 years back that said 5 years after such an event, 80% of our power grid would still be off That’s catastrophic. 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? Well, I call it the expectation of normalcy. Everything was yesterday. I mean, when you got up today, For example, where did your water come from? What, from you? Where’d the water— the top, the top. It always comes from the top, Bill. Yeah, yeah, it’s that magical tap that we all have in our house. It worked yesterday, expectation, normality. It works today, it’s going to 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, 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. 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. How much longer are we going to go like that? Another 80 years? Or maybe tomorrow. So what you’re saying is that— 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. 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. Man, the 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 call on 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 C: The EMP expert William fortune on EMP attacks. 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 2 technologies in particular stood out: lasers and high-intensity radio frequency guns, another name for a glorified microwave oven that can fry all of the circuitry a HRF beam hits by overloading the 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 Ukrainian conflict. They are already being deployed by navies and armies around the world, with H.E.R.F. guns being spotted on naval vessels to deal with drones and incoming missiles. While the UK’s Royal Navy has also announced its development of Dragonfire, a laser-directed energy weapon that provides its ships with self-defense against threats like drones, missiles, and aircraft. Dragonfire uses a beam to heat and damage a target at long range. It’s delivered with very precise tracking and beam control so that the energy stays at a very small spot. Demonstrations have shown such accuracy that Dragonfire can hit a target the size of a pound coin at around found 1 kilometer away, a key to making the weapon effective without using enormous power. So why has space suddenly become this contested? As ever, the answer is depressingly simple: space is all about power and riches. Here’s NetRise’s Tom Pace again.

Speaker F: One of our investors has an investment and 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. 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 C: I mean, that’s going to be— that’s a bit of a shock to people, isn’t it? Because, you know, 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 G: 100%.

Speaker F: I mean, the federal government’s known this for a long time. You know, they created entire government agencies and military systems for it. You know, you have in the United States, you have the National Reconnaissance Office, you have the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Obviously, you have NASA. I mean, it’s not been lost on certain elements of the federal government how important these things are.

Speaker C: NetRise’s Tom Pace, and as both he and Zurich University researcher Clémence Poirier have mentioned, interfering with the flow of data is valued in the last resort of taking out a satellite with more conventional weapons.— a point realised by Estonia, one of the more technologically nimble countries in the world, which, says Paul Lias, the head of space at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, is because it can see cyber gold in the stars.

Speaker G: It might sound strange that why should a very small country with 1.3 or 1.5 1 billion people go to space. Actually, it makes sense because one of the challenges Estonia and the 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, 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 owners of our own products and services. And of course, if you’re talking about the space domain, then it doesn’t mean always that we are developing scientific missions or launchers, but it’s also spin-off effect, for example. All 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, 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. 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?

Speaker E: It was very—

Speaker G: it was one of the questions, how to enter, what are the niche of doing this. 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, I think also in the space domain, will develop. And together with the European Space Agency, then for example, we started to work on the civilian industry to get cybersecurity experience also used in the space domain. So Of course, if you’re now listening, then of course maybe 6 years ago, cybersecurity in 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 CubeSat elect? 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 how dependent actually we are on our daily lives. GNSS is one of the easiest examples of all the applications on our phone to deliver food and get the car 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 Due to that, we have no connectivity. With satellite connectivity, it’s rather easy to set up networks in the area to establish connectivity.

Speaker C: So I think—

Speaker G: and so it also points out that space services, space infrastructure, both on ground and in space, are attractive targets for someone who wants to mess up your daily life.

Speaker E: Estonia is very well known for making— very deliberately electing to get involved in technology. They thought that as a nation, it’s all right. 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? What is it that you need?

Speaker G: 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. 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. 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 C: Paulias, head of space at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, proving, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s 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 spoils toiling of space. Dr. Bledwyn Bowen is a lecturer in international relations at Durham University and the author of War in Space. He says that we should really be pragmatic about why we ventured into space in the first place.

Speaker B: 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 detection 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 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 was 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 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 C: Who actually owns space? What governs what people are after in space?

Speaker B: Well, nobody owns space. So there’s no territory that’s owned 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, 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 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 hype and hot to hear 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 take the minerals or regolith and then sell it in those states.

Speaker C: So they don’t claim the territory, but they can sell what they find So this is mining of the Moon, mining of asteroids, that’s what we’re beginning to talk about now?

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

Speaker B: 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. 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 C: The soil, the surface matter.

Speaker B: 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 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— 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, 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 C: Dr. Bledwyn Bowen, a lecturer in international relations at Durham University and the author of War in Space, on the competition for raw power in the skies above our heads. As Dr. Bowen says, the space race has always been about an arms race since Sputnik’s 1957 launch precipitated the US’s Corona satellite program. Since then, it’s become a free-for-all. So much so that in the last 2 months of 2025, South Korea, Iran, Taiwan, and Japan attempted to assert satellite capability. The South Korean satellite confirmed its successful launch with a signal to a South Korean ground station in Antarctica, while Japan and South have stated their aim of developing a satellite network that, from jamming by North Korea and China, fears shared by Taiwan. For Taiwan in particular, satellites have become increasingly vital due to fears over Chinese invasion. Several of the satellites it launched last year are intended to pick up signals of Chinese naval activity, a point made by Holmes Liao, senior advisor from Taiwan’s space agency, last December, who said ships had been habitually disabling their automatic identification systems. Here’s a quote: In the past, we have identified many incidents where Chinese ships, cargo ships or otherwise, they either turn off or they disguise into something else., or they spoofed their locations into a completely different area. Satellite surveillance would allow the Taiwanese to track those ships. It’s a battle that in a sense was foreseen at the start of the superpower space race of the 1960s when it must have felt a little surreal debating the subject of who owned space and who had rights to it. Here’s Professor Stephen Freeland at the University of Western Sydney in Australia from an interview for Password in 2020 on owning space. Freeland 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 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. Fundamental principles that work really well, and around cooperation and taking account of others’ interests and all of that. So those treaties— 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 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, 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 of voting with all these newly independent countries, it says 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— 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, 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 that come up in the Law of the Sea— and the Law of the Sea also says, sure, if you get— 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, okay, 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 differences.

Speaker C: 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.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker H: To the Moon Agreement. In fact, there’s only that— the US, Russia, China. There’s only 18 countries that have signed the Moon Agreement, right? Ratified it, including my country, Australia. 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 learned 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 to allow us to move sustainably forward. And so there’s a lot that— so a lot of those things might— they might not be traditional binding law, international law, but they actually have, you know, value and normative effect. And then in addition to that, more and more countries like your country, like my country, have national law because more and more private entities are engaging in space. So the UK, it has obligations under the Outer Space Treaty, it brings them into— it has to implement them, but it also wants to regulate you to make sure that what you’re doing meets with what the UK’s obligations are, but also what their industry guidelines and of course their national security is. There are lots of law, but clearly the technology races ahead. Law never keeps up with technology. It’s impossible, and it shouldn’t, because the technology moves. And so we need to try to supplement what we’ve got, build on these principles that serve us well. They’ve stopped there being wars in space. There’s, you know, space has essentially worked, albeit there are issues, many issues, So we need to build on that with more, you know, behavioral things. Whether they take the form of formal treaties is going to be very hard because in this geopolitical climate, to get a multilateral treaty on anything, not just space, is impossible, right? But that doesn’t mean we won’t get other types of understandings. And even just last year, the UN committee agreed— it took a long time, took them 7 or 8 years to agree them— principles about the sustainability of space. So we are moving forward. It’s slow. There are many agendas, difficult discussions, but in a sense we’ve got to get it right. And as I keep on saying until people get so bored, there’s a common interest in finding a way, notwithstanding that I hate you and you hate me terrestrially, and we are, quote unquote, competitors. It’s not in either of our interests to screw it up.

Speaker C: This is Stephen Freelander at the University of Western Sydney in Australia and co-chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space about who should do what in space. A debate that could be born as the US is trying to assert control over Greenland, which, as we heard from Dr. Malmgren, is pivotal to Earth satellites. As Dr. Malmgren pointed out, the new NASA chief, Jared Isaacman, a close friend of Elon Musk, says space is not about just scientific discovery, it’s about strategic security dominance. And the Pentagon has said the most important warfighting domain is space. So it’s not really about ideas like Elon Musk’s and others of setting up colonies on Mars and the moon? Begging the question, have we not really evolved beyond the depressing end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove film, where even in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse, the characters discuss a post-nuclear winter conflict? For as William Fortune said earlier, In the aftermath of a nuclear war, electromagnetic pulses would have permanently destroyed the world’s power grids. So it’s perhaps ironic that one of the most compelling attractions of space for our modern age is due to its harsh conditions. Yet that makes it perfect for the building of data centers to develop massive AI programs. 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 center is 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 effective than a solar panel on Earth. Sounds like science fiction, but so much of what you’ve been listening to once was. And data centers in space are already happening. Over a year ago, Lumen Orbit, now renamed as StarCloud, announced plans for data centers in space and has received funding to do that. According to StarCloud, data centers in space solve many of of the energy and cooling issues as we’ve discussed, because they can use solar panels to generate energy and the temperatures are wonderful for cooling. A solar array in space generates over 5 times the energy as the same array on Earth, said the company. So think about that. That’s a development that makes securing space even more important. Wherever humans go, there’s always conflict. When will we ever learn? We’ll leave you musing on that while you look up at the stars. Password is a Future Intelligence production for TekTV. The program was presented and written by me, Peter Warren, and sound edited and produced by the imperturbable Blue Buffery If you’d like to know more about the war in space, go to the Future Intelligence website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

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