As the new space race heats up, Australia is among a handful of Indo-Pacific middle powers hanging on satellites for civil and military capabilities and eyeing new commerce.
The falling cost of launching satellites is stoking competition for outer space. It’s brought lunar missions back after 50 years and sparked talk of another space arms race.
Following NASA’s 2022 uncrewed Artemis I mission, India and Russia raced to touch down first on the Moon’s south pole; only Chandrayaan-3 landed this August.
Fears over an arms race in space trebled after Ronald Reagan aired his ‘Star Wars’ plan to neutralise the Soviet’s first-strike nuclear threat. Today, UN members are divided over rules to prevent an arms race in space and who is primarily militarising space.
Duncan Blake, a space law researcher and former RAAF legal officer, says it’s a “conceptual trap” to think of space in terms of ‘peace’ or ‘war’. How can a domain that was always militarised with dual-use technologies undergo an arms race?
“The reality is that cooperation, competition and conflict are concurrent – while the US supplies arms to Ukraine to defeat Russia, it concurrently cooperates on the International Space Station. So, the phrase ‘arms race’ is unhelpful, in my view,” Blake tells The Mandarin.
The battle over low Earth orbit (LEO) affects each nation’s bird’s-eye view of Earth for imagery, positioning, surveillance, transport and intelligence. Thousands of satellites and millions of bits of junk orbit Earth at altitudes between 300 km to 1,000 km at around 28,000 km/h. At that speed, destructive direct ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) missiles from Earth don’t ‘shoot’ a satellite down but wait in orbit for impact that creates a cloud of debris that pollutes Earth’s orbit for 40 years.
Several counter space methods have been tested surrounding Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, including kinetic DA and in-orbit ASATs; non-kinetic lasers; electronic warfare (EW) radio frequency (RF) jamming; and cyberattacks. Only destructive ASAT tests generate space debris.
DA-ASAT is menacing, but Blake says “debris is the greater danger”.
The US and Russia have tested ASAT technologies since the 1960s. Russia’s latest test in November 2021 used its modern Nudol DA-ASAT system to destroy a Soviet-era satellite; the US said it created 1,500 bits of debris that endangered astronauts on the ISS. In 2020, Russia’s Kosmos 2,543 satellite “injected” a new object into orbit that the US alleged was an in-orbit ASAT test.
China tested its first DA-ASAT intercept in 2007, which NASA estimated created 35,000 shards larger than 1cm. The space agency currently tracks 25,000 objects orbiting Earth larger than 10 cm but estimates there are 100 million pieces larger than 1mm.
India in 2019 became the fourth and last nation to test DA-ASAT before the US-led moratorium on destructive ASAT tests was adopted by Australia, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, the EU, and South Korea. Australia in 2021 kicked off Defence Project 9358 with a view to rapidly develop EW capabilities.
LEO is dominated by US satellites. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, of the 6,700 operating satellites orbit Earth – 4,529 were US, 590 were Chinese, 174 were Russian, and 1,425 were run by other nations. Some 15% of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs’ register of objects put into space since 1957 were added in 2022.
Since 2019, SpaceX has put around 4,900 Starlink satellites into LEO around 550 km from Earth. The constellation is set to grow to 42,000. SpaceX chief Elon Musk has argued there is room for “tens of billions” of satellites in LEO. But doing so safely is another question.
Jeremy Hallett, chairman of Space Industry Association of Australia, says Musk’s calculation is “technically true in a perfect mathematical model” but ignores the effect of atmospheric drag, degrading orbits and imprecise measurements.
“Our sensing capability on the ground and in orbit is not yet accurate enough to tell us exactly where all these objects are,” Hallett says.
“Launching lots of objects into that space when you’re not very confident exactly where they all are is not a very good recipe for managing that traffic effectively.”
In October, a Chinese military satellite came within what was thought to be hundreds of metres from an Australian satellite in October.
“That’s what we detected from the ground 400 kilometres away — two objects travelling at 14,000 kilometres an hour. There was no one standing next to it, watching,” says Hallett.
The hack on Viasat as Russia invaded Ukraine demonstrated satellites don’t need to be destroyed to knock out communications. Memory-wiping malware bricked about 40,000 Viasat modems in Ukraine and Europe. Cyber is attractive because it’s more difficult to attribute than ASAT, although the US and its allies publicly pinned it on the Russian military.
Hallett reckons cyberattacks offer nations the most favourable way to disrupt satellite capabilities.
“It would be perceived as less alarming than if a satellite was taken out by an ASAT but the effect would the same,” he says.
Russia’s UN ambassador in October accused the US of using commercial satellites for military purposes and threatened that “quasi-civil infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation”, citing the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans the use of weapons of mass destruction in space. The US National Reconnaissance Office in 2022 signed multibillion-dollar contracts with satellite companies that provided surveillance imagery of Ukraine.
Bec Shrimpton, defence, strategy and national security director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says the Russian UN ambassador’s comments were “entirely disingenuous and cannot be taken seriously”.
She adds the Outer Space Treaty does establish that “the responsible actor regarding any asset in space is effectively the nation state that it belongs to”. In that sense, shooting down any US satellite could draw the US into a war.
“[It’s] harder and harder to distinguish that as commercial launches from one country put payloads from other nation states and commercial and civil actors into space,” says Shrimpton.
A kinetic attack on the Starlink constellation is problematic. As Tara Moss, a legal officer at the UK Royal Air Force recently noted, striking one Starlink satellite wouldn’t degrade its performance yet taking out hundreds of Starlink satellites would create debris on a scale that would render LEO inaccessible for decades.
But Russia’s EW attempts against a constellation are limited, too. SpaceX reportedly neutralised Russia’s jamming attacks in a software update that dynamically altered its electromagnetic posture.
Hallett thinks there is an argument for Australia to have DA-ASAT capabilities as a deterrent. Blake favours other counter-space weapons and says constellations significantly undermine the benefit of DA-ASAT.
“I think that DA-ASAT is a small and diminishing deterrent whose deterrent impact has always been questionable anyway,” says Blake. “I don’t think Australia should be developing a DA-ASAT capability. Having said that, a ballistic missile defence capability is definitely worth having, and those two things are difficult to distinguish. Other counter-space weapons are the way to go.”.
In October, Australia and the US signed the anticipated Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA), which allows the US to launch US-licensed space launch vehicles and satellites from Australia.
Hallett says the TSA opens the door for Australia to solve bottlenecks in the global launch market.
“There’s a huge backlog of small satellite manufactured wanting to launch and other small launch providers, there’s limited locations they can launch from which are geographically convenient for physics reasons and geopolitical reasons. You know we’re a nice, stable democracy.”
