Humanity’s Space Future: Conflict or Cooperation?
The future is unwritten, and a future of space cooperation and peaceful settlement remains possible.
The Apollo 17 mission in 1972 was the sixth and last time that humans set foot on the moon. Now, after a 52-year hiatus, NASA is planning a new generation of lunar missions. These will begin with Artemis II, currently scheduled for the fall of 2025, which will send four astronauts on a ten-day trip around the moon. Missions three to six will put astronauts on the surface and set up pieces of the Lunar Gateway space station. From there, the plan is for future missions to focus on setting up habitable settlements.
From the beginning, Artemis has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. By 2025, it will have burned through US$93 billion. The first mission, Artemis I, sent the uncrewed Orion spacecraft to orbit the moon, and several issues emerged—the Orion capsule’s heat shield did not break up as the engineers predicted and bolts on the craft experienced “unexpected melting and erosion” according to the mission’s audit. Smart money should probably bet on further delays.
The October issue of Scientific American featured an article by Sarah Scoles titled “Why Is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” During the Apollo years, Scoles explains, NASA was blessed with four percent of the US budget, whereas today it is lucky to get one percent. Space missions also tend to be more global affairs now—the Artemis program is a collaboration involving the European Space Agency, Canada, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates. And we haven’t actually travelled to the moon in decades, and while the basics of rocketry have remained the same, the technology is now more complex.
And with the Cold War long over, national urgency is not what it was during the Apollo years. As Scoles notes in her concluding paragraph:
The new way of going deep into space ultimately results in a safer, better-understood system that might meet with more public approval—at home and abroad. And besides, it’s always been true that we choose to do it because it’s hard—so what if it’s harder. And what is the rush? It’s not a race.
A fine sentiment that leaves me with a question: China has announced an ambition to get astronauts to the moon by 2030. Is this a problem? No, according to Cathy Koerner, associate administrator in NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, who echoes Scoles: “We’ve already been to the moon, [so] we already beat China to the moon.” But how does this square with NASA chief Bill Nelson’s statement earlier this year that the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the moon. During an interview with NPR in May, Nelson stated:
I don’t want [the Chinese] to get to the South Pole, which is a limited area we think the water is. It’s pockmarked with craters. And there are limited areas that you can land on the South Pole. I don’t want them to get there and say, “[T]his is ours. You stay out.” It ought to be for the international community, for scientific research. So that’s why I think it’s important for us to get there first.
China’s government claims the purpose of its space program is peace and research. Of course, NASA says the same. The moon also holds resources such as titanium and a larger amount of Helium-3 than is found on Earth (though it is still extremely diffuse). Helium-3 is currently used for medical imaging, but one day, it could be the fuel of fusion reactors (some private companies are already making plans). So perhaps scepticism on both sides is warranted.
Testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee in December 2023, Dr Greg Autry (co-author of Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier) and Professor Michelle Hanlon (executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at Ole Miss) were asked by Congressman Mike Collins: “What is the worst-case scenario if China wins the race for space mining, and how will that impact the United States?” Autry replied:
I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but if China wins the race in space, we’ve ceded the entire strategic high ground militarily and ceded the entire economic future, and the United States will be relegated to the backwater position for the rest of human history. This is an existential point.
To which Hanlon added:
I agree with Dr Autry. The Chinese will have the opportunity to block our access not just to the moon but to all of space, and humanity’s future lies in space.
This certainly sounds like a far more pressing matter than simply landing boots on the moon for national prestige. But if that is the case, why is NASA allotted such a small percentage of the US budget? Do policymakers not believe any of this? After all, for the past decade or so there have been large-scale Western efforts to isolate China on things like chips, telecommunications, and electric vehicles (EVs). Perhaps all this space stuff, from lunar settlement to asteroid mining (potentially a trillion-dollar industry), is still too abstract to galvanise the establishment. Or perhaps rivalry with China is not actually a big problem at all.
The other important variable has been the rise of private space companies, which at the moment, really means SpaceX. If it weren’t for SpaceX, the US might be lagging behind China now. Even though almost all of SpaceX’s manufacturing is done in the US, it has been able to out-produce China in its field. Thanks to the reusable Falcon 9 and vertical integration, SpaceX has been able to reduce launch costs about twenty-fold. It owns roughly 60 percent of all satellites in orbit, mainly due to its Starlink constellation, and its Starship project is advancing with each new mission. There have been six missions thus far and SpaceX has already retrieved the Super Heavy booster.
Joseph Grosso
SpaceX has secured a commanding lead but other companies are lurking. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has yet to send anything into orbit but it plans to launch its heavy lift rocket, New Glenn, in the next few weeks. Rocket Lab has successfully launched 54 missions to date, specialising in smallish satellites. Boeing’s Starliner is off to a more sluggish start—it successfully flew astronauts to the International Space Station in June 2024, but the craft, due to leaks, was not deemed safe enough to ferry them back (the spacecraft did return to Earth intact, but the astronauts have been stranded up there ever since and will return on a SpaceX flight early next year).
A few months ago, it was reported that United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin and the main government provider before it was lapped by SpaceX, is being sold. Potential buyers include Blue Origin and Sierra Space. NASA was once the whole show, but it is now just one actor on an increasingly crowded stage (SpaceX makes a good percentage of its income from government contracts while Blue Origin currently only has a contract as part of the Artemis program).
On 20 February, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX had signed “a US$1.8 billion classified contract with the US government in 2021” (likely with SpaceX’s Starshield unit, which is tailored for government contracts and the leadership of which includes a former US Air Force general). While it has not yet properly entered the public consciousness, space has been a theatre of war for some time. What is generally considered the first “space war” wasn’t fought in a galaxy far, far away (as far as we know), but just over thirty years ago in the Persian Gulf. None of the fighting in the Gulf War took place in Earth’s orbit, but it was the first conflict in which satellite-based GPS played a key role. Thanks to orbiting eyes in the sky, coalition soldiers had an easier time navigating, communicating, and guiding their weapons along hundreds of kilometres of windswept, inhospitable desert battlefields of Kuwait and Iraq. By the time the US invaded Iraq in 2003, these weapons systems were routine. In 2004, satellites guided 68 percent of US munitions.
In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the city of Irpin lost its internet connection. The Russians hit all of Irpin’s 24 base stations, knocking the city offline. Two days later, the connection was restored. As the Kremlin was conducting cyber and physical attacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure, Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector found a solution in SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. More than 10,000 tripod-mounted dishes were distributed around the country. Though the range of these units is limited, this actually makes the network more difficult for the invading Russian military to dismantle. The Russians tried to jam the signal between the satellites and dishes, but SpaceX quickly worked out how to evade that jamming using a software update. Starlink, in effect, became a vital tool for the Ukrainian resistance.
In 2019, NATO added “space” to land, sea, air, and cyberspace as an operational domain, and in 2021, it established a space centre at its Air Command in Ramstein, Germany. Russia wasn’t about to sit back and just watch all this happen. Recently, the Western media was ablaze with intelligence reports of a new type of space-based weapon that could threaten thousands of satellites—there was even speculation about the threat of a Russian nuclear weapon in space. Reports from Ukraine reveal that the Russian military has been successfully jamming GPS satellite signals of weapons given to the Ukrainians. No doubt this will lead to the development of even more creative means of destruction.
Earlier this year, the Secure World Foundation issued a report that found Russia and China are rapidly catching up with the US in areas like electronic warfare and space domain awareness. This includes electric jamming systems and directed energy weapons using lasers or microwaves that can disrupt or disable satellites. The report even cites rumours of a new Russian program to develop nuclear-powered satellites that can slam territory with electromagnetic pulses, potentially crippling infrastructure.
It appears to be only a matter of time before satellites are recognised as legitimate military targets. And if satellites are targeted, what kind of damage will result? Satellites play a vital role in many earthly activities from banking and GPS to television and communication. In November 2021, Russia launched a missile from Earth’s surface that destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite (in orbit since 1982), creating 1,500 pieces of orbital debris. While that was the first test strike using a ground-based missile at that height, both China and the US have also destroyed satellites. India conducted a kinetic anti-satellite test in 2019. In May, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon is now rushing to expand its capacity to fight wars in space, including furthering its ability to disrupt and disable enemy spacecraft in orbit. At a Mitchell Institute event earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Deanna M. Burt, deputy chief of staff of space operations, said, “By no means do we want to see war extended into space, but if it does, we have to be prepared to fight and win.”
The basic rules pertaining to outer space are still based on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states, “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use and occupation, or by any other means.” Exploration “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries … and shall be the province of all mankind.” Sounds good—but how are we to define the interests of mankind? If one country mines a celestial body and sells the materials back on Earth, whose interest does that serve? If one country’s satellites are jamming another’s, who decides which is in the “interests of mankind”? The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in outer space but appears to leave the door open for conventional weapons. How does the mix of private companies and state agencies work?
The 1979 Moon Agreement aims to promote cooperation among states in the exploration and use of the Moon to prevent it from becoming an area of international conflict. But it was signed by only 18 countries (and Saudi Arabia withdrew last year, the first time a nation has withdrawn from a space treaty). Loopholes and ambiguities abound, all of which provide the potential for conflict. For instance, Starlink’s terms of service stipulate that Mars is a “free planet” over which no earthly government has “authority or sovereignty,” and that any disputes over Starlink services provided on Mars “will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
If history (and most of science fiction) is any guide, the opening of new worlds will bring the conflict that has always been endemic in this one. However, the future is unwritten, and a future of space cooperation and peaceful settlement remains possible. The massive difficulties associated with accomplishing anything in space may be enough to encourage cooperation. Is there another way to deal with something like the Kessler Syndrome? The International Space Station has already established a precedent. Cooperation there even survived the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Space is already a global affair, as evidenced by the Artemis program and the James Webb telescope (NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency). This kind of cooperation will be difficult to maintain as space activity ramps up, but the effort will be worth it. A good place to start would be building more robust, updated international treaties. The time to get to work is now.
