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If something is coming at you from the moon, you are not actually looking up, you're looking down. Most satellites are looking down on Earth. You might not see it coming at you.
To the Middle East now, and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the war began. That's according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.
I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. It is Monday the 21st of April 2025, Easter Monday, and because it's a bank holiday in the UK we've taken the opportunity to look slightly away from the news, in fact away from planet Earth altogether. Today's episode is about war in the heavens. Is space about to become a domain of conflict?
In his inaugural address in January, Donald Trump pledged that America would pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. He seemed to be articulating Elon Musk's stated ambition of colonizing the red planet. But America is not alone in this new dash for the stars.
China wants to build a semi-permanent base on the moon by 2035. India, Europe and others are all exploring their own space projects. And meanwhile, space has become increasingly important for conflicts fought here on Earth. Starlink, one of Mr Musk's projects, has been crucial in the war in Ukraine.
Last week, Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General, said he was concerned at reports Russia is considering putting nuclear weapons in space. And the US Space Force last month said a group of Russian military satellites released mysterious objects into orbit. Are we in a new space race? That seems clear. But are we entering an era of space warfare? Are we on the brink of the first space war? And what would that look like?
To help me answer these questions, I'm joined by Juliana Seuss and Namretta Goswami.
Juliane Soos is a researcher in the Security Policy Research Group and the Strategic Threat Analysis and Nuclear Disorder Project for the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. It's the German Institute for International Security Affairs in English. Juliane was formerly the Research Fellow for Space Security as part of the Military Sciences Team at the Royal United Services Institute and host, and this is really why we've got her on here, of a podcast called War in Space. The
Dr. Namrata Goswami is an author, professor and consultant specializing in space policy, international relations and ethnic identity. She teaches at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.
The Joint Special Forces University and is a consultant for Space Fund Intelligence. She's a guest lecturer at Emory University for seminars on technology, society, governance and India. She has taught the US Space Force and asked us to make clear that her views are entirely her own and not those of the US Space Force.
Her co-authored book, Scramble for the Skies, the great power competition to control the resources of outer space, makes the interesting argument that this second space race is going to be about a race for the resources of space rather than the simple prestige of the Cold War competition. Namrata and Juliana, welcome to Battlelands. I might begin, if I may, by asking you both for just a
A very quick response to the basic question here. So as our title suggests, Battle Lines, we're a foreign policy and defense broadcast. We spend a lot of time talking about battlefields. And we are preoccupied with the idea that here on Earth, global politics, balances of power are undergoing profound tectonic shifts. Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Donald Trump, and so on and so forth. Is the same thing going on above our heads?
Go on, Juliana. First of all, absolutely. I think we sometimes make the mistake of seeing space as a sort of separate domain where things happen separately and differently to how they happen on Earth, when actually all the geopolitics that we see on Earth or the strategies or the ambition of states, all of that is also projected into space.
So the same dynamics that we are seeing here on Earth, we can pretty much also observe in space. And I think the same goes for how we perceive modern day warfare. I think we can all agree that modern day warfare could not exist in its current form without space either. Thank you. Namrata? Yeah, sure. I just want to issue a disclaimer. Everything I say today is my own opinion and does not represent the perspective of the US Space Force, the Air Force, or the Department of Defense.
So to answer that question, I would continue with what Juliana has said, basically that if you look at the context of space and modern warfare, it is because most nations, when they conceive of great power competition or comprehensive national power, space is viewed as an enabler of military power projection by which
I mean, the usage of space for intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, for missile tracking, warning, as well as looking at what other nations are actually doing on Earth. So because of that, space is extremely important for nations in terms of how they perceive space.
who is the adversary, but also how they think about gaining a strategic advantage on Earth. And that's why it's very much interrelated. I think at this point, what would be really useful is to just give listeners an idea of who's doing what. We're all familiar with the old space race, but that's very old now, you know, Soviet Union, the United States. I mentioned China and the United States in the introduction. Could you give us a sense of who are the major players in this new era?
of space competition and what are they doing? So if you look at the current space developments and what nations are doing, the major players are, of course, the United States, which still leads in terms of space capability, by which I mean launch, which includes reusable launch
satellites in low Earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, and missions to the moon. China, who's a very important player today, unlike in the Cold War where Soviet Union was the more major player, Russia still plays a role, but Russian space capability has not been the same as it was in the Cold War period.
India, and then also middle powers. Like, for example, I would put United Kingdom in the middle power today. France, Luxembourg, countries like the United Arab Emirates. What is it all about? So what I notice in terms of the space race today is that most nations have recognized, especially the major powers, starting with China, that space is about economic development.
So in the Cold War, space was a lot about prestige and technology show off. So whichever country is able to go to a particular location would then use that to argue that we are the more attractive ideological power. Today, that is not the case. There is a mistake we sometimes make thinking that the current space race is exactly like the Cold War, but it is not.
And China leads here because what they have argued is that, well, space is vital for comprehensive national power. It's a critical technology. Our societies depend on it. And because of that, the impact on military power projection is very deep.
India is starting to have a very similar discourse, but also nations like Japan, who argues that space is all about commercialization today. So that is what actually nations are doing. They are actually starting to build missions that are about economic power, and then using that to build their military power capability as well. Go ahead, Juliana, please. No, I just want to chip in there with the military dependence on space as well, which obviously the U.S.
has been building up sort of its military assets in space as well in the sense of capabilities that sustain operations on Earth. So, you know, navigation, surveillance, communications as well, of course. And what we typically saw in the past was that the US was very reliant on space for its military operations, which is actually something that Russia saw as a weakness that they could exploit in a potential future conflict.
And Russia is losing ground quite quickly in space. They have been losing relevance as a space power for quite a long time as a result of corruption, sanctions, of course, as well, but also a brain drain problem and generally a sort of problem that not enough money is being invested in the space sector. But actually, we're now in a position where...
China, I think using the term emerging space power is no longer accurate because obviously China has invested lots and lots of money and effort into its space capabilities and is now, I think, easily the second biggest space power that we see. China is now also increasingly dependent on its space assets for its own military operations. So we have really seen a sort of shift in how military dependence in space works as well.
What do you mean by dependence for military operations? Give us some concrete examples. What do they use space for? Yeah, absolutely. I think Nimrata did a sort of very nice breakdown at the very beginning. I think the very essentials that space supplements, communication. So if we're talking about any sort of beyond the horizon, beyond line of sight communications, a lot of that is at this point supplemented, if not completely sort of taking place via satellites.
Navigation, obviously we all know about GPS, but obviously there is also a sort of military component of GPS, which is also built into a lot of weapon systems. The other one, obviously, reconnaissance, surveillance, intelligence gathering, the things that we can see from satellite images, but also from radar images from space, gives us a whole new sort of view of the world. It gives us information about where troops are, are stationed, where capabilities are being moved.
I think we've definitely seen in the context of Ukraine how absolutely crucial satellite imagery has been to the Ukrainian military as well. It's obviously used for target identification as well, for example. So those are just sort of a few of the examples. Obviously, also missile early warning. If we're thinking about sensors that are based in space that can see
When an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile, is taking off from anywhere, that is seen from space. All of that sort of underpinning what I would argue is very basic sort of military operations, using for targeting, command and control. Yeah, so space really underpins the basics of defense at this point. You talked about China. There are two
big kind of flagship projects that I think people should probably be aware of. One is this Chinese project to build a space base on the moon by 2035. The other, of course, is the American, particularly Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars. I was wondering, maybe we were talking about China just there.
Could you tell us a bit about this plan? I believe it's meant to be a base at the South Pole. What is it meant to do? How likely is it to happen? I think when you think about what China is attempting to do, is that by 2036, they're going to build a research base on the South Pole of the Moon in collaboration with Russia.
They're also starting to build international partnerships with the International Lunar Research Station. The question your audience would have is that what does it mean in terms of a base? So basically what they're trying to accomplish is to build a permanent structure on the South Pole because the Moon's South Pole is where there has been confirmed scientific data
that there is, first of all, water rise, which can be used for human sustainment, but also rocket fuel if you break it down. Second, that is where the peaks of eternal sunlight are. So, for example, if you want to sustain a base, you would need access to energy, and solar energy is one way to do it. But also what is interesting is that in China's detailed plan, they point out that they're hoping to build a capability with nuclear energy, which is going to be about one megawatt in terms of capability.
A nuclear power station on the moon? Yes, that's their plan. And with a one megawatt capability. NASA also has a very similar idea with the Artemis base camp, but it's about 40 kilowatt, which is much lower.
And then finally, the moon has been confirmed to have helium-3. So helium-3 is vital because helium-3 is what you would require if you want to build nuclear fusion capability, which is on the testing phase. And they're arguing that, well, by 2036, 2040, we might be able to crack that.
So that means you can build it into rocket fuel. So that's the reason why China is looking at the South Pole. And I would argue that they have already started building it. So it's not 2036. 2036 is the end goal. But China started building their lunar base focused on
program since 2002. They're the first country to land on the South Pole of the moon and bring back samples. Next year, they're going to send a mission to survey the South Pole for that base that they're talking about. And they're also building lunar communication infrastructure, the first nation to do so with their relay Magpie bridge capability, which is a satellite they have placed in
Moon, Earth, Lagrange point two, because that's the backside of the Moon, if you think about the Sun. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Moon, Earth, sorry, Lagrange. Could you explain to us what that means? Sure. So the Moon has several positions. There are four Lagrange points, which are stable points.
where the gravitational forces of Earth and Moon come together and basically enable you to locate a particular satellite that stays there and does not then tumble and go to somewhere else. So it's where the forces come together and pull each other and make it very, very stable. And so most nations argue that, well, if you look at Moon and if you want to build that kind of infrastructure, one of the challenges is communication.
How do you communicate from the backside of the moon, which is where the South Pole Southern Hemisphere is? And it's very difficult because communication back to Earth is required. That's the reason why they have placed this Lagrange point to Magpie Bridge satellite capability, because it's looking down at the backside of the moon. So when the lunar rover that China has sent communicates back to Earth, because it is facing away from Earth, it's not
it's actually not possible to directly communicate with Earth. So they send it to the Mech-Pi bridge satellite, which is in LaBranche Point 2, and that communicates back to Earth. Okay, that makes sense. When you say the backside of the moon, you mean the dark side?
The moon doesn't have a dark side. That's a Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd made it amazingly popular. So what I mean is that the moon, the backs, the side that always faces away from Earth. So when the moon revolves around Earth, you only see one side of the moon, which is the near side.
The side that is away is what is the backside of the moon. It never faces you, but it gets sunlight. It's not the dark side. It's where the eternal peaks of sunlight are. Let's say the far side of the moon. Goodness me. Yeah.
this base, is this going to be manned or is it going to be robotic? In the beginning, it's going to be robotic. So almost all of China's missions are planned to be robotic because China argues that it is actually not practical to send humans when you are not able to bring down the cost, you don't have the infrastructure. So what they are hoping to achieve is that through automation, 3D printing, they are building a base. And then by 2030, they are hoping to send humans, but not
actually sustain them on the base on the long term. It's basically to ensure that the base is working, the construction is good. And then between 2036 and 2038, they're hoping to achieve human beings living on that base, but not before they have actually achieved some level of sustainable capability. China is going to build a base on the moon with a nuclear power generator to extract helium-3 in order to
create nuclear fusion power. This is extraordinary. First of all, it's extraordinary. But it raises questions like ownership. Juliana, is there a question about who owns the moon? I mean, is it even legal to do this? So you can't build military bases on the moon. That is illegal. But scientific bases...
That is completely fine. I don't know, Namrata, if you've seen anything that's been discussed on this, but so far we don't really have any legislation that would prevent you from, you know, obviously landing rovers, which we've done, or building scientific bases. There's no real rule that says that you can't do it, unless obviously it was used for military purposes, in which case... Sorry, I'm kind of lost for words. How feasible is this? Mining the moon for...
for raw materials? You can, legally you can. The same way, for example, asteroid mining, that's another thing that is being explored at the moment. And again, there's currently no real rules that says you can't keep whatever you find in space in that sense.
So obviously the problem there from a sort of economic angle would be if someone was interested to do asteroid mining, obviously if they then wanted to bring that back down to Earth to then sell it, obviously there's questions around how economically feasible that is, financially feasible that is. But from a legal perspective,
I haven't seen anything that would ban actors from doing that, either commercial or state actors. It's astounding when you think about mining and resources, right? But actually, there is a very advanced conversation at the UN Legal Subcommittee on this. So they are already starting to talk about legislating or offering guidelines for enabling resource extraction.
And, and in that context, I wanted to bring that into the picture, because if you look at China's position, the United States position, as well as other nations, Russia too, they're arguing that, well, the Outer Space Treaty enables you to use space and utilize space. So we are going to now build principles that enable this.
The United States was the first nation to actually establish the Commercial Launch Activities Act that told you that U.S. citizens, if they are going to the moon or Mars to extract a resource or to an asteroid, they can keep it.
Japan has a space mining law that says the same thing. India says the same thing as well, that if Indian citizens go there, they can mine and keep it. And China says almost the exact same things. So there is actually quite the advanced conversation from the legal standpoint in terms of resources being absolutely legal under the Outer Space Treaty. After the break, can America really colonize Mars? And is there any point?
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Welcome back.
Could you tell us, either of you, how much do you know about the American Mars objective and how feasible is that? What is interesting is that both nations have Mars missions. So China was the first Asian nation to land, communicate back from Mars. They have a very advanced concept of being able to get to Mars by 2030 to bring back samples and then by 2045 to establish a research scientific base on Mars as well.
The U.S., of course, because of the commercial space sector with Elon Musk and SpaceX, are very much focused on actually going to Mars on its own and to not just be able to show that capability, but to build a city on Mars. But that is the SpaceX goal, or to be more specific, Elon Musk's goal. When you look at the United States' Mars goal of
Officially, that is not the goal, to basically go and colonize. We have heard speeches where Donald Trump in his second administration have said, well, we want to plant a flag on Mars, but now that will have to be put into actual policy and will have to be funded by Congress. So we still have a bit to go. And I'll finally say that when you look at the U.S. Mars program that is actually implemented by NASA, there are two things.
One is that to study Mars' surface, to understand how Mars actually is in terms of at all, if we at all go, for example, to establish human settlement. And second, to look at Mars individually.
also to understand Earth. So there is a very clear scientific program behind NASA's Moon to Mars program. So the U.S. is not really giving up on the moon. They see the moon as a stepping stone to Mars to understand how do you live on Mars. Moon is three days away, so it's a great celestial body. And so the U.S. actually connects both those two celestial bodies in their program.
How feasible is this getting to Mars thing? Could you tell us something about the technical challenges? If you look at both China and US space programs, as well as India and the United Arab Emirates that have actually got to Mars, it's feasible because you have the capability today in terms of launching, for example, to low Earth orbit and then entering the transfer orbit to Mars. The only thing that is a challenge is the time taken.
It takes about nine months to get into a Mars orbit. It takes a long time. And so the argument both by the U.S., especially by China, is that, well, if we crack nuclear propulsion, which is much faster, we will be able to get to Mars by between a window of three to six months, which is absolutely viable because that's how you'll sustain humans going there.
So we have the technology, the physics supports it. The only thing is that we still have to crack certain high advanced propulsion capability for humans going to Mars. I mean, nations have already gone to Mars in terms of robotic capability. Juliana, the moon and Mars, these are the big flagship things, which is why I brought them up. I think these are the things if they happen, those are going to be the kind of Neil Armstrong moments, the Sputnik moments.
that everyone's going to be talking about. What are the military implications of those missions? Yeah, it's a good question. And this is kind of where two schools of thought within the space security community sort of diverge. And I think me and Amrata might have a good discussion about this. I'm sort of firmly on the side of I don't currently see...
a full sort of military utility in either the Moon or Mars for what we're currently using. So if we're thinking about the way in which satellites currently support terrestrial operations,
We're talking about satellites that sit in Earth orbits. So the furthest away that they are is 36,000 kilometers away. That's in geostationary orbit. And that's where we see command and control satellites, some SATCOM satellites as well. That's sort of as far as we'll go. So if we're talking about how would either basis or capabilities in sort of the lunar orbit or on Mars sort of help us, I don't currently see what the military utility of those would be.
Obviously, it's a scary thought to think that someone might build a military base on the moon, but I currently struggle to see how that would benefit them in warfare that is very much still being fought on Earth. That's my current take, at least. I mean, obviously, we don't know what will happen in 100 years' time, but I think for the year that we're in, 2025, that's how I see it. Namrata? Yeah, I mean, I agree with Liana that if you look at
For example, the military implications of Mars capability, I don't see the impact there. But I actually see the impact of a capability on the moon. So if you build lunar infrastructure capability, by which I mean the ability to do cislunar, that is Earth-moon capability,
space domain awareness or space situational awareness, where you're looking at the moon to understand what is there, but you're also looking down. Because the moon is higher up, you're able to look down on geosynchronous orbit as well as low Earth orbit. Juliana mentioned what that is in terms of altitude.
So I would argue that if you're able to build a civilian capability to be able to do such space situational awareness, you are then able to look down. So let's take a hypothetical scenario. If China, as it is building a relay communications satellite, as well as hoping to build a
lunar space situational awareness capability, they can then look down and see how many satellites are there in geosynchronous orbit and beyond. And so they can build very good understanding of space and its assets. Second, if something is coming at you from the moon, you are not actually looking up, you're looking down. Most satellites are looking down on Earth. You might not see it coming at you.
And so that's something that we have to be very careful when we think about military implications. So let's take a future where you have a mining base, you have activity and economic activity. Nations will be primed to build such capability to ensure that their assets are secure. So there are implications as we speak. I've written a paper on that for the Aerospace Corporation on the military utility of cislunar space. And I argue that out in terms of what it means technically as well.
We've talked a lot about space as a kind of an enabler for terrestrial warfare, really. But are we on the brink of space itself becoming a domain of conflict? I don't know, X-wing fighters and things like that? I think it depends how we see space as a domain. I think the actions where satellites were involved...
in wars have so far been non-kinetic. So we've seen signals being jammed, so interrupted or signals being spoofed. So, you know, disinformation being given out through signals and we've seen cyber attacks against satellites, but we have not seen a sort of kinetic intercept of a satellite in space yet. We have seen tests of those kinds of weapon systems. We know they exist.
But so far, the red line of actually attacking or kinetically attacking another nation's satellite has not yet happened. I think with the sort of electromagnetic attacks that we've seen or the cyber attacks that we've seen,
I think in the current setting specifically, for example, in the war in Ukraine, they, from a military perspective, make a lot more sense because if you can disable a network through its cyber systems, you can actually disable the network. Whereas if you were to launch a kinetic attack against one satellite that's in a constellation of thousands of satellites, you're not really having that much of an impact either. So, you know, if we're thinking about
what Russia might want to do in order to disrupt Starlink for the Ukrainians, just as an example. They've tried jamming, they've tried cyber attacks, they've ultimately not been very successful. But if they were to try to kinetically destroy a Starlink satellite, one in this constellation of 7,000, that would not really have an impact for them. So I think the weapon system that we've seen being deployed so far have not crossed that line. What might happen in a couple of years...
is up for debate. Well, I'm interested in this mysterious object that the Americans say the Russians have released from a satellite. It's mysterious. I'm not going to ask you to tell me what it is, but I suppose that raises the question of anti-satellite weapons being deployed in space and so on. So we do see the enormous great power on great power war that the world seems to be lurching towards. Say there's a blow up between the United States and China over Taiwan or something like that. What would
What are the possible things we could see happening in the space domain? Let's take the Taiwan scenario. So if you have an escalation of conflict in Taiwan and you see China taking the decision to invade Taiwan, what space would do is that space would enable, as we discussed, intelligence, reconnaissance, as well as to an extent, building the battlefield in terms of where the US naval ships are, what kind of military deployment structure is occurring.
What could also happen is that China has now taken a decision through the People's Liberation Army Aerospace Force, which is their space force, that they are going to build systems level counterstrike capability, which means that it is not just direct ascent
orbital weapons that actually targets an asset in space or co-orbital, which means that you have an asset in space itself, by which I mean it could be a robotic arm that can grab a satellite, jamming, spoofing, or targeting your electronics by directly attacking it through a power beam. It also means that you're building a capability to attack a US constellation of satellites
altogether because the United States has a lot of capability through the Starlink constellation and its military satellites. So in that case, we might see an attack in space that way.
And so they might try to destroy that capability because the U.S. military actually depends on space for that kind of out-of-sight communication as well as deployment. Now, I'll end by saying that we talk a lot about how space warfare will actually look like. So it will not look like the air domain because of orbital mechanics. You will not have...
fighter plane-like situations where one satellite is maneuvering very fast. In space, if you maneuver out of one orbit, you're totally taken away from that orbit without
with altitude change. So you're not going to have one satellite dogfighting with another satellite. That's not going to happen like movies portray. What might happen is that a particular satellite might be lurking and once it very accurately predicts the path you are following, it might lurk there and then attack you. That could happen.
And so the kind of warfare you might see is targeting a satellite. For example, both China and the US have a capability called the space plane, which is an ability to maneuver. So it's very difficult to maneuver in space today. But space plane, the X-37B and China's Xiangyong, they can maneuver from one orbit to other.
So the thing we don't know in a space plane is that we don't know what is inside it. Unlike, say, satellites, we do have an understanding in terms of what the satellite is capable of. And that's a concern because something can come out of that. China released eight unidentified objects from their space plane. So that might be a satellite that maneuvers. And that is something I think which is of growing concern today in terms of space weaponization is that
China has now demonstrated the capability to both maneuver a satellite as well as refuel. Refueling a satellite is vital because it extends the life of the satellite. And if you want to change Delta V, you can because you have more fuel.
So that's how space warfare is going to play out. But it'll have implications in terms of how you are then building your military operations on Earth as well, very deeply. Thank you very much. Juliana, any last remarks on that? I think just my final remark would be you don't have to be a space power to actually do damage in space. If we're thinking about space,
cyber attacks, jamming, and there's a lot of very capable actors out there who are not currently, you know, big space powers or big space actors. So I think we shouldn't always sort of constrain our field of who we look at just to the big space powers who currently build satellites and have big launch capabilities. I think we need to bear that in mind too. It is a multi-domain field out there. And yeah, we have to bear that in mind. Namratika Swami, Juliana Seuss, thank you very much for joining us on Battlelines.
That's all for this week. We'll be back on Earth on Friday's Trump edition of Battlelines. Until then, that was Battlelines. Goodbye. Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Roland Oliphant, and Venetia Rainey. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app.
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