Tag Archive for: Space Force

Biden’s space policy: boldly going … where?

Joe Biden will have a lot on his plate after his inauguration as US president on 20 January 2021. The most pressing concern will be dealing with Covid-19 and establishing a path back to economic growth. There are a host of other domestic challenges to address, as well as a complex and increasingly adverse international security environment, so space policy probably isn’t high up on his to-do list. Yet, it’s not a policy area he can ignore. Important decisions must be made soon on a number of key space-related issues.

Biden has already signalled that he sees NASA’s role as having a greater focus on addressing the global challenge posed by climate change. That would certainly mean investing more in new satellites and scientific research to monitor changing weather patterns and rising sea levels and to deal with climate-change-induced extreme weather. A more ambitious, parallel approach would be to invest in establishing a permanent human presence in space, including on and around the moon, to support the development of space-related renewable energy technology, such as space-based solar power.

Thinking big, and going boldly, would represent a major shift away from the Trump administration’s destructive defunding of NASA’s climate-science activities. It’s ironic that investing in science and supporting a wider role for NASA in dealing with climate change reinforce the case for the Trump administration’s Artemis project to return to the moon this decade.

It seems clear that under Biden, the proposed landing of the first American woman and next man on the lunar south pole will shift from what was a clearly politically linked date of late 2024—which would have marked the end of a second term for Donald Trump—to sometime later this decade. The 2024 target was always going to be problematic for NASA without a big boost in congressional funding, which is extremely unlikely with the US economy already weakened by the pandemic. Nor are key vehicles—notably the lunar lander, and, the SLS heavy-lift launch vehicle—likely to be ready in time for a late 2024 landing. Biden may decide to rely more on commercial companies, and with SpaceX having just done a mostly successful a 15-kilometre hop test for its heavy-lift fully reusable ‘Starship Super Heavy’ booster, there may be less of a need for NASA’s beleaguered and expensive Space Launch System.

Getting to the moon should remain a key objective for, but it would be a huge mistake to return for just flags and footprints. The Trump administration’s plan to establish a sustained human presence on the surface to gather resources, and NASA’s spearheading of the Artemis Accords to manage lunar resources fairly, were the right approach, in that they recognised the moon and near-earth asteroids as a resource base to sustain a permanent human presence in cislunar space for economic activity.

Biden needs to sustain these efforts because a permanent presence on the moon, and the development of lunar mining, can support economic and manufacturing activities that transform our approach to space. This could include novel new technologies, manufactured in space from space-based resources, that ultimately contribute towards a carbon-free global ‘green economy’.

In an earlier article, I talked about the possibility of space manufacturing opening up new supply chains. If Biden wants to take a visionary, ‘green energy’ approach to reducing the use of fossil fuels on earth, he could do worse than allow NASA and other government agencies to invest in research and development towards space resource utilisation that was at the heart of the Trump approach. The key goal should be a sustained human presence in space that expands economic potential, rather than just space exploration for the sake of national prestige.

The Artemis initiative was always about using the moon as a stepping stone to prepare for human missions to Mars by the late 2030s. That goal is much more challenging than simply a return to the moon and is uniquely suited to international collaboration. Biden’s approach should be to continue the long-term gaze towards Mars but emphasise opportunities for a multinational mission. He should set a firm date for landing on Mars to form the base of a coherent strategy. An option is 2039—70 years after Apollo 11’s landing on the Sea of Tranquility.

Finally, what to do about the US Space Force? This was a key component of the Trump administration’s approach to space and it’s not likely to be dissolved by Biden. The reality is that space is highly contested and is already regarded as a warfighting domain in which US and allied defence and security interests are threatened by growing Chinese and Russian counterspace capabilities. Ditching the space force wouldn’t convince Beijing or Moscow to end their development of advanced anti-satellite systems or to eliminate their space-oriented military branches (the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force and the Russian Aerospace Force, both of which pre-dated the US Space Force). The Biden administration needs to shape a clear space deterrence policy and space-defence capability, and the US Space Force is ideally placed to lead that process.

A key debate in Washington is where the US Space Force should be focused, the ‘brown water’ region of low-earth orbit to geostationary orbit (LEO to GEO) out to 36,000 kilometres or, over a longer timeframe, in the ‘blue water’ region of cislunar space. That debate needs to be settled in this administration. That would then shape organisational mission, funding, doctrine and capability priorities. The sensible approach for Biden is to focus the US Space Force on the brown-water LEO to GEO region now but plan for it to operate further afield in case a major-power security threat emerges in coming decades.

Editors’ picks for 2018: ‘China, the US and the race for space’

Originally published 12 July 2018.

The head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, Ye Peijian, has remarked that:

the universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.

His reference to the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu  Islands) and Huangyan Island (Scarborough Shoal) suggests that China sees space in terms of astrostrategic terrain: the moon and Mars are places of astropolitical importance, rather than simply the focus of scientific exploration. Just as China sees control of the ‘first island chain’ in East Asia as vital to its maritime security, Ye’s comment suggests that these high grounds in space will bear directly on Chinese strategic interests in the coming decades.

Astropolitics is defined by Everett Dolman as ‘the study of the relationship between outer space terrain and technology and the development of political and military policy and strategy’. It contrasts with traditional geocentric approaches to space power, which focus on how space directly influences terrestrial affairs and downplays the vast astrostrategic terrain in cislunar space (the region between the Earth and the moon).

Astropolitics and astrostrategy are big ideas whose time is coming. The 2020s promise greater commercial and national activity from low-Earth orbit (LEO) to the moon and beyond, shifting mindsets from geocentric to space-centric thinking.

Ye Peijian is clearly thinking long term: Mars is distant and probably won’t be astropolitically significant for many decades, but the moon is more important, given its gravitational proximity to ‘near-Earth space’—the region from LEO out to geostationary orbit (GEO)—and its status as the highest natural ground above Earth’s gravity well.

It’s important to understand the astrostrategic terrain of space. Dolman notes:

What appears at first a featureless void is in fact a rich vista of gravitational mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers of resources and energy alternately dispersed and concentrated, broadly strewn danger zones of deadly radiation, and precisely placed peculiarities of astrodynamics.

Rather than being an infinite emptiness, space is delineated by gravitation and transfer trajectories, which constrain human activities in the same way as strategic maritime choke points. An actor that can control them can control access to resources of great value and strategic significance throughout the remainder of the 21st century.

Dolman relates astropolitics to Halford Mackinder’s early 20th-century ideas about geopolitics, which emerged as new technologies for ships, aircraft and railways were fast transforming advanced economies and thus power hierarchies. The driver for that change was a desire to control strategically important resources to gain comparative advantage over other states.

In the 2020s, there’s likely to be a similar recognition of the potential value of resources on the moon or on near-Earth asteroids, in addition to a requirement to control the LEO to GEO region. Under these circumstances, the traditional geocentric approach to space power will be increasingly challenged.

At the same time, space technology is being transformed through the introduction of lower cost reusable rockets, airborne launch systems and, on the horizon, hypersonic aerospace planes. Getting into space is becoming easier, quicker and cheaper, allowing more states and commercial actors to exploit it for geostrategic and commercial gain. Space is becoming more competitive and more congested as a result. It’s no sanctuary from human competition, and major-power conflict on the high frontier is becoming increasingly likely.

Into this complex astropolitical environment, President Donald Trump’s United States Space Force—another big idea—will emerge and evolve, probably over a similar timescale to the expansion of human activity to cislunar space in the 2020s.

There’s been a good deal of criticism—some thoughtful and some based on a kneejerk derision of Trump—about the idea of a US Space Force. The more thoughtful critiques have highlighted challenges in funding a sixth military force from an already constrained US defence budget. There are legitimate concerns about the need to avoid duplicating organisational structures and current US Air Force missions in space. Critics stress that the formation of a space force could severely disrupt the air force at a time of growing international uncertainty.

There’s also been criticism that a US Space Force would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and related agreements. However, nothing in space law prevents the military use of space or the development of space weapons, provided they aren’t weapons of mass destruction or involve the military use of the moon and other celestial bodies. The Space Force per se wouldn’t violate the Outer Space Treaty, but there’s a growing threat that the treaty may come under increasing strain as major-power competition extends out to the cislunar region.

The formation of the US Air Force, which split from the US Army in 1947, was driven by operational experience in World War II, maturing technology and the strategic importance of the air domain. There’s been a similar maturing of thinking on space as an operational war-fighting domain in recent years, and, like the air domain of the 1940s, the space domain in the next decade will be highly contested. Maybe the space force is an idea whose time has come, and it shouldn’t be dismissed outright without deep consideration of the risks and opportunities.

That means it’s important to understand what’s driving Chinese aspirations. If the Chinese see the space domain in line with Dolman’s astropolitics thesis, Ye’s parallel of the moon and Mars with strategically contested terrain on Earth should make space thinkers in the West sit up and take notice. Control of the high frontier doesn’t need to end at GEO, particularly if the moon and other celestial bodies hold strategic wealth and value, and will be within easier reach by the end of the next decade.

The prospect of major-power competition on the high frontier may extend beyond GEO. Ye is making clear that either China will control the moon and other celestial bodies, or others will. The US and its allies must decide whether Chinese control of this high ground is acceptable. The US Space Force’s mission may be completely different from what the US Air Force currently does in space.