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Space-based solar power, or SBSP, refers to orbital systems that collect and harvest solar energy using solar-powered satellites—enormous spacecraft with solar panels. Solar energy is converted into microwaves or lasers and then wirelessly transmitted via high-frequency radio waves to a fixed point on earth throughout the day. Once on the ground, a rectifying antenna, or rectenna, converts the electromagnetic energy into electricity and delivers it to the power grid for energy consumers.

The main benefit of SBSP is its higher energy collection. Because it is unaffected by the weather or time of day, it could provide clean, reliable and efficient energy for satellites and people living in remote communities and in disaster-hit areas worldwide.

The concept of collecting solar power in space isn’t new; however, in recent years, there’s been growing interest in developing SBSP partly due to pressure to meet national and international climate-related goals and achieve national space plans.

While some countries—China, Japan, India, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—and the European Union are in the race to develop SBSP first, the two leading countries in this competition are China and the US.

In recent decades, China has become increasingly interested in SBSP and appears to be the leader in this area. In 2008, SBSP was listed as a key research program. In March 2016, Zhang Yulin, a national lawmaker and deputy chief of the armament development department of the Central Military Commission, said that China would make use of the space between the earth and the moon for solar power and other industrial-development purposes. He linked SBSP to China’s national goals, declaring, ‘The earth–moon space will be strategically important for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’

In February 2019, construction of a ¥200 million ($42 million) testing base commenced at Bishan District in Chongqing, Sichuan. The China Academy for Space Technology’s vice-president, Li Ming, stated that China expects to be the first to build a working solar power station in space with practical value.

Chinese scientists expect to construct small to medium-sized solar power stations to be launched into the stratosphere to produce electricity between now and 2025 and build a megawatt-level power station in 2030.

In June, China announced that it would launch an ambitious space solar power plant program in 2028, two years ahead of the original schedule. At around the same time, researchers from Xidian University successfully tested a 75-metere-high steel structure to divert solar power from outer space.

In the US, although NASA began researching SBSP technologies after the Apollo program (1963–1972), the enormous projected costs meant that the idea wasn’t pursued. Nonetheless, there has been renewed interest in SBSP over the past few decades, including at NASA.

The US Space Force has also expressed interest, and the US Department of Defense is researching SBSP for military purposes.

There is also interest in SBSP at American universities. In 2013, the California Institute of Technology established an SBSP after a donation of more than US$100 million. Last year, the university announced plans to launch a test array by 2023.

It is only a matter of time before SBSP is achieved, potentially creating a new age in clean energy. This could open up opportunities for collaboration as well as assist deep space exploration programs and provide an energy source for moon bases and lunar surface operations. SBSP may become key in what economist Pippa Malmgren calls ‘space-based solutions to earthbound problems’. For instance, the resiliency of SBSP means that it could be used as a backup energy source in the case of power shortages, blackouts or attacks on subnational or national energy infrastructure.

However, developing SBSP is not without technical and non-technical challenges. One of the main barriers is the high cost for things like manufacturing and transportation, and the potential need for significant investment in transmission infrastructure. Other challenges to consider are the efficiency of wireless power transmission, the vulnerability of solar panels to space debris, and the impact on the environment and people. Nonetheless, it is expected that the costs will inevitably decline given the increasing interest from private companies in this area and technological advances.

China appears to be progressing at a faster and more concerted pace. It is already a contender in the global clean energy race and harbours ambitious space plans, and it could become the leading space power if it develops SBSP before the US and the rest of the world. That could result in SBSP becoming an essential element of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with Beijing offering this form of clean energy to other countries alongside opportunities for greater economic development and connectivity.

In a broader context, the increased interest in developing SBSP may extend the geopolitical domain of competition to geospatial dimensions. The growing rivalry between the US and China on earth has already resulted in competing plans to achieve scientific and economic hegemony in space, including for space-based energy, mining, manufacturing and weapons.

More importantly, perhaps, there’s also the increasing militarisation of space due to competition for military dominance. China’s People’s Liberation Army handles all space planning, and Beijing has already designated space as a military area. China’s 2019 white paper emphasised a growing role in space for the PLA’s Air Force, and a recent report noted that China now has the technology, hardware and knowledge to coordinate a war from space. To further support its space ambitions, China has increased the size of its total operational space fleets by around 70%.

The US–China rivalry further adds to the militarisation of space—China wants to build lunar bases by 2027 and the US by 2025. Based on their existing rivalry, competition between the countries to build bases on planets (such as Mars) is possible. In this context, it’s not unrealistic to imagine that geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions on earth will also be found in outer space or considered an extension of terrestrial activity.

The new year is well underway for US President Joe Biden. It’s not pretty. The Russians are coming at Ukraine. The pandemic is not under control; America this year will come close to one million dead from Covid-19. Inflation is at a 40-year high. Biden’s sweeping legislation on social programs and climate change is dying in the Senate. He has been unable to unlock the shackles on voting rights legislation, angering his base of black voters that helped sweep him into the White House. At 42%, Biden’s job approval is the worst of any modern president—save for Donald Trump. The November midterm elections look like a disaster, with the Republicans all but certain to take over the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate as well. There’s already talk the House Republicans will impeach Biden in 2023. (Spoiler alert: they will.)

So, what does the president of the United States do? The answer is simple: his job. Get as much done as he is capable of achieving.

In terms of Washington business, the issues are straightforward. Federal funding of the government (‘supply’, in Australian terms) expires on 18 February and must be extended. A deal will be reached.

There’s major legislation to rebuild America’s capabilities in high technology, scientific research and development, and semiconductors. The urgency of meeting what China is projecting across the Indo-Pacific in these fields means that enacting the bill is imperative, and this will get done too.

Discussions will reopen on the stalled Biden ‘Build Back Better’ agenda with the Democratic Senator who has stymied it so far, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The gulf between the two men is significant. Manchin is a conservative Democrat in a state Trump carried by nearly 70% of the vote. West Virginia is coal, and the heart of Biden’s climate program is renewables.

At stake are Biden’s pledges to ensure that American households have the resources to meet the basic costs of childcare, education, healthcare and care for seniors. Covid exposed the absence of safety and security for tens of millions of Americans when catastrophe strikes. The Biden programs are immensely popular. From the Obama years, Biden and the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate understand that they must find unity and win or be consumed by differences within their ranks and lose. Democrats need to show that in these times they can do big things. They can’t win if they can’t govern. That is what November is all about.

The logic is inescapable, and it’s likely that a more targeted Build Back Better program will be passed. Even if it is ‘only’ a trillion dollars, enactment would mean that Biden will have delivered more than US$4 trillion in economic recovery, Covid response and security for working Americans in his first two years in office. This is on a par with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Biden also is on the verge of making history with the nomination of a black woman to the Supreme Court. Prospects for confirmation are strong, and a win and will give Biden some added political capital.

Even if this all gets done, Biden’s road to recovery is rocky. Where he stands today is crystal clear: he has lost the confidence of most of the American people. Biden’s Washington is not delivering the goods. Over 70% believe America is headed in the wrong direction. Around 60% believe their households are losing the battle with the cost of living. The lived reality of Covid and inflation obscures the excellent macroeconomic numbers on annual growth, job creation and rising wages.

The penumbra of Trumpism is quite apparent. Some 70% of Americans believe that the country’s political differences are profound, and even more believe that American democracy is endangered.

This is the context for the work of the House Select Committee on the 6 January insurrection. The committee is doing a thorough job of tracking down and interrogating all the principals who had a role in developing and executing that violent assault on America’s democracy. All the former president’s men have been subpoenaed. The committee will soon hold public hearings, which will have the potential, not unlike the Watergate hearings nearly 50 years ago, of educating the American people about what happened and what was at stake. If dramatic enough, the hearings could shake the political landscape.

What will Biden face from the Republicans this year? Theirs is a simple playbook: don’t do anything to distract from a man besieged. Push buttons on the fears afflicting Republican and especially independent voters. Inflation is out of control and is killing your pocketbook. You trusted that Biden would make America Covid-normal, but it’s not, affecting your family and your job. The woke left is controlling our schools and our kids’ minds. Crime is skyrocketing and Biden wants to take away your guns. The borders are out of control and dangerous immigrants are flooding in. The left is dictating Biden’s agenda, and that agenda is socialism. And forget about voting rights.

Biden’s polling started heading south last September when the surge of the Delta variant coincided with the horrific exit from Afghanistan. That tested perceptions of Biden’s expertise in managing foreign policy—a significant selling point for his presidency. This is why the outcome of the Russia–Ukraine situation, beyond the issue of security in Europe, is so important for Biden. If he can stare down Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Ukraine saved, it will be a significant victory—not necessarily like John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, but not dissimilar. If Russia takes Ukraine, Biden will be vilified as the president who ‘lost’ that country. It will be quite searing.

And who knows what nasty surprises are coming from Iran and North Korea?

We can take the measure of this president when he delivers the State of the Union address on 1 March. He will say that the state of the union is strong, and that there’s nothing America and Americans can’t do if they are together. He will believe every word he will utter. But will the American people?

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States were a horrific shock. Images of trapped victims leaping from the Twin Towers are indelible, and the intrusive security measures introduced in the wake of the attacks have long since become a fact of life.

But sceptics doubt that it marked a turning point in history. They note that the immediate physical damage was far from fatal to American power. It is estimated that the United States’ GDP growth dropped by three percentage points in 2001, and insurance claims for damages eventually totalled over US$40 billion—a small fraction of what was then a US$10 trillion economy. And the nearly 3,000 people killed in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC when the al-Qaeda hijackers turned four aircraft into cruise missiles was a small fraction of US travel fatalities that year.

While accepting these facts, my guess is that future historians will regard 9/11 as a date as important as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The surprise attack on the US naval base in Hawaii killed some 2,400 American military personnel and destroyed or damaged 19 naval craft, including eight battleships. In both cases, however, the main effect was on public psychology.

For years, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had tried to alert Americans to the Axis threat but had failed to overcome isolationism. All that changed with Pearl Harbor. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush advocated a humble foreign policy and warned against the temptations of nation-building. After the shock of 9/11, he declared a ‘global war on terror’ and invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the proclivities of top members of his administration, some say a clash with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was predictable in any case, but not its manner or cost.

What 9/11 illustrates is that terrorism is about psychology, not damage. Terrorism is like theatre. With their powerful military, Americans believe that ‘shock and awe’ comes from massive bombardment. For terrorists, shock and awe comes from the drama more than the number of deaths caused by their attacks. Poisons might kill more people, but explosions get the visuals. The constant replay of the falling Twin Towers on the world’s television sets was Osama bin Laden’s coup.

Terrorism can also be compared to jujitsu, in which a weak adversary turns the power of a larger player against itself. While the 9/11 attacks killed several thousand Americans, the ‘endless wars’ that the US subsequently launched killed many more. Indeed, the damage done by al-Qaeda pales in comparison to the damage America did to itself.

By some estimates, nearly 15,000 US military personnel and contractors were killed in the wars that followed 9/11, and the economic cost exceeded US$6 trillion. Add to that the number of foreign civilians killed and refugees created, and the costs grow even more enormous. The opportunity costs were also large. When President Barack Obama tried to pivot to Asia—the fastest-growing part of the world economy—the legacy of the global war on terror kept the US mired in the Middle East.

Despite these costs, some say that the US achieved its goal: there hasn’t been another major terrorist attack on the US homeland on the scale of 9/11. Bin Laden and many of his top lieutenants were killed, and Saddam Hussein was removed (though his connection to 9/11 was always dubious). Alternatively, a case can be made that bin Laden succeeded, particularly if we consider that his beliefs included the value of religious martyrdom. The jihadist movement is fragmented, but it has spread to more countries, and the Taliban have returned to power in Afghanistan—ironically, just before the 9/11 anniversary that President Joe Biden originally set as the target date for withdrawing US troops.

It’s too early to assess the long-term effects of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The short-term effects of the chaotic exit are costly, but in the long term, Biden may come to be seen as correct to have forsworn the effort at nation-building in a country divided by mountains and tribes and united mainly by opposition to foreigners.

Leaving Afghanistan will allow Biden to focus on his grand strategy of balancing the rise of China. For all the damage done to US soft power by the chaotic manner of the exit from Afghanistan, Asia has its own longstanding balance of power in which countries like Japan, India and Vietnam don’t wish to be dominated by China and welcome an American presence. When one considers that within 20 years of America’s traumatic exit from Vietnam, the US was welcome in that country as well as the region, Biden’s overall strategy makes sense.

At the same time, 20 years after 9/11, the problem of terrorism remains, and terrorists may feel emboldened to try again. If so, the task for US leaders is to develop an effective counterterrorism strategy. Its core must be to avoid falling into the terrorists’ trap by doing great damage to ourselves. Leaders must plan to manage the psychological shocks at home and abroad.

Imagine what the world would be like if Bush had avoided the tempting rallying cry of a global war on terror and responded to 9/11 by carefully selected military strikes combined with good intelligence and diplomacy. Or, if he had gone into Afghanistan, imagine that he had withdrawn after six months, even if that had involved negotiating with the despised Taliban.

Looking forward, when the next terrorist attacks come, will presidents be able to channel public demand for revenge by precise targeting, explaining the trap that terrorists set, and focusing on creating resilience in US responses? That is the question Americans should be asking, and that their leaders should be addressing.

President Joe Biden’s statement this week of an ‘investigation into the origins of Covid-19’ shows that the US intelligence community is making progress towards uncovering whether the virus was released because of a ‘laboratory accident’ or ‘from human contact with an infected animal’.

Biden tells us his intelligence agencies agree these are the ‘two likely scenarios’ with one agency leaning to the lab accident and two towards the pangolin-bites-man theory, while the others ‘do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other’.

It’s no small thing to get all 18 American intelligence agencies agreeing that the laboratory accident scenario was a likely cause of the pandemic. The agencies have clearly made progress since the first ‘intelligence community statement on origins of Covid-19’, released in April 2020, which found that the virus ‘was not manmade or genetically modified’ but could do no more than promise to ‘rigorously examine emerging information’ about the origins of Covid-19.

Biden has given his intelligence system 90 days to ‘bring us closer to a definitive conclusion’. I’ll speculate here that the administration thinks a conclusion can made. Why set up the intelligence agencies to fail?

The president also said that the further inquiry would include asking ‘specific questions for China’. It is astonishing that it has taken 15 months before a US administration decided to put Beijing on the spot with some direct questions. In effect Xi Jinping is on 90 days’ notice for his regime to put aside the bluster and make its own case about the ‘two likely scenarios’.

I’m with the courageous US intelligence agency that is leaning to the ‘laboratory accident scenario’. Here’s why.

First, we know that China has long had an interest in developing biological and chemical weapons. The US State Department made that assessment public years ago.

Second, we know that Chinese military personal and scientists have written studies on how to fight wars with biological agents. The Australian’s Sharri Markson has reported extensively on this. It’s true that there is a huge volume of Chinese military writing which does not necessarily represent communist party ‘policy’, but it’s significant that specialists inside Chinese military science are writing on this subject.

Third, we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is designed to be a very secure research facility and prior to 2019 was working on coronaviruses, including on so-called ‘gain of function’ research about how to make a virus more virulent.

The much-discredited joint World Health Organization–China study into the origin of the pandemic said that the strain of coronavirus closest in genetic makeup (in fact 96.2% identical) to the virus that causes Covid-19 was ‘detected in bat anal swabs [that] have been sequenced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’.

Fourth, we know that serious concerns existed about security at the WIV. In late 2017, the US embassy in Beijing flagged these worries in a cable reporting there was ‘a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory’. The embassy was so worried that it wanted Washington to help China improve the laboratory’s biosecurity. The proposal was never acted on.

Fifth, we know that the WIV was presenting itself as a civilian institution, but a US intelligence judgement reported by then secretary of state Mike Pompeo in January 2021 was that ‘the WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.’

Sixth, a point highlighted in the WHO–China study, the WIV-linked Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory moved on 2 December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan wet market. The study dryly states ‘such moves can be disruptive for the operations of any laboratory.’

The seventh point is that it seems at least three workers at the WIV fell ill with Covid-19-like symptoms some time before the first publicly known cases emerged in December 2019. This was mentioned by Pompeo in January and is now being bolstered, according to the New York Times, with corroborating information from non-US sources.

Finally, there is the remarkable Chinese Communist Party cover-up of the whole issue: The fatuous claims that Covid-19 was planted by US military personnel visiting Wuhan or arrived on frozen salmon; the refusal to hand over actual samples of the original virus as opposed to its genomic sequence; the refusal to grant access to the WIV until the tightly stage-managed WHO–China study visit on 3 February 2021; the over-the-top attempts to prevent international access to research the virus; and the hysterical denunciation of Australia’s request for a credible international examination.

It’s almost as though Xi has something to hide.

Put these elements together and it becomes clear that China was working on coronaviruses, was interested in biological weapons, had thought about how to fight with them and had sufficiently shoddy processes to make the ‘laboratory accident scenario’ a real possibility.

Something else we should be clear about is that once the virus was released, the CCP instantly weaponised its use. It allowed international flights out of Wuhan for weeks while countries dithered about closing borders.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Australian counterpart Marise Payne on 30 January last year that ‘given the current situation, the epidemic is generally preventable, controllable, and curable’. This was at precisely the time China was stripping stocks of medical equipment and protective gear from Australia and other democracies.

Again, to speculate: I suspect Biden has a clear sense of what his intelligence review will find. We are getting closer to uncovering the reality of what happened in Wuhan. The truth could force a rethink about how the democratic world deals with China and, domestically, lay a major blow on Xi’s legitimacy as the people’s hero in the struggle against Covid-19.

US President Joe Biden has sent Congress his requested budget for the 2022 fiscal year. Due to the timelines of a presidential transition year, there’s not a lot of detail yet, but there’s enough to answer one big question in the strategic policy sphere: there won’t be a big change to the defence budget.

The document’s preamble states that ‘America is confronting four compounding crises of unprecedented scope and scale all at the same time.’ For those of us in the national security community, it’s a useful reminder of Biden’s priorities that China’s increasing power and aggression is not one of the four; rather, they are the pandemic, the resulting economic crisis, a ‘national reckoning on racial inequality centuries in the making’, and climate change. Competition with China is mentioned, but Biden makes clear that it isn’t simply or even mainly a military problem. Instead, he seeks to outcompete China through ‘a comprehensive strategy to reimagine and rebuild a new American economy’.

On top of that, Biden wasn’t exactly dealt a great hand in terms of cash in the bank. The budget request is only for discretionary funding. The bulk of the US federal budget is mandated or non-discretionary funding, which includes things like Social Security (retirement and disability benefits) and Medicare (health care for seniors). Over the past 35 years, mandated expenditure has grown from rough parity with discretionary funding to more than twice as much. In 2020 it blew out even further, to around three times as much, because of unemployment benefits and other support payments made during the pandemic (discretionary spending was around US$1.6 trillion and mandated was nearly US$4.9 trillion). With that, the annual deficit, which had been approaching US$1 trillion, surged past US$3 trillion. That also brought the public debt to US$21 trillion, or around 100% of GDP.

Within the discretionary budget, there’s been a rough 50–50 split between defence and non-defence spending. With most of the federal budget essentially untouchable, it might have been tempting for Biden to take the razor to defence spending to find the discretionary funds to support his domestic priorities. But he hasn’t done that. His discretionary budget request maintains an almost even split between defence and non-defence spending, despite his intent to reverse the long-term trend of declining non-defence discretionary spending.

The total defence request is US$753 billion, around US$12 billion more than President Donald Trump’s 2021 budget. Of that, US$715 billion is for the Department of Defense itself. In comparison, the rest of the discretionary budget, which funds everything else from energy to education, is only slightly more at US$769 billion. Defence spending is around 3.2% of GDP—far more than America’s allies, including Australia.

It’s a budget that probably disappoints the doves who want significant readjustment of spending priorities, and it’s about as good as the hawks could have reasonably hoped for.

The request acknowledges that more detail is to come. Even so, the lack of specifics around the Department of Defense stands out. While other departments’ individual programs are described with dollars attached, the DoD has only high-level language with no dollars. Whether that’s because issues such as health, energy and the environment are higher priorities, or because the administration hasn’t yet been able get its arms around the elephantine problems facing the DoD is not clear. But the discrepancy between the boilerplate language on defence and the sense of urgency and renewal in other areas is striking.

What is there on defence largely gives an impression of continuity. Countering the threat from China remains the department’s top challenge. There’s a commitment to ‘a strong, credible nuclear deterrent for the security of the Nation and US allies’. The recapitalisation of the ballistic missile submarine fleet—the US Navy’s most expensive program—will continue.

The Biden administration’s conviction that the means to manage competition with China are not purely military ones is evident in the document’s emphasis on rebuilding the economy and working with partners and allies. Importantly, the request includes a substantial increase to the State Department budget. But the need to deliver military capability is also real.

The administration seeks to ‘reimagine’ the economy, and elsewhere Biden has proposed bold ideas that affect all departments, such as putting climate change into their core planning. But there are few clear signs in this document of imagination at work in the administration’s plans specifically for defence. However, doing business the same way is unlikely to enable the US to counter the threats it perceives around the world.

The army, navy and air force all face major recapitalisation challenges, with fleets ageing out and the mounting cost of replacements simply unaffordable. Meanwhile, Chinese military power grows apace, reflecting its role as the world’s factory. China’s shipyards are pumping out ships at a rate the US can’t match. Trump’s defence secretary grappled for a year with the problem of how to design a navy that could counter China before delivering a plan that was essentially unaffordable and unachievable.

Biden’s administration will have to wrestle with the same challenges, and the lack of detail in the budget request suggests it hasn’t resolved where, or indeed whether, it will make fundamental changes. The boilerplate language leaves some room for manoeuvring. For example, it doesn’t sign up to a target for the size of the fleet, such as the 355 ships that have been an unattainable and arguably distracting goal for years. There are references to innovation and emerging technologies, such as ‘remotely operated and autonomous systems’ and hypersonics.

The request also refers to divesting ‘legacy capacity and force structure’. Again, this is standard boilerplate, but potentially offers cover for some large force structure decisions, such as reducing the size of the army to reinvest in the maritime and air assets needed in the Pacific.

Biden’s decision to follow through on the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan suggests that he’s willing to make tough calls. One may not agree with the decision, but he broke with the status quo, even if the outcome is not clear. That decision will likely play well to a US public tired of ‘endless wars’, but it won’t by itself make much difference to the balance of power in the western Pacific. That will likely require a combination of more tough decisions and greater imagination than was revealed in this budget request.