 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon. I am Professor John Jackson and I'll be the host for today's event. This is the second lecture in our issues in national security lecture series for this academic year. I'd like to note that we're gathered here together in person, which I particularly like, and we also have a large audience dialed in on Zoom. And I extend a warm welcome to the members of the LDO Warn Officer Academy and other students enrolled throughout the officer training command Newport who've joined us. And since this series began as a spouse-oriented program, we're particularly happy to welcome Cheryl Garvin, who's with us this afternoon. Over the 23-24 academic year, we'll be offering 10 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world from our resident faculty. This is intended to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. We also welcome participation by the entire Naval War College extended family, including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station, Newport and others around the globe. While the primary purpose is to share information and learn together, we do offer documentation in the form of certificates of completion to all participants who attend at least 70% of the offered lectures. You can participate either here live in the audience via Zoom or even by watching the lectures when they are posted on YouTube. We ask you to keep track of how and when you participate, and we will ask you to self-certify your completion toward the end of the series. Our next two lectures will be on the 14th of November when we'll talk about cyber and national defense, and on the 12th of December when we will discuss issues facing Taiwan. We'll then take a winter break and return in the new year on the 23rd of January with an interesting lecture called China and Zombies. So Professor Jim Holmes does a great job with that presentation. Okay, on with the main event. At the conclusion of the presentation of follows, we'll welcome questions from our in-person audience and ask you to please use the microphones that are located each seat so that everyone including our virtual participants can hear the questions. And our virtual participants should feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we'll get to as many of them as possible. So let's move forward. Today's presentation will survey how the use of outer space has factored into U.S. national security from the days of Sputnik to our emerging era of great power competition. The presentation will describe how face matters not only to the U.S. military but as a part of our everyday lives. The talk will address potential threats and possible responses for American space power, including the role that space has played in the Ukraine-Russia war. Professor David Burbach is an associate professor in the national security affairs department. He holds a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Arts in government from Pomona College. He teaches U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and space security. His scholarly interest includes civil military relations, defense planning, and the relationship between international security and technology. Before coming to Newport, Professor Burbach taught at the Army School of Advanced Military Studies and worked for several policy analysis and information technology organizations as well in astronomy and space education. So, stand by as we boldly go where few of us have ever gone before and to lead our journey, Professor David Burbach. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome those of you who are here in the auditorium today. I know we are competing against a sunny October afternoon, you know, fairly warm outside. Those of you who are new to Newport, I'm afraid to tell you it's not going to be like this the whole academic year. So, I very much appreciate that you've chosen to be here today. Get out and enjoy the weather the next few days though because, you know, winter is coming. Good afternoon also to those of you watching live online today, and I will give a shout out to the future. You know, those of you who see this on YouTube at some future date, thank you for your interest as well. What I would like to do today, and actually, I think Professor Jackson covered it well in his summary, is talk a little bit about why space matters. What's new with space? You know, what are some of the challenges that we currently face and what are some of the things we're doing about those challenges? No, it's a, you know, I have to use the cliche at least once. Space is very big. It's a very big topic, so I won't be able to cover everything that might be of interest, but I'm happy to go wherever your questions take us after the presentation. And I'll start by noting, we often think of space as a new thing, you know, one of these new areas that we need to pay attention to. Space is really pretty old in many respects. If Sputnik were still in orbit, it would be old enough to retire and collect social security at this point. You know, it's been 65, more than 65 years now since we've been in space. You know, we've, it's, you know, as old as some of the oldest computers. You know, we, you know, we've been dealing, we've been working in space and using space for military purposes for a long time. But there are some things that are changing from some of the traditional ways that we've thought about space. So what I'll begin with is to say a little bit about kind of the Cold War space paradigm. What did we use space for? How did we think about space conflict? You know, what, how did the superpowers relate with respect to space? And, you know, what, the first thing you probably think of when you think about space in the Cold War days is the space race. Astronauts going, you know, riding rockets into space, you know, for the glory of their countries. And that was a big deal. We really did think, you know, not just that, boy, this is cool, but that it mattered. That demonstrating to the world who, you know, was our side or was the Soviet side, that the, you know, the real masters of space technology, that that would influence countries around the world. And I know it's a little hard to read. The cartoon that you see at upper right shows, you know, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, wooing a woman, you know, labeled, and I hate the term, but, you know, as used back then, lesser nations, the developing countries that were becoming newly decolonized. Khrushchev pointing up at Sputnik, saying, who else can give you a moon while sad old Uncle Sam has some flowers and chocolates? Who cares about a box of chocolates when somebody can give you a moon? And this is exactly how we saw it at the time, that, you know, we needed to demonstrate our ability to master space technology. We put real effort. In fact, we have a, you know, I will go ahead and call out my teaching partner, a State Department Public Affairs officer. We put a lot of effort actually in the space race era. You know, we didn't just sort of rely on, well, I'm sure everyone in the world must turn on TV and see this. We really went to an effort to publicize our efforts. Like, we sent John Glenn's capsule on what they called a fourth orbit after his three orbits in space. We literally sent the capsule. The Smithsonian institution was very worried about this, but we thought it was important. We sent the capsule of 30 cities around the world. People lined up for hours to get to see it. And eventually, you know, while the Soviets got the early jump, we eventually showed ourselves as the winners of the most important prize in that race. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. About one in every six people in the world watched that live. And, you know, for those of you who are younger, TV and, you know, the internet didn't exist. TV was still a pretty new thing. We actually spent money helping some countries build out their TV network so that their citizens would be able to watch Americans land on the moon. You see here, people gathering in an Australian department store at six in the morning to watch it. This was a big deal. You know, the whole world was watching. Well, that was one half of what we were doing in space. The other half, there was a very, very secretive but extremely important part of this, you know, other space race going on. Spying. What better place to spy on your opponent than hundreds of miles overhead where they couldn't do anything about it. And we're legally, we kind of established pretty early on that if a satellite flew over your territory, that was legal. You know, you couldn't shoot it down like a plane. So we very quickly, you know, focused on space as a domain for spying. Now, today, we're used to being able to see everything. How many of you have heard of Area 51? You know, it's where we keep the crashed UFOs. We have the aliens where we're interrogating them. You know, seriously, this, you know, if I'd put this slide up in the 1990s, they would have stopped the presentation and have security hauling me off to jail right now and would probably make all of you sign NDAs. An incredibly secret Air Force test base located in Nevada, where it's now no big deal to see photos in journalistic stories from private commercial satellites. In this case, it was a story tracking some new structures they were building on the base, trying to figure out what they were. This is just the world we live in. You know, I could pull up images probably within the last few days of the NWC parking lot from space. You know, somebody might notice when we have our gaming day on Saturday that there are more people in the parking lot than usual and might incorrectly conclude that like there's a crisis going on. You know, but we live in a world where you can do that. And of course, we're able to gather that kind of information on our adversaries. You may have seen in the news a few years ago, we found, again, commercial satellite images were released, that China has been building mock-ups of American warships, putting them on rails out in the desert. And, you know, as far as we can tell, using them as practice missile targets, presumably see if the optical sensors on their missiles can accurately target a ship. They put it way out in the middle of nowhere, partly because they don't want anybody to see what they're doing. There is no nobody can see what we're doing in the world anymore. That's changed. You know, we're able to see what they're doing. They can see what we're doing. But that's very different than it used to be. During the Cold War, we faced an adversary that was incredibly closed. Literally, we, until we had good satellite information, we were making use of maps we captured from the Germans when they invaded the Soviet Union in World War II. Because the Soviets would, they would put cities in the wrong location. They wouldn't release maps. We knew almost nothing about where are their military bases. How many bombers do they have? You know, where are the factories to build the bombers? Where do they do their nuclear tests? We didn't know basic facts like that. And so the top priority for space, really even a higher priority than the human spaceflight program, though we couldn't talk about it, was developing spy satellites. Because Eisenhower, then Kennedy, then Johnson realized that so long as we had no idea what the Soviets were doing, you know, we were potentially vulnerable to surprise attack. Conversely, we might think they were much scarier than they really were and spend a lot of money we didn't need to, or, you know, think they were about to attack and we might preemptively attack them and be wrong. So, you know, even before Sputnik launched, Eisenhower had already initiated a spy satellite program and made it an absolute number one military priority for the country. And within two years after Sputnik, we had our first spy satellites up. You know, larger ones followed. The, you know, by today's standards, this isn't much, but this is an early, an image released in the early 80s showing a Soviet typhoon-class submarine. For the time, that was really pretty impressive. And President Johnson summed it up pretty well. It's very typical of Lyndon Johnson. In front of a bunch of reporters, he said, I wouldn't want to be quoted on this, then said it and then they quoted him on it. But he said the space program would have been worth 10 times what we spent just for the satellite images of the Soviet Union. And as he said correctly, turned out they didn't build nearly as many missiles as we thought they might, you know, just kind of based on estimates of, you know, how much, you know, what their GDP was, where, you know, how they, how, what their, you know, industrial capacity was. Turned out they didn't build as many nuclear missiles as we expected, and we were able to be a little more relaxed about the arms race. That was worth a lot of money. It was worth, and we also knew that if they were about to start a war, we would probably see evidence of that from space so we could be more confident that the Soviets weren't about to launch a surprise attack on us. And, you know, so early on, we were using space for a variety of military purposes. One of the most important purposes other than, you know, sort of taking secret pictures, missile warning satellites. Again, those of you in the military are used to receiving this kind of information now. This was a very big deal in the 1960s when we developed the capability to detect, you know, the plume of a missile launch right after it took off so that we knew we'd at least have half an hour warning before the nuclear missiles landed on the United States. We developed early on weather satellites, navigational satellites weren't as convenient as GPS is now, but by the mid-1960s we had the Navy had a navigational satellite system called Transit, weather satellites, communication satellites. So space became pretty important early on in the Cold War, especially for our strategic nuclear forces. Just to touch on a few kind of, you know, questions like, you know, the notion of space war or war from space, one question is, well, gee, you know, what about putting weapons in space? It's always good to have the high ground. You always want to attack from the high ground. Well, space is the ultimate high ground, so why not put weapons in space? We in the Soviets actually did consider, what if we put nuclear weapons in space? You know, what if we have orbiting nuclear weapons ready to, you know, to call down on to people? And then we both thought that through and realized that's a pretty bad idea. It's kind of the equivalent of imagine you put your nuclear weapon, you know, just, you know, floating in an, you know, an uncrewed buoy or something and push it out into the ocean and just let it float away. That's kind of what you're doing in space. Did we want an adversary to be able to go into space and grab our nuclear weapon and capture it or disable it? What if there was an accident at launch and rockets crashed a lot more often back then than they do now? Would you really want a live nuclear warhead taking off from, you know, the Kennedy Space Center and oops, so both sides decided, you know, it's actually probably not a good idea. So we even signed, we eventually came up with the treaty where we both agreed not to do it. People occasionally talk about an idea of, well, when you come back from space, you're moving at a tremendous velocity, think about, you know, look at what the asteroid did to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What about having, you know, things come back from space and hit the earth? We've looked into that. Turns out, actually, it's not the super weapon you might think. If a giant like telephone pole made out of heavy tungsten metal hits the ground from space, it'll have about the same explosive power as a TNT bomb of the same weight. That's impressive, but it's really expensive to put that rod up there in the first place. It's hard to aim it, you know, as you're screaming through the atmosphere at Mach 10 with, you know, incandescent plasma around yourself. So, you know, there's, in theory, you could put weapons in space to hit the earth. Most governments have, you know, so far governments have all decided that it's not worth the cost. It doesn't really buy you that much. On the other hand, attacking things in space from earth is definitely possible. As with everything else, early in the Cold War, we thought about doing this with nuclear weapons. We did a test. The image you see on the left is when, yes, that is your left, is when we tested setting off a nuclear weapon in space seen from Hawaii to destroy satellites. We did destroy the target satellite. We also destroyed a lot of other satellites. We destroyed AT&T's first television relay satellite. We destroyed other governments. We learned that when you set off a nuclear weapon in space, a lot of radiation gets trapped in the earth's magnetic field. And basically, you create a high radiation zone that lasts for days and affects all the satellites. So, that was a little inconvenient. We also eventually learned how to build anti-satellite missiles accurate enough to hit a satellite without needing a nuclear warhead. But even that can create a problem where if you've seen the movie Gravity, it dramatizes it. But there is this problem of if you blow up a satellite, you create debris, and all those little pieces of debris moving at orbital velocity might hit other satellites and blow them up. And eventually, it becomes an unsafe environment for everybody's satellite because there are so many high-velocity fragments up there. So, both sides realize that space combat was kind of difficult. And so, we actually had a relatively restrained take on space where both sides realized if you blow up the other side's missile warning satellites, they're going to figure you're about to start a war. So, that's probably not a good idea unless you really are about to start the war. Knowing kind of what each other is doing from spy satellites had some stabilizing effects. And space combat is kind of difficult. So, mostly in the Cold War, we use space as this domain for really important strategic nuclear intelligence communications. Didn't play as big a role for day-to-day tactical operations. And neither side put a lot of effort into deploying weapons to attack things in space. So, what's changed? One thing that's changed is space is now in everything. Everybody in this room has a space-enabled device. I mean, maybe there's somebody in here who does not have a phone and does not have a car built in the last 20 years. No phone? Okay. It's really, really hard to not use space technology day-to-day now. Your telephone uses GPS. Your car probably has GPS built in. And beyond the navigational services, GPS also is a very accurate clock. And we use that to, you know, how does the cell network keep track of, you know, when you send a packet of data, which one is first, which one is second, which one is next? GPS provides the precise clock signal that synchronizes all of the cell stations with each other. If you take away the GPS signal, the cell service probably stops as well. And there have been a couple of cases where there were some GPS problems that briefly took down some cell networks. You know, we rely on television broadcasts from space, incredibly detailed weather forecasting that relies on satellites. And on the military side, I mean, those of you who, you know, who are in the military know, we use space data for everything. I mean, not only, you know, GPS for navigation, sure. We use a lot of satellite communication. We use, you know, whereas in the 1960s, satellites were so rare and so limited in that, you know, pre-digital age, you would try and take photos of each other's nuclear missile sites. You know, these days we've got enough space capability that, you know, we could use it to help, you know, like space-based signals intelligence to try to track terrorists in Afghanistan. You know, we use space every day for, you know, all sorts of tactical operations. So we really depend on space, both for our civilian economies and for our military operations. You know, going back to the 1991 Gulf War, where, you know, I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember that the 1991 Gulf War pretty well. You know, there's a thing about, you know, people's moms were buying them, you know, really basic GPS receivers and, you know, mailing them to the Gulf. Satellite photos were really being used tactically for the first time. We've come a long way. Take away our space capability and we don't fight nearly as well. Well, of course, our adversaries understand that. And, you know, that's where things now get interesting is that as we potentially face adversaries who have space capabilities of their own, we've got to worry about that. From in the 1990s, you know, until recently, we were mostly facing adversaries that had no real space capabilities. The Taliban was in no position to destroy an American satellite. I don't know if they did any GPS jamming, but, you know, that's, you know, you can, I don't encourage you to do this, but you can go online, you know, and from various illegal sites, order, you know, GPS jammer that you can hold in your hand that would take away, you know, GPS from probably most of Equinic Island. That's easy to do. But the Taliban wasn't going to take out a spy satellite or a communication satellite. We were fighting adversaries that didn't have their own space capabilities. That may be changing. If we're now having to face, you know, Russia and China as potential adversaries, we're now facing the possibility of conflicts with countries that are major space-stirring powers. China launched almost as many rockets last year as the United States did. They have their own space station. They, you know, they've, you know, they also have a rover on Mars. I mean, I would still take our space exploration program over the Chinese program, but they're very capable. And on the military side too, China has a large fleet of military satellites. They have, you know, good technology skills. Russia, you know, has not been doing as well given the economic sanctions they face, but also, you know, country with long-standing space capabilities. So if we were to get into a war with either of these countries or, you know, probably closely with their proxies, they, A, would have space capabilities of their own that we might want it to grade, or at least we'd need to understand. And perhaps more worryingly, they'd be in a position to do something about our space capabilities, to possibly attack our space systems or, you know, try and disrupt them with various sorts of attacks. And we probably have an asymmetric vulnerability there. And what I mean by asymmetric is, let's imagine you did a fair trade. We'll take away all of China's space capability, and they take away all of our space capability. That probably is a net win for China. You know, we probably lose more than China loses if everybody lost space access altogether, partly because we rely more on space technology, but also geography. As you can see on the little, you know, globe I drew up here, if there were a conflict in the South China Sea or over Taiwan, China's only a couple of hundred miles off their shore. We would be thousands of miles from Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles from the Pentagon. In order to communicate at all, we have to use space in order to have any idea what's going around us. We have to use space. Now, if China were trying to fight the US, you know, like off, you know, off Long Island, you know, out the bay here, yeah, to be the other way around. And China would desperately depend on space capabilities. And, you know, we could use radio communication from shore. That doesn't seem like the most likely. I mean, by the way, I'll note that one of the very last submarine sinkings of World War 2 was actually right off the bay here. You know, you, I think you might be able to visit the wreck if you, you know, if you do scuba diving. There are actually some of the sailors from the wreck buried in the cemetery over on Vansant Avenue. So, you know, not completely crazy to imagine, you know, an enemy submarines or enemy ships right off the coast. More likely, we're going to be on the far side of the Pacific, so we're going to be the ones who need space to be able to play that away game. So, we worry that competitors may do, may take action against us. You know, may be able to try and deny us the use of space. And there are a couple of ways they could do that. One is, you know, the classic method that, you know, we developed in the Cold War of hitting a satellite with an anti-satellite missile. Nobody needs nuclear weapons, thank God, anymore for those. You know, countries are now able to build missiles that'll do a kinetic intercept. We actually, in fact, somewhere in the world there is a retired F-15 pilot who has credit for a satellite kill. They actually did, in fact, paint a satellite on the side of the plane. We tested an air-launched anti-satellite missile in the mid-1980s, and it worked. We shot down a satellite from a Navy destroyer in 2008. China has done actual anti-satellite tests. Russia did one a couple of years ago. India also about four years ago now, so four countries have actually tested the ability to launch a missile from the ground, blow up a satellite. Problem with this is it does create debris. The Russian tests two years ago actually threatened their own astronauts on the space station. As far as we can tell, they gave no warning to their civilian space agency that they were going to do the test. The astronauts on the space station had to get kind of in their shelter module, and even today, the space station occasionally has to maneuver to avoid debris from that Russian test. So everybody's a little concerned about what it would look like if you were to try and shoot down a bunch of satellites, but these systems do exist. On your left, this one's low enough, I can point it. The Russians have fielded a system called the Noodle for both ballistic missile defense and anti-satellite capabilities. We're pretty sure the Chinese have systems like that as well. We do not have any such systems deployed, though again, the Aegis systems on our destroyers have demonstrated they can shoot down a satellite in low orbit. The other interesting possibility is as space robotics get better, instead of smashing into a satellite and blasting it into little pieces, what if you come up slowly on a satellite and then stick out a giant pair of scissors and cut off its solar panels? Or you spray paint the lens of a spy satellite so it can't see anything. Or you have a microwave generator and you get close enough and fry its electronics for those of you old enough to remember, if you put a compact disc in your microwave, it would spark up. This is a really interesting technology because if you can get up close to a satellite, dock with it, you might be able to refuel it. You might be able to repair it. If it's an old dead satellite, you could slow it down so it reenters and it's not up there as a hazard to navigation. There's a lot of commercial use for this technology and companies in the U.S. and China, Europe, Japan are all working on developing this ability to have a satellite grab an old satellite and service it. Well, the problem is if you can grab a satellite to do something helpful and useful, you can also grab it and do something terrible to it. The James Bond film series envisioned this 45 years ago or 55 years ago now where one of the villains had a ship that would go up and capture U.S. and Soviet space capsules. This is something that within the next few years there'll be a possibility that we may be able to build satellites that can do this. Even today, we accuse the Chinese of, oh, the robot arm on your space station is maybe testing to do damage to other satellites. They say, well, you had a robot arm on your space shuttle decades ago, so maybe you were doing bad things with your the robot arm fight. I just find kind of silly. But what it really gets at though is this ability to possibly damage a satellite without blowing it up and creating debris. We can also do electronic and cyber attacks on satellites. We have acknowledged U.S. Space Force has, you can see the big antenna system there on the right, a system to try and jam adversary communication satellites. One presumes other countries have that. China, we have claimed that China fires lasers at our intelligence satellites to dazzle their sensor. It doesn't damage them permanently, but it's like trying to take a photograph of somebody shining a flashlight right into your camera. You know, they're not, the satellite isn't able to see anything useful for a brief moment while it's overhead. And even more secretive, but presumably satellites, in a real sense, satellites are flying computers. They're flying computers with solar panels and thrusters attached. And if you can do a cyber attack on a computer on Earth, why can't you try and exploit a vulnerability in a satellite's computer? Or what if you don't touch the satellite at all, but you do a cyber attack on the ground systems? You know, the data from a satellite is only useful if somebody on Earth is able to do something useful with it and push that useful data out to users who need it in the field. If you can interrupt any stage of that chain, you've taken away the space capability, even if the satellite is working perfectly fine. If nobody's listening or nobody who's receiving the data can get it out to the people who need it, that's just as good. And as I'll talk about with Ukraine, we've seen some real examples of that. Well, so what do we do about this? And there are a number of avenues that we're pursuing. The number one word, and if we have a speaker from Space Force again here at the War College, I'm sure we will hear this. If we've had General Salzman last year who gave a really good talk, I think, resilience is probably the number one thing we're focusing on. Being able to take a punch and keep operating, because during the Cold War, when we had that paradigm of space kind of stabilizes things, fighting in space is hard. We got used to relying on a few very large, very expensive satellites. You know, GPS is 32 satellites. We only have four of those kind of main nuclear missile warning satellites out in geosynchronous orbit. Relatively small number of very high capability communication satellites. What we're realizing is, you know, if you only need to take out three, four, even 20 satellites to completely take away a capability, that's a pretty tempting target. If you need to take out a thousand satellites to take out that same capability, that's a less attractive thing to try to do, because the anti-satellite missile is going to be just as expensive whether you need four of them or whether you need a thousand of them. So that cost would add up. So we're putting a lot of emphasis on what if we have a lot of small satellites, kind of the old notion for the internet. You know, if you have a distributed network of computers, if one of them goes out, it'll just send the messages through a different pathway. Well, if you have a thousand satellites and one of them gets blown up, the system can adapt to that pretty easily. So we're really emphasizing this notion of relying on a large number of relatively cheap, relatively small satellites, and also thinking about ways, well, how do you make the satellites more difficult to destroy? I mean, at the high end, you could put like, you know, laser, defense laser cannons on a satellite, and when you see an interceptor coming in, you try and blow it up first. It's expensive, but maybe it's worth thinking about that for some of our particularly valuable satellites, or you give them more fuel so they're more able to move out of the way of an interceptor, not get hit in the first place. It means a trade-off where if you give it, you know, 10 pounds more fuel, that's 10 pounds less for capability. You know, you've got to put a smaller camera or something on it, but we're thinking about how to make those trade-offs in a way that puts more emphasis on survivability. We could also, as we do for many things, rely on deterrence. We could make it clear to adversaries. We depend on space. We know space is fragile. We know we probably can't win on the defense. So if you take out our space capabilities, we're going to come after your space capabilities. Maybe we'll come after targets on Earth in response. And Space Force has said, you know, we do need some counter-space options, offensive options of our own to hold adversary space capabilities at risk. There are others who say, you know, we're so dependent upon space, you know, other countries will make that trade, so we need to be willing to, if you blow up our satellites, we're going to blow up an airbase from your country because you're going to care about that. You may not have satellites that you care about. The problem that comes up there is the evidence seems to be we don't, you know, know attacks in space are unlikely to kill people. Now, unless somebody blows up the space station, you're blowing up a machine. And we've seen it when, you know, Iran has shot down a drone, for example. National leaders seem to be pretty wary about crossing that line of taking human life when there was no risk to human life in the initial attack. And in fact, one of the congressmen who was one of the key advocates for Space Force, recently retired Jim Cooper from Tennessee, is actually kind of annoyed and says, why is Space Force talking about deterrence against Earth targets? The whole point of Space Force is kind of like Vegas, you know, what happens in space stays in space and says no president is ever going to authorize killing enemy soldiers because a machine was blown up in space. It's going to be an interesting debate. I'm not sure Cooper's right, but he's definitely not crazy to think that. There's evidence he may be right. We could also, and this is getting difficult at this point against adversaries like China and Russia, 20 years ago there were those who said, hey, we've got a window of opportunity to go full bore, put up all kinds of space weapons and anti-satellite weapons and those rods from God to come in. We just need to dominate space and tell everybody else on Earth, you're going to do what we let you do in space. That's probably a little late at this point, given where Russia and China are, but you could still imagine doctrines where we really focus on deploying and developing a lot of space weapons and just try and make sure that nobody can threaten us in space. We could also, and we are, trying to pursue some diplomatic routes. If we're so worried about space being fragile, but also very prone to an arms race, we could pursue diplomacy. Maybe come up with a treaty banning anti-satellite weapons or agreements on which satellites it's okay to attack, try and at least set some rules for the game. In fact, right now there really aren't many rules. For example, some of you in the Navy may have had to think about codes of conduct for unplanned encounters at sea. With the Soviets, we had a treaty called the Incidents at Sea Treaty that set rules for how do our ships behave when they get close to your ships. There were some cases where you have an aggressive skipper on our side and aggressive skipper on their side. The ships shoulder each other back and forth and then suddenly it's World War III and everybody's dead. We wanted World War III to happen because we wanted it to happen, not because two destroyers got a little too sporty out at sea. So we came up with some agreements on how to behave. You see this now with China where we complain about them doing unsafe intercepts of our spy planes. We don't have a lot of those rules of the road for space really written. We have indicated we would be interested now in working on developing them and trying to reduce some tensions and uncertainty. So a variety of directions that we might go, we also have done a major organizational change. We created a new service. Anybody from Space Force here? I apologize for singling. I guess I don't need to apologize, but had there been a Space Force officer, I apologize for singling you out. But this is a pretty big deal. We created a new service for only the second time since the early days of the Republic. In the previous example, the Air Force has been around for what, 75 years. We decided that space was sufficiently different from air, that we needed to have a service that could focus on space, develop a cadre of officers who really understood the space domain and sort of marinated in all things space. The way people are with land power, air power, sea power. So we created a new service in 2019. They're continuing to develop doctrine to build their personnel. Just this year is the first class at Space War College, a partnership with Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. So we have stood up this new organizational unit and it causes a lot of confusion. In fact, just two weeks ago, I was on vacation visiting family. My mother-in-law actually said, no, but seriously, this Space Force thing isn't real right. Wasn't that just a comedy show on Netflix? I had to explain, no, it actually exists and she was just utterly befuddled that why we would do this. Well, I can tell you this is not U.S. Space Force. And if any of you were thinking of transferring because you would get to go to strange planets and fight alien monsters or be able to zoom around in your X-wing fighter, no, no, you know, space right now, I think, I don't even, I'm not sure there are even any Space Force astronauts. I know a lot of NASA astronauts are on detail from the military. There may now be some who are Space Force, but Space Force doesn't have an astronaut core. Space Force does not have Space Marines. Space Force, the only actual real weapons they have right now, as I understand it, are the personal arms of their security forces. Now that might change. They may develop offensive capabilities. So if they're not Starfleet or Space Marines, what are they? And the key missions for Space Force at this point are space domain awareness, knowing what's going on out there, you know, using radars here on the earth, telescopes. One of the things they've been moving very quickly on doing is actually establishing international partnerships, sharing data with our allies who have their own space tracking capabilities. Because the more data you can put together, the better you can track objects in orbit and make sure you really have a strong picture. So that, you know, day to day, one of the main things they do is to simply know what's going on up there. I have had people wonder, why didn't Space Force know about that Chinese balloon? Well, here's a hint. If it's a balloon, it's floating in the air, and that means it's not in space. The boundary between the other combatant commands, areas of responsibility in space is 100 kilometers up. So if it's a balloon or a plane, it's not Space Force's fault. But they keep track of what's going on in orbit. They operate and defend American satellites, you know, GPS communication satellites, military weather satellites, you know, Space Force now runs them. The intelligence satellites mostly still belong to the intelligence community. There was a big bureaucratic fight about that. But the Space Force's mission to understand threats to our satellites and to be able to protect them from those threats, you know, and possibly conduct counter space operations. Right now, we have no indicated plans to deploy kinetic space weapons. But, you know, again, we've acknowledged having one radio jammer and we might develop other systems for cyber attacks or other ways of disabling adversary satellites. You know, in the last few minutes, let me just say a bit about a couple of the other big changes happening in space and what to make of them. Most of you have probably heard of Elon Musk, richest man in the world. I think he's still ahead of Bezos. At this point, owns the Tesla auto company, Twitter, or now X as he's renamed it, and owns SpaceX, which if you add up all, if you take not just number of launches, but the weight, you know, total mass lobbed into orbit, SpaceX launched more mass into orbit than every other country and company combined last year by a good margin. Far and away the leader, but they aren't the only player. There are a bunch of other companies getting involved in rocket launches. There are a lot of companies building, you know, they're not launching them on their own rockets, but a lot of companies deploying satellites. As I was talking with a colleague before, if you have children, go look at the night sky with them in the next few years. Take them out somewhere dark, look at the constellations. You'll probably see a couple of satellites if it's in the early evening or early morning. You're going to see more. If you add up all the plans right now, there might be, I don't know, 200,000 satellites in orbit in another 10 or 15 years compared to about six or 7,000 now. A lot of companies are putting up these massive constellations of satellites. Now, that's good from the standpoint of redundancy and, you know, kind of providing coverage everywhere like your cell network. I'll admit I'm kind of nerdy in my hobbies. I actually like going out and doing photography, you know, astronomy photography. Yeah, I need to get out and do that more because it's going to be impossible to do it in a few more years. It's going to be like being at the end of the runway at LAX. There are going to be so many satellites. And these commercial companies have, as you saw with those photographs early in the presentation, have the ability to do military-grade intelligence. Optically, synthetic aperture radar. There's even commercial E-Lint constellations that do radio triangulation. In theory, I don't think they're supposed to do SIGINT like actually listening in on communications but locating transmitters on Earth. Absolutely. You can buy that kind of data in the commercial sector now. So how have we seen this play out in Ukraine? And I won't go into a lot of detail here. But space has really mattered a lot. Russia, space-faring power. Ukraine actually, a lot of the former Soviet space industry was in Ukraine. So this was actually a country that on the eve of the war, they didn't have many of their own satellites, but they actually had a lot of engineers who understood space technology. They were where Russia, you know, the Soviet Union had a lot of its software development for space. So some ways Ukraine was kind of primed to make use of space information. Russia began the war with a cyber attack on a company called Viasat. In fact, my mother-in-law uses it for her internet service in very rural Oregon. A company that provides satellite-based internet. The Ukrainian military on the eve of the war relied on Viasat for their tactical communications. Day one of the war, Russia launched a cyber attack not against Viasat satellites, but they were able to use the Viasat management system to put out a software upgrade to everybody's user terminal as if talking to your cable modem, and that upgrade bricked them. You couldn't use them. Even if you turned it off and reset it, they needed to go for a factory reset in order to be repaired. So that took away Ukraine's ability to use those terminals. It also affected tens of thousands of commercial users in Europe, causing some real damage. Viasat had to spend millions of dollars to replace all those receivers. It knocked a bunch of wind turbines in Germany offline for days and cost the power company money. So Russia actually did do some non, you know, I mean they didn't blow anything up, but they actually caused some real commercial collateral damage in NATO countries, which is kind of interesting. However, as I noted, Elon Musk quickly stood up and they've been making good use of the Starlink system ever since. And although Russia has said that Starlink is a valid military target, and I've seen American Jags say, yeah, he's actually right. It would be by the laws of war to be legit. Starlink now has about 5,000 satellites in orbit. So Russia maybe has a few dozen at most of those interceptors. So it's really not worth it for Russia to try to shoot them down. And so far, Musk's company has been able to keep ahead of Russian hacking attacks. We've also seen the importance of commercial intelligence, commercial imaging. From the day before the war, the commercial radar satellite bike from Capella space, they have a constellation of radar satellites. You could see vehicles lining up near the Ukrainian border. And this image was taken at night. SAR can see through clouds. It can see at night. 24-7 imaging of really pretty significant detail. So we've seen the Ukraine's made some pretty good use of these capabilities. And again, some of the lessons that we've seen play out, the value of that redundancy of having thousands of small satellites instead of a few juicy big targets, the importance of cyber attacks. And one of the interesting things that we still don't really have figured out is, so what does it mean if the commercial sector is so deeply entwined and directly providing military capabilities? And Russia has said Starlink is a target. They've even occasionally implied that Elon Musk personally would be a valid military target. That's probably not okay by the laws of war. But what do we need to do to protect our commercial operators? What are we willing to do against third-party operators who are helping our adversaries? If an Indian company sells imagery to a country we're fighting, are we going to attack an Indian satellite? We generally have good relations with India. We probably don't want to do that. We probably also don't want them making that sale. And India might not go along with saying no to it. So as this global market for space services developed, there's a lot of policy questions that we're going to have to figure out. And finally, on a happier note, I know I mostly have not talked about the civil space exploration side, but there are some interesting developments happening there too. You may have seen the last couple of years. We've had some space tourism flights. William Shatner, Captain Kirk, actually got to, technically, he didn't go into orbit. He did make it into space, got to see the blackness of space outside the atmosphere on a suborbital flight from Jeff Bezos' company. There have now been a couple of private tourist flights from SpaceX's Space Capsule. And we're likely to see, I don't think you're going to see your grandma taking a cheap holiday to the moon anytime soon. But in the same way that people climb Mount Everest, people go to Antarctica, you're going to see space tourism becoming a bit of a thing. And the exciting kind of, you know, to end on that, go back to that prestige space exploration note I started on, we're trying to go back to the moon. NASA has a program called Artemis. The first launch of the new rocket that supports that was a little less than a year ago. And SpaceX is modifying their big Starship rocket to land on the moon. So we hope to put astronauts back on the moon and about, you know, technically, we're now aiming for the end of December 2025, because we don't want it to be 2026. I think probably 2027, 2028 is more likely given how the program is going, personal opinion. And on the national security side, we're very much involving allies in this. We're really trying to make it international. Come work with us. Be part of our program. Send your people to the moon. We've already got plans for European astronauts, a Japanese astronaut. I wouldn't be surprised if we make plans to include an Indian astronaut in the program. We're really trying to internationalize it and really make this a way of helping to deepen relationships, signal friendships, and build prestige for countries that we're trying to help. So I think Toyota is contributing a rover. Australia is building some hardware. The United Arab Emirates is building hardware from the program. So unlike the Apollo program, this one's going to be very internationalized. And I will leave with this image from that test flight, that rocket that launched in the previous slide, sent NASA's new Orion capsule. Nobody in it. This was a robotic test mission, but it did fly past the moon, successfully landed off the coast of San Diego when it came back. So hopefully, we'll have some actual people getting a view like this in a couple of years. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you to our online audiences. And I look forward to questions. A terrific rundown. We appreciate that. Questions here in the audience. Raise your hand if you have a question. Don't be shy. Yeah. Hello. So first, good afternoon sir. Thank you so much for the presentation. You mentioned the debris generated from attacking satellites. It seems to me, and of course correct me if I'm wrong, that seems more like a matter of when rather than if there's a significant debris field that makes, that basically makes low earth orbit a hazardous environment for satellites. So are you aware, and are you able to talk about any efforts to mitigate that threat and potentially clean up that environment? I know it's a very difficult challenge, but it's a, that's a great question. And yes, I can. And there actually are some effort. I wouldn't say anything is to the point of an effort yet, but ideas and tests and that could become real efforts where, yeah, you're right. Even if nobody, even if there are no attacks, every few years, two old satellites will collide just by accident and break up into debris. So yeah, we recognize that if nobody does anything about this, it's eventually going to spiral into that, you know, from the movie, the movie Gravity, they talked about the Kessler syndrome. That's something that would take months to years. It wouldn't happen in like an hour or two, but the movie wouldn't have been a very dramatic movie if they had to wait months for the, you know, the space station to be threatened. But there are a couple of things we're doing. One is to try and avoid the problem in the first place. Right now, if you want to launch a satellite as an American company, you've got to get a license from the Federal Communications Commission to do the radio broadcasting. They now are going to start requiring that you demonstrate a plan so that when the satellite is at the end of its life, you can safely de-orbit it so that you don't leave it there as a derelict satellite to create debris, and also that you can demonstrate that, hey, our satellites are going to be, they're going to be reliable enough that they're not going to die and fail to re-orbit. Occasionally, satellites will blow up on their own. I guess the thermal stress and the battery are, you know, they're fragile and there's stuff that's explosive inside of them. So we are trying to do a little better in the U.S. about making, you know, making satellite operators recognize the problem and operate their satellites in a more sustainable way. Now, for cleaning up debris that's already up there, that's where, if you remember my James Bond slide, you know, the big thing with the MOG and grab the Gemini capsule, there are companies working on stuff like that. There have been some, in fact, both American and China just did a test of satellites grabbing on to an old satellite that wasn't designed to dock, but, you know, they've developed, you know, bumpers and grabbers that are able to catch on to it. And so the theory would be, if you can grab big satellites and give them a de-orbiting push before they collide, you know, if you get rid of all the big intact satellites before they become thousands of pieces of debris, that actually gets you a long way to dealing with the problem. So the small pieces of debris, usually they'll slow, they're a little more susceptible to the, I mean, there's, you know, I, you know, I now, you know, caught by my own joke, there is actually a little bit of air even in orbit. You know, there are still enough molecules that things will slow down and re-enter. The small pieces that happens more quickly, the intact whole satellite, that can take a long time. So there are companies developing this technology to grab on to a satellite that wasn't, you know, that's maybe derelict and wasn't designed, give it a de-orbiting push, let go, move on to the next satellite. Where that gets interesting for security purposes is, what if I do that to a Chinese spy satellite? Like, ha, sorry, I guess something went wrong with your satellite, you know, or they do it to us. And so this is, this is where you get that tit for tat, like we're complaining about each other's robot arms. That's, you know, again, the robot arm thing is silly, but yeah, the exactly the same technology that you would use to clean up space of things you don't want there, you could use to, you know, de-orbit adversary satellites. So, you know, fast forward 10 years when we have that technology more in place, I think there are going to be some real international politics about figuring out, you know, are we going to complain when a Chinese company wants to start doing that, and are they going to complain when an American company starts? So I think there are some ways we can, you know, get a handle on it, but they raise some interesting problems too. Thank you, sir. Sir. We have a question from Zoom here. Can you talk about how the other services are interacting with Space Force? How much stuff that was formerly done by one services now being consolidated with Space Force? That's a good question, and I probably don't have the level of detail the questioner is looking for there. I know a lot of these space capability of other services did move over to Space Force. I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head of how many personnel. I do know from everything I've heard that mostly people were pretty eager to go. I mean, think about it. You know, it's rare that you have the chance to be, you know, I think a plank owner, they tend to call it, you know, being somebody who's there at the ground floor, helping to establish a new service. It probably doesn't hurt that most of the Space Force bases you're likely to get sent to are pretty reasonable places to live. You know, so they've got, Space Force has some real recruiting advantages, but in terms of kind of how those seams are working, definitely all the services kept some space personnel because, you know, everybody needs to understand space and no service is completely comfortable. You know, totally like, you know, I guess I'll sit here on my computer and wait for the space stuff to show up. Up until then it's your problem, Space Force. Nobody wants to be quite like that, so there's been some capability kept. I think the biggest fight was actually, as I mentioned, between Space Force and the intelligence community, where there were some proposals like, well, if we're creating a force to own, operate and develop satellites, and they're actually, by dollar value, more satellites in the intel community than the military, shouldn't we move the National Reconnaissance Office to be part of Space Force? Congress decided they didn't, you know, they thought, you know, the intel community has done pretty well. They've actually, the sense was they, the intel community had been more innovative and better at sticking to budgets and schedules. So what won the day was essentially Congress saying, we trust the NRO more than we trust DoD, so we're going to leave the part that we think is working okay. Maybe that changes once Space Force demonstrates their ability to procure and deliver innovative stuff. Basically, Congress felt like we, you know, we're really trying to fix a military problem more than a reconnaissance satellite problem. And I realize that was a bit of a dodge to not have, but I don't have a really specific answer on how that interface looks kind of at the ground level. Any other questions here in the auditorium? Yes, please. So as, as commercial company, like as companies are getting more involved in space, how is it going to affect relations between the companies and governments to make sure that things, they aren't doing things that the governments don't want them to do? Well, there's a good hypothetical question that has, that has no, no, no possible relationship to, you know, any examples that we've seen recently. Now, I bring up Musk is there. Starlink has been so important for the Ukraine war, but it's been this odd situation where it is a private company supplying, you know, tactical military communication support largely on its own, not to DOD and then we provided to our ally. And like there have been some news reports where, you know, Musk has made decisions like they can use it in these locations, but they can't use it for Crimea or SpaceX has decided, you know, they can use it in vehicles, but not in drones. And they've tried to, you know, there's been a bit of a back and forth where Ukraine tries to come up with ways that they can like bolt a Starlink receiver onto a drone. So SpaceX then puts a, you know, a gate where if the thing is moving faster than 60 miles an hour, it'll stop working. But you've really had a private company making decisions about exactly how are, you know, an ally can use the support it's getting. And that has made some people uncomfortable. That same article that went into the Crimea detail said, you know, you've seen very senior DOD officials kind of talking to Musk as if he's ahead of state trying to negotiate, you know, hey, what SpaceX will, you know, what if we do this, you know, that's a little unusual. And most of the traditional defense contractors in the U.S., like Boeing or Lockheed, they usually have, they usually try and stay out of the politics. It's kind of, okay, DOD, what's going to make you happy? That's all we can, you know, you don't see most of their CEOs talking about, here's how I think the peace deal should look. I mean, you just don't see the Boeing CEO opining on what the right foreign policy is. A lot of space, a lot of these new space companies are new and don't come out of that same culture. So are we going to see, you know, Musk is kind of, is a fairly unique kind of case, you know, he being that wealthy and that outspoken. But yeah, we're going to have to make rules in the U.S. about, you know, who can U.S. companies sell information to, you know, or SpaceX, or not SpaceX, Space Force is talking about developing what they call a space reserve fleet where we could give some preferential contracts to companies in peacetime for the ability to essentially take over their systems in wartime and say, okay, you signed a deal, we helped you out in peacetime. Same as we do with the airlines where, you know, we, in exchange for, like those of you who are in DOD will know, like, you know, our government contract fares. Partly, it's if you sign, you get preference in that system if your airline signs up to what we call the civil reserve air fleet, craft, where we have the ability to call upon those airlines and say, we need your planes. We need your people. We need your planes and your pilots to fly military personnel from A to B. And they have to do it because they took the money in peacetime. We'd like to do something like that with satellites and kind of work out a deal where we can get some preferential wartime access and control in exchange for peacetime contract preferences. I don't know any details beyond that. You know, I've only seen that idea floated. But yeah, we're really not used, we're used to the government having real control and companies that really just want to stay out of the politics of it all. That's becoming less true. So we, there's, there's going to be a lot we need to figure out with that. David, we have a lot more questions here, but we're out of time. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you.