 All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming. Look forward to very good discussions afternoon about the UNICEF Anasatellite Test. As we all know, back at the end of March, India successfully tested an Anasatellite weapon against one of its satellites, becoming the fourth country to demonstrate the ability to deliberately destroy a satellite. With this intercept, India, Prime Minister Modi held it as a major step towards for Indian security and proof that India had become a space power in his words. While reaction from most other governments has been relatively muted, there has been concerns raised by civil society and the commercial space world about the tests and about some of the impacts it has, both in the space environment and to international norms and behavior of the space more broadly. So the topic of this afternoon's discussion is to talk about the test and what it means in the context of space security and stability and sustainability. Talk about whether or not there actually has been a precedent established that this is a responsible thing to do, how will it impact both regional security as well as broader geopolitical issues and is it an impact on other space actors? With us here today to discuss this is a panel of experts talking about different aspects of this. On the end of the table there, we have Dr. Bob Hall. He's with Anical Graphics Incorporated and serves as the director of the Commercial Space Operations Center, where he oversees day-to-day operations of the commspok, including sensor management and honorable threat processing. Bob is a background in systems engineering and project management of AGI's satellite toolkit software suite. Sitting next to me is Ankit Panda. He's the senior editor and a journalist at the diplomat and also an adjunct senior fellow in the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists, where he focuses on international security, defense, geopolitics, and economics. Most recently he has had some excellent coverage of South and East Asian missile and space security activities covering activities in China and India and other areas in the region. And finally, in between them is Ms. Victoria Samson. She's the Washington Office Director here at Secret World Foundation. She's got 20 years of experience working on space and national security issues, with a particular focus on missile defense, nuclear arms control, and space security. And most recently has been traveling the world to different places, talking with people about the reactions to the Indian ASAP test and what it means, so hopefully get a little bit broader perspective on that. The format for today, we've asked each of them to prepare a few minutes of opening remarks, and then we're going to open it up to a Q&A discussion after that. Also a reminder that today's event is on the record. It's being recorded, and we posted it to our website after the event. So without any further ado, I think we'll start with Bob. From your technical background and what you'll be seeing through the data collected by the ComSpok, I was wondering if you could kind of talk about the dynamics of the test and maybe what impact it had on the space environment. All right. Thank you, Brian. Hopefully what I prepared here is going to address just that. And I am going to try and stick to the technical facts about the space environment. And I think from a policy perspective, I think the rest of the table has it well covered. So I will attempt to steer clear of policy comments. And I think I've wrangled 10 or 15 minutes, but I'm going to still have to speak fast. I apologize for that. So we know by now that this test happened. March 27, India announced it that day. We were able to pretty quickly reconstruct it via things like a NOTAM, where they publish a notice to Airmen. And then very quickly you can drill down through what assets are on orbit owned by India and what flew that range at that time. Fast forward to later on, the 18th Space Control Squadron, formerly the JSPOC, has said that there are hundreds of pieces that they are now tracking as a result of this. And as of Friday, there are 94 pieces that have been added to the public catalog. So that is a fraction of the debris that's been generated. But that just gives you a sense of the number of objects that the, I was going to say the JSPOC, the 18th is tracking. So very quickly that there's an example of the NOTAM, which is you can find it on the web. In this case, TS Kelso, who you probably know, was very good at this and he was on it right away and dug that up. And like I said, when you see that, it narrows your focus very quickly. So this is a representative scenario where we see Microsoft flying north and the ASAT was launched in a suddenly direction. This was done in the day or two after the event using, we have debris modeling and simulation tools, fragmentation modeling analysis that have been validated that we use. And based on the mass of the objects and the engagement, we, our tools tell us that they were over 6,000 pieces greater than one centimeter were generated. And that's what you see here, all these red dots. I'm gonna abbreviate this because we'll see this again in a minute or two. A week or so later was the first time that the 18th released any data, that they first published 58 pieces. And one of the things we always do is we cross-correlate. If you can see here, the plane of the red lines, they're not all exactly coplanar, but they come together in a pinch point at the time that they originated from. And you see that that pinch point is here and sideways is here. So they corroborate the analysis that this was the time, this was the place that all these debris pieces came from. And like I said, since then, they've published another 30 odd pieces. Since then, it's like India went and did a press tour. They put out a whole YouTube video saying, look at me, look what we did. And it was a treasure trove of information. You may have seen that the diplomat published an article just the other day and they did great detective work going through the engineering data that was in that YouTube video, which either India didn't care about or didn't realize that the level of detail that was in that video. But the best part was the kill shot at the very end, the very last second of what the seeker saw, the infrared seeker saw right before it destroyed the satellite. So this is a little bit of a view of the side view, if you will, of the pieces. These are the 6,400 or 64, 66 pieces, greater than one centimeter. It's a little hard to see the red dots with the lights here, but you may be able to see that some of them, they're not all down here in Leo, and some of them have come way up here. And the reason for that is that this is a hypervelocity collision. I know that the article the other day that Dr. Langeberg published, he did a great detective work to pull out the geometry thanks to the data they released. But it is in some sense, a little bit insensitive to the geometry of engagements because it's a hypervelocity collision that we get this large dispersal, if you will. Now, in terms of the debris being up there, there are cycles that we go through, solar cycles, which will help drive the atmosphere and thus the drag, and thus how quickly those pieces will come back. And unfortunately, it turns out that we are here kind of in between cycle 24 and 25, meaning the drag is slightly less. So these pieces, relatively speaking, will be up there longer than, let's say, had they been generated five-ish years ago. This is, I want to dwell on this for a second. These are the results of our debris based on intercept and explosions tool, our Debi tool, which uses a NASA standard model for breakups with some ESA enhancements. But this tool computed over 6,400 pieces greater than one centimeter. So that is a lot of new debris in the Leo environment. When the day before, the minute before, we didn't have these 6,400 pieces. And how to read this is each contour is one unit. And the reason I did that is because way out here, in this range, we even see some pieces out here. So in the two to five centimeter range, there are pieces that will be up there three to four years. Now, I've talked about what the JSPOC, sorry, the 18th is publishing. For argument's sake, what's being published in the public catalog is probably in the five to 10 centimeter range. That's the detectability threshold, at least based on what they publish, based on the SSN, the space surveillance networks, tracking ability. So my reason for saying that is all this stuff down here is probably not able to be tracked without the new space fence, which is not yet online. So there's a ton of debris smaller than what's even been catalogued. The other thing is this graph looks a little weird over here and that's because I went to contour levels of individual objects and the contours are just too dense over here. This really doesn't, whoops. This really doesn't matter though because this is what we are now in the sixish week range. So we're kind of over here right now. And like I said, most of the pieces come in with a few months but some of them are up there for way more than a year. This is, again, is the fragmentation analysis which is in past events, we've validated this. But now I want to talk about these are the pieces that have been published by the 18th Space Control Squadron. So I say published. So reports are that they are tracking hundreds of pieces. As I said, as of Friday, they're up to 94. So all I can show you is what they've published, meaning they probably have many, many more. This was backdated to the event. And so this is, if you look at the timestamp up here, this is basically the day of the event and you see them spreading out in track in the orbit. If I could have stopped that at the beginning, you would have noticed that they were not all at a pinch point. That's due to the nature of TLEs. What I mean by that is if you back propagate them all to the time of the event, they don't all come together. The planes come together, but the in-track direction, they don't. It turns out that it's really, really hard to separate all these pieces and do the orbitology on them. And so we know that when you go back to the event, there's a little bit of spread. We don't get too wrapped up about that. I'm gonna fast forward to just Friday, five weeks after the event, and now things are a little bit different. Yes, I changed the color on you just to confuse you. Two things, the guys are spread out more around the entire orbit plane. Two, we've lost some. So at this point, depending on how you do your math, we're on the order of 28 or 30 of these pieces, of the published pieces have decayed. At the same time, there's another 30 to 35 that the 18th has continued to add to the catalog. So round numbers, this is about the same as what I had in the previous video. And then for reference purposes, just to give you the sense of where we are, the ISS orbit is in green coming through. And if you look at how high up these guys are going, and if you watch where the green orbit goes, the green orbit is below the highest of these. And this is exactly what Jim Bridenstine was talking about several weeks ago, where he said, this event has increased the threat to the human lives on the space station because the debris has gone higher. So that is both this and the previous analysis. The Indians have said the debris was gonna come down within 45 days. It was a head-on hit. And Dr. Langbrook's article the other day kind of shows why that's not true. But again, the data analysis says it's not all coming down to 45 days. In fact, this is what we've put together as of this morning. These are the pieces that have been published. And so this is measured in weeks after the event. So we're sitting, I'm at a pretty bad angle here, but we're sitting here about six weeks. So we've had about 20 or 30 pieces come in and there's this longish tail. The interesting thing is we have at least one piece way out here. That one piece is over three years. That's a piece that's big enough to be tracked by the 18th. So that's a piece that's probably at least five to 10 centimeters. And actually this morning, I was working feverishly on this because I was questioning that. And I had some of our orbit experts back home re-verifying that, no, yay verily, this piece, if you take the data that the 18th has published, it's not gonna come in for almost three years. The other thing we're seeing with some of these pieces is as we continue to assess the lifetime day after day and week after week, some of their lifetime, their predicted lifetimes are stretching or growing. Part of it is there's some uncertainty in the TLEs that are being released. But part of it is just due to the nature of the objects themselves and perhaps how they're orienting in the drag and how big they are. So bottom line is India said they'd come in within 45 days, which is right around, I think this week will cross 45 days. And we have a lot of pieces still up there, tracked pieces. Remember the fragmentation analysis, there's 6,000 pieces total. So we'll have hundreds of pieces that'll be up there for a while. What does that mean? We have another tool, this debris risk evolution and dispersal tool where I can measure the accumulated or integrated likelihood of fragments in the orbit where the object is. And so for several objects, we see that likelihood, again, for pieces that came off this event exists, including number 58 on the list is the ISS. So these are not huge, huge numbers, but still these are numbers above zero that say the risk has increased for these objects due to this event. So bottom line is both our fragmentation modeling and our analysis of the published data that have to emphasize that that means that they are above a certain size, so it's not the whole population. So that the claim that India made is not true, that it's going to be up there, it's gone higher than they said. They said, oh, we're gonna hit a head on, it's all going down. That's not the case. And then it's gonna be up there much longer than what they claimed. So the implications of that, I'll leave to you guys. Thank you very much, Bob. That was great. So with that technical background in mind, let's now turn to more of the political and geostrugic analysis. And so Anka, I'd like you to pick up things where we are here and talk a bit about what the Indian domestic politics were and sort of how they saw the motivations of the test and how they view it as part of their goals. Sure, thanks a lot. And thanks, Bob, for that great setup on the technical side of things. So I'll talk about a few things. And the way I really see this Indian anti-satellite test is less as a demonstration of a counter-space capability, per se, and more as a real-life validation of exo-atmospheric hit-to-kill technologies. And the nice thing about those technologies, depending on your perspective, of course, is that you can use them against orbital targets like India did or against suborbital targets like ballistic missiles. And there is obviously a history here. In 1999, one year after India and Pakistan both broke out as nuclear possessor states, India's ballistic missile defense program began in earnest. And 20 years later, we see this anti-satellite demonstration. And while it's true that this was the first time India shot down an orbital target and shot down a satellite, what is also true is that this is the highest ever intercept apogee that India has demonstrated with its ballistic missile defense testing. In 2017, India used a Prithvi defense vehicle interceptor to conduct an intercept at 100 kilometer altitude. But this was considerably higher. I think it was at about 282 kilometers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said it was 300 kilometers. That was obviously emphasized. And I'll just talk a few, just a little bit more specifically about the prime minister's remarks on the day. I was watching them live. I think it was three or 4 a.m. in New York City where I'm based. So I heard that the Indians were about to make a surprise announcement and nobody really had any idea what it was gonna be regarding. There was just a major India-Pakistan bout of escalation at the end of February, of course. So there was some concern that it might have been pertaining to that issue. But it wasn't, right? Modi announced that India was now a space superpower and that it had destroyed one of its own satellites in low-Earth orbit. But he emphasized that this was a very prompt operation. The promptness was something that the prime minister really talked about. He said this whole thing was done in three minutes. And that's a little bit of a strange thing to emphasize with a counter-space capability in some ways. But it's highly relevant when it comes to ballistic missile defense. And immediately after the prime minister's address, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs was ready with a FAQ document that was sent out to reporters and publicized widely. And in that document, it answered the question of what exactly India had used as the kill vehicle. And they clarified that it was a ballistic missile defense interceptor, capital B, capital M, capital D. It wasn't called the anti-satellite interceptor or anything like that. They owned up to the fact that it was a BMD interceptor. The DRDO video that Bob talked about gave us a little bit more information about the code name of the weapon itself, which is apparently DRDO is calling this the Krithvi Defense Vehicle Mark II. So this is very much technologically the latest iteration of India's indigenous ballistic missile defense capability. And it just so happens in April, reports in India suggested that DRDO had now declared that phase one of India's indigenous ballistic missile defense efforts were now completed. And those reports weren't necessarily related directly to the ASAP test, but I just find it interesting that just a few weeks after the anti-satellite demonstration, we see India declaring phase one of its BMD plans completed. So why does this matter and what are some of the strategic stability and geopolitical consequences? So since 1998, since South Asia really entered the nuclear age, we've seen sort of a game of cat and mouse between India and Pakistan in terms of coping with these new realities in the region. Basically, since the mid 2000s or so, around 2007, 2008, India has been put in a box by Pakistan, given Pakistan's deployment of low yield, battlefield nuclear weapons. In particular here, I'm talking about the Nasser system. I'll just briefly talk about both countries' nuclear strategies since I think it's important to understand that, to understand why this kind of ballistic missile defense interceptor demonstration might matter in the future. So in 1999, India releases a draft nuclear doctrine emphasizing a policy of no first use trying to clarify that India's nuclear weapons will only be used to retaliate proportionally. That's changed in 2003 to clarify the fact that India would retaliate massively and inflict unacceptable damage on Pakistan. To cope with that, Pakistan transitions to the development of these low yield tactical nuclear weapons that will be deployed early in a conflict with the intention of effectively nullifying an Indian strategy that was developed in the early 2000s to use mechanized conventional brigades to enter Pakistani territory. And that was done after a crisis between the two countries in 2002 after a Pakistan-based terrorist group attacked the Indian parliament. So what happens by the late 2000s is that India doesn't really have a good response to that because it's simply not credible that if Pakistan were to one day use low yield tactical nuclear weapons against Indian mechanized divisions on its own territory that India would retaliate massively against a Pakistani city. So the solution to that, we're still waiting to see an actual change in India's doctrine. The doctrine remains the same, but there are signs that Indian strategy is beginning to shift to deal with this new reality. Some of that I think has been seen with the recent crisis between the two countries that India's old practice of strategic restraint is maybe less restrained today. The crisis in February marked the first use of conventional air power by one nuclear armed state against the territory of another in history. In the Kargil war in 1999, when the two countries fought each other, the Indian Air Force did not cross the line of control to strike Pakistan. Yet this time we saw Pakistani territory stricken. But anyways, coming back to the issue of ballistic missile defense, why can BMD enable India to potentially move away from the kind of nuclear strategy that it's deployed since 1999? BMD would allow India to think more seriously about damage limitation against Pakistan. So in a crisis, India may choose now to use conventional weapons to try and disarm Pakistan of its own nuclear weapons, effectively in the nuclear jargon, deploying a counter force style of nuclear strategy. And ballistic missile defense would allow India to effectively sweep up the residuals. If let's say a Shaheen III medium range ballistic missile, which would reach an apogee of around, let's say 600 kilometers on its way to a city like Kolkata on the Indian East Coast, were to be launched by Pakistan. These kinds of hit to kill, high altitude, exo-atmospheric interceptors like the Perth V Defense Vehicle Mark II, I think demonstrate to Pakistan that India is now entering a place where these kinds of technologies are starting to become available. So I would fully expect in the future that we will see India conduct a similar test against probably a suborbital target. There are certain reasons to choose an orbital target for a first demonstration, the ease of intercepting an orbital target given the kind of information that India had, obviously about Microsoft R's trajectory, specifically may have made that a compelling candidate for a first kind of test. The Indian official response, of course, I think merits a little bit of discussion because what I've said is not in India's official FAQ document, none of it is. It's worded as a very anodyne document saying that this is about protecting our own space-based assets because India is a civilian space-faring nation as well. And that just doesn't really make all that much sense to me because the theory there would be to practice effectively deterrence by punishment, that if another country were to shoot down an Indian satellite that India would retaliate in kind using its counter-space capabilities. Yes, we could have a discussion about co-orbital counter-space capabilities, but really I think this is more about Pakistan. And of course, there is the prestige angle that I think merits discussing. The fact that the Indians decided to call this test Mission Shakti evoked the 1998 nuclear test, which were called also Shakti. So the fact that that was again redeployed I think mattered for the Prime Minister. Obviously we're in election season right now in India. We'll find out the results of that at the end of this month. But the fact that this test did also occur before an election I think merits a little bit of discussion. The results of the February crisis, of course, I think should not be seen in the context of this anti-satellite test. There was an initial Indian attempt in early February before the major terrorist attack in February that killed 40 Indian soldiers that precipitated the crisis between the two countries. So India was planning on doing this in the first place, but there is an interesting counterfactual there that if the February 12th intercept had actually succeeded in India's anti-satellite test that occurred then, would the Prime Minister have made a national address? It's not so clear to me. Obviously we don't have that counterfactual. But he chose to do it and it was really a moment of emphasizing nationalism and the fact that India had now entered this exclusive club of countries that had these kinds of capabilities. With regard to China and the potential application of a weapon like this, I said this a day after the ASAD test when asked by reporters about how the China angle factors into this. And I really think that in any hypothetical India-China conflict, if India is at the point where it's seriously considering escalation by destroying Chinese satellites in low earth orbit, the crisis has probably already escalated to a place where India is going to be poorly positioned to manage that conflict. So I think this is less about China. It is about prestige. But overall, I think the main strategic significance boils down to the applications that hit to kill technologies like this do have for ballistic missile defense. So I'll end there. I'm happy to elaborate on that in the Q&A. Great, thank you very much. And also for reminding us that even though space people tend to focus about space stuff, there are broader issues here at play that may impact things beyond just the space world. So Victoria, you just came back from a trip to India where we're talking about space policy. So if you could talk a little bit about what the international reaction has been, what the Indian space world is talking about this and sort of what you think the impact might be then. Great. Sure, good afternoon, everyone. As Brian said, I just came back. I was in India last week, New Delhi, the Secure World Foundation co-sponsors an annual conference every year, the Kapana Chava Space Dialogue, which looks at various aspects of issues affecting space security and stability and sustainability. And of course, ASAT test was discussed, something. So I'll be talking a little bit about kind of the rumor mill that I heard, things people said to me that I read that I heard about there and talking a little about India's their thinking on this issue and some of their capabilities. So one of the things I just want to emphasize, and this always surprises me when I think about it, India has been a space power since the early 60s. They've been very thoughtful and strategic in how they use space. India does not actually have a national space policy. So think about that for a minute, no white papers, nothing really just directing how they're going to go on this. They have the 1991 salad communications policy. They have a 2011 remote sensing policy and that's it. If you talk to Indian policymakers, they say, well, this is kind of a feature, not a bug. This gives us some flexibility, but there has been discussion about maybe now that they're expanding their use of space, they need to have some sort of national space policy or maybe they only need to have a civil space policy and let DRDO take care of the military space. But I think this kind of was a tipping point for them in terms of, okay, things are changing. We need to really think about how we're going to go ahead with this. Interestingly enough, while they don't have a national space policy, I read an article that said they're looking at a security space strategy because now they have toys to play with and they probably should figure out how they want to handle it. We'll see what ends up happening with that. And I could talk a little bit about the Prime Minister of Moji statement, but I want to emphasize that while he said repeatedly, our capability is not against anyone. It's defensive entirely. I heard repeatedly, okay, it's defensive and he has the right peaceful use of space, you know, protecting our space assets, but we have to protect ourselves against China and Pakistan constantly. So it's not against anyone, but it's protecting against China and Pakistan. As well, Prime Minister Moni said, India has always been against arms race and outer space. That policy has not changed. I guess it comes down to different definitions of how you look at arms race and outer space. And that's a broader discussion about how the US looks at space security and stability and maybe some of the other countries look at it. Other countries look at it as, you know, a space weapon is only something that literally goes up in space. Whereas I think a lot of people in the United States have a broader discussion of anything that disrupts the stability of the space domain can be threatening. The Ministry of External Affairs has been mentioned and put out a statement almost immediately. And they said, again, the test was done to verify that India has a capability to safeguard its space assets. But they, you know, so again, defensive. Space is a common heritage of humankind and that you see a lot from Mia's statements. They emphasize that India has a party to all the major space treaties participate in the Community and Peace Release of Outer Space. India has supported the idea of no first placement of weapons in space. This is important because this is largely affiliated with the Russians as something they've been pushing in international fora pretty widely. And also interesting because it's something the United States does not typically support. We don't support no first use for nuclear weapons and we typically do not support no first placement in space because that implies there's gonna be a second placement. As well, the Indians have come out supporting the idea of the PPWT, which is a very long acronym for a proposed treaty by the Russians and Chinese looking at the prevention and placement of weapons in space, primarily space based missile defense. Again, this has been a bonus contention at international discussions because it comes down to what do you see as the biggest threat for space security and stability? For Russia, China and their allies this includes India, I guess, in this context. There's been a focus on an actual weapon placed on orbit. Whereas an anti-satellite test like India had, like China had, like the United States test in 2008 would be A-OK according to the PPWT. Whereas the US and its allies tends to look at it more as idea of congestion, competition, that sort of thing. That the change in the space domain, that's really where a lot of the threats are. And yeah, so they push that as well. There was a speaker from the MIA at the dialogue last week and he talked about how international legal system is insufficient for currently how space is being used. He said in multi-level four, there's not been as much progress as been expected due to difference in opinions on key issues, i.e. no agreed upon definition for space weapons. Satellites and other objects can have dual use. May not be able to comply with the future regime. And then he pointed out only a few nations have associated verified compliance. But again, emphasize India as opposed to the weaponization of space. And then pointed out that India wants to be a constructive role in debate as responsible space-faring nation. Would like to participate in future negotiations to strengthen the national legal regime applicable to arms race and outer space. And then they pointed out that India would actually support legally binding transparency and confidence building measures. Again, the multi-level four, there's kind of a push-pull between how we're gonna ensure space is secure and stable long-term. Do we have a treaty? Do we have non-legally binding and yet powerful transparency and confidence building measures? The secretary, Pandy said that India supports legally binding, transparency and confidence building measures as long as there is universal application, they're non-discriminatory and agreed upon by states. So, well, I thought Ankit's theory was very interesting. I'm gonna focus on the space aspects, but I think the BMD stuff is definitely, I think relevant as well. This is, well, this change having an ASAT test was the first time for India. According to the head of DRDO, Satchitredi, this is not a one-time event. He has said they are working on a lot of different technologies and he kind of gave the rogues galleries for a discussion, working on directed energy, doing EMP, doing co-orbital. I mean, again, and I recognize a lot of this may be just playing to the crowd or discussing things for domestic audiences. Certainly every country does that when they're talking about the capabilities. But if you look in our counter space threat assessment, we do discuss some directed energy work that they've been doing and so it doesn't surprise me that they're thinking about it. Co-orbital doesn't surprise me as well just because that's, I think, any good next steps in terms of close approach for space capabilities. I am secure world, just a side note. We work on a project for DARPA, called Conferred's Consortium for Execution of Branded View and Proximity Operations. Did I get that right? Thank you. Basically, the idea that commercial actors will come together and talk about best practices for close approach, Branded View and Proximity Operations. Talking to Indians last week, they are very interested in what's going on with that and they would like to learn more about it. So I think there is absolutely an interest in close approach work there. Again, that's always dual use. It doesn't mean necessarily it's going to be weaponized. It can be done for completely legitimate, non-weaponized things, but I think the interest is definitely there. As well, such as Freddie said that it is, quote, feasible to target multiple satellites with multiple launches at the interceptor. They can go up to 1,000 kilometers and they're reportedly interested in reaching both Leo and Geo with ASET. Of course, this interceptor I don't think would be able to get to Geo, so I'm not sure what that means that there's something else they're working on or if it's just, again, conjecture, it'd be nice to have sort of thing. We can have a whole discussion about why they need to get to Geo, whether you're targeting there. That sort of discussion I haven't heard much about. And then finally, with Reddy, he said, space is, again, important in the military domain. The best way to ensure security is to have deterrence. He said, there's no further plans on testing this particular ASAT, so we'll see what happens. They'll probably take a lesson from the US and China's book and just have a missile defense test and use the same interceptor and call it a win, because they point out their accuracy was pretty high on that. Going into a little bit, some of the rumor mill. As we heard, Indians have said, we were trying to be very responsible. We designed the test very carefully, and I'm sure they did, but that's one of my criticisms of having this sort of capability proliferated is that things don't always work out exactly as you intend it. And so oftentimes you can have a great test, but things happen and perhaps your angle of approach is closer, pointing up higher than you think, as we saw from Bob's presentation, and it goes from there. There was a lot of people insisting that General Hayton had justified India's concern about their worry about their space assets when he testified in center armed services. If you go back and actually read the testimony, he said, they feel they need to have this capability. He did not say, I think India's being threatened and they need to have this capability, but if you talked to a lot of Indian policy makers, that's the implication that they got from that. There were concerns about Pakistan, and again, given everything that Anka talked about, obviously, things are bad. Side note to my flight was delayed quite some time because we were not allowed to fly over Pakistan airspace. I was on air Canada flight. There was concern that Pakistan would somehow get some sort of assistance from China and it would be able to demonstrate its own ASAC capability. And they saw that as a distinct possibility. This is probably, I say, this is the fifth year of this particular, the Kapanatava Dialogue, Secure World has been involved with it for the past four years. I would say the rhetoric on Pakistan is probably the most aggressive that I've heard in the four years I've been going to this. And then, also interestingly, one of the presenters did kind of a relationship map of China with its countries in the neighborhood and they had India listed as a foe of China. So, just again, some of the thinking there. Some policy makers have said, well, yeah, debris was created but the ISS can handle it. They're fine. They have a debris monitoring thing. They've got hardened shield. They're okay. They can deal with it. Which is probably not what the space station would like to have to handle with. I think that probably goes back to Mr. Brightenstein's criticism of it as well. I had one person say to me, so 300 pieces were recreated in the grand scheme of things. Hundreds of thousands that are there. What's the big deal? And you explain, okay, actually, it's not just a matter of debris was created. It's at the particular altitude and what it means in terms of orbital use and precedent-sensing. And yeah, it's probably not the best thing. And the emphasis that India's got a lot going on in space. They've got the second mission of moon. They've got their Mars program. They've got the first human astronaut coming up the next three years or so. So, they must make sure that space is stable and the ASAT helps them determine it is stable. One of the things also, and convention national pride, I heard a lot. I mean, we've seen that. I think anyone who wrote, for a Westerner who wrote about this issue got this comment at some point. Why is it okay for the United States, Russia and China have ASAT capabilities when operating the, there's a sense like if they're a major space power, they should have that capability as well. One thing that I thought was pretty interesting is that they were very interested in the difference in response from the West from the 1998 nuclear test to this ASAT test. You remember the 1980 nuclear test immediately criticized put under sanctions. A lot of very harsh rhetoric came out from this. Whereas for this particular ASAT test, state departments said we see that it happened and India as a strategic partner, which I understand is how they like to rephrase it. The only, as was mentioned, the only US government personally came out critical of this was Administrator Bridenstine, who almost the next day later had to dial back what he said under pressure from the White House. So they were, I think they've taken that lesson to heart. Now they're a strategic partner. They have more flexibility in terms of what they can do. And then finally, there was a common concern by the Indians, and I've heard this before, that they're being held accountable for treaties that they did not sign. They pointed out the Missile Technology Control Regime. The United States put ISRO under sanctions for colluding with the Russians back in the early 90s. And so we actually signed the Missile Technology Control Regime. India has since joined it. That's from the past couple of years. And of course, India has always been upset that it's being held as a non-nuclear weapon state including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. So that's a point of frustration for them. And then finally, I'm gonna wrap up, because I think I've gone over my time a little bit, but talking a little bit about some of the space situation awareness capabilities. Right now, India has 18 commercial satellites of its own, 20 Earth observation, eight navigation, two space science. Overall, India has launched over 400 satellites. Of those 297 were for foreign countries for 31 different countries. India obviously is a very active space program, but they are largely dependent on TLEs from the United States. So they're actively working to improve the space information awareness so they have that kind of capability, which is good because if they're gonna be having ASAT tests and throwing things up in orbit, you really hope to have the ability to track it and not just do it and design the test and then walk away from it at that point. They've commissioned their tracking radar. They've got supposedly, there have been discussions with the United States on the space information awareness agreement that has not come to fruition yet, but they're working on it. They do space object proximity analysis, the close approach analysis. They have their multi-object tracking radar, which can track objects at a 50 centimeter dimension at 800 kilometers range. It has successfully tracked the PSLV upper stages and the electron RB as debris targets. It's a presently undergoing refurbishment and internal assessments. And they have a new thing called NETRA, Network for Space Object Tracking and Analysis, which is dedicated facilities for SSA. It would have observation facilities, three optical telescopes, a couple radars and then existing facilities with a control center for analysis in Bangalore. The objectives would be to establish observation capabilities of space objects through a network of indigenous tracking to evolve a mechanism to process tracking observations, make an assessment of SSA and disseminate SSA information in a timely manner. And then finally to participate in global efforts in information exchange and residence space objects. And they have a proposed phased array radar with multi-object tracking capabilities and the idea that it would track space objects with a more than seven centimeters in diameter up to 3,200 kilometers range. So even if they go for geo, they can't track it, but they're trying to do Leo at least. So with that, I think I will stop when we do questions. Thank you. So we're gonna open up for questions now. I've got several that I've prepared, but I wanna start by asking Irene, did you wanna ask a question before you have to head out? Okay, great. So as usual, if you wanna ask a question, please raise your hand, identify yourself and make sure you state your question in the form of a question. So we wanna start up here towards the front. Hi, everyone. Thank you for this opportunity. I'm Riddhu Pavandas, Councillor Political with the Indian Embassy. I was obviously listening intently to the views expressed by the panelists. You know, this is a free independent country and respect all your views. India is also a free independent democratic country. Very proud country indeed. Well, you know, all of you, I referred to FAQs, which came out in the MEA. You referred to Prime Minister's remarks. Before I get down to those specific things, well, I would first get into this tendency of people to get into China and Pakistan immediately. Well, you know, you're aware of some of the things which happened specifically in February on St. Valentine's Day, which was essentially a day of love converted into a day of terror, by you know who. So, you know, let's not really try to conflate issues here. Let's stick to what we have on the table, because, you know, India doesn't need to be apologetic about whatever it has done. You know, we have a minimum credible deterrence in place. Our first, no first use doctrine is well known and I would not really like this to get into a nuclear kind of debate between, you know, that India needs to do this and that. Because, you know, if you ask me honestly, during the period of February, March specifically, when we are absolutely restrained in conducting ourselves, there were statements coming out of a particular government. I'm not gonna name it, you know it, saying trying to dissuade world attention from the core issue of terrorism by drawing the world into something which is, you know, which is what they normally do into some kind of a nuclear, you know, scenario, where, you know, you see that, you know, well, you know, two nuclear arm powers close to each other, now what's gonna happen? They're gonna like, this is gonna escalate into a nuclear kind of thing. So, you know, so they keep on doing it. We did not do it. We are very restrained, though we believed that our threshold was being tested and, you know, know about Balakot and all. So let's not get into that. Let's not conflate issues. Let's stick immediately to ASAD. Though the panelists and I would respectfully defer to all of them, did mention to the FAQs, I think it's my bounding duty to tell you, you know, some of these things, which are very important. One, I saw, I saw some, you know, data being, you know, shown. I respect, as I said, studies, you know, on the debris and all that, you know, but I'd like to address those concerns. You know, India was conscious of such concerns to begin with and the dangers posed by space debris, right? So it conducted a test in a manner to minimize the incidence and longevity of such space debris. You know, it's not merely for effect, a prime minister has said so and I'm gonna repeat here that, you know, after having conducted extensive simulations, the ASAD test being referred to on 27th of March was intentionally conducted in low earth orbit at an altitude of 280 kilometer to ensure that there would be minimal space debris and that it would not pose any danger to objects in outer space. As per the simulation studies, whatever debris would have been generated, we're not saying no to it, right? Whatever debris would have been generated was expected to have decayed and fallen back to earth within a brief time frame and further, you know, I have, again, heard references to ISS and all, I don't think there's been any specific concern in relation to the ISS, which is at an altitude much higher than that at which the test was conducted. If I may add here, there was an initial statement from NASA expressing concern and then, and then there was another statement from NSC saying that those concerns were not really, you know, there was no need for such concerns. So there have been views expressed by the US department, I mean, the US government on this particular ESAT test. If I may take one more minute of your time, I know I'm taking a lot of time, I'm conscious of that. You know, let's not be apologetic when I say that India, this test was a demonstration of our technological capabilities to defend and secure our wide-ranging interests in outer space. But if I may add, the test was purely defensive and character and not targeted against any country. And, you know, as a major space-faring nation, we have made significant strides. You know, panelist Samson referred to the fact that we have been in this since the 1960s very proudly, you know, doing a lot of things. He mentioned the moon mission, sorry, the Mars mission and other things, the human capability, the human mission we're gonna have to take in some time to come. We are very proud of what we have been doing. And, you know, we remain opposed to the weaponization of outer space. India has not, will not resort to arms freeze in outer space. Other countries might do so, we are not really into it. And we have been a consistent advocate of the importance of preserving outer space as a common heritage of mankind. We remain committed to maintaining outer space as an ever-expanding frontier of cooperative endeavor rather than conflict. Panelist Samson referred to some of the initiatives that we have undertaken in this regard in multilateral fora. I, though at the risk of repetition, would like to state them all because I think these are important things. You know, as I said, India supports a substantive consideration of the prevention of an arms freeze and outer space within the multilateral framework of the UN. We remain committed to the negotiation of a legally binding instrument in the prevention of an arms freeze and outer space to be negotiated in the conference and the summit, where it has been on the agenda since 1982. India has been an active participant in the group of governmental experts on the prevention of an arms freeze and outer space, which conducted a session recently. At the 73rd session of the first committee last year, India voted in favor of all resolutions submitted under the outer space cluster, including on the prevention of an arms freeze and outer space, which were also co-sponsored. Further, if I could just- Just a quick, just 10 seconds. Hey, you guys, I had actually reached out to the Latinos happening and he had the right to- So further practical measures for the prevention of an arms freeze and outer space on no first placement of weapons in outer space as well as on transparency and confidentiality, confidence-building measures and outer space activities. What I'm saying is I'm laying out our official position. We're very clear about what we did. As I said, purely defensive in character, not directed at any particular country. We have our achievements to show off. We have the confidence of the world references of me to some of the 1990s tests and all that. Because I would not like to conflate issues, but since those were mentioned, I would also say that when the India-U.S. Civilian nuclear deal was signed, we had the confidence of the world in terms of getting an NSE waiver also. So as far as trust of the world is concerned, we have that with us. So all I can say is, I think we have the confidence of the world and we are willing to address all these concerns. As I said, the debris thing, we have made it very clear, lower orbit less than 280 kilometers, lower, much lower than ISS and all that. So some of these concerns perhaps are out of place. Can I just get a please wrap up, please? Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. So do you have another question? Arina, yes. I do have a question. Why do you think that the United States and the international's community response to the ASAT test was so muted or non-existent? I can take first crack. Very good question. I mean, I think part of it is there's concern that if we criticize other countries having ASAT tests, should the United States wanna have one, we'll open ourselves up to that sort of criticism return. I think there is definite relation to our need for strategic partnership with India to counterbalance China. And so probably a concern, we don't wanna lose that part of the triangle to counterbalance them. Most countries, I think the only countries that came out with official statements criticizing the Indians were Pakistan, China, and Germany, oddly enough. Although Germany did it in a roundabout way, it was at the Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and Legal Subcommittee. And basically they talked about the need to not do sort of ASAT tests. And I think they literally hashtagged India in their statement, but they didn't criticize officially India in it. So that was the way they did it. But so I think it has to do a lot more of the complication of the political environment right now. Yeah, so just to emphasize the sort of the, my perception on the US point, yes, the original statement from administrator Bridenstine was very negative about it. And I think justifiably so given his position as the head of NASA and with people, his own people on the ISS, which is a very important international asset. And then you saw as he walked back that statement, after it was the White House, I think it's pretty clear that at a higher level of the administration, they are trying to forge this strategic partnership with India. And I think a big part of that is to, as you said, to counterbalance China. And so then it looks like they made the decision not to upset that potential relationship over this one incident. I can say talking to the more rank and file people in the Department of Defense in the State Department, I get the sense they feel there should have been a stronger statement because they don't like the potential precedent it sets that it's okay to do this as long as you take some steps to make sure it was what you might say, call responsible. Because for the countries might take that as a model and not all of them may be as technically capable or willing to limit the debris creation. But I think it's pretty clear that in this particular case, a decision was probably made that the broader partnership with India took priority over whatever impact this has on the space community. There's no questions yet in the back, Thomas. Hi, thanks so much for hosting this panel discussion. I really appreciate it. I have a question from a comment that Victoria made that I'm hoping the whole panel can respond to. You mentioned that Indian defense officials had mentioned that this would not be a one-off test and other developments across the counter space spectrum could lead to further demonstrations. So I wanted to ask about if we could hypothesize together if there were to be a non-kinetic successful anti-satellite test, what would be the role in the political environment? And if there is a role for the technical community in bouncing off the published data from the Air Force but also independent private data, what is the use of that in a situation where no debris is created at all? So, Victoria Ankit, you guys want to comment on what a future follow-on test might look like and if there's a BMD versus ASAT? Yeah, I'll talk a bit about the BMD angle. I mean, look, the BMD program isn't going anywhere. They've just said that they've completed phase one. And with phase two, I'd expect to see intercepts occurring at similar altitudes. But of course, with suborbital targets, that's, you know, debris is less of a concern. And obviously, it's much more difficult for the United States to criticize India when we regularly do missile defense tests here. So that kind of testing is, I think, going to happen. I think what'll be interesting is if and when we do get data on the kinds of interceptors that are used and specifically the kill vehicle, we have very good pictures and data from this last ASAT test. So I'll actually be curious to see how much of the technology that was used for the ASAT test actually survives this testing cycle and makes it into the future of India's kind of BMD efforts, indigenously. So just quickly on that, Ankit, so you talk quite a bit about, you know, your hypothesis, this has more to do with missile defense than it is with anti-satellite testing and that sort of top of the technology is very related. I want to unpack a little bit and ask the question, why, if it is more about missile defense than anti-satellites, why did they chose to test it in an anti-satellite mode given they probably could have gone after a suborbital target and not generated the debris? Yeah, I mean, again, I can only hypothesize about why they chose not to do a ballistic missile defense test. So the DRDO video, I believe, talks about multiple modes for the interceptor, which raises the question of what are those other modes, given that we know that it's a prot-feed defense vehicle, Mark II, which is a ballistic missile defense interceptor. I think it's pretty reasonable to surmise that the other mode is kinetic intercept of a ballistic missile defense, of a missile reentry vehicle. The reason I think they chose to do this, right, so India's apparently had this capability for a few years now. There was an interview with the former chairman of DRDO, Dr. Saraswat, and he talked about how the previous government had basically, didn't have the political will to move forward with an anti-satellite test at the time. The factors could have been multiple. India's, the general nature of India's application to things like the nuclear suppliers group, I think, hinged on India demonstrating a certain level of responsibility internationally, so maybe conducting an anti-satellite test back then would have made less sense, but now the political environment has changed, the geopolitical environment has changed with the United States especially, so perhaps they chose to push away with that. There of course might be simply technological imperative to do this, that certain people inside DRDO probably have always wanted to demonstrate an anti-satellite capability. It's also sort of one of those boxes you tick in the, you know, enjoying the superpower club that you do ballistic missile defense, you do anti-satellite. Like Victoria said, you do directed energy and a variety of other things, co-orbital. So will the Indians move ahead and do other things? I'm, you know, we've heard it from DRDO that they are working on several other kinds of technology, so maybe this was about ticking that anti-satellite box, but of course I think the core technology will be much more useful in a ballistic missile defense context. Victoria, do you have anything to add? Yeah, just a couple of things. One, they may be working in EMP, but essentially it's a nuclear weapon that's going off in orbit, so I sincerely hope they do not try to test that capability and we'll just assume that they have it. In terms of the role of data, I think it's really interesting because it's really difficult to ascertain intent, right? You don't really know what other countries' plans are, particularly if countries do not have national space policies or strategies you can try and read to, you just have to look at the testing and guess from there. So I think the role for the commercial SSA sector is to help increase transparency and awareness of what's happening in orbit space activities and that way you won't necessarily get intent, but you'll be able to have better clarification as to what's going on and go from there. And Bob, following up on that, I was actually the question, you talked quite a bit about analyzing data produced by the US military, these TLEs. Where do you see the role for this sort of independent commercial analysis and where do you see the role of, where's commercial data to kind of validate these sorts of events? How is that shaping up and where's that going? Well, I would say there's a few aspects that when people talk commercial SSA, a lot of times the conversation is a conflated conversation between data and processing. And so there is a large or growing community data providers and then the other side of the equation is you need processing and the commercial SSA processing is what allows you to really distill or pull out finer detail of what's going on in orbit. So for example, when you look at the TLEs, the US Air Force is presently using technology that's a few decades old from an orbit determination standpoint for a long and sorted history. But that only gets you so far when you start to watch what modern satellites can do, particularly when you're talking about rendezvous and proxops and you're trying to watch these closing behaviors. The other thing that commercialists can do is provide a layer of transparency or attribution that the US DoD cannot provide. So when a commercial entity, such as the Kong Spock or others can lay on the table, we just saw this, we just saw that. The US, the State Department, for example, doesn't have to divulge the capabilities of US sensors, US processes to say what it saw. The analogy is with the commercial overhead imagery providers. When we see North Korea preparing for a launch, for example, we don't use US national assets and lay a photograph on the table and say, hey, North Korea, what are you doing? We can lay an image from commercial overhead assets and say, hey, what are you doing? Commercial, as I say, has the same analog here that we can help with that attribution. And speaking of that attribution, we've seen China be very aggressive in this area, by aggressive I mean, very aggressive test cycles, where they take satellites that are technology demonstrators, clearly could be dual use, but they do all kinds of testing where they do extreme rendezvous and proxops tests, which again, they could claim it's for scientific purposes, it's for refueling, it's for servicing, it's whatever, but it could just as easily have military purposes. So I can't tell you that intent, but I can tell you what they're doing. And so to go back to the original question, if India were to continue with further demonstrations like co-orbital, they would be seen, the full intent would not be able to be determined, it could be a co-use type thing. So I wanna pull back a little bit and look at the bigger international picture. I mean, China a few years ago did a satellite test, which was actually much nastier than India's, is at a higher altitude, it put out thousands of pieces of debris that'll be ascending through Leo for the next century. So if we keep doing this, somebody's gonna screw it up royally, right? If country P and country I and country K and so on all feel like, well, I gotta do an anti-satellite test too, something bad's gonna happen. And so how can we sort of internationally stop that or can we internationally stop that? Victoria, you wanna take a first crack? I've got the answer. No, I mean, that is a concern. You know, I mean, it's the whole idea behind, you don't want nuclear weapons to proliferate because at some point someone's gonna find it a good way to use them. Same thing with ASAC testing, at some point someone's gonna screw up or they're gonna find it, they're gonna wanna use it. There have been, the problem you run into is that a lot of the international discussions get really bogged down and the whole, should it be a treaty or should it be a non-legally binding measure? And then they get bogged down on what the biggest threat is. And so it's really difficult to move ahead because basically they've been cycling through the same arguments, I would say for the past two decades at least, same thing over and over and over again. We co-host a conference in Geneva every year at the Conference of Disarmament, which is part of the one that discusses security, space security measures. And every year there's someone talking about no first placement and PPWT and the idea, you know, the basically the same answers that have not yielded any kind of solutions. But there are, in my mind there is a ray of hope but there have been some discussions about how we can do TCBMs in other ways and the idea of having guidelines maybe for ASAT tests, which is not ideal, but at least it's recognizing that it may be happening. And so we want people to do it in a responsible manner that has been brooded about as a possible way in which we could maybe move the conversation ahead a little bit, the idea that you have tests at a low altitude that you let people know that's happening and you'd be pretty transparent about it. That may be one way to avoid having these concerns in the future, it's a baby step, but there actually has been indication that it actually may get some major power support at some point. Obviously this would not happen now it would probably be, you know, something we discussed and maybe five or 10 years from now may see something come, you know, that's a nature unfortunately in the international system that it just doesn't move that closely, that quickly, but that's also how you build consensus. And I think it's very important to build consensus because otherwise countries don't feel like they have buy-in if they don't have buy-in they're not gonna follow the agreements. I would also argue that oftentimes countries they don't have to do it just with the UN they can make a, you know, you don't have a decision. Okay, we're not gonna, we're gonna have, these are our guidelines. We're gonna just, if we wanna have ASAT tests here's the rules that we're gonna follow. Other countries can take on from there and I would encourage space powers to start thinking about the way they can demonstrate responsible use of space and being a responsible space actor and maybe just unilaterally making these announcements and we can maybe build upon that from there. I mean, I'll just add a specific note on that. So the country that I have most concern about is probably Russia. They've been developing the noodle and that's probably a candidate for testing. They haven't done a kinetic hit-to-kill anti-satellite test and now that the Indians have done it and the Russians see themselves as a superpower and they've been more comfortable with toying the edge of international norms. Let's say over the past few years. So I'm hoping that we can get to that before the Russians decide to conduct a test but that's probably the country that I have the most concern about right now. Yeah, so along those lines, back in 2007 China did the test and obviously you can't know what they were thinking but it seemed contemporaneously as if they were surprised by the world reaction and maybe you take that and indirectly you say, well, maybe they didn't have a greater understanding of what the results of their test would be. Again, that's a lot of assumptions in there but subsequent to that, and I think Brian, you guys have reported this, there were events follow-on of that program where the US has stated that they continued to conduct tests of that weapon system but they were not engagement tests. They were purposely near misses, perhaps because they learned their lesson and didn't want the ire of the world on them for the Leo population. So again, from a debris standpoint, this is maybe a progression where India said, hey, we're not gonna do what China did. That was pretty high. We're gonna stay way low and we're gonna try and design it so stuff comes in. So just apples to apples, way better test design, the intent was there. I would say again, the debris analysis shows it's not always so simple and we do have debris unlike the China says it's not gonna be up there for a century perhaps, but still. So the hope would be that, again, I was trying to not get into policy but if there was a stronger world reaction to this to say, okay, this was better but still not good enough that might drive us all to not having further tests. I don't know. Just building on. Good. Yeah, I mean China was surprised by criticism in 2007 because it was not the first time they tried to do it. They had done it several times prior and didn't get any kind of response. So I think they were legitimately shocked by how vehement it was protested. And along those lines, I mean, you guys talked about, this was actually the second time India tried to do it. They tried the first time in February. So just to clarify that, so yeah, two things there. One, I think there's the debris environmental impact question and then there's the proliferation of the technology question. I think you can address some of the environmental impact question by talking about ways to responsibly test an ASAT, lower altitude, you know, doing ways to minimize the creation of the debris. But then you're effectively saying, it's okay to develop the technology and you're okay to the technology proliferating, which then raises concerns. Is somebody then gonna go ahead and use it in a future conflict? And in the use of it, it's not gonna happen 300 kilometers because there's no military targets that low. It's gonna happen higher and it's gonna have much more changes consequences. As far as the prospects for an agreement, you know, as Victoria laid out, unfortunately, right now the major powers are talking past themselves, right? Or past each other. Russia and China are pushing for a treaty to prevent placing weapons on orbit as a way to hinder the U.S. space-based missile defense, but at the same time allowing them to develop their ground-based anti-satellite weapons as a deterrent against the U.S. The U.S. for the last several years, maybe longer has been saying no to any sort of agreement, they just want voluntary measures, voluntary guidelines is what that's what they'll talk about. There are a few people, notably Doug Levero, former OSD director of space policy, who has come out and said the U.S. should be pushing for a narrow agreement that talks about banning this kind of kinetic testing of anti-satellite weapons. In general, you would think that the U.S. government would be behind that because they're the most to lose, but there is still a strong contingent U.S. government that does not want to limit freedom of action. They wanna keep their options as open and as wide open as possible. Unfortunately, even if that means everyone else gets to do the same thing. I have not seen that dynamic shifting yet in the U.S. government to the where the DOD and the IC will be supportive of limiting this or supporting a ban, but one can hope that at some point they might, but until that happens, the U.S. is not gonna probably be a leader on this. So the question is, is there another country out there that's gonna be willing to propose something other than the PPWT that deals with a narrow issue like this and then try to rally support for it? I haven't seen any indication that'll happen yet, but it might, not sure. Brian, you forget the Code of Conduct. Yes, the Code of Conduct, voluntary. Bruce, and then I'll go up here. Hi, Bruce McDonald, the Johns Hopkins SICE and Federation of American Scientists. Question, first, a specific question and then a more general question. Specific question, has Doug Laverro, did he do that in a speech or congressional testimony where he said he would favor the kind of narrow thing you just described? He wrote it in an article in the Space Review, I think a year and a half ago or so, right after, within a few months after he left and he's talked about it. The context was, what principles should the US be pushing for in future space governance initiatives? Okay, thank you. And now my question to primarily to Ankit, but to any of you, I would agree with your analysis about the objective for the Indian ASAT test primarily being Pakistan, but it seems to me that there could be, as an important secondary thing that China would be relevant as well. It was announced in a recent government publication or sometime back that China may have one sort of semi-operational BMD base and I wondered if, because of the growing sort of competition, strategic competition between China and India, that India might want to at least put a little uncertainty into China's mind where the test they could always maybe expand to a second site. That's, in other words, not that that was the primary objective, but that might be a non-trivial secondary objective of the ASAT test. And also, thank you all for your presentations that I found very informative. Yeah, thanks for that question. I mean, with China and Indian BMD, the one thing I will say is that, given just the numbers, the sheer ability of China and the People's Liberation Army rocket force, China poses a saturation challenge and that there are just so many targets that even if India could create that kind of a doubt in the minds of Chinese leaders and military planners, it would require a significantly larger BMD force than currently exists in India, but given Pakistan's limitations, it's much more useful there. And I believe the base you're talking about is Corla, which is actually not that far from the Indian border and that's what the Chinese actually do there, get to kill intercept tests using the DN-3 system. Wouldn't it be true though that a limited BMD would mitigate the option of a limited signal sending nuclear strike against India? That might pose more of a challenge, because I agree all out they could do well in here, but wouldn't that at least constrain China a little bit in nature? It's one thing to send one or two nuclear weapons, it's another thing to send a hundred. That's right. And the only thing I'll say to that is that given what we know about China's nuclear doctrine, I think just that kind of a practice would be highly unlikely for the Chinese to actually do in a conflict. So that's just another limitation I see with that. But yeah, I mean, I think absolutely the Chinese will have taken note of this capability being developed in India. Down here. Good afternoon. My name is Julian Kyle Lewis from the American University here in Washington. I was also the Associate Director of the Office of Presidential Correspondence in 2011 for President Obama. Guess I just wanted to clear up a few things and have a question. Just as far as Pakistan is concerned, the way the United States deals with a country like Pakistan, when we don't really trust them, but they're an ally and a strategic partner in the region, we'll say, hey, we'll let you tell the world that you have these nuclear warheads and we'll give you the cover for it, even though we know that what you do and don't actually have. And India is aware of that. So they've been trying to call Pakistan's bluff over the past course of however many months. That's point number one. Point number two, with President Trump's space force, and that's where my question is gonna be, Russia, what he saw before he made that announcement, Russia had let out a cube into space. And what happened was a smaller cube came out of the larger cube, and then a smaller cube came out of the other smaller cube. And he saw that, and he was just thinking, well, how would we defend if just a missile came out of one of those cubes at any given time? Because a cube has all of those different sides and angles, so it could come from the top or the bottom or the left or the right. That's what he saw and he was like, space force, we need a space force. Oh my goodness, how do you stop that? So what I would like to know from anyone who wants to answer is what do you think about the progress of President Trump's space force over the course of the past year? Thank you. So you mentioned basically the satellite series, Cosmos 2519, 2521, 2523, you're talking about, the sort of the Maratushka satellites you were talking about. Yeah, that was something we saw. It's not necessarily new. There have been multiple tests in the past, including there was a DARPA program, 2007, where two satellites separate in orbit and then rendezvoused and did an exchange of fuels and things, and I don't quite think that was the impetus for the decision. The space force debate, long predates President Trump, it's been going on for 20 years or so, and the most likely reason why he came up with that is that there was a study, a crested humanity study underway that was evaluating multiple different options for restructuring military space activities, one of which was a space force. And in the midst of that study over the course of our last spring, for whatever reason he seized upon that as what he wanted to see. Interestingly, that the actual policy proposal put forward a couple months ago by the administration is not a separate, a separate but equal space service as he put it, but a core underneath the air force. As to where that stands, it's in Congress's hands at the moment because that sort of a change has to be authorized and funded by Congress. And so it's being discussed as part of the FY20 budget discussions. We'll see probably end of May, early June when the markup happens, whether or not the initial mark includes a space force or not. And then whether or not they come to a budget agreement by October 1st, or unlikely, it probably won't be resolved until I would say late fall or early next year if the budget negotiations go on that far. Another question? I'm sorry, go ahead. Just add a brief advertisement to my colleagues in CSIS. Do you guys want to talk about your documentary really quickly? Oh, yes. Hi, I'm Caitlin Johnson, I'm an associate director for the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. We featured Victoria and several other experts talking about the history of the space force and this debate of national security space reorganization. It's called Commanding Space, the story behind the space force, and it can be found at our website aerospac.csis.org. And Victoria has the best line in the entire thing. So I really recommend you check it out. It's very exciting. It's 18 minutes long, just step away. Not my line. Another question out there at all? Yes, over here, and then I'm done. Jay Gullish, a US India Business Council, two separate questions. One, I know there's clear desire for commercial space industries in both India and the United States to work together, figure ways out how to share technology solutions and services. Does the ASAT test help hinder or is it completely neutral on commercial industry working together from the two countries? My second question is, later in the year, the US and Indian government have a space dialogue scheduled on civil space. What are some sort of proactively, what are some of the things that two governments can talk about to perhaps push the concept of space stability and how the two governments can both work together to enhance that? Thank you. Okay, I'll take a stab at the first part. On the surface, I don't see it affecting it one way or the other, the ability or the possibility of the commercial industries working together with the one exception of, and this is striking, so you're talking about how it really was a veiled BMD test. If you're deploying and developing an ASAT weapon and you don't have the ability to track targets other than TLEs that are published by the 18th Space Control Squadron, you might wanna look at that. I mean, they're not necessarily target quality information. Your seeker has to be much more capable. So if they're gonna go down this path, they need to build an indigenous SSA capability. And you talked a little bit about it, but for a country that wants to go from zero to 60 and doesn't have the five decades of Cold War experience and ballistic missile defense deploying global sensors, commercial is one way to jumpstart that development of indigenous SSA capability. Yeah, I mean, just building on that idea, you know, one of the strongest, I think, sharpest criticisms after the ASAT test came from some of the new space commercial actors. He said, we are not happy about this because this affects the domain, it affects our ability to utilize it. You know, Planet, for example, is one of them that said that and they often get their satellites launched by the PSLV. Having said that, I don't know that they've changed their thinking and using the PSLV. So maybe it's just, you know, a show of unhappiness and we'll go on from there. But it definitely was said that. And then in terms of this US India civil space dialogue, I mean, we keep harping on this, but SSA is foundational to the use of space, whether it's civil space, security space, scientific space, commercial space, it is foundational. And we really need to have a way to share information back and forth because, as Baba said, sensors can only do so much. Own operators have very good information and there should be a way in which to share that information. So you have a better picture overall of what's being used in orbit. In the case of Planet, they actually did have a PSLV launch in early April, just days after they criticized India, which was very interesting. Yeah, in Planet's defense, I don't think they're gonna pull a bunch of satellites off that time scale, particularly when the PSLV is one of the few options they have. That said, they were very serious about their concern about this. And other companies, not all have been as publicly adamant, but many have been expressing concerns. And their concern is that this sort of testing that does create more debris, any debris in low earth orbit, could impact their business models, right? And their ability to do stuff in low earth orbit and make money off of whatever the business model happens to be. I think if there were more launch options other than the PSLV at this point in time, you might have seen a different response from companies expressing their concerns. But I think like the US, they may have made a decision that even though we're unhappy about this, the importance of us getting our satellites into orbit kind of outweighs taking the action about it. But I think there was a broader question here is that is how is this proliferation of counter space technologies that we talk about in our report and CS talks about in their report, how is that impacting this commercial development of space? You have on one hand, all this discussion of the trillion dollar more space economy and the commercial boom and going on. And then you have a separate discussion going on that is the proliferation of anti-satellite technology and a satellite testing and concerns about war extending into space. There's not a lot of overlap that I've seen among those two communities and those discussions even though there probably should be because I think they impact each other and hopefully we'll find ways to maybe bridge those discussions at some point. Testing one too. Yeah, Jim Armer with Northrop Grumman. As a student or a victim of five decades of nuclear strategy and politics, I'm still, this discussion sort of makes my head hurt. I mean, I've heard it all before dozens of time and to me, the most illuminating part of our discussion has been from Bob with the commercial capabilities to show some degree of attribution, transparency, tracking and consequences of these activities in space. So what I wanted to ask you, Bob, is is this a growth area in the commercial business or more and more folks gonna start investing in commercial space situational awareness or in a transparent way? And furthermore, are you seeing the insurance folks roll in in a sort of a liability regime where you can actually attribute, oh, after this test, this part hit that satellite and lawsuits or whatever ensue. Are you seeing anything like that evolving, Bob? Let me try and go in order. So do we think this is some sort of growth area with regard to SSA in this environment? I don't see the ASAT being a tremendous swinger here, but the broader problem, and I alluded to it, I didn't really foot-stomp it. There's a gap between what is published or tracked today size-wise and the size that an operator needs to be concerned with. And what I mean by that is there's a small enough size that if you have a satellite get hit by that, it will damage your satellite. It may even completely disable your satellite. You'll have a dead satellite. It'll maybe go through it, produce very, very little debris. There's bigger and bigger pieces of debris and you get to the point where you can have a piece of debris hit your satellite, it disables your satellite, and it creates a debris field. And then as we keep going up in size, it's higher than that that we get to the size of things that we as humankind know about today, that we can measure with the sensors we have today. So if you have a business plan and you're putting up hundreds of satellites in a common altitude, and there's that no man's land where the thing is too small to be tracked, but big enough to basically take out your entire business model. And that really is the Achilles heel, I would say. Now, space fence coming online should help close that gap. There are other commercial capabilities being looked at that might help close that gap to basically to drop the perceived line closer to the size that kills my business plan line. And I think that is a conversation that's going on. We haven't seen it completely hit the knee in the curve yet because a lot of these large constellations remain on paper. We've seen one web has launched, what, four or six satellites. We're still in the very, very early stages. I think as these constellations actually come to fruition, that entire conversation is gonna change rapidly. The other question you had was about insurance. The attribution angle's an interesting one. We haven't talked too much about that. We have talked a lot about collisions and insurance and insurance companies and they're insured the commercial operator's and what has to be tracked and what's the risk. And is there a dynamic where the insurers would get to the point where they would almost demand or require that the insured does more to understand their environment. And insurance it turns out is a very funny game where sometimes it sounds like they want losses once in a while. And it's sometimes we've had to scratch our head when we have these conversations with the insurance industry. That doesn't mean that they're looking for death and destruction and gloom, but there's an interesting dynamic there. And then on top of that take, for example, Intercept 2019, which just died last month. There's a three or four year old satellite, which guess what was not insured because operators often operate on the very hairy edge from a profitability standpoint. So yeah, beginning of the mission and then that's it. I'm not gonna insure the rest of the mission. So the whole insurance question is a dicey one I would say. Okay, but just to add on that, we did a workshop with self-reruption in the insurance community beginning of last year, I think, talking over basically the issue without insurance could ever be an incentive for responsible behavior. The short answer was no, not at the short term, but if there's some things change the space world that could be. And that report's available on our website. Just to add on something that Bob said, the insurance company at least in the space world tends to also be lagging in that they look for historical data and metrics to kind of drive their future investments. They're not, at least for the time being, not looking ahead to what might be coming in terms of how the metrics might be changing in the future. And because we haven't had any, there's no court cases, there's no lawsuits, there haven't been any actual damages in orbit that anyone's took anybody to court over, there really isn't any motivation for them to start looking at that yet. That was really, I guess, interesting. There was, yeah. Sir. Yes, I wanted to ask about what the debris field is made of, what are the materials in the debris field? Off the top of my head, I don't think I can answer that. I'd have to consult with some people. It's the, I'm sure there's a lot of aluminum on the satellite, but beyond that, I couldn't speak to that properly. Does that make a difference in how sustainable the debris field is, or how it can be cleaned, and is anybody working on that? Indirectly, it does. So for example, that piece that I showed that's three years out, we've looked at a few different pieces. Again, we're at the mercy right now of using the TLEs that the 18th has published for the debris population. And so there's detailed physical data that that process doesn't provide. For example, things about the ballistic coefficient and what have you. We've done some reverse engineering on a few pieces and seen, not wildly, but significantly varying ballistic coefficient, indicating a much more dense piece, which was the one that's gonna take three years, as opposed to pieces that have a much lower ballistic coefficient. So again, the other thing is we're dealing with, statistically, it's a fairly small population set, couple dozen, several dozen pieces. So I'm hoping that more and more pieces, they say they have a couple of hundred. I'm hoping that more of those get released. And of course, as we get further from it, some of them will re-enter. And part of your question is what's working on to kind of clean this stuff up. This particular case, even the pieces in this that didn't go as high as 2100 or higher kilometers in Apogee, the perigee is still down at 280 kilometers. So they're gonna re-enter three years as longer than when claimed, but still relatively short compared to other things. There's quite a bit of R&D going on and technology development on debris removal in general, both government side and commercial side. The challenge is that so far no one's willing to really pay for that development. The US government, for example, NASA has said that they're willing to do R&D up to TRL3, which basically includes paper studies and on the ground, but no actual in-flight demonstrations. The only in-flight demo that we know of so far who was recently done by the European Union that have removed debris mission out of the Surrey in the UK and they tested several different technologies that could in the future be used to remove debris, but there's still this gap between the technology demos and actually having an actual capability to go do it. I would say related to what Bob said about the large constellations, there is a chance that that might help spur the creation of that capability. If you've got a thousand satellites in a constellation, even at a 5% failure rate every three to five years, that's still a lot of dead satellites in your own orbit. And so a couple of those companies are talking with other companies about a tow truck kind of a service. So that might help get the technology real. That's not, of course, they're not gonna pay to clean up everybody else's debris, just their own, but that might get us somewhere down the road. But so far, most governments, including the US, have not really prioritized any kind of funding for that capability. They call me Charles University proc. My question is, do you think that the whole situation with India asset test can pave the road for laser technologies to be used for not necessarily tracking of orbit debris, but also taking down? The question, you mean? Do you think that the whole asset situation, I mean, you know, what happened now can pave the road for enabling and deploying laser technologies for orbit debris removal? Laser. Yes. So there are a couple of entities working on this. Primarily a group in Australia that is developing technology to laze small pieces of debris in low earth orbit to slightly alter their orbit. And over repeated attempts, they can bring it down faster than it would normally otherwise do. I've heard they might be testing at some point this year, but I'm not sure about that. I mean, that was going on long before this test happened. And those particular technology, looking at the much smaller pieces of debris, the less than 10 centimeter sizes that Bob was talking about, the challenge there is that those pieces are not generally well tracked. And so, you know, you kind of have a challenge of how do you know that they're there in order to be able to laze them, bring them down. So I don't think this test is necessarily going to push that at all. Because it is still a relatively small population of debris compared to other things that have happened, but it's sort of not going to hinder that, I don't think. I think maybe what it does, it just gives an incentive. You know, this is not something we're talking about in an event that happened 10 plus years ago. It happened recently and it's probably very likely it's going to happen again soon. And so it becomes much less a theoretical discussion. It'd be nice to have dream world technologies to be like, oh my gosh, we, people are testing ASAPs, we need to have a way to handle that now. Question, Ankit, for you, you mentioned this discussion I think you actually had on Twitter at some point over whether how much the timing of the test is driven by the election or not. And in the video that came out after the test, if I recall, they said that the decision to start the program had started in 2014 and then the decision for the test was made a year and a half or two years earlier. So can you unpack that a little bit and talk about how much, if any of the timing might have been driven by the election or how much the role of domestic politics played in all this? So, you know, we have some evidence after the test that this is certainly being used in a political way, right? I mean, the prime minister at one of his rallies shortly after the anti-satellite test made a reference to having conducted, you know, surgical strikes on land, air and space. So the surgical strikes were something that India did after a major terrorist attack in 2006 when it claimed that it had crossed the line of control to strike at terrorist launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. But the fact that that was sort of compared to the anti-satellite weapon test at a political rally by the prime minister, I think imbued this whole test with a degree of political significance. As far as the political ascent and the decision to move forward with an anti-satellite test, yeah, so what I've heard is that same thing that 18 months to two years in advance of the actual test occurring, the decision it had made, so well ahead of the actual election schedule. But the fact of the test certainly does coincide with the actual electoral calendar. In fact, when the test actually occurred and the prime minister announced it, the Indian Electoral Commission had to investigate the prime minister because India has a particular law called the Model Code of Conduct where members of the sitting government aren't meant to make major social or economic or other political announcements that can be seen as gaining an unfair electoral advantage. And they cleared the prime minister. He wasn't actually held culpable for making the announcement, but certainly the politics and the opposition definitely seized on it as about of opportunism. And we can look at it in a way as India again, imbuing a degree of technostrategic optimism right before the elections, right? The end of February, the conflict with Pakistan, in my view, did not go particularly well for India. India lost a MiG-21 and a pilot. The narrative of a sweeping victory was not something that India enjoyed on the international stage, certainly. So carrying out this anti-satellite weapon test a few weeks later is sort of this major moment of national pride and optimism that we're now in this exclusive club of countries that can destroy a satellite. So part of it is there, but of course I think the political assent does come a lot earlier and I suspect we'll learn more about the factors within the Indian government that led to this as time moves on and we get a little bit more insight into national security decision-making in Modi's first term. Right, just to add on to that, I mean, I think obviously you don't just do this in the drop of a hat, you have to plan for it, obviously. But my opinion is that definitely the political situation had a lot to do with the timing just because there was, as far as I can see, zero negative consequences for Modi for this test. They did it, they did great. The only criticism I saw was that it hadn't happened earlier. So I really, I guess in my opinion, they figured it was a win-win. You had the test, if it didn't work out, you just saved the missile events test and never acknowledged it and it worked out great. You can demonstrate your technological prowess and use it for elections and it shows up. I mean, if you read articles about the Indian election and campaigns, it's every single one that's mentioned. Any other questions out there? We're reaching the end here, sorry. Thank you very much indeed. No, just a small point responding to Ankit's views on the fact that India was not being seen as having come out of that February thing. Well, February, Balakut strike and all well, if I understood it well. Just a minor point, which is just to highlight that when Pulwama happened, just to give you a sense of what happened. When Pulwama, the terrorist strike, happened on the 14th of February, as I mentioned. You need to look at the reaction of the world in terms of major countries, almost a 50-odd country, be more, much more, I mean the entire world, coming out with some kind of understanding as to why, coming out with a lot of criticism over the Pulwama terrorist strike. If you look at the US, you would have seen, you should see the statements coming out of bipartisan manner of a lot of congressmen, members of the congress here. There were statements from the White House, there were statements from the State Department and all that. And then when Balakut happened on the 26th, you could see even there judging from the world reaction that there was this sense of the world that something like this terrorism being used as an instrument of street policies simply cannot go on and on. And if I may just inform you all, I'm sure all of you are aware of this, Masood Azhar, the chief of Jaisahem Muhammad. The outfit which claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack on 14th of February has just been listed as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council's one to six, seven sanctions committee. So I raise my case there, thank you. Any final questions at all from the audience about the Indian Asset Test or where we're going? I do have one for Victoria. You mentioned sort of where things stand in various multilateral discussions on space security and perilous sort of things. One of the ones that we talked about in our report was the notion that India might decide to test to get ahead of some sort of ban on anti-satellite weapons and therefore be grandfathered in. Do you think that this test having happened makes it more or less likely might eventually get to some sort of global agreement this should not be done? I think it actually makes us more likely just because, again, as I said before the previous tests we had to talk about were over a decade old and now we have a country demonstrating this technology and being willing to test it. So it's no longer a theoretical discussion. You know, it's something you need to actually deal with. So maybe there'll be a silver lining coming out of this. All right, with that, thank you very much and please join me in thanking our panelists.