 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon. Welcome to everyone here in the auditorium and the audience that's watching us on Zoom. I'm Professor John Jackson and it's my pleasure to serve as the emcee for today's event. We're Admiral Chatfield is on international travel this week, but I'm pleased to welcome you on her behalf. The series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and via Zoom around the world. We'll be offering an additional 14 lectures between now and May of 2023, spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement detailing the dates, topics and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. Looking ahead on Tuesday, 25 October 2022, Professor Tim Hoyt will speak about the brutal conflict in Ukraine. This is a very timely discussion. I'm sure it will be of interest to all of our participants. So enough background and admin. Let's proceed with the main event. Today's topic is very timely considering all that is going on in the areas of space engineering and exploration. Were it not for the recent hurricane, we might have seen the launch of the huge NASA Artemis rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed mission to the moon. We hope to see this launch sometime in November. NASA recently smashed a probe into a comet and SpaceX continues to launch rockets on a nearly weekly basis. And as a heads up on 15 November of this year, we will welcome NASA astronaut Sonny Williams to the college for an evening lecture about her upcoming flight to the International Space Station aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. Like I said, there's a lot going on. Today's lecture on space and national security will survey how space is factored into U.S. national security from the days of Sputnik to the emerging era of great power competition. The presentation will describe potential threats and policy responses facing American sea space power today. And we'll discuss future challenges and possibilities ahead. Our distinguished guest speaker, Dr. David Burbach, is an associate professor in the national security affairs department here at the Naval War College. He holds a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor of arts in government from Pomona College. He currently teaches U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and space security. His scholarly interest includes civil military relations, defense planning, and the relationship between international security and technology, particularly with regard to space and nuclear issues. Before joining the Naval War College faculty in 2007, Professor Burbach taught at the Army School of Advanced Military Studies and worked for several analysis and information technology organizations in astronomy and space education. As a reminder, during the formal presentation, please submit any questions you have using the Zoom chat function, and we'll get to as many as possible at the end of the remarks. And following the conclusion of the remarks, we will have a family discussion group meeting where we'll provide some information of interest to the military folks here in the community. So without further ado, Dr. Burbach, over to you, sir. Well, thank you, Professor Jack. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Professor Jackson, for that kind introduction. And good afternoon to everyone, to those of you with us here in person in Spruance, to the audience on Zoom and LinkedIn, and to the future, to anyone who may be watching this recording on YouTube after the event. I'm very pleased to have a chance to talk to you about space, which is, as Professor Jackson described, there's a lot going on. And it's kind of interesting that we often think about space as representing the new thing. But actually, it's very appropriate that this lecture happens to be today, because today is the birthday of Sputnik. It was October 4, 1957, that humans first put something in orbit around the earth when the Soviet Union launched a small satellite that orbited for several months. It's now far enough in the past that if Sputnik were still in orbit, it would be able to retire, collect social security, move to Florida and relax. So we've had satellites almost as long as we've had helicopters or ballpoint pens. But there is still a lot of interesting new things going on in space. So what I'd like to do in this talk today is give you a sense of some of the ways we use space for national security purposes during the Cold War, kind of that classic period of space. Talk about some of the ways that space security issues have changed since then. And why, other than just, wow, cool new rockets, why some of our concerns about space on the military and security side have changed, what we're doing about those, from creating Space Force to some of the diplomatic responses we might have. And then talk just a little bit about some of the changes in the commercial sector and some of what we've observed about how space has mattered in the war with Ukraine. So like I said, 65 years ago, the world was shocked when Sputnik was launched and that kicked off the what is probably the more familiar part of how space mattered to us in those early days was the public space race. The belief that space was critical for national prestige, that space technology was a way of demonstrating which superpower truly was going to own the future, who had the leading technology, whose economic system could really produce revolutionary events. And it may be a little hard to read the cartoon on your upper right, but an editorial cartoon right after Sputnik shows, you know, Khrushchev trying to woo the lesser nations, we'd use a better phrase today, but Khrushchev trying to woo the lesser nations saying, who else can give you a moon while poor Uncle Sam stands there with a box of chocolates. That's how we looked at it, that we, it was critical to show the world that we could compete. The Soviets managed to put the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin in 1969. We countered with John Glenn not too long after just as an example of how this wasn't just about going into space, but part of this big, you know, we would now call it soft power or information operation. After Glenn's trip around the world, we sent, we sent Glenn's capsule around the world again, not in space, but on ships and trucks to demonstrate in many countries. This particular long line is in India, it stopped in 30 different countries around the world. So we wanted people to feel like it wasn't just America going into space, but that this was a grand adventure for the whole human race. And that culminated when we eventually landed on the moon. You see, I think that's Aldrin, I think Armstrong had the camera, so it's probably Aldrin's looking at the flag. Just as one example, you know, department store absolutely crowded with people at six in the morning in Sydney, Australia, people wanting to watch it, you know, in a time when television was really still pretty new. One in six people around the world found a way to watch it, you know, whether in a store, a big screen in a park, people, you know, some people at home. This was a big deal. You know, we're very familiar with this story. Somewhat less well known is, in some ways, the more important part of space back then, and throughout much of the Cold War, was not so public. We had a very important, very expensive secret space spy program. We still do a lot of surveillance from space. It was even more secretive back then. And it can be hard to put ourselves in that mindset, where today, we're so used to being able to see anything in the world anytime we want. This is an example that was in the news last year, where it turns out the Chinese have been building large mock-ups of American warships way out in their Western desert on railroad type tracks so they can move them at a missile test range. You know, pretty obvious what they're doing. They're practicing having missiles home in on moving US ships. We've, you know, we've done tests like that too. But traditionally, this would be the kind of thing that countries would really, really try to keep secret. They wouldn't want people to know that they were up to this. That's just not possible anymore. You know, this was in the newspapers, and this is not even from a government spy satellite. This image was taken by a commercial satellite. Any one of you with a credit card, I'm not sure how much, you know, probably, you know, decently high limit, any of you could go to the Maxar website and order images like this. You know, you could say, I want to pay for the satellite to take a photo of this spot and they'll do it for you. Governments have even better capabilities. But when Sputnik went up, the world was a very different place. The Soviet Union was an extremely closed and secretive society. You probably can't, you know, the map is a little dense here. But what this is, is an example of a captured German map that the Germans put together during their invasion of the Soviet Union, because captured maps from the Wehrmacht were actually better, the best we could do in many cases because the Soviets, I mean, they literally would put towns in the wrong places on the maps that they were able to willingly distribute publicly. We had no idea what was going on. So it became a critical priority to find out, you know, what sort of technology are they developing? How many bombers? How many missiles? Are there are their forces getting ready to launch a surprise attack? And the way that we were able to do that was from space. So even before Sputnik was launched, we were working on our own space programs, much of it extremely secret. And we had already identified that putting spy satellites in orbit was a top national priority, that we needed to be able to have satellites seeing what was going on inside the Soviet Union. Now, we also tried things like the, you may have heard of the U-2 spy plane, you know, we violated Soviet territory and flew those for some years. Earlier we even tried just putting cameras on balloons that we would let drift over the Soviet Union and they just take a picture of whatever happened to be below. Those were suboptimal. The balloons weren't very good. They shot down the U-2 spy plane. We realized space is going to be the way to do this. And within two years of Sputnik, we had functioning spy satellites in orbit. And this became a tremendously important thing. We figured out very, very quickly, the Soviets didn't have nearly as many missiles or bombers as we thought, you know, that's kind of a useful thing to know. You can be a little less afraid, maybe not spend so much money. And in fact, President Lyndon Johnson by the late 60s told, well, I'm not sure, you know, he apparently told a bunch of reporters, I don't want to be quoted on this. Well, of course, you know, they were reporters, so they quoted it. But Lyndon Johnson said, it'd be worth what we spent on space 10 times over because I know how many missiles the enemy has. I don't have to buy missiles that we don't need. I don't have to be afraid of a surprise attack. You know, I don't have to live in fear. I know what the other side is up to. And that's worth a tremendous amount of money. So during the Cold War, you know, this surveillance use of space was absolutely critical, just as it continues to be critical today. And very early, we developed other military, we had other military uses going on in space. We put a big priority in addition to the spy satellites to see what was going on. We developed satellites that could detect missile launches so that if the, you know, God forbid, if nuclear war were starting, we'd be able to see the missiles on their way as soon as possible to help avoid surprise attack. You know, and other applications that we're used to today, like weather satellites, the Navy had an early GPS, you know, forerunner of GPS, a lot more complicated to use, but they had Navy had a navigational system up by 1964, weather communications. So, you know, these, you know, going back to just the first decade of space, you know, we got a lot of military and national security utility out of it. One thing I thought I'd mentioned that, you know, some of you may wonder is, you know, what about putting weapons in space? You know, it's a standard thing in science fiction movies, you know, shoot down at the planets from space. That really wasn't something that was, that anybody was very seriously considered. We and the Soviets both thought about, well, we've put nuclear bombs everywhere else. Maybe we should put some nuclear bombs in space, too. As you think about that, though, it means launching a nuclear weapon on a fairly, you know, what we're then fairly unreliable rockets, you know, and that would be kind of an unfortunate launch accident. And once it's in orbit, the other country might destroy it, sabotage it, you know, take it over and bring it back to their country to inspect it, that, you know, it'd be kind of like if you just let a nuclear weapon go drifting around in the ocean, you know, where anybody could grab it. So both countries figured out pretty quickly that there's just, there wasn't a really good reason to put nukes in space, given that we already had ballistic missiles that could reach anywhere on earth. Other, you know, people have also thought about, well, what if you have, you know, imagine something like a telephone pole, made out of a, you know, made out of tungsten or some heavy metal, and that comes screaming down from space and smashes into something. Theoretically possible, but it turns out it's not some kind of, you know, science fiction super weapon. You'll create a nice explosion, but, you know, it's not different enough from a conventional explosion. It's, you know, hard to steer this metal telephone pole on its way down. So, yeah, it turns out that that's really not a very attractive prospect. So there really hasn't been much effort to put weapons in space to shoot down at earth. There has, however, been a lot of interest going back to the very beginning of the space era to think about can we do something to shoot down satellites if we don't like what an adversary satellite is up to. And within just a couple of years after Sputnik, the US had a very rudimentary anti-satellite system that relied on setting off nuclear weapons in space. It's not surprising, but it turns out a nuclear weapon can destroy a fragile little satellite pretty easily. You know, the photo in the lower left there is a test of an anti-satellite weapon in space about 800 miles away from Hawaii that's looking from Honolulu. Yeah, it turns out that that has some bad side effects. Radiation gets trapped in space and will affect other satellites. That test you see there destroyed AT&T's first television satellite. They put up the first television relay satellite just a few weeks earlier and we in AT&T tried not to talk about it too much at the time, but it turns out we fried that first television satellite with our nuclear test and a couple other of our satellites and a couple Soviet satellites. So that, you know, it's something you could do. Nobody was really eager to go that route because it would make space unusable for everybody pretty quickly. Likewise, and here I've got a frame from the movie Gravity that came out, that was probably getting towards 10 years ago now, with the Kessler syndrome. And if you destroy a satellite, it'll break into thousands of pieces that'll hit other satellites and so on and so on. So, you know, both the US and the Soviets realized you could build anti-satellite weapons, but if you actually use them, space may be big, but you can actually contaminate space with radiation and debris pretty quickly. So during the Cold War, we both developed the technology for anti-satellite weapons, but relative to how much money we might have put into them, how we might have deployed, you know, whole fleets of anti-satellite missiles, both countries were relatively restrained. We kind of realized we've got nuclear deterrence. In fact, having missile warning systems and other nuclear surveillance in space provides some stability. If you blow up the other side's missile warning satellites, they're probably going to assume you're about to launch a first strike at them. Why else would you blow up the missile warning satellites? So there was a relative amount of restraint. You know, we certainly competed to be better at spying, you know, than the other side or, you know, figuring out, you know, try to figure out what the other side was up to, but, you know, space didn't become as much of a battleground as many people feared it might. Well, what's different today? And, you know, what has changed over the years is how much space has become integrated in everything. You know, if in the 1970s, space was absolutely critical for nuclear deterrence, you know, knowing where targets were, communicating, missile warning, you know, but for the, you know, even for the military, the average service member and their daily job, you know, probably wasn't interacting with space technology very much. The average citizen, you know, they do see some fairly low quality satellite weather photos on the, you know, when you tuned into the local news at six o'clock. That's all different. Everybody in this room probably has a smartphone and that relies on GPS signals from space. Your phone probably can use, you know, the probably can also use the Russian Galileo system, might use the Chinese Baidau system. You know, there are now several different of these navigational systems that not only are critical, so you know where you are, a little more, you know, a little more down in the nerdy weeds, but timing signals from GPS are critical that cell stations can keep track of, hey, when did this bit of data arrive? When did that bit of data arrive? Timing from GPS and similar systems turns out to be critical. You know, what military or civilian communications, you know, television, you know, I've got a standard sort of DOD issue, you know, overly complicated chart of, you know, how to build a whole, you know, space-based ISR architecture. We use space for everything. Now, we have used, you know, satellites in space to track terrorist cell phone signals to direct GPS-guided munitions onto them. So with space and absolutely everything, it means that everything is dependent on space. And taking away space capabilities has the potential to have huge military implications, you know, or civilian implications. Take away GPS and the civilian economy takes a big hit. So you combine that space dependence with return, return to great power competition. And with the case of Russia and China, unlike adversaries like the Taliban or even Serbia or Iraq, Russia and China are space-faring powers. They've got space technology. They also have systems like ours. And they have what we call counter space systems, ways to attack our space systems, anti-satellite weapons, cyber and electronic weapons. And there's a fear that we're probably even more vulnerable than they are. Given that the U.S. and our allies tend to be so technologically dependent, you know, we have more of this built in. Our economies depend more on the kind of capabilities, you know, that space enables. Geography also matters. If we were to be involved in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits, you know, think about what a relatively short distance that is for China. They can use fiber optic cables to their coast and then, you know, might be as little as 100 miles to where they're operating. Whereas we're on literally the opposite side of the planet from U.S. headquarters or even from Pearl Harbor, we would absolutely be depending on space-based communication, space-based ISR, space-based navigation. So if you take space away from everybody, that's probably a relative advantage to China. You know, Russia not entirely, you know, less so but not entirely. So there's a lot of concern about these countries might feel like there would be an advantage. There'd be value in attacking U.S. systems. And there are a couple of ways they might do that today. You know, just as in the early Cold War, we had some very rudimentary anti-satellite weapons, technology's gotten better. And both China and Russia have anti-satellite weapons that will intercept and destroy a satellite without a nuclear weapon, smashing into it, creating a lot of debris, but pretty effective. The Russians tested one of these systems about two, almost three years ago now, caused a lot of debris, in fact debris that threatened their own astronauts on the International Space Station, but the system clearly works. So if Russia or China wanted to start shooting down U.S. satellites, they'd have the ability to do that. Even more attractive these days are the possibilities of electronic or cyber warfare. If you can blind the satellite, you know, by overpowering its radio receivers, and the U.S., oh, actually, I, sorry, I probably, let me, I should have advanced the slide, but I realized I skipped, I skipped actually one of the more cool points on this slide was, you know, not before we do EW and jamming. We have the technology now to rendezvous when space, you know, just like how the space shuttle would pull up to the Hubble Space Telescope, but we can now do that robotically. So if I have a little satellite who, you know, come close to your, let's say your spy satellite that I want to disable, I can pull up to it and out comes a giant pair of robot scissors, and I snip off your solar panels. Well, your satellite doesn't work, and there isn't much to breathe. Or I have, I mean, as ludicrous as it sounds, this would work. I just spray paint the lens of your giant spy satellite. Can't see anything now. Or a beam of microwaves that causes, you know, same like if you put a, you know, same thing like if you put a compact, does anybody still know what a compact disk is? If you put, you know, those, you know, compact disk in a microwave, it makes, you know, impressive little lightning, you know, out of it. Yeah, you could, there are ways you could shoot microwaves from a short distance that would be able to destroy a satellite, render it inoperable without creating debris clouds, or even more so in that direction, radio jamming, laser blinding, or cyber attacks. The U.S. acknowledges that we do have a radio jamming capability. You know, we've admitted this in public that we'd be able to overload an adversary communication satellite and render it inoperable while we're jamming it. We're quite sure the Russians and the Chinese have similar systems. We say the Russians and the Chinese both have systems that can shoot lasers to temporarily blind spy satellites as they're passing overhead. And nobody admits, of course, to any cyber capabilities, but we know they're out there. So as I'll talk about in a minute, Russia actually used a cyber attack against a space system in the Ukraine war, but, you know, one assumes that, you know, the Russians, the Chinese, us, anybody else is working on cyber capabilities, which again, you know, could be used without creating all of this debris without making space unusable as we worry about. So what could the U.S. do about this? I'm not going to go through these in detail. If you, for those of you who are NWC students, if you want to take my space elective, you know, we'll talk more about strategy and diplomacy. But there are a number of things that the U.S. is thinking about how, you know, could we do this? One is simply make ourselves our space systems more difficult to attack, make our satellites less fragile. You could even potentially put defensive systems. So if you see, you know, if that, you know, the spacecraft with the giant pruning shears is coming at you, maybe you've got a short range, you know, interceptor that you could fire at it as it approaches. You know, you could kind of have a cool James Bond arms race and that kind of stuff with the satellites. Even easier, just put up a lot more satellites. You know, instead of having 10 or 20 satellites that provide a given capability, if you have thousands that provide that capability together, that's a lot of targets that need to be hit. And so that kind of redundancy is something we're thinking about. We can also rely on deterrents. And, you know, we, we have made clear that, you know, in fact, also NATO has now said that an attack on NATO country space systems counts as an article five, you know, incident, perhaps you can tell other countries if you attack our space systems will attack yours. Or even that if you attack our space systems will attack something you care about on the ground, blow up our missile warning satellites, and we'll blow up, you know, one of your missile launch facilities or something. You know, we could, you know, back in the in the heady days after the Cold War when, you know, we had the unipolar moment, some people said, hey, the US has an opportunity now to race ahead, weaponize space, and basically to shoot down anything any other country ever launches if they don't agree to do it by our rules. That day has probably passed and that that really wasn't kind of how we were thinking about international relations. But, you know, there's still a possibility that we could really kind of move into a more of an offensive counter space orientation, or going the other direction. Maybe we could pursue some space arms control. And we certainly, we have been trying to at least get other countries to stop doing destructive weapons tests. We have pledged we will not test an anti-satellite weapon that causes debris in space the way Russia and China have done. And we've done in the past too, you know, a pretty distant past. But, you know, we've said unilaterally, we're just not going to do it even if they keep testing. And we would like to get other countries to stop that as well. So there are a variety of things that, you know, that of strategic responses that we might have. We have also had a major organizational response. Because of these concerns that we had these space vulnerabilities that weren't being adequately addressed, we created the Space Force. Those of you who are students, well, you will have a lesson on the creation of Space Force in the National Security Affairs Department, when either when you get to that part of the course. And it's easy to say us, we have Space Force because Donald Trump thought Space Force was cool. Yeah, that's actually part of the reason. But even without Donald Trump, there actually was even in the late Obama administration, talk about how we needed to reorganize to put more focus on space and deal with these rising challenges. You know, I won't go into too much more detail there. If any of you are familiar enough with Space Force, you know, the current Chief of Space Operations is John Raymond. And that's not his photo. The Senate just confirmed the second Chief of Space Operations hasn't had the change of command yet. But General Salzman will be will be coming in to take command, you know, sometime in the next several weeks. What is Space Force going to do? They're not going to be flying X-Wing fighters. They're not going to be shooting lasers at anyone. They're not going to have space marines. I don't doubt the marines will at some point insist we need an independent space capability, because that's kind of how the Marine Corps thinks. But Space Force is not going to have space marines. They won't even have astronauts. What Space Force is going to be about is defending and operating satellites mostly. They're going to be in charge of keeping these of operating our space capabilities, protecting our space capabilities. And if we choose to develop offensive counter space capabilities of our own, they would be the ones who would use that. So they're going to be in charge of knowing what's going on in space. They're going to be in charge of, you know, of figuring out how to protect our satellites. And more at kind of more of the program management and acquisition level, Space Force is supposed to figure out, how do we build this stuff faster, better, cheaper? Because one of the, you know, those of you who are students, this is actually where some of the meat of the lesson will go. Space had been, you know, we are used to delays and cost overruns in military procurement. Space systems had been especially bad with some very long delays and lack of coordination. We had new GPS satellites up several years before the ground terminals had been built and distributed because the Air Force and Army got out of sync on that. So we literally had signals that nobody had the capability to use because we hadn't distributed the ground equipment yet. Space Force is supposed to pull this together and figure that stuff out. We don't know if that's going to work yet. It's still too new, but what Congress really hopes is that Space Force is able to get us more innovation, lower cost, more synergy between, with everything we're doing in space. Now at the same time, as, as Professor Jackson alluded to, there's a lot of cool new stuff going on commercially. Rockets may not be new, but having competition among multiple private companies for who's got the best rocket, that actually is pretty new. Even if companies like Boeing and Lockheed used to build, you know, build rockets, they were on government contracts, you now have companies not only like SpaceX, the, the rocket you see in the top left there is from a company called Rocket Lab that has launched out of New Zealand. Just this weekend, a company called Firefly got its first rocket into orbit. SpaceX will have the next commercial flight to the International Space Station tomorrow. So there's a lot going on in the launch field, but there's also a lot going on with satellites and software. And in some ways, that's actually where the even more interesting action is. You now have commercial capabilities like that photo of the warship mock-up in the Chinese desert. You tremendous ISR capabilities from commercial constellations. Not only optical sensing, there are networks of what's called synthetic aperture radar, radar imaging that'll work at night and through clouds that provides absolutely militarily useful level capabilities in, you know, available. I'm not sure exactly how long it is from like when, when they would provide, take an image to when you'd have it, but short enough time to be tactically useful at a commercial level, even commercial elint and sigan type satellites. Like, you know, there are now commercial firms that have, you know, elint systems to triangulate, you know, to like help keep track of where ships are on the ocean. So commercial companies are developing capabilities that used to be almost exclusively government and developing them sometimes in very large numbers. Like, if for, for any of you who have kids, please in the next couple of years, take your kids outside, look at the stars, enjoy the night sky. Because in another 10 years, it's going to look like you live right off the runway at LAX. The number of satellites in orbit is set to possibly, at least by 10, maybe 100. I like to do, try doing a strong photography at night, astrophotography as it's called. In some of my images just a couple of weeks ago, there were as many as a dozen satellites visible in every single frame that I took near sunrise or sunset. That's kind of, I'll admit, that's kind of a weird niche interest. So, you know, don't let me stand in the way of progress. What this means is that you're going to be able to get, it's going to be like Wi-Fi from space, broadband from space, constellations of many, many thousands of satellites from different providers. SpaceX is out in the lead, but they're not the only one. And so there's a lot happening with, with commercial players here in the US, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, you know, all over the Middle East, UAE has allies very interested in developing commercial space. So there's a lot going on in that sector. And you can see this come together. Some of these security concerns and the commercial revolution in Ukraine, you know, and I think this is from India today, you know, headline to kind of capture it there from early in the war, you know, Ukraine sends SOS to Elon Musk. And the, you know, say, well, let me, let me move on and say where, where this came from. I'll go backwards there. One of the very first shots that Russia fired in this war was a space, a cyber attack on a space system. The Ukrainian military had made heavy use of a satellite communication system called Viasat for voice communication. They have a pretty cool artillery system. It's almost, you know, they, people have called it Uber for artillery, you know, a very distributed, we're kind of people identify targets and then artillery units kind of say, I can serve that target, cell phone based, they need to move data for that. And, you know, a lot of that moved over a network called Viasat. First hour of the war, Russia launched a cyber attack, not against the satellites, but against the ground terminals. It essentially told the Viasat servers, here's some new, the new software update for the terminals, push it out to the terminals and it rendered the terminals dead, unusable, unfixable. For both the Ukrainians and for thousands of commercial users in Europe, in NATO countries. So NATO countries actually suffered millions of dollars worth of property damage out of this attack. It was kind of interesting. Pretty, and that's what led to Ukraine calling on SpaceX. Hey, can you help us out? And SpaceX with funding from the U.S. government has provided a lot of terminals, satellite capability. And because they have so many satellites, they don't have 100,000 yet, but they do have 2,500 in orbit. Russia probably has a few dozen at most anti-satellite interceptors. So you reduce 2,500 to say 2,450 and you really haven't slowed SpaceX down that much. They launched 50 satellites every week. It's not worth it to try and shoot it. They've tried cyber attacks and so far have failed. Maybe they'll figure something out. This is where that revolution and this massive commercial capability has enabled Ukraine to survive that loss of capability. Or on the commercial side too, this is from just before the war began, a commercial radar satellite showing vehicle columns forming up. This is at almost midnight local time. The Ukrainians have been getting imagery, radar imagery. The U.S. has provided assistance in how to analyze and interpret and make use of satellite data. So this commercial capability has been pretty helpful to Ukraine. And so just a few thoughts on what I think we've seen from the war so far. There were, if you'd gone back before the war, many analysts said probably cyber or jamming is going to be a lot more attractive than blowing up satellites. And that's exactly what we've seen. And in fact, had it not been for Starlink, the Russian cyber attack on the commercial space systems that Ukraine used might have made a real difference in the way that might have been a pretty big hit. It absolutely shows the value of redundancy. Russia hasn't bothered to try and do anything against the SpaceX satellites. They're 2,500 of them. What are you going to do? Nobody has that many anti-satellite missiles. That sharing intelligence and communication data can be very valuable, that commercial companies, as I've said, can provide militarily useful equipment. It also raises a question that I don't think policymakers have really thought through fully yet. It makes the commercial sector a target. In fact, the head of the Russian Space Agency implied that Elon Musk personally could be considered a military target, given how involved he'd become. But certainly, by international law, if whether it's via SAT or SpaceX, if they're providing tactical direct military relevant service, legitimate targets. So what would the US do if the Russians or the Chinese did start blowing up commercial satellites that belong to a US company? Or what if they belong to a country that doesn't have a NATO member that doesn't have space capabilities of its own other than owning a satellite company? I don't know that we've fully thought that through yet of what level of protection are we willing to provide. Should our military cyber people be talking to these space companies about potential threats and how to fix them? Maving are the other direction. Apparently, our cyber people have been really impressed at what SpaceX has been able to do to fend off Russian attacks. But it does suggest that there's more connection between the commercial and the military than either side had really thought through. So we'll see what comes out of the policy there. I did want to end on a happier note before we move to Q&A, though, the other cool thing that's happening that hopefully doesn't have a lot of military connection yet is the rise of commercial space travel. Jeff Bezos' blue origin spacecraft is a suborbital rocket similar to what Alan Shepard, the first man to ride an American rocket on a suborbital flight, graduated of the Naval War College. In fact, the number of people who've walked on the moon, Navy is definitely ahead of Air Force on that. We've done pretty well. Similar to Alan Shepard's flight to William Shatner, TV's Captain Perk, a fully private mission of civilians into orbit on a SpaceX capsule. And as John described, what you should keep an eye on in the news in the next few weeks, if you weren't aware of it, we want to go back to the moon. It's been more than 50 years, seems like it's reasonable to visit again. But in the next couple of weeks, NASA hopes to launch the first test flight of this new rocket. Those of you who are interested in space may notice it has some similar kind of same color, same side rockets as a space shuttle. That's exactly right. It reuses some space shuttle technology. We hope to do a first uncrewed test flight to the moon in the next few weeks, and then probably in about three to four years to actually land on the moon using this gigantic lander that SpaceX is developing for NASA. But there's a security connection here too, where for Apollo, when we went to the moon the first time, it was all about the U.S. demonstrating what the U.S. could do. We want to do that again. We'd really like to get to the moon before the Chinese get to the moon for the first time. But we're doing it in a way that really emphasizes partnerships. We've already made agreements with a number of countries. The Canadians will include a... Canadians specialize in building robot arms, like they first did for the space shuttle. There's going to be a Canadian robot arm included as part of one of the missions. Japan is going to contribute a rover built by Toyota for one of the missions. The European Space Agency is contributing a small space station that'll be in lunar orbit. We're really... What we're doing in Artemis is really trying to bind out, saying, come join us. Do this really cool thing with us. Your cynical view, your voters back home will think it's really cool when a Canadian or a Japanese astronaut sets foot on the moon. You're joining with us in our view of an open... Our vision of a liberal rules-based order in space. We're trying to leverage this to get... And countries that are not as close an ally as, say, Canada or Japan. The United Arab Emirates is participating at some level. So we're trying to... In a slightly different way than Apollo, there's definitely some diplomatic goals that we have that we're trying to build a coalition that's working together with us in the same way that China is now taking on Russia as a junior partner for their lunar exploration plans. Well, let me... I want to allow time for Q&A and for the family discussion group. So let me bring it to a close there. I'd be happy to take questions here in the room, or I assume the booth can pass on questions from Zoom or however we're going to work that. Would you like... That is just way cool stuff. Does anyone here in the auditorium have a question? If so, use your microphone that's attached to the seat in front of you. Any questions here internally? Okay, Gary, do we have anything from the Zoom audience? We do. And thank you for the remarks, Professor Burbach. The first question that came in was about Elon Musk's Starlink system and just putting up a lot of numbers. So is that really the solution to counter China and Russia? But is there also the backside that we increase the congestion up in space with the number of operational satellites? Yes, to both parts of that. I think if you went back 10, 20 years, the thinking would be nobody can make satellites cheap enough that you could put up thousands of them. So we aired on the side of building a very small number of incredibly capable super expensive satellites. SpaceX, they figured out how to do some amazing stuff. I actually just a few weeks ago was at an event and talked to a woman who she was the manager for the solar panels on the Starlink satellites. First of all, one way that it's different than how we do things in DoD or Boeing, she was in charge of the solar panels on the satellite. And I think she was 26 years old, mid-20s. And there wasn't a whole lot of management between her and Elon. Really Glenn Shotwell, the CEO of SpaceX. And they tried things like instead of using space-qualified solar panels, they said, well, if we're launching a lot of them, they don't have to be perfect. They literally went to Home Depot or REI or something and bought the same kind of solar panels that you would take camping and found that they were almost as good as the space-qualified and 99% cheaper. So they went with that. And if a couple of satellites don't work, well, launch 50 a week, you can afford to lose a few. You imagine traditional aerospace program people, their heads exploding at that. So now that we've just figured out, you actually can make satellites small and cheap in an assembly line way. Yeah, the thinking that we've long had that satellites are these very fragile, very small in number items. So if anybody starts attacking them, your space capability goes away fast. Large constellations really seem to help with that problem. The Russians, they kind of say, yeah, we're kind of confounded. You wouldn't be worth it to attack these satellites. The questioner is exactly right though, my little graph with the 100,000 satellites, it raises the possibility that these satellites are going to collide with each other. I only came to realize this a couple of years ago, they're private companies that have giant tracking radars just to help companies not have their satellites smash into other satellites. This is going to become a more and more difficult problem. Again, selfishly, I focus on the night sky is going to be full of these things when you look up. But more seriously, yeah, we need some rules on traffic management. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission just announced they're making stricter rules on how you have to plan to de-orbit and get rid of a satellite when it has stopped working. Worldwide, those rules aren't really in place. You may have seen a couple of times in the last few years, China has launched one of their largest rockets, the booster stage from that. Most countries at this point, they have little thrusters. They can do a controlled entry of the big booster into the ocean somewhere. China does not. They let it fall wherever it's going to fall. There was debris that came down close to some West African villages about four or five years ago. On that particular one, it's orbit actually passed right over Rhode Island before it got to five minutes earlier. We would have had to think about it. There's a lot of room for global regulation here. At the very least, I'd hope to see the US impose more. But yeah, that's from the standpoint of, if anybody, for the, I know I've got one of my faculty colleagues is in the rooms, I know he's worried about space being very offense dominant. Whoever shot first would win. When you've got 100,000 satellites, it's a little harder to pull that off. It does change some of that thinking about how delicate the military balance might be in space. Thank you, Professor Burbach. The second question that came in, now that there's interest in going to the moon, is there then the follow-up interest in putting up satellites around the moon? Yes. In fact, NASA, the NASA plan, and it's a, let me back up one. What I don't show here, this is the big, on the left, the orange rocket is what's going to carry the astronauts to the moon in a tiny little capsule on top. On the right is the SpaceX Starship Lander that will meet it near the moon and then land on the moon. What you don't see here is we plan, and there's an intermediate step, we're actually planning, and I think the Europeans are building most of it, a small space station that'll orbit the moon. So we'll actually have the astronauts go into lunar orbit in this small space station, go down to the moon from there, come back. There are people who think it's kind of a little convoluted and it's kind of an excuse to have more stuff to build, to have more contractors involved. It gets me on my kind of systems engineering knowledge to know if it's a good idea or not, but it also means we probably will put little relay satellites. In fact, the Chinese currently have, they have a rover on the far side of the moon that can't communicate with Earth because the whole moon is blocking its radio signals. The Chinese have a relay satellite in a distant orbit over the moon that can relay its communications back to Earth. And one thing with that kind of a common problem with space when countries don't trust each other, so many technologies are dual use. SpaceX uses the same rockets for the astronauts or to launch military satellites. We have raised concerns that that Chinese relay satellite, at the very least, that same maybe the Chinese want to put a spy satellite in way out past the moon or they could as a backup for their Earth-based communication satellites, they could have a nuclear command and control satellite past the moon. I've seen even a few anonymous quotes from some Air Force intelligence offices saying, oh, maybe the whole rover is kind of a covert weapons test and the science mission is just a cover story. I don't buy that. I mean, I know scientists who have been involved with the Chinese on it. I mean, the things like, you know, microwave oven size. But when countries don't trust each other and when it's hard to know what's going on in space, anything, you know, like, I am slightly surprised the Chinese didn't raise the concern with the asteroid smashing test we just did. The technology to have the NASA spacecraft hit that tiny asteroid is very similar to the technology that an interceptor would use to home in on a ballistic missile. You know, the Chinese might have said, this is just an excuse to practice that technology. If the Chinese had done that mission, we might have said that about them. And, you know, in some cases, we're right to be suspicious like that. So, you know, I kind of off the moon satellite subject, but that is actually, you know, we are feeling kind of wary about, hey, does, you know, with China wants to do stuff around the moon. Is that really just because they're interested in moon science, or do they see some potential strategic uses of being able to operate satellites out there? You know, so geopolitical tension spills into space. Gary, let me throw a question out. How SpaceX has really revolutionized rocketry by being able to use those spacecraft, those rockets over and over again. The Artemis will be used once and it'll fall in the ocean and it's done. The SpaceX model is totally different. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that reusability? Yeah, the SpaceX, the rocket they're using now, the Falcon 9 is the one you've probably seen video footage of this, you know, like the science fiction movies used to show this, you know, thing comes down and lands vertically on its rocket plume. They, I think on their most recent launch, the booster that they used had flown 13 times. And one thing that's changing in a paradigm is in space, we tended to think, well, geez, you know, rockets are so fragile, like, okay, maybe it made it up once and came back. But yeah, I don't want my valuable satellite because, you know, what, what if that weld that's going to go goes on flight number two? They've actually developed such a reliability record that people are starting to look at it the other way around. And the NASA's top science guy actually said, I now want my missions to launch on a previously flown booster, because I think the probability of discovering a defect when it blows up on the first flight is higher than the probability that something is fatigued and breaks on the second or third or fourth flight. That's a very different way of looking at things. So that, and this, you know, this has been the holy grail for a long time, we thought the space shuttle was going to provide cheap access to space because you, you wouldn't throw everything away. Turned out we actually, you throw away most of it down every launch, actually, we made a lot of compromises in the space shuttle design. And it turned out simply that it's so difficult to keep people alive in space. And the other thing in here, here, you know, I'm kind of riffing in a slightly different direction, but the importance of things like kind of culture and, you know, who dominates an agency, the big problem with the space shuttle is that it had wings and landed at a runway and making something that'll both fly in space and be able to maneuver and fly like an airplane, you know, supersonic subsonic flight on earth, like it's a lot of weight to lift landing gear up to space and back that, you know, you really only need in those last few seconds. But if you look back at kind of the talk back then, you know, all the astronauts, you know, most of the NASA people had an aviation background. You see, talk about how undignified it was to come down in a capsule and splash down in the ocean. And everyone was like, Oh God, finally, we're going to land like real pilots, you know, we're going to come down on a runway. This will be a real spacecraft, not a capsule. Well, it turns out the capsule, if all you want to do is get people up and back, the capsule approach is a lot more efficient than an airplane that also goes in space. And, you know, space shuttle could do a lot of things we didn't really need it to do. So by and kind of the thing that SpaceX did, we also thought, well, landing a rocket on its tail on its engine, nobody could, you know, no pilot could handle that. Well, it turns out computers are not good enough to do that. I mean, it's a really finicky, you know, wings have the advantage of being reasonably stable. You know, landing a rocket, you know, holding itself up, you know, on its plume, that's really finicky. But it turns out that computers, machine vision, GPS guidance, we can do that now. We, there were some early tests in the 1990s. People still thought winged airplane-like vehicles were the way to go for the future. To Musk's credit, he kind of, he was one of the people who saw those 1990s demonstrations, but nah, this is the way to go. This is how we're going to do it. And, you know, it turned out to be a bet that paid off. Harry, do you have any other questions for us? Just one other question. Can you talk a little bit about the success or not so with hacking the Starlink system? I think that there's been reports perhaps like in Ukraine that this has happened, as well as like, is China interested in doing that for low-earth orbit satellite networks? I'll take the second part first. Yes, in fact, China has, you know, Chinese military, there was, I don't know the journal, but, you know, Chinese military newspaper, you know, in fact had an article saying, hey, given what we're seeing in Russia, yeah, we need to develop ways specifically to take out Starlink if we get in a conflict with the Americans or some other, an ally who's using it. So the Chinese have definitely said, hey, this is an issue. We need to be ready to just because it's commercial and not military, you know, no, it's a legitimate target if it's being used by a military. On hacking, I don't, you know, I have no doubt there are a lot of attempts to hack it. My from what I've understood so far, SpaceX has at least mostly been winning that fight. In fact, even again, early on in the spring, I know our cyber command people were saying they were amazed at how the cycle, the rapidity of the cycle, which they could develop and get a patch up was very impressive compared to what we were able to do. I don't doubt that there's hacking. I don't have a, yeah, here was this hack and it was successful story. I'm also not going to claim that I've seen every possible claim about that. It hasn't been, you know, it's still working. So there hasn't been a hack that's like taking the system down. But, but I, it's, I mean, if I were the Russians, it would certainly be a huge target far as I'm concerned. One more question, a final question here, Leo. Good evening, left and go modern Indian. I've got two questions. First is regarding asset capability against geosynchronous satellites, geosynchronous or geostationary. We have evidence suggesting that against Leo and Leo, the kinetic asset capability has been proven. But for a geosynchronous satellite, there is nothing concrete, which says that yes, there has been an attempt and it has been successful. So the question is, are there ASAC capabilities against geosynchronous satellites? Okay. Yes. We've seen the maneuverable satellites, which are approaching and other things, but kinetic asset capability against geosynchronous satellites. Is there a likelihood of its development or is it already in place? Second, second one is about Moon Earth exploration zone. So the Chinese doctrine says about Moon Earth exploration zone. How do you see it, whether it will be a commercial activity or will it be a government activity? And what is the way US is thinking about similar thing? Okay. On the first part, get the most of the anti satellite weapons that have been tested are against satellites in relatively low Earth orbit, not all the way out at geosynchronous orbit, 23,000 miles, where you need more velocity to get out there. I don't know of these direct ascent weapons. I don't believe any country has done a test all the way out to Geo. I know China has done that they have not done a test where they've destroyed a satellite at higher altitudes. They've done some tests that we're pretty sure are tests where they know what point they're aiming for in space. So it's kind of a simulated test. We're pretty sure that they have worked on, and I don't know if any have been all the way to Geo particularly. So I know the Chinese have been interested. I don't know of a Russian system that reaches Geo, but somewhat and getting there kind of direct from Earth is tough. There have also been systems that I think you mentioned where you would put a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and then gradually approach. In fact, even the possibility of essentially a space mine, you could put it there and just let it sit for months or years and maneuver it. That's actually something I know we worry about because, you know, if it's small and doesn't do anything to draw attention to itself, you might lose track of it until it actually matters. So that's one of the reasons Space Force is putting a lot of emphasis on what we call space domain awareness, knowing what's going on. And, you know, even all the way out to the Moon for the Moon question. Yet, you know, the Moon, by international law, anybody's free to go anywhere on the Moon. Nobody can claim the Moon as territory that they own. But we also agree, and everyone agrees in the outer space treaty, to not harmfully interfere with other country's actions. What if China says, and this actually came up in the Comedy Show Space Force on Netflix, there was one of the few things where like, that actually, you know, that they hit on a real issue there. What if China lands at like the most, you know, there are a few craters near the South Pole that probably have ice in craters where it's shadowed permanently because it's at the pole. What if China lands at the most interesting crater and says, you will interfere with our science mission if you visit anywhere near this crater. And it's where we wanted to explore to. And the Chinese say, you got to stay 100 miles away from us. Do we have to listen to them? Nobody knows, you know, when the outer space treaty was written 50 years ago, the prospect of what if two countries want to explore the same crater, that was a dis, well, that distant future is arriving. One of the things that we're doing with the Artemis diplomacy is we actually have something called the Artemis Accords, which about two dozen countries have signed now that goes into a little more detail about creating safety zones. It doesn't have like numbers like you can't claim more than this many miles. But it does say you need to provide real data that shows why do you need that? And it should be for specific time. Basically, don't, you know, the signal that the accord communicates is don't play games with this, you know, be able to demonstrate to the world why you seriously need people to stay away because there's a sensitive, you know, you're going to be blasting something or there's a very sensitive experiment. The Chinese, of course, haven't signed that. So if they land and say you need to stay away or you will disturb our experiment, or another question, what if a country decides to land a mission right next to the Apollo 11 landing site to like take video of it? Or, I mean, a question I've actually thrown out to my students in a, you know, kind of humorous essay question. Some country says we're going to go to the moon and grab one of the American flags and take it home and show it in our national museum. That would actually be illegal. But what do we, what do you actually do about that? I had a Jagu act like my God, he actually knew the federal laws and international law to talk about what you would do about that. But right now, if China wants to land near one of the Apollo sites and drive their rover back and forth over the footprints, it's not clear what the law says about that. I don't think they want to do that. But we're getting to the point where we need to think about some of these issues of how do we share the moon, you know, what, how do you protect, you know, what, and the Soviets have landers too that probably they wouldn't want somebody messing with their old landers. So we, we don't have a good answer to that question yet, but we're going to have to start thinking about it. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, what we'll do is we'll take about a five minute break here and we'll come back at five 40 for the family discussion group meeting. Thank you very much and we hope to see you on the 25th for the next session.