Orbital shooting war would risk ending the space age, scientists find

In orbit, a shooting war would never really stop.

A violent conflict in Earth’s orbit could make space far more dangerous for human use long after hostilities cooled, according to a study published on Friday in the journal of Defense and Peace Economics.

The study found that a shooting war that destroyed 250 satellites would fill Earth’s orbit with more than 25 million pieces of deadly space debris.

Each new fragment would be the size of a marble or larger (1 centimeter, or 0.4 inches), and would be rocketing along at more than 22,000 miles an hour.

Such a conflict would increase the number of deadly space fragments that size — currently, there about half a million in Earth’s orbit — by a factor of more than 50.

And every single fragment would create a “potentially lethal” threat to spacecraft, study coauthor José Luis Torres of the University of Malaga wrote.

Those risks aren’t reserved to a full-scale war, the scientists noted.

Every satellite destruction could result in more than 100,000 new pieces of such high-speed shrapnel, the researchers found — which could take as long as 1,000 years to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

That means a conflict in the planet’s orbit would raise the chance of the dreaded Kessler Syndrome: an unintended cascade of space-based destruction which would severely limit — or even close off — human use of the orbit.

That’s a situation dramatized in Alfonso Caron’s 2013 science-fiction film Gravity, Space.com noted — and it’s one that the theory’s proponent says is already underway.

“The cascade process can be more accurately thought of as continuous and as already started,” former NASA scientist Don Kessler explained about the theory that bears his name.

In such a situation, “each collision or explosion in orbit slowly results in an increase in the frequency of future collisions,” Kessler added.

In Gravity, Cuaron depicts the syndrome as a row of falling orbital dominos set off by a blown-up spy satellite releasing a cloud of high-speed debris.

That cloud blows up more satellites, creating an ever-growing cloud that eventually takes out the International Space Station itself.

Kessler himself never envisioned the syndrome as a short-term event but rather as a gradual process in which human-caused debris would become — by a process of exponential growth — a bigger threat to space-based activity than meteorites.

But Kessler also published his seminal 1978 work detailing the potential phenomenon decades before China carried out the first anti-satellite missile test in 2007, which Russia followed with its own test in 2021.

The U.S., meanwhile, has banned the practice — in part, perhaps, because of the risk of blowback.

Such anti-satellite missile tests “dramatically increase the probability that the Kessler syndrome will occur,” the scientists wrote.

While space is infinite for practical purposes, the parts most useful to human civilization are decidedly limited. 

The more than 8,000 satellites we rely on for science, navigation and communications are all within about 22,000 miles of the earth’s surface — with 90 percent within about 3,000 miles.

That makes space analogous to the ocean: an immense whole accessible only through a far more congested — and contested — fringe of usable coastline.

And like the geopolitics of coastal territories in contested seaways — notably the South and East China Sea — those regarding space have been heating up.

The U.S. Space Force — the newest branch of the military — is preparing for conflicts that spill over into space, security news site Defense One reported this week.

That preparation marks a creeping shift away from the understanding written into the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

The agreement bars “the establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military maneuvers on celestial bodies.”

While the treaty left some gray area — enough to allow space agency NASA to draw from military officers and researchers — even during the Cold War, space remained remarkably peaceful.

Now tensions in Earth’s orbit increasingly match those below.

When first learning to pilot satellites in the years before China’s anti-satellite test, “I didn’t really train against an adversary trying to destroy my satellite or deny its capabilities. That just wasn’t required,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, told Defense One.

But the Pentagon increasingly appears to view space — home to the strategically vital communication, guidance and navigation systems that guide Earthbound weapons — as a logical extension of conflicts on the planet below.

Under the Trump administration — which established the Space Force — the military’s chief of space operations called for “an order of magnitude expansion of our ability to protect and defend American interests in cislunar space and beyond.”

The Pentagon has also invested in a network of surveillance satellites and is developing the technology to build potential bases for orbit around Earth and the moon. Meanwhile, China and the Pentagon are attempting to find ways to destroy satellites — for aggression or maintenance — without leaving behind debris, an effort that may be motivated by the risk of Kessler syndrome.

In 2021, one Chinese satellite — the “space tug” SJ-21 — grabbed another defunct Chinese satellite in its robotic arms and pulled it a few hundred miles into an unstable “super-graveyard drift orbit.”

In such a trajectory, the dead satellite will spiral into the Earth’s gravity well until it burns up against the high friction of our atmosphere — leaving behind no orbital debris.

Such technologies could imply a beginning of “grappling”-based space conflict, the commander of the U.S. space command told Congress in 2021.

According to military contractor Northrop Grumman, a new generation of U.S. grapplers may be on the horizon — though the contractor only listed civilian applications.

The aerospace company is collaborating with the Naval Research Laboratory to deploy an “autonomous” robotic arm for spacecraft by 2025.

The arm will be able to grab and manipulate spacecraft “that were not designed to be grappled,” Bill Vincent, director of the Navy lab, told Breaking Defense.