SpaceX launches a new section of its Starlink satellite constellation, which Russia has threatened ... [+]
In the wake of Russia’s threats that it could target American satellites now aiding Ukraine with a “retaliation strike,” a cofounder of the U.S. Space Force says the White House needs to act resolutely to prevent Moscow from extending its military conflict into low Earth orbit.
The threat has become even more ominous since American intelligence leaders briefed Congress in February that the Kremlin is developing nuclear warheads that would be stationed in orbit - potentially to attack constellations of U.S. satellites, according to reporting by The New York Times
General Thomas Ayres, who co-drafted the founding legislation for the Space Force and became its first general counsel, told me in an interview that spiraling threats issued by Moscow over the past year call for a response underscoring Washington will forcefully protect U.S. satellites.
General Ayres was reacting to a provocative stance staked out by Konstantin Vorontsov, a deputy director at Russia’s foreign ministry, who has fired off a fusillade of threats to shoot down American and allied spacecraft over Ukraine. Vorontsov’s brinkmanship on an orbital showdown started in 2022, when he told a UN gathering in Geneva that civilian satellites “may become a legitimate target for retaliation.” He repeated that warning at the UN’s headquarters in New York.
Although Vorontsov did not identify SpaceX while sketching out these threatened space strikes, Elon Musk has already been sighted in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.
When Russia launched its lightning war, its initial missile barrages were aimed at obliterating Ukraine's internet infrastructure, even as its cyber shock troops attacked ground terminals linked to Viasat’s satellite internet network, the UK government reported.
Within days of the first blitz, Musk began supplying Ukraine with Starlink dishes, and later teamed up with USAID to rush thousands more satellite broadband transceivers to Kyiv as part of what the government agency called “life-saving humanitarian assistance.”
The head of Russia’s space agency at the time accused SpaceX’s founder of supporting Ukraine’s “fascist forces,” and intimated revenge was in the works, according to dispatches on these skirmishes Musk posted on Twitter (now X) for his 150 million-plus followers.
Then, even as Moscow conjured the specter of a new battlefront in space, Vladimir Putin’s inner circle raised the stakes higher. Behind the scenes, one Kremlin emissary issued an apocalyptic threat to use atomic bombs to perpetuate Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its all-important naval base.
Musk told his official biographer Walter Isaacson, a former head of Time magazine, that Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, had personally informed him Moscow would respond to a Ukrainian assault on occupied Crimea, where the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet is headquartered, with its ultimate weapons.
“The ambassador had explicitly told him [Musk] that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response,” Isaacson revealed in his blockbuster biography, Elon Musk. Isaacson spent two years intensively interviewing Musk, even as war engulfed Ukraine.
Musk unveiled fascinating details in the escalating Ukrainian drama that he said “could lead to a nuclear war — with Starlink partly responsible.”
Weapons designers in Ukraine, he told Isaacson, had devised a squadron of robotic unmanned submarines “packed with explosives” that would autonomously cross the Black Sea and ambush the Russian fleet. They apparently reverse engineered SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system to develop an advanced navigation technology to guide the drone subs on their clandestine mission. When they discovered Starlink’s coverage was disabled across the periphery of Crimea, Ukraine’s leaders pleaded with Musk to activate it, but he refused.
In a Twitter exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Musk warned: “Trying to retake Crimea will cause massive death, probably fail & risk nuclear war.”
In an excerpt from the Musk memoir adapted for the Washington Post, Isaacson wrote the SpaceX leader reassured Ambassador Antonov “Starlink was being used for defensive purposes only.”
Yet even Musk’s backstage diplomacy with Antonov has failed to halt Kremlin moves to target American satellite systems breaking through Moscow’s new Iron Curtain, or information blockade surrounding Ukraine.
Russia is deploying Su-34 bomber jet crews to target SpaceX satellite terminals in Ukraine, TASS ... [+]
Over the past year, Russia’s state-controlled TASS news agency has chronicled a series of attacks by Moscow’s fighter-bombers and missile forces on Starlink ground terminals across Ukraine, depicted as high-value military targets. Last August, Russian troops deploying a Tornado-S multiple launch rocket system “eliminated a control center for foreign mercenaries with a Starlink communication terminal in Nikolayevka,” TASS reported. Just weeks earlier, TASS recounted, “a UAV control center, a Starlink station and 25 Ukrainian servicemen were eliminated in a Su-34 airstrike on the command post.”
The White House should send out a burst of messages that any armed attack on an American network of satellites will be regarded as an act of war, Ayres says.
President Biden’s diplomatic and defense chiefs have already crafted powerful messages “about the repercussions of the use of nuclear weapons and concrete possible responses,” Ayres told me in the interview. A parallel “declaration about space would have to coincide with messaging and military planning and preparedness to respond.”
Yet other defense scholars across the U.S. are split over how to counter Moscow’s threats to extend its missile salvos to hit orbital targets.
Some say Russia’s shooting down its own satellite just before its invasion of Ukraine served as a warning that any space power aiding Kyiv could face attacks via the same Nudol ASAT missiles. The Kremlin is also racing to perfect “kinetic kill” rockets that can annihilate even human-piloted capsules.
“No country has ever shot down another country's satellite and it would be hugely escalatory,” Victoria Samson, a scholar at Washington’s Secure World Foundation, told me in an interview.
But declaring that a missile strike on a single satellite could be grounds for an all-out war between the superpowers might feed into a confrontational spiral, she predicts. “Does the U.S. want to get involved in a nuclear war with Russia because one satellite out of a constellation of thousands is interfered with?”
American military planners “have to be very careful about creating automatic triggers to war,” says Professor Jack Beard, one of the world’s leading experts on the UN treaties governing space defense and military space activities, in an interview by telephone.
The clearest statement ever on preparations for a spectrum of military responses to Russia’s shooting down of a commercial American satellite emerged during the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing for the new Commander of U.S. Space Command.
Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, nominated to that post by President Biden, revealed Space Command has already begun wargaming countermoves to an ASAT assault when Senator Jeanne Shaheen asked him whether, if Russia were to attack a SpaceX spacecraft, “should we consider that an act of war?”
“Inside the Unified Command Plan, where the president gives tasks to each of the combatant commanders, there is a task to the United States Space Command to defend commercial space capabilities if directed,” Whiting said.
Yet the chances of Russia launching swarms of missiles against SpaceX’s constellation are low, predicts James Clay Moltz, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Professor Moltz told me in an interview that the physics of cascading hyper-speed collisions in space mean even a limited missile attack could endanger not just the International Space Station, but also China’s new orbital outpost.
“Any kind of space warfare will put all satellites at risk,” astrophysicist Joel Primack, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me in an interview. “The SpaceX Starlink satellites orbit at an altitude of about 550 km. That’s high enough that if they were targeted, the debris would remain in orbit for centuries.
Heightened threat perceptions triggered by Russia’s expanding space armory are sparking changes across U.S.-led alliance treaties.
A U.S. resolution at the UN calling on all space powers to halt ASAT tests gained more than 150 votes in December 2022, but sparked opposition by Russia and China. Now Washington is drafting a universally binding ASAT test ban treaty.
Some scholars say a cosmic twist of fate presented the potential to freeze Kremlin threats against American spacecraft when a Soyuz capsule docked at the ISS, hit by a micrometeoroid, was wounded too severely to carry its cosmonauts back to Earth.
SpaceX raced to transform its spacecraft docked at the International Space Station to potentially ... [+]
Roscosmos’ spaceflight director acknowledged Russia couldn’t immediately launch a back-up Soyuz to rescue its stranded explorers.
SpaceX engineers raced to craft a rescue plan if all seven ISS astronauts, including the Russians, faced a life-threatening catastrophe requiring split-second evacuation.
At lightning speed, they transformed the SpaceX capsule at the ISS, originally designed to hold four astronauts, into a life-saving ark that could ferry the Station’s entire crew back if disaster struck.
Yet speculation over whether Musk’s mission to safeguard the lives of the Russian cosmonauts would halt Moscow’s space wargames quickly evaporated.
Just weeks later, the Russian foreign ministry’s Konstantin Vorontsov signaled the Kremlin was still mulling whether to launch “a retaliatory strike" against Western satellites aiding Ukraine.
American intelligence agencies say Moscow is now super-charging its capability to wage war on these spacecraft. U.S. diplomats have been briefing European allies that Russia is developing nuclear warheads, designed to perpetually circle the planet, to challenge entire networks of satellites, according to The New York Times, in an operation that could be launched as soon as this year.
Russian nuclear missile in Red Square military parade. American intelligence agencies say Moscow ... [+]
The specter of an orbital battlefield now looms over the U.S. and Russia, but it’s unclear how extensively the Kremlin is engaged in high-stakes saber-rattling. Despite Putin’s threats against SpaceX satellites, he can still step back from the brink of sparking Space War I.
