EXPERT INTERVIEWS — The domain of space has become essential to 21st-century life, given the extent to which communications and navigation are now reliant on space-based systems. That reliance has made space a strategic domain as well — one where geopolitical competition on Earth is increasingly projected, and which is being weaponized in preparation for potential conflicts. It’s a future that not long ago would have seemed the stuff of science fiction; today, experts say, it’s all too real.
For years, the key players in this beyond-earth domain have been the U.S. and Russia – not surprising, given the histories of the American and Soviet space programs. The new power is China, which has made strides in space much as it has in many areas here on Earth.
Moscow made headlines in 2024 with reports that it was seeking to launch a nuclear anti-satellite weapon, but many experts see China as the primary near-peer competitor for the U.S. Beijing has invested heavily in its space capabilities, with satellite launches aimed at building its own networks to rival U.S. and allied options. China is also known to have satellites with arms designed for sophisticated orbital debris removal. And just this week, China launched three taikonauts to its Tiangong space station, marking its 15th crewed spaceflight and 20th overall in its Shenzhou program.
The Cipher Brief spoke with two leading space experts — Clayton Swope, Deputy Director of the Aerospace Security Project and Senior Fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Charles Galbreath, a retired U.S. Space Force Colonel who is now a Senior Resident Fellow for Space Studies at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Center for Excellence.
They warned of the mounting threat posed by China in space, why they believe Russia is on the decline, and how they think the U.S. should respond.
‘We must be optimistic but also realistic that there will potentially be a conflict that extends to or starts in space,” Galbreath said. “We need to be prepared to endure that and also prevail in it and achieve space superiority for ourselves and our allies so that the fielded forces moving forward to conduct joint operations can do so more freely and safely.”
Swope and Galbreath spoke with Cipher Brief Editor/Writer Ethan Masucol. Their conversations have been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the full discussions on The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
THE EXPERTS
The Cipher Brief: Broadly, where are we today, in space?
Galbreath: We know that there is great utility to be had from having systems in space. The United States and our allies have demonstrated, for many decades, the benefits of satellite communications, global positioning, navigation and timing capabilities, missile warning, intelligence, weather, etc., and how military forces in the air, at land, and at sea can utilize those to enhance their combat effectiveness. This is a well-established fact, demonstrated time and time again over the past 30 years.
And we know from a civilian or from a commercial perspective, there's great utility. So when we talk about competition in space, there's this dual facet — the civil and commercial side of competition. Does one country have a Starlink or a Starlink competitor? Or are they providing imagery that can compete with other imagery? Then there's also the military aspect.
We know that China in particular is adamant about erasing the advantage that the United States and our allies have enjoyed for the past many years from our space capabilities. They want to deny us that access, and they also want to establish their own space capabilities, and they are actively doing it. And over the past several years, they've been launching satellites at an alarming rate to specifically get after their own space capabilities.
Swope: I look at competition from three different angles. One that stands out now is the business case for space — communications, broadband, connectivity. This is an area of space that has a strong commercial interest. It started at a higher orbit, in geostationary orbit with satellites broadcasting television to Earth, but also communications. Now it's in low Earth orbit with satellites like Starlink, soon to be Amazon's Project Kuiper, OneWeb. There are hundreds, if not thousands of satellites that are providing internet to people around the world. People, businesses and government are paying for that. This is an element of competition because China also wants to get in this game. They are launching constellations that look a lot like Starlink.
The second piece is really a military, national security element. There is military value from space, and there has been since the very first satellites were launched. The military uses space for GPS, for communications, for figuring out what's going on around the earth, getting geospatial data like pictures. China sees that benefit. They knew that anyway, but what they really saw in Ukraine is the value of companies that are helping Ukraine stay in the fight. It's a value to have a capability similar to that, even though this is an area that China had already been investing in prior to Ukraine.
Beyond those two elements, the third one is just influence. All these elements of competition involve China and the United States. Looking at ways to use space, either through broadband or investment in infrastructure to really project your values and your interests in countries around the world. I'm particularly thinking about the global South. China has been very active in that when it comes to Belt and Road, and they're becoming more active in that when it comes to space and space infrastructure.
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The Cipher Brief: Where does Russia fall in the threat picture?
Swope: You can't ignore Russia in any domain, including in space. But when it comes to space, and really when it comes to any domain, they're really on the decline. They're not the Soviet Union. Everything that Russia does in space now is built on the back of technology that was designed 30-40 years ago. I think it's a testament to Soviet engineers that a lot of these systems and satellites and methodologies and factories that were built in the seventies and the eighties are still pretty good. But if we look at it on the horizon, it's just really a matter of time before this kind of peters out. I look at it as they're driving around a late-model Buick that is just one day going to kick the bucket, and you're going to not be able to rely on that system anymore.
Russia is behaving in space like a power that's on the decline. It's using all the levers it could pull on to cause problems as it's on its way down on its burnout. This isn't a situation of a strong space power. This is the situation of someone that's on the wane. So what you'll see is Russia may be willing to risk access to space, use of space, use of low earth orbit, and would be tempted maybe to use a weapon that could cause catastrophic and widespread damage in space, just because they don't depend on it as much as the United States and China do.
Galbreath: If Russia developed and fielded a nuclear anti-satellite capability, an anti-satellite weapon, it would have a potentially devastating and indiscriminate impact on spacefaring nations around the world. It would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which Russia is a party, which prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around celestial bodies.
If Russia were to detonate a nuclear weapon of mass destruction in orbit, it could potentially have a devastating impact to all of the satellites in that orbital regime and indiscriminately affect all of the satellites and nations involved there — to include our astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts who are currently in orbit, not just from the United States, Russia, and China, but also from other countries that have placed astronauts on the International Space Station. It would be a reckless and, I would say, desperate maneuver by the part of Russia if they employed such a weapon.
Russia relies on space, but not to the extent that the United States does, and certainly not to the extent that China is currently heading to.
The Cipher Brief: How does China rate in militarization and wider competition in space with the U.S.?
Galbreath: China has the lead in space weapons. It’s fundamentally a result of the policy of the United States to not put weapons in space. We have tried to maintain a belief that space is somewhat of a sanctuary up until we couldn't maintain that belief anymore, in about the 2018-19 timeframe. And we established the Space Force and recognized that space is a warfighting domain. But that was because China, and to a lesser extent Russia, had been developing weapon systems specifically developed and fielded to take away our space capabilities to eliminate that advantage that we have been enjoying for many years. And so that has driven us and the United States Space Command to develop capabilities to increase the resilience of our architecture in a defensive manner and to think about ways that we might need to defend our assets against the Chinese or Russians or any adversary’s attack.
And the growth of Chinese indigenous capability in space has also led us to the point where we could defend all we want and the best we could hope for would be a draw in terms of their capabilities and our capabilities. And that's not a position we want to be in because it puts all of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in harm's way if we ever went to a conflict. So we need the ability to deny China access to their space-based imagery or space-based communications so that they become less effective in a potential conflict. This is all to ultimately try to deter a conflict by showing them that any attack that they make in space would not achieve the effect that they intend and that there would be reciprocal measures taken to deny them and punish that sort of behavior.
There's ground-based capabilities as well as space-based capabilities and you can even throw cyber capabilities into the mix as well. So let's start ground-based. They've demonstrated direct-descent anti-satellite missiles — they’ve destroyed their own satellites with that. They've demonstrated successfully higher orbits that are vulnerable to such an attack. We know that they have ground-based laser systems as well, and they have demonstrated that capability. And there are reports that they have laced us and our satellites in a test.
There's also ground-based jamming, electromagnetic warfare, electromagnetic spectrum interference. That’s not a new concept; that has happened in the air and on the ground for many years. Doing that to a satellite is something that they also have. Just to be completely transparent, the United States has also had a ground-based jamming capability for satellite communications for many years. But it's China's ability to jam our communications as well as interfere or potentially spoof our global positioning system, or GPS, satellites, for positioning, navigation, and timing. Cyber attacks can interfere with our ground systems, as well as potentially infect our satellites.
And then moving to on-orbit assets, we know that they have more than one satellite that has a robotic arm on it that they say is used to get rid of debris. They've demonstrated that capability once and then since have not used it. And recent reports suggest that they've actually conducted on orbit maneuvers between five different satellites simultaneously to show what has been characterized as dogfighting in space. So they are clearly preparing for capabilities and concepts of operation to attack space systems of the United States and our allies.
Swope: No one has said that China is developing a nuclear weapon to put in space like Russia. But that doesn't mean that they're not doing military things from space and thinking about ways to use space differently for military purposes. Right now, China is very active in launching remote sensing satellites which collect geospatial information on Earth — that could be collecting pictures, radar, signals. They're doing that with satellites that sometimes operate in triplets; they have satellites in geostationary orbit that are taking optical pictures of Earth, which is not a common thing to do from that orbit.
They're continuing to launch military satellites in space, a lot of which we just don't know what they do. Some maneuver very aggressively, mostly around their satellites. These are very sophisticated capabilities that show that China is willing to burn fuel on these satellites, as maybe the Space Force would say, without regret. But we don't know what these satellites are really intended for. They could be counter-space weapons intended to attack other satellites. They could be for another purpose. In a lot of cases, we just see the behaviors from Earth. So we don't really know what that adds up to when it comes to what they're intended for. And intentions can switch overnight. There’s a satellite that is intended to remove debris. The next day, President Xi [Jinping] calls and says, sorry, we're going to use that satellite as a weapon. Thank you for your service. And thank you for putting that into orbit.
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The Cipher Brief: How can the U.S. leverage its private sector to fill the gaps?
Swope: There are two things that are entirely commercial when you think about how space works. One is launch. So companies do launch, for other companies wanting to put up satellites, for not just the U.S. government, but also allied governments that want to do space launch. Right now, it's really the commercial sector that is getting satellites and getting technology and spacecraft into orbit. So the U.S. will continue to rely on that.
We may see a shift from this notion of space access, which just means putting satellites into orbit, to maybe something more like space mobility, which is more about using space to gain access to other domains. There's a program called Rocket Cargo, where you would launch a rocket from one part of the earth to try to get cargo to another part of the earth in less than 90 minutes. There is a scenario where you could effectively have cargo cache aid in orbit and then launched through a reentry vehicle to get to somewhere really quick, if you needed it on a battlefield. That cargo is just being dropped, effectively, with a parachute from an aircraft, but really from a satellite into a war zone. I think those kinds of uses will be very prominent because these are technologies that are being developed by the commercial sector.
The second area is just low-earth orbit broadband and connectivity that is dominated by companies and it will continue to be, and the government will continue to rely on that.
Looking forward, what do we think the companies will provide? A lot of it will depend on what the U.S. military wants to do in space. I think we see a pivot now. We're talking about missile intercept as part of Golden Dome from space. I mentioned space mobility. I mentioned dropping cargo, but they could just as easily drop a capsule full of drones or full of missiles or some other weapon from orbit onto Earth. I think we'll be looking and talking about those things, and a lot of the innovation that may be the foundations for those systems will probably come from companies.
Galbreath: Certainly, the United States Space Force has been adamant about leveraging the benefits of commercial space capabilities. There's a whole office designated to go after those capabilities and integrate them, as well as international capabilities, making sure that, like in any other domain, if we have to go to war, we're going to go to war as a coalition of nations and capabilities.
Satellite communications have long been an area where we've relied on commercial capabilities to augment the military. This goes back for many years. In the past decade or so, we've seen a growth in space-based intelligence, imagery, or surveillance information. We certainly saw that when Russia invaded Ukraine — that commercial imagery helped show the Russian force is massing and invading.
There's potential areas out there for positioning, navigation, and timing that could come from commercial sources or from international sources as well. So there's a variety of capabilities out there that the United States, and particularly the United States Space Force, is looking to integrate into its overall architecture to present as robust and capable architecture as possible.
One of the benefits of the private sector is they move faster than the typical government bureaucracies. So it's about how we can integrate that effectively at a pace that matches what they can produce and that we can ingest.
The Cipher Brief: Where does this all leave the U.S.?
Swope: I think the government can use its investments in ways that maybe create, effectively, the transcontinental railroad equivalent in space. Infrastructure that could be used to support future business cases where we do truly have a space economy, a lunar economy that is not mostly dependent on the government, we're not there yet, but I think the way that the government invests can help us get there.
The second thing is, from a military standpoint, we really need to make sure that we're using space as much as we can so that we can win wars, but then also deter. It's not just that we want to have space weapons so that we can blow people up. We want to have space weapons so that we scare our future adversaries enough so that they don't want to get into a war.
Space for that purpose is something that we really need to think about now. Maybe we're pivoting there, like I said, with this idea of space-based interceptors, but think about how to wholly use it. I don't want to violate any treaties. I don't think anyone does. So you want to do that in a way that's respectful of that.
Galbreath: I hope that space will continue to be an area for scientific exploration and research and inspiration. But like any other domain where mankind has gone, there's potentially conflict that follows. And so we must be optimistic but also realistic that there will potentially be a conflict that extends to or starts in space and that we need to be prepared to endure that and also prevail in it and achieve space superiority for ourselves and our allies so that the fielded forces moving forward to conduct joint operations can do so more freely and safely.
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Ethan Masucol contributed reporting.
