(This is the first part of an article originally published by the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, UK, in May 2005).
As it waits for George Bush to pronounce his policy on the weaponisation of space, the world stands at a moment of transformation. A combination of geopolitical/geostrategic change, accelerating pace of technology and the ongoing innovations in military thinking are launching back into space a part of the revolution that in the first place came from up there. Bush is likely to give this trend a hard push forward, but even if he does not do so, he is unlikely to either seek or be able to reverse it. For, the drivers of this transformation in space affairs are well underway and cannot be put back into the box and shut.
Globalisation of Space in the Earth-Moon System
For most of the Cold War period, the US and the former Soviet Union were the only competitors that mattered in space and their competition was driven primarily by military considerations. Since the late 1980s, however, China, the European Space Agency (ESA) and India have stepped up their space activities. All three have built up major launch capabilities. China and the ESA are already players in the global satellite launch market. India, which has the largest constellation of remote sensing satellites orbiting the earth, is a major player in the data services market. One of the few areas where Russia still maintains world-leading capability is in space - both military and commercial. It dominates the space launch industry.
As a sign of their growing capabilities and confidence, they have all announced ambitious space ventures over the past few years. China, for instance, is embarked on launching a series of remote sensing, weather, navigation and communications satellites into high orbits. It is already capable of launching a five ton satellite into geosynchronous orbit and is now building rockets to double the capability. In October 2003, China became only the third nation in the world to have launched a man into space on its own. In Fall 2005, it will send two taikonauts into space for five days. China intends to follow this up with a second phase between 2006 and 2010 during which it will achieve space docking and space walking capabilities. By 2020, China plans to have its own 20-tonne class permanent space station operating.
Russia is moving purposefully, amidst economic difficulties, to replace its Soviet-era Soyuz manned vehicles with a reusable spacecraft called Kliper. It is now being increasingly courted for space launch and data services, including by the ESA. The ESA is building its own global positioning system, Galileo, which in time will evolve as a major challenger to the US GPS. India’s decade plan until 2008 includes several new remote sensing, weather and communications satellites. India is also building its own global positioning system, Gagan. It has signed up as Russia’s exclusive partner for the latter’s GLONASS global positioning system, which it will help upgrade. India is also in talks with the ESA to be a partner in the Galileo system, which would serve its civilian navigation purposes.
In the 1990s, driven by the explosion of mobile telephony, satellite bandwidth for the internet, earth-observation data for commercial and development purposes and President Clinton’s decision to open up the GPS navigation system for civilian use, private corporations became major players in the space launch and data services industries. This commercialisation has made it possible for even non-space-faring countries around the world to make use of space technology. Commercial success has spurred private corporations onto even more ambitious, but ever more realistic, investments of hundreds of millions of dollars to make space the next tourist frontier.
But the globalisation of space is most evident in the military realm. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s commissions on ballistic missile defence and space in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and the 1999 Cox Report on Chinese espionage of nuclear and space technology had already put military space affairs in the spotlight during the last months of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Bush’s 2001 withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the announcement of a multi-tiered missile defence system has made a renewed Space Race virtually inevitable and has accelerated the globalisation of military space. China is already making and testing a variety of missile decoys; it is known to have programmes to build ground-based lasers and kinetic anti-satellite weapons and has become an early adopter of micro- and nano-satellite technology in its quest to build orbital anti-satellite weapons. One innovative orbital weapon that China is reportedly trying to build is a parasitic satellite - a nano-satellite that would attach itself to a US spacecraft undetected. When directed, it would eat up its host’s electronics and disable it.
Russia has for long had the capability to deploy ground and space-based anti-satellite weapons as well as orbital nuclear weapons such as the Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS) of Cold War vintage. In 1975, the Soviets demonstrated the ability to disrupt American satellites temporarily by hitting them with a low-intensity ground-based laser. Now, Russia also has several ongoing programmes to build new nuclear missiles - including one that would fly as a ballistic missile in space but would have the low trajectory of a cruise missile when within the earth’s atmosphere -- that would penetrate missile defences.
At least some of India’s remote sensing satellites - such as the Resourcesat-1 launched in 2003 and the Cartosat-1 launched in May 2005 - are also useful militarily because of their high-resolution capabilities. In 2001, India launched its first dedicated military satellite. Called Technology Experiment Satellite (TES), it has been beaming one-metre resolution pictures to the Indian military. It was a star feature of a 10-day combined Army-Air Force exercise in May 2005 to try out a new networked warfighting doctrine in a nuclear environment. India also plans to launch a microwave radar imaging satellite (RISAT), which will give it observation capabilities at night and in cloudy conditions. India reportedly has plans to launch six military satellites as part of a $50 million project.
Following the American lead, the Indian Air Force has announced a desire to transform into an aerospace force. Towards this end, it is acquiring Phalcon AWACS and a number of UAVs that would be integrated with space data links. A former air force chief is reported to have said, and quickly retracted, that India is building a command headquarters for possible future orbital weapons. What is well known, however, is that India is keen to build a missile defence system for itself. It is building components of an integrated air and missile defence system indigenously. It has acquired the Green Pine radar and battle management system for the Israeli Arrow anti-missile system but has been unable to acquire the missile battery for the same due to American pressures. It is now, however, in high-level talks with the US to acquire the Patriot-3 anti-missile system.
Days before China’s first manned mission in 2003, Japan restructured its space programme in an effort to gain a higher profile. Recovering quickly from a failed launch of spy satellites just a month after the Chinese manned flight success, Japan recently launched a communications satellite aboard its H2A rocket. JAXA, the new single national agency for space, is shifting focus from conventional satellite launches towards building a Japanese space shuttle to undertake manned missions.
New Geopolitical/Geostrategic Factors
But it is not just low and high orbit space that is becoming globalised. The phenomenon extends all the way to the moon. President Bush wants the US to return to the moon by 2020. The determination with which the US is pursuing interest in the moon can be seen in the radical changes NASA is effecting in the way it does business. In one such innovation, NASA has started to announce Centennial Challenges - $80 million in prize money for technology innovations that will help it ultimately to establish a self-sustaining lunar base. The latest such challenge announced is a $250,000 prize for technology that will pull oxygen out of moon regolith.
Japan wants to land robots on the moon by 2010. Soon after, it will build a reusable space shuttle to carry out manned missions to the moon. Japan’s plan is to achieve advances in robotics and nanotechnology that would help it to have a manned lunar base operating by 2025.
Russia’s Kliper passenger spacecraft is expected to begin taking humans beyond earth orbit in 2015 and is said to be capable of flying to the moon and beyond. China plans to send lunar orbiters and unmanned landers within a decade and lunar sample return missions by 2020. The ESA’s long-term solar system exploration plans start with manned missions to the moon in 2024. India is preparing for its first unmanned moon mission in 2007. Called Chandrayaan (Moon Voyage)-I, the Indian plan is to launch a remote sensing orbiter and land probes from several countries. Both the orbiter and the landing probes will look for resources - minerals, water/ice, helium concentrations. If the 2007 mission is successful, the Indian space agency plans to follow it up with at least one more lunar mission before 2015.
National prestige is certainly a key motive in the plans for lunar missions and bases. While the US strives to keep its leadership position and enhance that lead, the Chinese and Indian desire to be seen to have arrived on the global power scene will mean a growing challenge to the American position in space. Physicist Freeman Dyson perhaps described the mood in Washington accurately when he said recently of the US lunar ambition, ‘‘If the Chinese push us, we’ll move even faster’’. Similarly, Japan finds it necessary to counter the growing international influence of China.
But the more salient factor driving lunar missions is the search for resources and this, indeed, will become critical in the decades ahead. The epic scale of growth in China and India means that these economies will need ever larger quantities of natural resources. Their demand for oil, for instance, has already pushed up world prices to record levels. This upward trend in prices is only going to accelerate in the next two decades as the world uses up its known reserves of oil at a rapid pace. According to the Worldwatch Institute’s Vital Signs 2005 report, China is now driving the consumption and production of almost everything, threatening to deplete the world’s resources. Consequently, the costs of raw materials are rocketing up in the world markets. As India’s manufacturing sector expands, this situation will become critical. The West and Japan now also have to reckon with the fact that for the first time, China and India have the ability to project military and diplomatic power far beyond their shores. As their economies grow, they will tend to become increasingly involved in the politics and security of their resource bases and lines of communication. Thus, key Asian and African resources will become increasingly scarce or prohibitively expensive for the West and Japan, although even China and India themselves will find it increasingly expensive to acquire resources.
Meanwhile, the globalisation and commercialisation of space has caused a continuous fall in the costs of space launch (cost per kilogram in orbit) while technological advances are leading to gains in capability per kilogram in orbit. The idea of exploiting space in general, and the moon’s location and resources in particular, has therefore started to appeal to many in the US and the other space powers. Indeed, in the US, long-forgotten ideas from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Solar Power Satellite (SPS), are now being ferreted out and their feasibility re-examined in the light of new technologies. Japan, too, plans to build its own SPS by 2040. According to Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dr. Neville Marzwell, using existing technology, a Solar Power Satellite could generate energy at a cost of 60-80 cents per kilowatt-hour, including construction costs for the first system. In 15-20 years, this could be brought down to 7-10 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour for conventional electricity.
An even more feasible and simpler idea gaining ground is to beam solar power as microwaves from the moon. According to physicist David Criswell, while building a massive satellite array in space to capture and beam sunlight would require immense gains in technology and costs that are still decades away, the natural base and resources that the moon provides makes it both currently viable and indispensable for a space solar power base.
The moon is also a rich source of helium that could fuel a future nuclear fusion reactor. But not just energy, the moon will also be mined for minerals and new materials. India’s lunar orbiter, for instance, is a remote sensing satellite being sent to find commercial and strategic minerals. Japan’s space officials have said their hope is to establish a base on the moon that could mine resources found on and under the lunar surface.
As space historian Robert Zimmermann wrote recently, "We are at the dawn of a new colonial age. The growing space competition between nations is in many ways very reminiscent of the 19th century competition between the European powers. Today, a new list of nations - India, China, Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States -- are throwing their resources at space exploration in much the same way’’.
