By Ankit Tiwari
The US and the USSR were directing huge resources towards R&D in Outer Space capabilities in order to gain a strategic advantage over each other but today all spacefaring nations, including US and China, are entangled in interdependencies, primarily because of the vital need for satellite communications as a backbone of globalization, and this itself is a massive deterrence for the weaponization of space.
On 7th December 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution asking member states not to conduct direct ascent Anti-Satellite (ASAT) missile tests that create space debris. The resolution was praised by Vice President Kamala Harris, who chairs the White House National Space Council, she tweeted “Back in April, I announced the United States will not conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests, and I called on other nations to join us. Today, 155 countries voted in favor of a UN resolution, helping establish this as an international norm for space.” It’s worth noting that out of the four countries that have ASAT capabilities - the US, India, China, and Russia - only the United States voted in favor of the resolution. Russia and China along with 6 other nations voted against the resolution and nine more nations abstained, including India. While the US moratorium on kinetic ASAT tests, which was joined by France and several other countries, and the UN resolution are optimistic steps in the right direction to create important international norms for conduct in outer space, it is not nearly enough.
To begin with, ASATs are not the only threat or attempt at the weaponization of outer space. In fact, space-based assets can often be dual-use and repurposed for military use as demonstrated by China’s Scavenger Satellite program. And more importantly, resolutions undertaken by the UN General Assembly are non-legally binding and only reflect the views of the member states. And moratoriums can always be reversed, with regime change for example, and do not carry the weight of international law. In general, only the resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council are considered legally binding, in accordance with Article 25 of the UN Charter, and negotiations over comprehensive regulation of strategic activities in space have stalled, if not outrightly failed, for decades at various levels of international co-operation. The negotiation over the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) Treaty is a good case in point. For 40 years, PAROS has had near-universal support among the UN Member States, with the US and Israel being notable exceptions, either voting ‘no’ or abstaining. The UN General Assembly has passed it, as a resolution, every year and urged states to ‘consolidate and reinforce’ the existing legal regime for outer space and to ‘enhance its effectiveness’. But to date, no nations have made any serious efforts to actually implement the stated goals of PAROS in their policies. The treaty effectively acts as a ritual for space powers, signaling their empty support every year while doing next to nothing to initiate any official work on PAROS, supposedly due to national strategic interests in outer space. At the international level, while PAROS remains an important agenda item at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) at the UN and negotiations are ongoing to come up with a legally-binding instrument to implement PAROS’ stated goals, the diverging interests of its constituent nations and great power rivalry within the body make it difficult to converge on common interests and make decisions, and PAROS is no exception. In fact, the Conference on Disarmament hasn’t produced a single treaty in this century, a dire situation, given that it is the only multilateral disarmament forum for the international community.
China’s ASAT test in 2007, followed by the US, Russia, and India has shattered the complacency that had settled in with respect to international space security and the ‘peaceful purposes’ stipulation of the Outer Space Treaty (1967) is more or less defunct as spacefaring powers have shown they have no regard for it. Many experts argue that the space arms race conversation is often exaggerated as the situation in space is far more complex today than it was during the Cold War when the original idea of a space race originated. The US and the USSR were directing huge resources towards R&D in Outer Space capabilities in order to gain a strategic advantage over each other but today all spacefaring nations, including US and China, are entangled in interdependencies, primarily because of the vital need for satellite communications as a backbone of globalization, and this itself is a massive deterrence for the weaponization of space. Although there is merit to this argument, it is surely limited when viewed in the context age of growing mistrust between nations and, as much is demonstrated by the fact that four countries felt the need to test highly destructive and risky ASAT weapons in the 21st century even when none of them were at war with each other, hot or otherwise. The economic interdependencies between great powers are a deterrent but history has proven many times over that it is not always a reliable one and certainly not adequate when the stakes are as high as they are in outer space.
To understand why the stakes are so high, there are two important facts to remember when thinking about destructive ASAT tests. First - the vast majority of satellites orbit in an area of outer space called the Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where the period of a satellite is only 90 minutes, and second - a collision with a tiny fragment of debris (potentially caused by ASAT weapons) even one centimeter-wide can damage or destroy entire satellites, as they travel at speeds of tens of thousands of kmph and every collision will create more debris that may remain in orbit for many decades. To put these facts into perspective, consider Kosmos 2251, a defunct Russian military communications satellite that collided with the solar panel of Iridium 33, a commercial American satellite in 2009, which led to catastrophic disintegration into more than 2,000 pieces of space debris with sizes greater than 10 centimeters, and potentially hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments that cannot currently be tracked from Earth. In 2012, Scientists estimate that about 10% of all known space debris accumulated over the past 55 years comes from the 2009 Kosmos-Iridium collision. Since then, Russia and India have both launched direct-ascent anti-satellite tests that have worsened the problem of space debris. And furthermore, the International Space Station has had to steer multiple times to avoid trackable debris, once as a direct result of Russia’s 2021 test.
I use the word ‘catastrophic’ because this collision was a definite step towards a nightmare theoretical situation, first proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, called the Kessler Syndrome in which the density of orbital objects in LEO is high enough that a collision between two objects (satellites) could create enough space debris to increase the likelihood of further collisions, thus setting off a chain reaction where little pieces of debris with enough kinetic energy destroy other satellites and keep multiplying till there are no satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and furthermore, create a cloud of debris over LEO that can potentially cut off our access to space for decades, if not centuries. It is worth noting that when Kessler proposed this paradigm, there were about 120 satellites in orbit around the Earth. Today that number stands at 8,261 and out of which, about 3500 satellites were launched by Elon Musk-owned Space-X in the last two years. It is estimated that in the next 5 years alone, the number of satellites orbiting Earth will exceed 35,000 mostly due to private players mass-manufacturing little satellites in a move to monetize space. It is also worth noting that the creation of space debris alone is not the only risk associated with ASAT weapons and their testing. Many nations have critical strategic assets in space and even the threat of destruction of their strategic assets by ASAT-capable nations could lead to significant escalation, if not all-out war.
The metaphorical road ahead, which represents the implementation of a multi-lateral comprehensive arms-control treaty to prevent the weaponization of outer space and safeguard one of mankind’s most valuable resources (outer space) in the 21st century, is full of hurdles and the stakes have never been higher. Nations across the world must unite to determine an immediate future that maximizes collective security in outer space.
Mr. Ankit Tiwari is pursuing M.S. in International Studies, JNU.
Email - ankit.tiwari2000@gmail.com