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00:12Space. Long a peaceful frontier.
00:15It's becoming more militarized by the day.
00:18A fight in space could be decisive to a war on Earth.
00:22In the near future, we may need to exchange blows in space.
00:27New technologies.
00:28It's like something out of Star Wars, inconceivable even ten years ago.
00:32Are raising new questions.
00:34What would a war in space actually look like?
00:37Some answers are chilling.
00:39The nuclear-capable weapon in space that could threaten.
00:42Such a weapon is the doomsday weapon.
00:44Others, surprising.
00:46Then it grabbed this other satellite. First time we've seen that.
00:50What's clear, space is vital not only to daily life.
00:53Nearly every single person on this planet uses space, every day.
00:57But to the future of warfare.
00:59There has not been a domain that human beings have not figured out a way to fight in.
01:03Why is space any different?
01:05Space Wars. Right now, on NOVA.
01:27February 5th, 2022.
01:30500 miles north of Moscow.
01:33A Russian rocket lifts off, carrying a satellite named Cosmos 2553.
01:40The U.S. military detects something highly unusual.
01:44Cosmos 2553 was deployed into a 2,000-kilometer orbit.
01:48That's actually kind of high.
01:50There's not a lot of satellites out there.
01:52The altitude raises concerns.
01:55It went to a very unique place in space, deep into the radiation belt, where spacecraft generally do not want
02:03to operate.
02:04Congressman Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, issues a cryptic message.
02:10News outlets immediately pick up the story.
02:13CBS News has learned the U.S. has informed Congress
02:16of a, quote, serious national security threat
02:18on Russia's efforts to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space.
02:23They suspected that the Russians were actually testing the development of a nuclear bomb in orbit
02:28that they would be able to detonate at any time that they desired.
02:32A nuclear explosion in space could devastate the massive networks of satellites that underpin the technology of modern life.
02:40Everybody in the United States makes use of space every day, whether they realize it or not.
02:47It's now become part of everything that we do.
02:50Altogether, more than 12,000 active satellites are orbiting the Earth,
02:55from 100 to 22,000 miles above our heads.
03:00GPS satellites. Our phones use them to pinpoint our location almost anywhere on Earth.
03:05Weather satellites. Without them, killer storms could strike without warning.
03:10communications satellites. Essential for keeping us connected and informed.
03:16And eyes in the sky. Peering down, gathering data, monitoring everything from crop growth to the global supply chain.
03:23And peering up, telescopes helping us understand the story of our universe.
03:28Pretty much there's no part of your life that is not touched by space.
03:31Our society is more reliant on space today than it was yesterday and will be more reliant tomorrow than it
03:37is today.
03:37And that curve has been moving upward really since we entered the space domain as humans.
03:43Space has also become fundamental to how the American military operates.
03:48Satellites are essential for battlefield communication and targeting.
03:52Without them, commanders are blind.
03:55The more sophisticated these space-based systems, the greater edge they provide, and the more valuable targets they become.
04:05So in 2019, the U.S. created the Space Force, America's first new branch of the military in more than
04:1370 years.
04:14At the Combined Space Operations Center in California, service members, known as guardians, prepare for potential conflicts.
04:23Former Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command Lieutenant General John Shaw directed many Space Force missions.
04:30The reason that we have a Space Force is you need to be able to develop, organize, train, and equip
04:35for a potential fight in space,
04:37which could ultimately be decisive to a war on Earth.
04:41Roughly 100 countries have satellites of all kinds in space.
04:46But the U.S. remains the dominant military player, far outspending its nearest competitor, China.
04:54And with more satellites launched in the past five years than in the last six decades combined,
05:00scientists and engineers are being recruited into the battle to dominate space.
05:12Humans have always looked to the sky, wondering what lies beyond.
05:17But today there are eyes looking back, and increasingly they are military eyes.
05:24Intelligence analysts for the U.S. government are alert to the shift.
05:29Chirag Parikh served in the White House on the National Space Council, where he prepared for possible space war scenarios.
05:40Imagine an extreme scenario.
05:43Two nations are in conflict.
05:44One decides to detonate a nuclear weapon in space.
05:49Because space has no atmosphere, there is no mushroom cloud or heat blast.
05:53But there is an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that fries the electronics of satellites within its line of sight.
06:00On the ground, cell towers, emergency services, the electrical grid, all fail.
06:05Crisis ensues.
06:08Such a weapon is a kind of a doomsday weapon.
06:10It's so indiscriminate.
06:12If Russia were to detonate a nuclear weapon in space, it would destroy Russia's own satellites, our satellites, Chinese satellites,
06:19commercial satellites.
06:20It would endanger the International Space Station and the Chinese Space Station.
06:24In the 80 years since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the world has been
06:32building nuclear weapons of all shapes and sizes.
06:36These bombs either split or join atoms to release huge amounts of energy.
06:42And while on Earth, nuclear explosions unleash destructive blast waves, along with heat, blinding light and radiation, in space, they
06:53do something different.
06:55In the late 1950s and early 60s, the U.S. and Soviet Union conducted eight nuclear tests in space.
07:03The largest was called Starfish Prime.
07:07In 1962, the U.S. launched a 1.4 megaton hydrogen bomb and detonated at 250 miles above the South
07:18Pacific.
07:18This footage shows a high-altitude explosion.
07:23When you set off a nuclear weapon in space, there'll be a flash of X-rays and gamma rays that
07:30travels out.
07:31And when those high-energy particles hit satellites even thousands of miles away, they can cause severe damage.
07:38The detonation unexpectedly destroyed about a third of the 24 satellites orbiting the world at the time.
07:45It took out, like for example, the U.K.'s first satellite. Gone.
07:48And it didn't stop there.
07:50The electromagnetic pulse was so severe that it impacted the electrical grid and knocked out streetlights in Honolulu.
07:57Dangerous high-energy particles released in the explosion were trapped by Earth's magnetic field, continuing to damage satellites for months.
08:08It was a sobering lesson that led to an international ban on nuclear weapons in space, but it underscored an
08:15unavoidable reality.
08:17There is this idea that, hey, we don't want to weaponize space, we don't want to militarize space, we want
08:22space to be peaceful.
08:24And yet, the uncomfortable fact is, it's really been militarized from the very beginning.
08:29Even in the early 1960s, most of the satellites we were putting up were for military purposes.
08:35But that militarization was conducted largely out of sight, while public attention focused on NASA's peaceful exploration.
08:45For many years, the United States did not like to talk about offensive space capability, because the last thing we
08:52wanted to encourage anyone to do was to think about shooting down satellites.
08:57When we sent the astronauts to space in the 1960s, the intelligence community would have liked for the astronauts to
09:03not take any pictures looking back at the Earth.
09:05Because they were afraid that would remind people about spy satellites. NASA said no, like you couldn't come back and
09:11say, oh, we forgot to look at the Earth.
09:13There was a deep sense of we need to keep space secret.
09:17So it is a real change of mindset, bringing space into the realm of open discussion as just a regular
09:24part of warfare.
09:27There's been a real shift, I would say, just over the past 10 years in how comfortable the United States
09:31is in talking about its interest in and need for military capabilities in space.
09:36We are ready to repel all challengers, and any attempt to defeat the U.S. in space will fail.
09:41Thank you, General.
09:42The White House later clarified that the Russian satellite Cosmos 2553, which initially caused so much alarm, was in fact
09:51not carrying a live nuclear bomb, but they suspect it was a part of a program to eventually deploy one.
09:58What's clear is that the militarization of space is only accelerating.
10:02We have always used space for military purposes, and we are now starting to think about it as a domain
10:09where, you know, we may need to, you know, exchange blows.
10:13But exchanging blows in space turns out to be more complicated than military leaders and even some science fiction writers
10:21have imagined.
10:22You know, as an engineer in aerospace, I love science fiction movies, but little of what you see, for example,
10:30in Star Wars is actually physically possible.
10:33In a single scene of Rogue One, there are at least five things going on that challenge our understanding of
10:41physics.
10:42First, most of these spacecraft that are around this Earth-like planet are hovering.
10:47We know you're not going to hover in low Earth orbit.
10:49If you're in low Earth orbit, like the International Space Station is, it's like you're on railroad tracks and you're
10:55going 17,000 miles an hour.
10:58The second thing is you're seeing people flying spacecraft like TIE fighters and X-wings that are flying and diving
11:05as though it's a dogfight.
11:08That's not how things work in space.
11:10On Earth, fighter planes turn by pushing against the air.
11:14But in the vacuum of space, there's no air to push against.
11:18So spacecraft can't actually turn on a dime or perform tight maneuvers.
11:23The only way to maneuver is with your rocket engines.
11:27And because you're going so fast, to change your direction like you see in a Star Wars movie would take
11:33so much energy, you couldn't carry enough fuel to do that.
11:37The third thing is they're dropping bombs as though there's gravity.
11:42That's not how it works.
11:43When you let go of something, it's just going to fly along with you.
11:46The fourth issue is space is a vacuum, so there's no sound.
11:52There is no medium for sound to travel through.
11:57So no explosions.
11:59And oh, by the way, those explosions are unrealistic.
12:02It's in a vacuum.
12:03And that explosion will be gone in milliseconds.
12:07So Star Wars is great science fiction, but it's not based in reality.
12:10So what is the reality?
12:13The rules of physics make movement in space very predictable, so objects can be easy to track.
12:20But with more than 12,000 human-made satellites now orbiting the planet, the U.S. military partners with private
12:26companies like ComSpock in Pennsylvania to monitor what's actually happening up there.
12:31Paul Graziani is the company's founder and CEO.
12:36A satellite is anything that's orbiting around another body.
12:40So for instance, the moon is a satellite of the earth, and the earth is a satellite of the sun.
12:46So the term satellite can mean an active satellite, or it can mean a very tiny piece of space debris.
12:53There are a lot of objects up there.
12:54Right now, we're tracking around 49,000 is what the U.S. government tracks.
13:00And of those 49,000, roughly 12,000 of them are operational satellites.
13:06The rest of them are spacecraft that are no longer operational, or space debris.
13:11Satellites travel around the earth in predictable paths.
13:15To stay in orbit, a satellite has to move forward fast enough to counteract the gravity pulling it downward.
13:22Because the earth is curved, if a satellite moves at the right speed, it can keep falling, but never reach
13:30the ground.
13:31This way, it moves in a continuous loop, an orbit.
13:36So you need enough speed to keep going in your constant direction.
13:41But orbits of satellites have all sorts of variables.
13:45We developed software that takes inputs from telescopes and radars and antennas.
13:50And from those inputs, we figure out where those objects in space are at any moment, and where they're going
13:57to be going.
13:58The term used by the military or national security side is space domain awareness.
14:04What is that object, and what might it be able to do?
14:10Back in the Apollo days, there were maybe a few dozen satellites operating in space.
14:16A decade ago, it had gotten up to 1,200 satellites.
14:22Today, we have over 12,000, and we're looking at maybe another factor 10 increase to more than 100,000
14:29satellites a decade from now.
14:31Almost all satellites operate in one of three orbital realms.
14:36The three main orbital regimes are low-Earth orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit.
14:43And you can think of low-Earth orbit as being between 250 and 1,200 miles above the Earth.
14:50What we're looking at here are the low-Earth orbit satellites that we are tracking currently.
14:55Joe Calero is ComSpock's Director of Operations.
14:59In LEO, the accuracy of the data in our system is between 25 and 50 meters.
15:06Low-Earth orbit, or LEO, is the easiest to get to.
15:10It also allows the fastest communication with the ground.
15:13So today, nearly 90% of all satellites operate there, including the International Space Station
15:20and the growing number of commercial satellite networks, like the SpaceX Starlink system.
15:26There's a lot of satellites, there's a lot of debris, but space is a huge volume.
15:31And so while it looks relatively dense with satellites, there is way more space between these objects than it appears.
15:41The vastness of space is hard to comprehend.
15:43Even the relatively small area where satellites normally operate is about 75 trillion cubic miles,
15:51roughly 300 times larger than the volume of Earth itself.
15:55I've shrunk the Earth down to 16 inches across.
15:59This means that every inch is about 500 miles.
16:03Most things are actually happening within arm's reach of the planet, so to speak.
16:08We talk about three orbital regimes. Low-Earth orbit, within about 1,000 kilometers of the Earth's surface.
16:15Medium-Earth orbit, so about 2 feet away from this 16-inch globe.
16:20And geosynchronous orbit, which gets a little bit of an arm stretch, but about 4 feet away from the Earth.
16:27So what we're looking at here is the geosynchronous belt.
16:30It is the furthest orbit regime that we typically use for satellites.
16:34In geosynchronous orbit, around 22,000 miles up, a satellite moves in perfect sync with the Earth's rotation.
16:42So it can stay over a fixed point, putting it in a perfect position for telecommunications, weather forecasting, or spying.
16:51It was Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer, who started to formulate this idea.
16:55That satellites that are in orbit in that belt are actually moving around the Earth at the same rate the
17:01Earth is rotating.
17:02And so they're always in that same spot in the sky.
17:04But some of the most important satellites sit between LEO and GEO, in a relatively quiet realm called medium-Earth
17:12orbit.
17:12So this is medium-Earth orbit, or LEO, and this is where we have put our GPS satellites.
17:20It's not hard to imagine the disaster if these suddenly stopped working.
17:29A Navy warship is patrolling the ocean.
17:32The ship is guided by GPS satellites.
17:35Suddenly, the GPS signals go out.
17:37They can't navigate. They have decision uncertainty. Operations grind to a halt.
17:42The ship is a massive sitting duck in the middle of the ocean.
17:47In recent years, the U.S. Navy has been preparing for just such a scenario.
17:53Sailors used to be taught celestial navigation to determine where their ship was.
17:58They stopped doing that when they got GPS. Why waste their time doing that?
18:01But there's a danger in becoming too dependent on a utility that's vulnerable to attack from an adversary.
18:07The Navy realized there's a non-zero chance that the Global Positioning System might not be operating to our satisfaction.
18:14Well, celestial navigation was taught for nearly 200 years at the Naval Academy.
18:19So they have reintroduced the use of sextants.
18:23They want to have a backup for a really bad day should our adversaries take out the GPS constellation.
18:29The Global Positioning System is a group of more than 30 satellites in medium Earth orbit, about 12,000 miles
18:38above the planet.
18:39GPS was developed to solve a targeting problem.
18:42If you're a ballistic missile submarine and you surface or come near the surface and you're ready to launch your
18:47missiles, how do you know where you are?
18:49Well, a really nice way to do it would be to get precise signals from satellites in space.
18:54Each satellite broadcasts a radio signal providing its location and precise time from an onboard atomic clock, accurate to within
19:03a billionth of a second.
19:04GPS satellites are all synchronized on the same clock and they rely on communicating that timing signal back down to
19:12the surface of the Earth.
19:13And then our receiver figures out the difference of when we receive those signals from different satellites to calculate where
19:20we are and how fast we're moving.
19:23The 1990s Gulf War was the first major conflict that used GPS widely and it was a game changer.
19:30It allowed a precision of weaponry that we had never seen before.
19:36In World War Two, it took a thousand bombs to destroy a factory that you were going after.
19:43Whereas in the early 1990s, one airplane could actually hit targets with precision with just a few bombs that are
19:49GPS guided.
19:50So that revolutionized warfare.
19:54Because it came out of the military, GPS was classified and held as a top secret capability.
19:59But eventually, the U.S. government said, no, this is a utility that should be provided to the world.
20:04At first, the accuracy of the signal made available to the public was intentionally degraded.
20:10In the 1990s, with the civilian version of the signal, 300 feet was as accurate as you could be.
20:16In 2000, President Clinton removed that limitation for the civilian population.
20:22And that opened up all sorts of uses.
20:25Today, anyone with a GPS receiver knows exactly where they are nearly anywhere on Earth.
20:31They also have access to the satellite's atomic clocks.
20:35Modern banking relies on these clocks to precisely timestamp every digital transaction, from stock trades to ATM withdrawals.
20:45GPS is crucial for both the modern economy and modern warfare.
20:50I had the privilege of having the global positioning system under my command out at Shriver Space Force Base in
20:56Colorado Springs.
20:57And the center of GPS is an operations floor with eight people that operate that entire constellation for both military
21:04and civilian applications.
21:05The U.S. is not alone in having a global navigation system.
21:10The European Union, the Chinese, and the Russians all have independent constellations of satellites.
21:17In fact, your phone is tracking satellites from all four of those constellations.
21:23But these openly available signals leave a crucial technology vulnerable to attack.
21:29An adversary could want to eliminate those GPS satellites.
21:33Right now, though, we've seen adversaries, when they want to counter a navigation system from space, do localized jamming on
21:41the ground.
21:41The radio signals that GPS satellites send are weak by the time they reach the ground, so local jammers broadcasting
21:49on the same frequency can easily drown them out.
21:53It's actually happening all over the world, and it's affected civilian air traffic.
21:57A plane carrying the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was targeted by GPS jamming while trying to land
22:05in Bulgaria.
22:05Russia regularly jams over Europe, and recently the U.S. has done the same in the Caribbean and Middle East.
22:13But intentional interference has extended beyond just GPS.
22:18Russia launched cyber attacks in late February against commercial satellite communications networks in an effort to disrupt Ukrainian command and
22:28control during the invasion.
22:29In the hours before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russia launched a cyber attack that knocked out satellite-based
22:37communications and Internet systems across Ukraine.
22:41Ukraine turned to Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and owner of a satellite constellation called Starlink, for help.
22:49There were people in the Ukrainian military tweeting at Elon Musk directly, saying, can you please help us out?
22:54You know, so Elon was able to snap his fingers and get it into the country very quickly.
22:59Starlink provides satellite-based Internet using a novel approach.
23:03Instead of covering the whole Earth with a few large satellites in geosynchronous orbit, it uses a constellation of small
23:10satellites in low Earth orbit.
23:12So instead of sending a signal all the way to geosynchronous and bouncing it back down, you just send it
23:17up a few hundred miles and back down.
23:20These satellites are communicating with their nearest neighbor, and their nearest neighbor is communicating with their next nearest neighbor.
23:26That makes this network happen.
23:28Starlink brought Ukraine back online and helped level the battlefield.
23:33The Russians were not happy, and the head of the Russian Space Agency even hinted that Elon Musk personally might
23:40be a legitimate military target.
23:43As the war continued, SpaceX appeared to be limiting the service for certain regions and uses.
23:49There are a lot of people that said, look, you know, it's kind of scary that you can have this
23:52capability you depend upon for your military.
23:54It could just be turned off, not because a government has thought about it or a military has said, okay,
24:00this meets our needs, but a private citizen.
24:03It is concerning that one person has so much control.
24:08In 2025, there were over 12,000 operating satellites on orbit.
24:14About 70% of those are from one U.S. company, SpaceX, and their Starlink constellation.
24:20SpaceX has been responsible for probably around two-thirds of national security launches in recent years.
24:27They're now putting up 50 satellites at least once a week.
24:30So, Elon Musk owns something like three-quarters of all the satellites that the human race has operating.
24:37SpaceX recently began providing the U.S. military with a customized version of Starlink called Star Shield.
24:45It's one of several military satellite constellations being developed for communications, spying, missile defense, and GPS.
24:53It's really an entirely new paradigm, having large numbers of relatively disposable satellites operating at a low altitude.
25:02But even these satellites might be vulnerable to another kind of weapon that people have long imagined.
25:09Lasers.
25:14Imagine this.
25:16A series of high-powered lasers conduct a coordinated attack.
25:20Ground-based and space-based weapons hit our intelligence satellites.
25:24They destroy optics and fry electronics.
25:27Suddenly, we can no longer see behind enemy lines.
25:31Our military and intelligence services are rendered blind.
25:34General Atomics is one of the world's largest privately owned defense companies.
25:40In their lab in San Diego, California, Robert Peterkin demonstrates how laser technologies can be used for military purposes.
25:49Since the day the laser was invented in 1960, people have been imagining ways to weaponize lasers.
25:58Lasers work by amplifying and aligning light particles, so all of the energy is focused into a single concentrated beam.
26:08One type of laser technology has been deployed as a weapon for years.
26:13It's called dazzling.
26:14So this is the small laser we're going to use to demonstrate laser dazzling.
26:22We're ready to go, so let's turn off the laboratory lights.
26:27I'm going to switch the laser on and intercept the camera located a couple of meters across the room.
26:35The green laser is about to hit the aperture of the camera, and on the camera you should start to
26:41see some green laser light.
26:44Many satellites rely on optical sensors, like those in digital cameras, but these sensors can be vulnerable.
26:52As I continue to slightly move the laser beam, I can obliterate the image.
27:01The laser intensity is overwhelming the electronics in that camera, but it causes no damage.
27:09So when I move the laser beam away, the image reappears.
27:16If my laser was powerful enough, I could, in principle, dazzle a satellite from the ground.
27:24Both the Russians and the Chinese have a truck-mounted laser dazzling system that is deployable.
27:31They've, they've displayed them.
27:34It's a weapon. It's a weapon system.
27:36It's kind of optical jamming, if you will.
27:39And we see our adversaries fielding this, because we see the attempted interruptions in our satellite systems.
27:46The U.S., China, and Russia are all known to have laser dazzling systems, though none have acknowledged using them
27:54against adversary satellites.
27:56The U.S. has claimed that both Russia and China have used lasers to try and dazzle American spy satellites,
28:04possibly American commercial imaging satellites.
28:08Nobody wants to give them any details, and they also don't, you know, they don't want to get, you know,
28:12they don't want to let the Russians know was the dazzling effective or not.
28:16And higher power lasers can not only dazzle, but destroy, though the details of the weapon used for this test
28:23remain restricted.
28:24If the power is sufficiently high, and I'm able to keep the beam on the drone for sufficiently long, I
28:32can defeat the drone, and this drone will then fall to the ground and will no longer be able to
28:39bother me.
28:40At close range, a 30 kilowatt laser, the equivalent of 30 million laser pointers concentrated into one beam, can burn
28:49through solid steel.
28:50This hole was made here in this laboratory with a laser of several tens of kilowatts, but the details of
28:59how weapons class lasers work are held at a higher classification level.
29:05Laser weapons have been used on land and at sea, but putting them in space is a challenge.
29:12Lasers are large consumers of power, so you need large battery banks, you need large solar arrays.
29:20To date, no nation has acknowledged putting a laser weapon in space.
29:24But because it can operate over large distances, and it's not attenuated by an atmosphere, directed energy will be the
29:31weapon of choice in future space combat.
29:34But for now, many military satellites are potentially vulnerable to large scale attack from a more conventional weapon.
29:45Our spy satellites detect a ballistic missile launch, but this isn't going to the other side of the earth, this
29:50is going into space.
29:52These weapon systems, known as direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, attack missile warning satellites, communication satellites, intelligence satellites.
30:01Within minutes, these satellites are destroyed. Our military and intelligence services go dark.
30:06At a Space Force base in Colorado, missile defense units use satellites to scan for infrared heat signatures of enemy
30:15missile launches and coordinate intercepts.
30:18With a handful of these satellites in orbit, we can surveil the whole world and see any rocket launch anywhere
30:25on the planet.
30:26An attack on these satellites could open the door for undetected missile launches.
30:31There's been five anti-satellite missile operations done so far. And the first was actually conducted by the United States.
30:39In 1985, the U.S. launched an anti-satellite rocket from an F-15 fighter and blew one of its
30:47old satellites into hundreds of pieces.
30:49At the time, the Soviet Union had a good number of satellites operating in low Earth orbit that they were
30:54going to use in a potential conflict with the United States.
30:57And we were motivated at the time to say, how do we deprive them of that capability?
31:02The test served as a cautionary tale, not only for the Soviet Union, but for anyone with hardware in space.
31:09It's relatively easy to blow up a satellite, but that generates tons of debris. And that makes space unusable for
31:17everyone.
31:18Despite the risks, in 2007, China used a missile to destroy one of their own defunct satellites.
31:25There are countries who are pursuing very aggressive, very impressive counter space capabilities, which I cannot go into here because
31:33of classification restrictions.
31:37People talk about hitting a bullet with a bullet.
31:39The satellite you're shooting at is probably traveling at about 17,000 miles an hour.
31:44And if you're coming at it from the opposite direction at 5,000 miles an hour, that's an incredibly high
31:51closure rate.
31:53And kinetic energy is equal to one half mass times velocity squared. That's a big velocity squared.
31:59So you produce a tremendous amount of kinetic energy at impact that just totally obliterates the satellite and creates this
32:06large field of debris.
32:07The Chinese satellite strike created thousands of pieces of orbiting debris. And the farther an object is from Earth, the
32:16less gravity and atmospheric drag it encounters. So the longer it stays in orbit.
32:21Now that altitude was 500 miles. And debris at that altitude is going to persist for tens of years, if
32:29not a century or longer.
32:31Just a year later, the U.S. announced that a disabled American satellite around 130 miles up, carrying highly toxic
32:39rocket fuel, was in danger of falling to Earth.
32:42And so the U.S. said, you know what? We have this satellite that's not working. It's filled with this
32:47chemical. We don't know where it's going to crash. It'd be bad for people's health. We better shoot it down.
32:53Officials were concerned that the satellite's hydrazine fuel tank might survive reentry and crash in a populated area.
33:01A mission was given to U.S. Strategic Command, where I was at the time. And this was truly a
33:07mission to protect humans.
33:10You'll see the intercept. You'll see the hit of the mass. There you go.
33:15And what we're watching right now is this cloud that's forming right here.
33:21The U.S. will swear up and down. It was a safety hazard.
33:25I have always said, well, clearly they were doing this operation in response to the Chinese.
33:29I can tell you that was not the intent of the mission at all.
33:33But if I was putting myself in a pair of Chinese shoes, I would assume that there was a demonstration
33:41there.
33:42Some questioned whether the shoot down was necessary. But because the satellite was relatively low, the debris quickly reentered the
33:50atmosphere and burned up.
33:52Then in 2019, India shut down a test satellite with a missile. And in 2021, just three months before invading
34:02Ukraine, Russia made a move.
34:07I was actually on the operations floor at United States Space Command in November of 2021 and was dismayed as
34:15we saw the launch happen.
34:19The Russians kinetically intercepted Cosmos 1408, which was a defunct intelligence satellite.
34:27And we started to see that we no longer had one target satellite but a field of debris.
34:33My assessment is that they conducted an actual intercept just to prove they could do it and say that no
34:38one could keep them from doing it.
34:39Russia defended the test and accused the U.S. of accelerating the militarization of space.
34:46They did it at an altitude of 250 miles, which happened to be the same altitude as the International Space
34:53Station.
34:55Mark, good morning. Sorry for the early call. We were recently informed of a satellite breakup and need to have
35:03you guys start reviewing the safe haven procedure.
35:07NASA required the astronauts to shelter in their emergency spacecraft.
35:12And they had to begin maneuvering the International Space Station to avoid this debris.
35:17The astronauts were unscathed. But for months, the space station had to maneuver to stay clear of the fragments.
35:24Much of that debris has fallen out of Orbital Ray, but a lot remains.
35:29We're still tracking hundreds of pieces of debris from that particular event.
35:34So far, nations have only shot and hit their own satellites.
35:38But given the danger posed by a single tiny fragment of debris, the prospect of a full-scale anti-satellite
35:46missile battle in space is daunting.
35:52A massive barrage of anti-satellite missiles creates tens of thousands of pieces of debris.
35:58This is when the nightmare scenario begins.
36:01Known as the Kessler Syndrome, this debris cascades and intersects with other satellites, causing them to be destroyed, causing more
36:08debris.
36:08And in a self-perpetuating chain reaction, thousands of satellites get destroyed.
36:14Chain reaction or not, space junk is already a problem.
36:19Just because you're up there moving 17,000 miles an hour, doesn't mean everything is moving in the same direction
36:25as you.
36:25In fact, very little is moving in the same direction as you.
36:30Orbits all have different orientations.
36:33So it's not about the pieces that are in your orbit.
36:36It's about the pieces that are at your altitude, but have different orbital paths.
36:42And the biggest risk is the piece coming at you from a perpendicular direction that's going to hit you at
36:4917,000 miles an hour.
36:52Space junk comes in all sizes, from spent rocket stages to defunct satellites to lost astronaut gloves to errant screws.
37:02Recently, a small untracked piece of debris hit the Chinese space station.
37:07It hit their evacuation module that they were planning to go back home on.
37:12There was no loss of life, but it could have been much worse.
37:15A massive collision between two satellites happened in 2009.
37:19A US communications satellite inadvertently hit a defunct Russian satellite, and it created an enormous debris field.
37:29It's not clear how close we are to reaching a Kessler threshold that could start a chain reaction and render
37:36orbits unusable.
37:38Or if we'll ever get there.
37:40Space is enormously vast.
37:42Even though there are more than 12,000 satellites and tens of thousands or more pieces of debris, stuff is
37:48not constantly bumping into each other.
37:51Others believe the chain reaction is already underway, even if it looks different than in the movies.
37:57In a movie Gravity, everything got shredded in about half an hour.
38:02But, really, this happens over decades.
38:05Like most environmental disasters, it's a very slow-moving car crash.
38:11I think the Kessler chain reaction is already happening.
38:15Certainly in some orbital regimes, there's enough debris that it's not the problem of just waiting to see if things
38:23hit each other and statistically calculating the probability.
38:26It's how good are your dodge maneuver schemes and how well can you control the flow of traffic.
38:34Most satellites rely on solar panels to power their onboard electronics.
38:39But they also carry small amounts of fuel to enable maneuvering with thrusters.
38:46In 2025, SpaceX had to do 300,000 maneuvers to make sure their spacecraft did not impact either a piece
38:54of debris or another satellite.
38:56So this is really getting, I think, to the edge of being tenable.
39:00I really worry if we go from 10,000 satellites to 100,000 satellites, it may no longer be possible
39:07to successfully do all the dodging that's needed.
39:10I think we're going to learn the hard way.
39:13Most new satellites are equipped with thrusters.
39:16But the same technology that can help satellites maneuver can also enable another kind of attack.
39:27Imagine a number of small, agile satellites approaching some of our key national security assets.
39:33Suddenly, we start losing communications.
39:36GPS starts getting jammed.
39:38Other satellites are being moved out of their orbits.
39:40It's hard to know exactly what's happening.
39:43But it's clear these attacks are something new.
39:46Governments rarely talk openly about military operations in space.
39:51But in Southern California, one private company has glimpsed some of the cutting-edge technologies that are driving space warfare.
40:00ExoAnalytic runs a network of small optical telescopes that track objects in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles up.
40:08MJ Jeffries oversees the network.
40:11So here at ExoAnalytic, we operate a global network of telescopes.
40:15On the map right here, you're seeing all of our observatories.
40:17We're in South Africa, Morocco, Spain, France, Greece.
40:22We have them splattered across Australia, the United States, and Hawaii.
40:25We are also down here in both Argentina and Chile.
40:29The telescope network is a series of 40 observatories all around the world, about 400 telescopes total.
40:37So right now, I'm going to click in the telescope 1818.
40:40If you look at the map in the lower left-hand corner, it shows you that we have a target
40:44symbol around Western Australia,
40:46and that's where this observatory is.
40:47And I can go ahead and zoom in on the night sky in real time.
40:51Now, as I zoom in, we're seeing a live picture coming in from the telescope.
40:56I can jump over to a telescope in Morocco, come over here to France.
41:00Any of them are at our disposal.
41:02ExoAnalytic can detect the light reflected by even small objects from 22,000 miles away.
41:09With one telescope and one picture, we can see something about this size.
41:13Using 10 telescopes co-located and putting all their frames together, we can track something down about this size.
41:20All of the observations that we take with a part of our telescope network are what's called not classified,
41:26because it's just a passive collection of the night sky.
41:28So right now, that's about 700 active objects.
41:32Now, of those 700 objects, 30 of them are not in the public catalog.
41:36These 30 objects include classified reconnaissance and military satellites that the Space Force doesn't publicly discuss.
41:44But because it's hard to hide in space, even the infrared detection satellites that anchor the U.S. missile defense
41:51system, called SIBRS, are visible.
41:53Currently, we're tracking SIBRS GEO-4, parked up at GEO, and we can see that it's positioned above the African
42:00continent.
42:00Since it's a geostationary satellite, it always maintains the same position. It doesn't move to the left or move to
42:07the right.
42:07And sometimes, ExoAnalytic finds surprises.
42:12In 2021, China launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit.
42:17The stated purpose of Shijian, or SJ-21, was debris removal.
42:22So this gets launched up, it arrived at GEO, and it does a maneuver to go and rendezvous around another
42:29Chinese satellite called Compass G2.
42:31And then it goes and actually captures Compass G2.
42:35So you've got these two objects, right, that are orbiting the Earth at thousands of miles an hour.
42:40And you've got to move them close to one another with imperfect knowledge, right, about what their orbits are.
42:47The, when they touch, they don't hit each other at like 100 miles an hour, right? That would be bad.
42:52So you see right now, you have SJ-21, and you have Compass G2 next to it that's spinning.
42:57In a moment here, you're going to see, instead of that square spinning, it's going to be stuck. Now it's
43:01stuck.
43:02SJ-21 may have grabbed onto the other satellite with an arm, a maneuver ExoAnalytic had never seen before.
43:09That was a pretty big deal. So now, we have to ask ourselves, what are they going to do?
43:14Suddenly, after weeks of orbiting together, both satellites disappeared.
43:19In January 2022, I went to go see the location of SJ-21, and there was nothing there.
43:26So it was a pretty big effort for our team to go and refine the satellite.
43:30But once we did, we saw that SJ-21 was moving very quickly east to west.
43:37Like a tow truck, SJ-21 grabbed another satellite and moved it 2,000 miles, stopped, released it, and then
43:48SJ-21 returned 2,000 miles back to the geosynchronous belt.
43:53China is doing some very cutting-edge things in space and demonstrating capabilities that I think the U.S. in
44:01general, and the DOD in particular, wishes it had.
44:05And so that's causing some concerns.
44:08China insists they disposed of a defunct satellite as part of a debris removal test.
44:14But many instead saw a public demonstration of a tool easy to repurpose for offense in the event of a
44:20conflict.
44:21Yeah, it's worrisome. Of course, they'll tell you it's for peaceful purposes.
44:27The United States has not done anything like that.
44:30And that alone would have been remarkable for the career of SJ-21.
44:34But then, in January 2025, China launched another satellite, SJ-25, to rendezvous with SJ-21.
44:44And then sure enough, right around July of 2025, we saw them dock.
44:49The publicly available information states that SJ-25 is some sort of a refueling satellite.
44:56There was a fuel transfer from SJ-25 to SJ-21 that replenished its tanks.
45:03Remember, in space, if you want to get somewhere fast, you have to spend a lot of fuel.
45:08Fuel is the most important expendable resource that you have.
45:13Fuel determines how often you can maneuver, how fast you can maneuver.
45:17And you can imagine, if you no longer had fuel as a limiter, what you could do.
45:22My response to seeing SJ-21 do the towing operation and then do the refueling operation was kind of some
45:28respect.
45:29And it was a realization to never underestimate your adversary.
45:34Grabbing a satellite in orbit isn't the only way to mess with it.
45:38In 2019, observers tracked the launch of a Russian satellite and noticed something odd.
45:44The single dot showing the satellite soon split into two, and then into three.
45:51Russia is unique in using a technique of deploying spacecraft from other spacecraft.
45:56You can see as many as three of these nesting dolls or Matryoshka dolls,
46:01where one satellite will release another, and that will release a third.
46:06That object could be anything.
46:08It could be a kinetic weapon that's intended to impact.
46:11It could be a weapon that's intended to jam.
46:13You just don't know.
46:14Russia claims these nesting doll satellites are intended to inspect other satellites for damage.
46:21But Komsbach has observed them following classified U.S. satellites, at times coming within 50 miles.
46:27There's no other reason to come up close to one of our very sensitive and important satellites than for bad
46:33intent.
46:33What they're trying to do is intimidate us and let us know that if we got into a conflict,
46:38that those satellites would cease to exist.
46:40Small, mobile satellites that can attack in a variety of ways might be the future of space warfare.
46:51With little warning, hundreds of satellites deploy on-orbit weapons against our national security space assets,
46:57jamming, lazing, kinetic effects, cyber intrusions.
47:01Billions of dollars of national security satellites are rendered useless,
47:05leaving our military back on Earth crippled.
47:13Evan Rogers is a founder of satellite maker True Anomaly.
47:17He's racing to build small, agile satellites that might be key to this new style of warfare.
47:23Spacecraft subsystems have become less expensive and they've become smaller,
47:28which allows you to deploy more satellites in a single launch than you would previously where a single launch was
47:34dedicated to a single billion-dollar spacecraft.
47:37So we build them smaller, build them cheaper.
47:39This new spacecraft is called Jackal.
47:43Jackal is a multi-role space superiority platform.
47:45It's designed to track and follow highly agile targets.
47:51As our adversaries have built more and more highly maneuverable systems, we've needed to adapt to that.
47:57Jackal has extra fuel tanks and highly efficient thrusters that give it more maneuverability and range than most traditional satellites.
48:06So these are the tiny little rocket engines that allow the Jackal spacecraft to move from point A to point
48:11B within an orbit.
48:13Cleanliness is really important because if you get dirt or particulates inside those thrusters, it can cause jamming and leakage
48:20of fuel.
48:21So these have a lot of thrust that allow us to really quickly maneuver and get into position to go
48:27perform whatever mission is that we need to go do.
48:30It's designed to get close to a target, for now carrying a camera, but ultimately perhaps a jammer or even
48:37a laser weapon.
48:38There's no technological barrier to deploying a laser on Jackal.
48:42The question is how far away do you need the target to be to engage it.
48:46If it's very close, that technology exists, if it's very far away, that's a pretty significant technological hurdle.
48:51But for most engagements, you know, a handful of kilometers, a space-to-space laser is totally achievable.
48:58Carrying even simple weapons, maneuverable cheap satellites can potentially take out billion-dollar behemoths.
49:05They can lie dormant in space for months or years and be hard to identify as weapons.
49:12This ability to have lots of satellites that can interact with each other, that is going to be a very
49:18different sort of future than what we've been used to in Earth orbit.
49:23International agreements are few and far between when it comes to the militarization of space.
49:28Nothing governs how close one satellite can get to another, or most of what companies and governments do up there.
49:35All of those things from the Wild West era, right, are going to happen in space if we don't prepare
49:42for them.
49:43The main international agreement, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, prohibits nuclear weapons, but says nothing about conventional weapons in
49:53space.
49:53And while the U.S., Russia, and China are all party to the treaty, there have been no major new
50:00agreement since.
50:02Space is a shared domain, and actions by one actor can affect everyone's ability to utilize space.
50:08There's a lot of work being done in diplomatic circles on space issues.
50:12But at the United Nations, they've been going in circles, frankly, for decades now.
50:17I think the likelihood of any arms control for space in the near term is pretty low.
50:22I'm actually pretty pessimistic.
50:24I'm afraid we are headed towards a higher level of militarization and weaponization of space.
50:31In 2025, the White House mandated the development of a new space-based missile defense system called Golden Dome.
50:39The Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world
50:46and even if they are launched from space.
50:48The program is supposed to include a constellation of satellites that can actively shoot down missiles.
50:55Critics have pointed out that besides the many technical challenges involved, Golden Dome would be a major escalation.
51:02Satellites that can shoot down missiles can easily be aimed at other satellites.
51:07We have not yet seen satellite-to-satellite attacks. I think those will happen in the future.
51:14What if I had a satellite that had a mechanical arm and it could grab another satellite? Would that be
51:20a weapon?
51:21Well, I used to fly that weapon. It's called the space shuttle. But it wasn't built to be a weapon.
51:26So we don't even have a good definition of what is a weapon and what is not a weapon in
51:30space.
51:31We're now, in my mind, thinking about space warfare as we thought about air warfare in the 1920s.
51:39We are so early in the testing and training that it's not even quite clear how this whole thing will
51:44play itself out.
51:45As technology progresses, it's up to humankind to decide how to use it.
51:50But what's increasingly clear is that it's no longer possible to ignore what's happening above our heads.
51:58There has not been a domain that human beings have not figured out a way to fight it.
52:03Underwater, on top of the water, on land, in the air. Why is space any different?
52:08Or land.
52:38Next Professionals
53:08...