This Week in Space 101 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Coming up on this week in space. Is Russia really building a nuclear space weapon? We'll talk with spacecom managing editor and military space expert Brett Tingley, all about it. Plus, spacex has a launch date for their Starship rocket, and it's closer than you might think. We're one month away from the great American well, great North American solar eclipse, so mark your calendars for that. And is Voyager 1 on its last legs? We sure hope not, but we're going to all look into it on this episode, so tune in.

00:29 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This is Tweet. This is this week in space, episode 101, recorded on March 8, 2024. Nukes in space. Well, hello everybody. Welcome to this week in space, the Nukes in space edition. I'm Tarek Malik, editor in chief of spacecom, and of course it wouldn't be another week without my partner, rod, being off exploring the Galapagos Islands or Ecuador or something. I really hope he has hugged one of those tornaces there, but we'll have to wait until he comes back. He can let us all know. But with us today we're actually joined by one of my longtime colleagues, Brett Tingley, managing editor of spacecom. We're going to talk all about nuclear weapons in space. Brett, thanks for being with us today. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you, because I am not the one to ask about just what military stuff in space is going to happen. But first of always, we do have our traditional joke. This actually one was sent in from Rod and I meant to ask it last weekend. I forgot, but here it goes. Here it goes. Hey, brett, why did Pluto go to finishing?

01:45 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
school. Why did Pluto go to finishing school? Oh man, I would love to have something witty to say, but I can't think of it. Let me have it.

01:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So it could finally learn to be world class. Excellent, get it. Get it Because, okay, I got the laugh track down. That means that it's a good joke, rod, if only you were here, you would be so, so proud. So of course you can send us your jokes. You can join what is it, team Rod, is that what it is? And send in a joke to us all here at Twist, at TwistTV, please. We need it because we only have so many of these corny jokes to go around.

02:33
But coming up next, we've got a couple of headlines and then we're going to get right to it, and the biggest headline for this week is SpaceX's Starship is going to launch next week. Spacex they sent a, an update I guess it's kind of out of on X, their Twitter post, where they have set a date of March 14th Tensative they actually don't have the full what is it? The launch license from the FAA yet that says they can try it, but at least they're confident they can to launch their third flight test of the Starship and Super Heavy booster. And this is, of course, their big, fully reusable, like 400-foot rocket that they're trying to send to the moon for NASA to land astronauts. They want to fly it to Mars and all of that, but first they have to get it to orbit and they have not been able to do that yet.

03:24
So this is their third attempt. It might lift off about eight o'clock in the morning, local time on Texas, but we're still waiting to see if they have everything like ship shape for it. Now they did tank the vehicle this week. That means that they fueled both the massive Super Heavy booster and the Starship vehicle at their Boca Chica Texas Starbase Proving Ground in South Texas. It's a very southern tip of Texas, if you're looking at the map there, and it seemed to pass it with flying colors. So we'll have to see if they're going to do any kind of engine test firings over the weekend and if they're going to get that launch license. But, brett, you were actually on the shortlist to go cover this for spacecom, weren't you, brett?

04:06 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Kudlow, that's right. Yeah, unfortunately I just got back from the Crew 8 launch, which I actually didn't get to see because it was delayed. But yeah, hopefully I can get down there to Starbase to see one of these Starship launches, because the first two were absolutely spectacular and we know all the others going forward are going to be just as spectacular. There's something so cool about a stainless steel rocket. I mean, that Starship just looks like something that was thought up in the 1950s. Say what you want to about it, but it's got cool factor. Brett Kudlow, it does, it does.

04:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And, of course, I did see the first one, although it didn't get very high, it didn't even make it to space. It blew up right after lifting off, and JoshDinnerForSpacecom he headed out there. By the way, that was from SpaceX, that story there. Our second story is actually from spacecom, and I'm very proud for this one, because Rod's not here to roll his eyes, but we are one month away from the great North American solar eclipse. So today is March 8th. It's also International Women's Day, so congratulations to women everywhere, but on April 8th is the actual total solar eclipse, the one that is going to cross from. Well, it's going to actually cross from Central America and Mexico through Texas and then through states, all the way, kind of like Northeastern diagonally through Maine and Canada and everyone, if you get a chance to drive or fly, to be in that path.

05:37
You've heard me say over and over again that this is one not to miss, and of course we've got our big preview out, but there was another story today. Even that said, 99% just won't cut it. If you have 99% totality, you want to be in the total part of the eclipse. The nice thing, though, is that if you can't get there, most of the country will have in the 70% and up range of percentage of the sun that is eclipse, which means if you have the glasses you will be able to see at least something.

06:09
But of course it's that sliver, about 60 mile wide, with across the country to be in totality, that we want everyone to go see and NASA's going to webcast it live and we want to make sure that everyone is making their plans now. You don't want to be going into the weekend, that weekend before April 8th, because April 8th is a Monday if you're planning now and then wondering what you're going to want to do. So be thinking about that now for everybody. I'm hoping to be somewhere upstate New York. Brett, are you going to go see the eclipse?

06:40 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
I am. I'm going to travel to southeastern Missouri State University in Cape Giroudo, missouri. They're having a huge block party. They're going to like block off the whole city. There's going to be bounce houses for the kids. They're going to allow the community and the students of the university to come into the football stadium to watch it. I'm really excited and it's right on the centerline of totality, so I should be able to see a little over four minutes of the total eclipse. Yeah, that's really exciting.

07:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm hoping to go to this kind of scenic Lake Saranac in New York just trying to work out some of the travel stuff on that end. And, by the way, if folks out there are wondering, you know, hey, what are some big ticket places to go see it? Dallas is going to in Dallas, texas is having a huge, huge event there. San Antonio, austin having great big events across there, cleveland in Ohio and Indianapolis all these, you know these, these huge cities are all in the line. So you know, if it's cloudy, you at least have other stuff to do around those cities to check out. So this is the time to plan because it's during spring break for a lot of people and there's going to be probably a lot of, a lot of big crowds. And then finally, I guess to end on a downer, we talked about this a little bit before, but it looks like Voyager 1, nasa's long lived and the farthest spacecraft from Earth, still not doing well.

08:06
The New York Times had a piece this week and they weren't the only ones just kind of revisiting the fact that it's been months, months since, like November, that we've actually had anything that made sense come back to Earth from Voyager 1. It has some, some really critical computing problems, that it is in contact with NASA and they can talk to it a little bit, but they've been trying to diagnose a computer glitch for months now. They keep getting kind of gibberish back. They think they know what the problem is, but it's very difficult to reach the spacecraft because it's like so far away. It's like billions and billions of miles away out there in interstellar space. It's not dead yet, but Suzanne Dodd, the principal investigator at NASA's JPL, told the New York Times that this is and then she said, and I quote, the most serious issue that Voyager 1 has faced since she took over as as Project Lead in 2010.

09:01
So that's it's. It's the biggest challenge that Voyager 1 has been facing and you know it's. It's a plucky probe. It's about as old as I am I think I'm like three months older than than than Voyager, than Voyager 1, in terms of how long it's been out there in space. So I mean, just the fact that it's lasted this long is amazing. But at least we have Voyager 2, right, brett? So we've got a spare also in interstellar space if we need it.

09:25 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, you know there's a lot of a sentimentality, there's a lot of emotional attachment to them. You know something about the farthest thing we've sent in the space from Earth, so I think everybody's rooting for it, you know. But, like you said, we still have another one.

09:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, yeah, by the way, if anyone out there is listening and has an idea about what NASA should do to try to wake up Voyager 1, let us know and then we'll pass it on to NASA and see if it works, and we'll let you know then too. So, but we're here, brett, to talk about space weapons and, in particular, russia's potential for some kind of crazy space nuke thing, and we're going to talk about that right after this next break. Ok, welcome back everybody. We are here with Brett Tingley, managing editor of Spacecom, a colleague of mine, who is the smartest person I know when it comes to military stuff, and he's actually been covering this story for us for the last few weeks. But, brett, we know, welcome, welcome aboard. We're here to talk about Russia's potential new nuclear space weapon. Thanks for joining us today.

10:27 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Big fan of the show.

10:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I hope so, I hope so. Yeah because we, your, your, your reporting helps power it. So yeah, I wanted to start just so that folks can get to know. You know who you are because you haven't been with Spacecom forever. You had. You know also all sorts of other experiences, kind of who you are, how you found your road to space reporting and in particular, some of your military expertise, to kind of set the stage for what we're going to talk about right now.

10:55 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Sure, well, I started writing professionally about 2016, 2015,. And started small writing for a couple like weird news blogs and at during that time, I got really interested in spaceflight. Technology is a lot of the weird sides of military technology space weapons, things like that and then, around 2019, I started writing about military technology full time for a site called the war zone and I was during that time I got really interested in Space Force anti satellite capabilities, because these things have really been exploding, really been developing at this breakneck speed for the last 20 years or so. Really, last five years, we've seen a huge explosion in the funding that Space Force has been getting, that DARPA has been getting to develop new capabilities in space. So I don't know if I call myself an expert, but it is something I have reported on, been researching for several years now. It's a big interest of mine.

11:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And were you a huge fan of space stuff when you were a kid too?

12:01 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Of course.

12:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We hear from a lot of astronauts.

12:03 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, it was Lego that got me interested in space as a kid the classic Lego space series and I love building radical, wild spaceship designs and so I had to think that experience as a kid building these Lego's got me so interested in this kind of stuff, and I grew up during the space shuttle era, which was a huge thing for many of us, right, space shuttle was so iconic, it just looked really cool, and so, yeah, I've always had a huge interest in space. Plus, science fiction was another thing that led me to where I am Star Wars, star Trek but growing up in the 90s we had several years in a row there where we had some really killer movies come out Men in Black, independence Day, the X-Files was going on during that time and so all of that kind of combined together to create the interests that I have today.

12:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, that's great and of course now that it's funny that Lego got you into it. Now there's a whole new Lego space line that just came out this year. But that's a great road to get here and of course you've got some bona fides there when it comes to covering military hardware in particular. So kind of walk us through, like what's going on? Because this story we talked about it on the show here a couple of weeks ago as one of the headlines but it seems to have blown up and then is now just kind of sitting in the background while other politics and stuff are going on. So the big report was like last month, as we're recording this, basically that Russia has a new secret weapon that they could blow up satellites or who knows what in space. What's going on that we know about like right now. Can you give us like an overview of what we know?

13:43 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Well, the good news is that, according to the White House, there's no immediate threat to anyone's safety Right. They're not saying that this is some kind of weapon that's hanging in the air above us with a nuke ready to come down. There's been a lot of chatter over the past few weeks, but from most of the experts it seems like what we're talking about is some sort of nuclear powered anti-satellite weapon, maybe a nuclear powered electronic warfare platform. There have been a lot of great reports that people have done over the last five years to show that a lot of Russian industry has been working on this one particular design of this large nuclear powered electronic electronic warfare satellite and what it could do is kind of disable a wide area of radio communications that can jam satellites across a wide area. So that's one potential option.

14:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Like a PMP or some other kind of active jamming thing.

14:39 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
More like an active jamming, like radio frequency jamming, that kind of thing, although, to your point there, there's also some speculation that maybe Russia's looking to revive the decades old concept of actually detonating a nuclear weapon in space, which would be even more catastrophic, across a larger area of satellites in orbit.

15:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And this is all still classified. It seems like it's kind of like a fluke that we know about it, right? So how did that become public in the first place?

15:09 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, the intelligence itself is classified. But on February 14th the chair of the House permanent select committee on intelligence, Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio. He issued a public statement asking President Biden to declassify all the information that we have on this threat so that we can openly discuss how to respond to it, and there was a lot of back and forth with other congressmen. I think that the next day there was a White House press conference because it just, you know, the headlines just exploded. The story went crazy wide. So that's how we know about it. It's all because of, you know, Mike Turner putting this out there. There's been some speculation that maybe him even leaking that little bit of information might have been somehow politically motivated to drum up military funding, to kind of help push Congress towards approving some military spending bills. But we don't really know. That's all speculation.

16:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Okay, so like, like, like spending for Ukraine, or or something like that yeah.

16:09 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Right, because you know there's been a lot of back and forth on whether or not we should continue funding Ukraine at the rate we've been going at, and so obviously this big Russian threat that you know might tip Congress in one direction. However, in that White House press conference we did learn there is actually intelligence about an actual, you know, russian nuclear space weapon. Okay, but again everything's pointing towards it being nuclear powered.

16:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Like a like a like a reactors which we're talking about. So you don't want anyone to worry that there's this giant there's. There's a movie from the 80s called Def Con four or five. I'm not sure if you've ever seen that movie. I don't think so.

16:49
It's absolutely awful. It's like one of the worst sci-fi movies I've ever seen. But but the whole point is it's it's these two guys that are stationed on an orbital platform that just launches nuclear weapons down to the earth, and of course you know it's an apocalypse movie, so it all happens and then they crash and everyone's fighting over their, their crash spaceship. But that's not what you're talking about. It's not like that. It's like something that would. It would, you would if it's nuclear power, and I guess the point is that it needs a lot of power. So that's what they would. They would use that for, and then they could keep it up there for a long time, because nuclear powered stuff lasts a long time.

17:24 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Right, yeah, yeah, you know electronic warfare, kind of these non kinetic means of disabling satellites, they do require a lot of power. If you want to jam a wide band of radio frequencies over a long period of time, it's going to take a lot of energy, and so a nuclear actor could be one way to power something that could stay on orbit for a long time and really disable communications across some wide area and new. Okay, you know Russia has signaled that it would like the capability to disable Western satellite constellations because you know Starlink SpaceX, a Starlink mega constellation, has been used widely throughout Ukraine to provide battlefield communications and government communications for the government of Ukraine. We had some statements come out several months ago from the Russian government that it considers even commercial satellites operated by the West as legitimate targets and war time. So this capability, the ability to destroy, disable or degrade Western satellites, is something we know Russia and other nations like China are very actively pursuing.

18:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
To put it in perspective because, like you said, the White House was very adamant and the Defense Department too because there were some briefings that we were following there said many times that it isn't like a current threat, like it's not something that's going to happen right now. It's not something that's in space right now that we know of, but it sounds like the ability to knock out or interfere with satellites at a scale that was described by by these officials. I Mean it sounds like that could be a pretty damaging Blow to just how we live. You and I are talking right now through like internet that gets bounced all around through communication satellites or or when we travel and we use GPS and all of that mean that that stuff seems like a Pretty, a pretty large array of vulnerable systems, because they don't have any kind of defenses built into them. Right, all these commercial satellites. They're just Designed to do the thing that they're built to do.

19:36 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, today's satellites are a little more hardened against radiation than the ones, say, 60 years ago. But to your point, yes, gps satellites, all sorts of telecommunications satellites, you know, would be entirely vulnerable. Many of these don't have the ability to change the orbits or maneuver out of the way in any way. It's for those reasons the Pentagon has said, and Pentagon leadership has said in recent months, that space is the most vital domain for the US military right now, because we depend on it at every level For all the things we just talked about navigation, position timing, communications, early warning for missile launches, all, all, all of those things. So, yeah, we, if our satellites were taken out of any nation satellites were taken out, they'd be basically blind, deaf and dumb to a large extent.

20:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I found yeah, and John, for your records there on line 43. I did find like a whole statement from the Defense Department about basically saying that space well, that one is about hypersonic weapons. Pardon me, it's line 42 is is the? Is the? Is the report that I had found where they were saying that the Space-paced threats from competitors were like the biggest thing that we have to worry about, and that was back in 2022 and that was two years ago. So it sounds like it's just heating up right from. Yeah.

20:58 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
What you're describing here. That's right. And you I mean you just have to look at the Launch cadence that the US Space Force, these national security, launches. They're going up more often, they're going up more rapidly. We saw the Victus NOx mission last year in which the Space Force was able to turn around a satellite in a matter of days. Right, they ordered it, got it on the rocket, send it up, and they want to even increase that. There's another one coming up in which they want to shorten that window to hours.

21:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know well, I want to. I want to ask about the military actions in space, because I have some treaty questions for you and to, but but you brought up a really good point about just the military wrapping up its own actions here to to do surveillance, to do reconnaissance and and defense. Of course we have missile defense satellites which are designed to detect launches from potential. We want to call them potential adversaries.

21:59
But but military participation in space, that's not new. That's been going on right since the dawn of the space age. It was the first astronauts were purely from military backgrounds. That we had as well as in Russia and the Soviet Union.

22:15 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
That's right and you know some experts will argue that the entire space age is entirely a military operation. There's a fantastic book that came out last year by Bled and Bowen called original sin, that delves all into this. But yeah, you know the, the original rocket technologies they were derived from. You know military missile technologies, and Even though the whole concept of putting nuclear weapons in space goes back over 60 years.

22:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So yeah, there's. And was that just to put the weapons in space for quick strike or to make stations? Were we gonna leap, put them up there and, I guess, aim them down at earth from the moon?

22:54 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
well, as far as we know, it wasn't that various. But as far back as 1959 the US tested an anti-satellite missile that was intended to have a nuclear warhead. Wow, they never did put a nuclear warhead on it. But yeah, 1959, this goes all the way back to that. So you know, for 60 years we've known that one of the best ways to take out satellites I was with the nuclear detonation in space, and back then we didn't have the precision guided missiles we have today, so a big explosion in space was the best way they had to do it. Luckily, president Eisenhower at the time took a look at it and said you know, this isn't a good idea and they scaled back. But however, just three years later, in 1962, as part of what was known as Operation Fishbowl, us Air Force conducted a test called starfish prime and and but. Southwest of Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, over Johnson atoll, a little series of islands out there, they detonated a around a 1.4 Megaton warhead at an altitude of 250 miles, 400 kilometers.

24:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's where the space station flies 250 miles up, yeah.

24:04 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
It was wild when you see pictures and videos of it. I mean it turned night into day, it created auroras on the other side of the world, on the other hemisphere. It Street lights on the ground below went out and it's estimated about a quarter of the satellites that were in orbit at the time suffered some kind of damage. And and they did that was only one of five that they did as part of Operation Fishbowl Five test.

24:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I forget, well, they get some links for that so that folks can follow up on that, because that is crazy, that is crazy, yeah. So, and then did they launch all five of those tests, like one after another, or they like kind of spread out over Like a few.

24:44 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
they were kind of spread out, um, but they are took Place in the span of a couple years, right then, nearly 1960s, and so it's because of those tests that we know a lot about what the effects of Dating a nuclear weapon in space would be today, mm-hmm.

25:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's just it's hard to imagine even contemplating that kind of a test like right now, because you can't hide any of that stuff with the types of satellite surveillance that we've got going on these days. Well, I actually have a lot of questions about if it's even legal to do a lot of this stuff. I didn't have one just to follow up, because you mentioned early on that this potential Weapon capability would be nuclear powered rather than Rather than like a missile or a or a bomb or whatnot, and that seems like it's not new either nuclear reactors in space.

25:35
I mean there was, there were some nuclear powered satellites even During the the early days of the space race.

25:41 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Right, Sure, and to go back to the Voyager probes we talked about earlier, right, these are Radio isotope thermal generators. Is that what they're called?

25:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, radio.

25:52 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Which is not quite the same as a nuclear reactor, right, they, they use the heat generated as an Isotope, a radioactive isotope, to case. But that you know, you can still consider that nuclear powered in a way. But it seems like what this new Russian capability might be is an actual nuclear reactor. Okay, and you know, darpa is pursuing the DARPA, nasa pursuing a nuclear powered propulsion system. So you know, russia's not alone in that. But yeah, the nuclear powered rocket, that concept goes back, I mean, to the dawn of rocketry, basically, you know, because the space age was the same as the atomic age. Right, all of these technologies were being developed kind of at the same time.

26:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So yeah, Crazy is crazy that it's coming back now.

26:36
Well, we're gonna take a really quick break, but when we come back we're gonna start looking at what the UN has to say about all of this stuff. So don't go away, all right, brent. I mean, so you've painted kind of a well, I guess, a bit of a scary picture about this stuff. I guess it's good that we know that this is something that Russia is is actively looking into so that we can be watching out for it.

26:59
But I was of the mind that there has been a treaty in place from the United Nations that says specifically that we can't do those things right. I mean that this, this outer space, the peaceful uses treaty the UN has it says very clearly that states Shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or Station them in outer space in any other matter. That seems pretty clear about putting weapons in space. So so I guess, kind of, what do you know about that outer space treaty? And then how would that apply to what word? What we know that Russia, maybe looking at you right now?

27:41 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
right and that's the been the big question, as reports of this reported Russian capability of Surface. This outer space treaty of 1967, or its long name, treaty on principles governing the activities of states and the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies. It very clearly as you just read Bands prohibits weapons of mass destruction in space. However, that has not prevented things like starfish prime. You know that, that test that we talked about earlier.

28:13
China, just in the past few years, tested what's known as a fractional, fractional orbital bombardment system, or FOBS. Fobs, in which they launch a spacecraft on a polar orbit and just before it makes a complete orbit, it re-inters the atmosphere. And you know ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles. They travel through space, right, and we've never, to my knowledge, actually tested an ICBM with a warhead on it. But so it seems like the treaty has some gray areas in terms of traveling through space, as opposed to actually just putting them in space. But, to your point, it very clearly and explicitly bans Putting them kind of in orbit, right, well, a loitering nuke, as they're known, that would just be there on orbit until it's called to drop. Those are very clearly banned. The problem with the treaty? Yeah, as I've heard from some people I interviewed this week for an article I did at space comm, is the Enforcement of the treaty isn't very clearly defined. Yeah, treaties can be broken. This treaty in particular doesn't really have any clearly defined consequences About what would happen if a nation were to break the treaty.

29:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So there's not like a, there's not like a cop, a police, that's some kind of thing like that, that that they would have to answer to.

29:37 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Ultimately it would be the United Nations. But, as we know, China, russia and the US all have permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and so it can be very hard to enforce penalties against any one of those nations. Sanctions appear to be probably the the go-to punishment, but even those in today's age are difficult to enforce because of the way international banking is now, it's very easy for nations to kind of move money around. We've seen this with the Ukraine war. The United States has put these huge sanctions on Russia and, as we can see as the war enters its third year, they're still able to wage this war. So that's kind of where the treaty Reaches its limits is in the enforcement of it. What do you do if a nation violates it? And there's not really a good answer for that.

30:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Is it is the answer, a new treaty, or is it establishing some kind of body whose job it is to police space at all, like a? Well, there's another. There's another 1990s TV show for you space police.

30:39 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Uh, 29 people should look at this one up to that was a good one. So that was. That was a great Lego space series.

30:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I guess, yeah. Question though.

30:54 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, that's a big question and we published an article this week at space comm asking that same question Is it time for a new outer space treaty? I spoke with Sharon squash Sony, who's a professor of international relations at George Washington University, and she said the hard part is the transparency aspect. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has been very good at kind of Hiding certain weapons development programs, about getting around treaties, you know not being completely transparent with the international community and you know we see the effects with the Ukraine war. So we could try to put a new treaty out and in fact in 2008 Russia and China proposed a new treaty along these same lines in the United States Did not want to go along with it because they felt it was targeted towards kind of a crippling US capabilities in space. So this has been proposed before. It's bubbling back up now with these reports. Everybody I've spoken to Agrees that the difficult part will be in the enforcement. You know that brings to mind.

31:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I mean, it seems like, when it comes to anything in space, that that is. That's where things break down we were talking about Russia and China and the US all have plans not just to work in low earth orbit but to go to the moon and to use its resources to do other stuff, make air out of the ice, but it's all in one place. And what's to stop one company, one country, from going into someone else's I don't know base or whatever and saying, no, we're going to take this stuff there too? There's, there's, there's laws for uses of the moon and stuff there too. But there isn't, there isn't a force that's supposed to enforce all that stuff.

32:41
And even without nuclear weapons in space and I don't know if I'm getting on a soap box here, but you can just aim your satellite at another satellite and have it move over time to encroach and mess some stuff up that way, you know, by crashing, we saw in 2007. Is that right? 2006. And then the anti, the, just the two satellites that crashed into each other a cosmos, a defunct cosmos satellite and an iridium communication satellite, which was active, by the way, at that time. I think that was 07. Maybe it was 04.

33:15
I got my years wrong. Someone correct me right right, right in and send me a note to refresh my brain there. But it caused these two huge clouds of debris that are traveling, you know, around the earth right now. And then China did the same thing to create another satellite debris when they when they blew up a thing in a weather satellite at that time too, and those weren't nuclear, you know capable things at all. It's just space junk.

33:43
And I did see a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists of the US. So they're just worried about the implications of space debris from these types of these types of measures that can knock out different satellites. And oh, john John, correct me it was February 10, 2009. That was the collision of the, the iridium satellite and the other Russian causes. Thanks, john, thanks for for for a look at what up. Now it sounds like there's other, just basic concerns that we have to be thinking about, because anything can be a weapon in space. You know, you could have a power beaming satellite that you just focus it a little bit, a little bit too robustly, and it can mess other other things up there too.

34:30 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
That's right and that's why we've seen initiatives like the Artemis Accords in the US, where we're trying to get nations to sign on and agree for these peaceful principles of cooperation on the moon and in space. China and Russia have their own kind of, you know, international coalition for moon plans and but it's a huge question as anti satellite capabilities develop. We've seen to your point about debris and satellites kind of following each other. You know, space Force leaders have been saying over the past couple of years that US satellites are under attack almost daily. Now these, these attacks, most of them, are what they call reversible attacks. So it might be a laser shined right into the optical sensors of the satellite from another satellite to blind it as it's passing over, you know, say, an airfield or something. If China or whomever doesn't want us spying on them, they'll just point a laser right at the camera on our satellite.

35:29
We can even do that from the ground. There was a report we reported on either in 22 or 2023. You don't remember when about Russia developing this huge ground based laser facility that I can beam these powerful lasers up at satellites to blind them. And there's many ways we can do this. We talked about jamming electronic warfare earlier. There's all sorts of satellites now that can shoot projectiles into space. We've seen reports of these over the last couple of years, russia testing them, china and to and even some satellite cleanup technologies that are like that.

36:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's right. If you have a satellite you know that can go up and and and grapple on to an older satellite to refuel it, then that it can grapple onto an older satellite and do some stuff that maybe isn't as nice as gassing it up or fixing it up or or even deorbitting it properly. If you can deorbit a satellite at the end of its life to clean up a space junk, you can deorbit a perfectly fine satellite and and and and and ruin someone's day there.

36:31 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
One of the favorite, my favorite things I've reported on, just because of how wild and science fiction sounding it is the Chinese Shurjin 21 satellite shot out a grappling net and grabbed onto another satellite and towed it into what's known as a graveyard orbit. It's just, it'll get farther and farther away from Earth. So to your point again if it can do that to a dead satellite, what's to stop it from doing it to a live satellite? I think about these propulsion jet packs, as Space Force calls them. They want to develop these little modular systems that can go on and grab onto another satellite and then propel it into a new orbit. But again, what's to stop it from just grabbing onto an enemy satellite, adversary satellite, and pushing it down in Earth's atmosphere? So there's some wild new capabilities being developed in terms of anti-satellite technologies that are going to play out in interesting ways if we ever do see a conflict between space superpowers.

37:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I do. I do want to ask a couple of final questions about that. Let's take the one really quick break, one last one before we get there, and then, brett, you can you can clue us in on what you think is coming in the near future for us all to watch. So, brett, you mentioned a lot of different things. We were talking about anti-satellites and I guess, at the core, what we know about this potential capability that Russia is developing is basically like the, what is it? The Moab, the mother of all, like anti-satellite things. Basically, instead of shooting a missile from the ground which missile defense satellites can track fairly, fairly regularly, because we've got a lot of those types of satellites you would have just something up there lurking that you can activate as like a surprise, where you have a lot of these satellite mega constellations. You know how many Starlink satellites are there right now? There's like 4,000, right?

38:27 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Something like that.

38:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Over 5,000.

38:29 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
5,000 satellites?

38:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and that's just one company alone, and Iridium had plans for some, amazon has plans for some, and that's just for communication satellites and internet satellites, let alone the GPS stuff that the military and our infrastructure needs to go. So do you, do you see, or can you see, a situation where there is kind of like an unstated space race now to develop these things? Because if the US doesn't have this capability and it sounds like the US doesn't, although they probably wouldn't tell us if they did- right.

39:08
That the one of the reports that I had seen in the New York Times was that this was a capability and it was one that the US had no idea how to counter at this point in time. Is this going to spark like another space race, but a space arms race as opposed to, you know, a geopolitical race to get astronauts to the moon, which is kind of already underway, with Russia partnering with China on a potential moon base in the near future, not really committing to the Artemis Accords, you know that sort of thing, but is that going on in the background now, do you think? Or should we be worried about that kind of a military arms race for now?

39:47 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
I would argue it is already going on and has been for some years. You know, just a couple months ago, darpa put out a call for proposals for new space weapons and the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, has been publishing these annual reports every year about threats in space. And we know, you know, there are things as wild as chemical sprayers that can, you know, spray corrosive chemicals onto another satellite's solar panels, which would cause them to start tumbling because of the, you know it would cause an imbalance in how the solar radiation interacts with the solar panels. So I would argue we are already in the midst of a kind of a cold war in space or a space arms race. And you know, all these tests that we talked about earlier, of these new anti-satellite capabilities over the past 20 years, are kind of the way the public can see that this race is going on.

40:44
I think I mentioned it earlier, but just a couple years ago I think it was 2020, the chief of the space force said you know we're under attack every day in space. Even Senator Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said just a couple months ago we're in a race. We're in a race against China to get to the moon, and that's a whole other podcast episode. Why is there so much military interest in the moon right now? Just this week we saw China wants to put a network of surveillance cameras on the moon to watch over its moon base. And you got to ask yourself why do you need surveillance cameras to watch your moon base if you're not expecting somebody to come tamper with your moon?

41:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
base. Yeah, and to that point I think DARPA has put out reports on military uses for, quote unquote, sis lunar space. That's right, you know, and it's just. It always raises the question why would DARPA and the US military need to have satellites in SIS lunar space when that's so far from Earth where the rest of us live, right? So yeah so clearly.

41:48
Clearly I guess there is, there is some far thinking ahead that these military powers are looking at as as another high ground and it feels to me, brett, like like a bit of a regression back to that, that us versus them mentality that powered a lot of the space race in in the 60s, you know, the Cold War. In the 70s, in the 80s, I mean, we had during the Reagan era a whole Star Wars program, right With things from not just from missile defense satellites but but for space based lasers, you know, to shoot stuff down and all of that, and of course it ended up being a whole lot of money with very little overall to show for it, although it did spool up an industry, industrial base for aerospace military projects that we are still using this day. But it feels like a bit of a throwback to that that we're slipping into that kind of mindset when we really could be using all of this new technology to do maybe more benign and constructive things in orbit together.

42:55 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, that would be preferable, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, I think, if you look geopolitically what's been going on over the last decade, we are kind of regressing back into kind of a Cold War, east versus West mentality. China and the US, you know, are kind of vying for supremacy in the South Pacific and there's been a lot of satellite maneuvers to spy on each other's activities, naval activities in the South Pacific. Lately, and obviously with Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine, you know, it feels like the Cold War kind of all over again. And so I think that what's been going on down here on Earth is just kind of extending up into space. You know where this East versus West kind of second Cold War thing and.

43:42
But you know, as you mentioned, the first Cold War, the space race led to a lot of technological development that led to peace. We use is, and hopefully we can see the same thing today. I mean, we all want to see humans back on the moon and yeah, you know the Air Force and Space Force might have great military interest in that. But how great would it be to see a moon base, you know. So as unfortunate as it is to see these military tensions rise again, I think you know, as people like us who watch space flight, you know it's very interesting time.

44:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know there was. There was a we've talked a lot about, like Russia and this, this potential for a front like a nuclear powered weapon in space. But you did remind me that you know the US Space Force has been testing a classified robotic space plane in orbit, the X-ray 7B. In fact, I think there's one in space right now right Doing who knows what in in geostationary orbit somewhere, and China has their own, now that they've been flying to Shenlong that can do its own separate things in space. Russia doesn't have one yet that we know of, but clearly that stuff has been going on in the background for a while. So I'm curious what you see the end result being. Because do, do. Do folks need to like right now? Should they be worried and looking up? Is it just something to know in the background, along with all the other news that we have to deal with on a regular basis? Or or should we start practicing duck and cover drills again, like I think you and I had those drills when we were in school?

45:28 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, let's hope not. I think there are more pressing threats to be worried about than any kind of space nuclear weapon right now. As we've heard from the White House, this isn't anything that's going to be eminently launched. You know, there are still thousands of ICBMs on either side pointed at each other with nuclear warheads on them right now. So I, like I said, I think there are more pressing threats to be worried about than any kind of reported space weapon. But you know, to go along with what we've been talking about, it's just kind of one more thing thrown on the pile of this kind of growing tension between the East and the West and the growing militarization of space.

46:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, we'll have to see how that develops over time. If we learn more about it, definitely Brett will want to have you back. Thank you so much for for taking the time out to to speak with us. I'm wondering where folks can follow you, if you know if you've got a new update, a new story about this or something else in space. I know you're working on some other supersonic tech stuff in the background, but that's a secret because we'll have to wait until that story comes out later on. Okay, but where should folks follow? Follow you and where can they find you on the computers?

46:45 - Brett Tingley (Guest)
Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Brett Tingley Just my name, with no spaces or punctuation and, as always, find me at spacecom over there daily reporting on the stuff we talked about and more.

46:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Great and for me, of course, you can find me at spacecom, just you know, right alongside Brett. There we are getting very excited for the upcoming Starship launch, so we'll be following that pretty closely. And of course, I am on the Twitter at or pardon me, the X and, we're supposed to say, at Tariq J Malik, and on YouTube at Space Drone Plays. It's a new season of Fortnite right now All Greek gods and whatnot. Maybe a little bit of space. I'll have to have to look into it. There's some constellation stuff I'm very excited about, but you can find me playing that, so maybe we'll see you in a game, in a game there. And, of course, don't forget to check out spacecom because the website is the name and the National Space Society, which is, you know, rod's haunting and stomping grounds at nssorg. Both are great places to satisfy your spaceflight cravings. And of course, you can always drop us a line at twist at twittv. That's T W I S at twittv and we welcome all your comments, your suggestions, your space jokes and ideas, and we really read every one of them. We love getting your comments and Rod will answer every message, and I try to as well.

48:12
New episodes published every Friday on your favorite podcast. So make sure that you like and subscribe and tell your friends and give us five star reviews. Six star reviews, that's one more than Rod asks for, so please help me show him up and, of course, the thumbs up will always do nicely. You can also also catch us at our website at twittv, slash T W I S, and you can get all of the great programming on the twit network ad free, on club twit as a lesson extras that are only there and available. Like, as Rod likes to point out, me falling off the chair, but I ordered the replacement parts and they're on my porch now, which means by next week, next episode, I might actually have a working chair and you'll never see that again. But club twit, that's seven dollars a month. That's like two coffees right, and you can.

48:57
You've heard Leo talk all about the tough times facing podcasters. This is your chance to step up and be counted. Help us out and find out some some cool Easter eggs. On the side. You can follow the twit tech podcast network at twit on Twitter and Facebook and twittv on Instagram, and we will see you all in the next one. Rod comes back next episode. I can't wait. It's been great being here on my own, but looking forward to having him back in the bag next week.