With the increasing relevance of space for commercial interests as well as power projection, a new dimension gets added to the complex matrix of geopolitics
Who controls low Earth Orbit, controls near-Earth space. Who controls near-Earth space dominates Terra. Who dominates Terra, determines the destiny of humankind.
~ Everett Dolman, Author of Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age, and Professor, Strategy, US Air Force War College
The first rustlings of ‘Space Race’ were perceptible when ‘amateur radio enthusiasts in the USA heard a series of blip sounds on short wave radios’. This was the transmission sound from Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite, launched by the USSR in 1957. Tim Marshall vividly describes it in his latest book ‘The Future of Geography’.
As is commonly said, the significance of momentous events is often not fully grasped early on. Nonchalant about their success, the launch of Sputnik was just a footnote in the Soviet daily Pravda, while it was a front-page headline in the US newspapers.
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially rebuffed Sputnik as a ‘small ball in the air’, but it didn’t take long to realize the gravity of it. Two months after the Sputnik launch, the American Vanguard Test Vehicle Three crashed and exploded. It was a moment of gloom, introspection, and reckoning. The rest, as they say, is history.
Some of the episodes from the early days of the space race make it seem less like a sideshow to the Cold War, but a confrontation in its own right, impelled by classical motives of power politics, one-upmanship, and aiming to demonstrate the superiority of respective socio-political systems in that bygone era of bloc alignments and US Capitalism vs Soviet Communism.
Eisenhower’s somber speech on the USSR surpassing the free world in space technology gave the impetus for the formation of DARPA and NASA – two stellar American science & technology institutions – that have spawned innovation, unlocked value, and sparked dynamism across multiple sectors.
Perhaps un-ironically, when David Graeber, the anthropologist, called the US space program the greatest accomplishment of Soviet Communism, it was an allusion to the dialectical and inductive effect of technology rivalry.
Unlike the proxy wars waged in distant corners of the globe, this facet of the Cold War had a net positive enduring legacy, creating an entire ecosystem worth billions of dollars, which is at the kernel of most technology innovations, and everyday applications. It also serves as a bedrock of connectivity, access, monitoring, and visualization.
Simultaneously, it has emerged as the next terrain of extending national influence, scientific prowess, and prestige.
Era of Astropolitics?
National Security and Defence have been key motivations for space since the heydays of the Cold War. What unnerved the US about the launch of Sputnik 1 was the fact that it was launched aboard R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM).
With this, the Kremlin demonstrated not just its capability to reach space, but also the ability to hit targets on US soil. This was, naturally, a cause for worry.
The dilemma between the use of space for peaceful purposes to reap socio-economic dividends, and advancing national developments, or to bolster defense capabilities, is an old one. However, in today’s age of networked and hybrid warfare, the two need to complement each other and are not seen as mutually exclusive.
As Professor Arup Dasgupta, former Deputy Director ISRO, mentions the initial trajectory of the space programs of China and India was similar, but later Beijing geared it toward missile programs.
However, since the advent of GNSS, near real-time information sharing, precise location intelligence, accurate visualizations, and profusion of geospatial data, space has become inherent to defense and national security considerations. The ongoing Ukraine conflict has further escalated it.
With leading countries such as the USA, UK, France, and Japan raising space commands/ space forces, and India recently launching the Defence Space Agency, though not going the full way to mobilize a designated Space Force, it is clear that focusing on space defense capability will be a major national priority.
Inflection Point
Ever since the age of exploration and the scramble for territories, resources, and new markets in the 17th and 18th centuries, geography has been at the core of global politics. Its centrality is best summed up by the titles of two books – Revenge of Geography by Robert Kaplan, and Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.
Navigating geographic constraints, finding a way around deadlocks, and exercising choices according to latitudes, longitudes, and natural barriers, are fundamental prerequisites in geography. It isn’t an overstatement to say that ‘geography is destiny’ in international relations.
Geopolitics is again in vogue today, perhaps for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. What was perceived as the ‘End of History’ – or the terminal end of nation bloc politics, alliances, and gambits to extend global hegemony, has made a comeback. Though with the rise of multipolarity, and transactional alliances over iron-clad ideological rigidity or political fealty.
Ancient Greeks described powers as either land-based (military), termed Tellucracy, or sea-based (naval), called Thassalocracy. Taking a leaf from it, the foremost geopolitical thinkers of our era – Halford Mackinder (Heartland), Nicholas Spykman (Rimland), and Admiral Alfred Mahan ( Primacy of Sea) – outlined the behavior, choices, compulsions, and restraints of land powers and sea powers. Their influence animates strategic thinking and policy-making till today.
Space is the new determinant in this matrix, for civilian as well as military purposes. That’s why the boundaries of conventional geopolitics are being pushed towards astropolitics.
Space rivalry won’t be just for securing orbital space for satellites in the ever-congested low-earth orbit for Earth Observation, remote monitoring, and reconnaissance, or to deploy spy satellites, but a bid for inter-planetary exploration to look for rare earth minerals, water, ice, helium, etc, or to conduct scientific experiments taking the advantage of micro-gravity
“It’s believed that the moon contains reserves of silicon, titanium, rare earth metals, and aluminum. Humanity is destined to spend more time there, digging beneath the surface in pursuit of these metals, which are used in vital modern technologies”, writes Tim Marshall.
“Many countries have the incentive to go after them, especially those that don’t want to rely on China, which holds a third of the world’s known reserves”, he adds.
Mike Bechtel, Chief Futurist, Deloitte, says that space today is at an ‘Inflection point akin to the Age of Exploration’.
New Space Race – A continuum or rupture?
The original space race between the USA and USSR saw a series of Soviet firsts in space – satellite, dog, man, woman, moon rover – and the US catching up and outstripping with ‘Giant Leap for Mankind’ in the phenomenal Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 that cost over $30 billion and close to a decade to culminate.
Clocking US President John F. Kennedy’s deadline for the moon race, with time pending, the successful moon landing, changed the tack in the stiff rivalry, paving the way for competitive collaboration.
This phase is best exemplified by the Apollo-Soyuz joint missions, mutual disarmament, and later on the ISS (International Space Station) – often held as the shining beacon of space cooperation even between countries with antagonistic policies or diverging interests.
The major difference between the ‘Space Race’ and the ‘New Space’ era is the unparalleled liberalization and unshackled access. What was hitherto a monopoly of national space agencies, with core technology limited to only a handful of nations’ has achieved the semblance of a ‘level playing field’ where entry barriers, as well as cost of launches, are drastically being reduced.
From just one satellite in orbit in 1957, to 50 put in orbit just by the USA by the mid-1960s, today over 10,000 satellites are hovering above the Earth. Most of these are by private companies, not government entities.
“We have entered into a new era of space exploration. In the past decade, there has been an incredible acceleration in the number of satellites in orbit”, says Clayton Mowry, President, International Astronautical Federation (IAF).
“Today, the highest number of satellites in space are by Space X and OneWeb respectively, which are both private companies. New Space actors are looking at ways to utilize capability, creating a billion-dollar economy”, he adds.
This seamless transition from space being a restricted-access turf of national space agencies to a level-playing field of entrepreneurship and innovation is certainly one of the defining shifts in the past decades.
Be it mapping and navigation that powers the billion-dollar location economy, or the utility of satellite imagery and analytics for agriculture, infra monitoring, planning & designing, mining & metallurgy, space has been a game-changer, adding immense economic value.
“The contours of our current space-age include more diverse actors, both in terms of countries and private sector actors. All of them are aided by a lower cost of space access. As more and more countries have their space agencies, space is no longer just about large countries and their interests”, believes Alexander MacDonald, Chief Economist, NASA.
In 2014, he authored a NASA report that said the USA stands at the cusp of the Second Space Age.
“With increasing private sector involvement, commercial interests and the intrinsic motivations of individuals are increasingly becoming drivers of the industry. This creates both new challenges and new opportunities”, adds MacDonald.
As per a report by Brookings, currently, 20 countries across four continents have civil space budgets of more than $100 million, while 70 countries have active space programs”.
“New companies are leveraging small satellites to build large broadband constellations including SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat Canada, Samsung, and Boeing, among others”, says the same report.
However, commercial interests and for-profit pursuits haven’t reduced the impact of geopolitical tussles in space. Instead, they have become more prominent over the years, as China emerged as a spacing power with a series of its firsts – the first reusable launch vehicle, the first methane rocket, the first SAR rocket etc.
Apart from the ISS, which is set to be decommissioned in 2030, China is the only country in the world with a space station, Tiangong One.
Though efforts are underway to build space stations, including by private companies such as Axios Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman before 2027.
Russia, which launched the world’s first space station, Salyut-1 in 1971, and which operated the Mir space station till 2001, also plans to launch its new space station.
Roscosmos, the country’s space agency, has invited BRICS countries to join their space station program. As a consequence of the sanctions against Russia post the Ukraine invasion, space cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is deepening. Russia also plans to develop methane-fuelled rockets by 2027.
The launch of Luna-25, Russia’s first moon mission since 1976, was replete with ‘Back to the USSR’ symbolism. It conjured imagery of technological autarky as if a throwback to the old space race. Vladimir Putin affirmed this by saying that the Soviet Union developed most of the cutting-edge tech in situations similar to sanctions.
Meanwhile, Russia has become a shadow of its former self in space capability, despite maintaining an edge in powerful rockets, launchers, and an enviable space defense ecosystem.
The Russian space sector has, off late, seen cost overruns, delays, and endemic corruption. In 2018, Alexei Kudrin, Russia’s Former Head of Financial Audit and ex-Finance Minister, red-flagged financial irregularities in the country’s space agency.
“We have big problems with Roscosmos. There is simply irrational spending and all sorts of violations of discipline. Procurement procedures are carried out incorrectly, prices are too high, a lot of funds are wasted on unfinished objects or on objects that are simply idle, funds in the accounts have not been used for months, ” he said to news agency TASS in 2018.
Russia’s flagship Vostochny spaceport project, aimed to reduce the reliance on Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the world’s first and largest, which is leased until 2050 for an annual rent of $100 million, is still under construction.
A RAND corporation paper titled ‘Great Power Cooperation in the Global Commons, quotes Ivan Moiseev, head of the Moscow-based Russian Space Policy Institute, who believes that after the success of Space X’s Crew Dragon, Russia has lost its monopoly on flights to the International Space Station.
Creating the Ecosystem
With an ever-increasing demand for space data, imagery, applications, and the need to secure space assets, the pie is ever-widening. The NewSpace market, with its high specialization, is today more about collaboration, niche area expertise, and diversification.
Though ‘Creative Destruction’ is yet to unravel, and the pace of the sector is exuberant, unarguably the most dazzling success story of New Space is Space X, founded and led by the maverick tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Space X rockets have largely become the standard-fare workhorses for carrying US missions. The company is a vendor for NASA as well as the Department of Defence( DOD ). Much of the drastic cost-reduction in launches, which has broken down entry barriers, is attributable to technology advances, miniaturization, and conducive policy frameworks, as well Space X being the trailblazer.
As per a recent report by BryceTech, in Q2 this year SpaceX lifted nearly 10 times as much mass to orbit in the second quarter of this year as its closest competitor, the nation of China. While Space X carried a payload of 214,095 Kg to outer space, CASC carried 23,069 Kg. Third came Roscosmos with 8100 Kg, followed by China National Space Agency ( 8,082 kg).
With most of NASA as well as other government department launches carried by Space X, the picture is quite interesting.
More than 80% of the payload has been carried by Space X alone, and the gap between it, and its nearest competitor is huge, which will take a long time to bridge. This gives the USA a cutting edge over China in terms of the number of launches as well as the payload capacity.
New Outreachs
With new accords such as Artemis and voluntary self-imposed bans on ASATs ( Anti-Satellite weapons), the USA is articulating its new space doctrine, which includes a wide range of participants.
China has its vision of space, which it describes as peaceful and aimed at socio-economic benefits. Beijing has long-standing space and technology outreach in Africa and Latin America.
In July, NASA chief Bill Nelson, on a visit to Brazil, offered the country NISAR satellite imagery to combat Amazon deforestation. Since 1999, Brazil’s Space Agency has a deep-seated partnership with China for agro and environmental monitoring.
China also plans to build a spaceport in Djibouti, the strategic Horn of Africa, where Beijing already maintains a naval base. Earlier this year, the government of Djibouti signed an MoU with China’s Hong Kong Aerospace Technology Group ( HKATG) to construct a spaceport.
Closer home in Asia, China Supports the space programs of Myanmar and Laos, allowing them access to its space facilities for civilian purposes.
In 2021, an MoU was signed between Russia and China to build a lunar space station. As a result of US-led sanctions on Russia, space cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is poised to strengthen.
If the curtain of the ‘New Cold’ War gets drawn over the world, then what is seen as space competition between the US and China would morph into a more synergistic and interoperable collaboration between Russian and Chinese space efforts.
Sustained Multilateralism
Indian Space Program, which has seen the highs and lows of the Cold War Era, has distinguished itself by maintaining collaboration with both countries.
India’s first sounding rocket, Apache Nicke, an American sounding rocket, was carried atop a bicycle and launched from a makeshift launchpad near a Church.
When ISRO was formed in 1969, as a successor to INCOSPAR, its first major project, backed by NASA, was SITE( Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) which transmitted educational programs to the villages.
However, in 1975, India’s first satellite, Aryabhatta, was launched aboard the Soviet Kosmos-3M rocket from Kaputsin Yar launchpad near Astrakhan Oblast. India’s first man in space, Rakesh Sharma, was also a part of a Soviet mission.
Remarkably, in the spirit of multilateralism and sustained cooperation, India embarked on space collaborations and partnerships with all key players.
With the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3 and previously setting a world record for putting the highest number of satellites in orbit on a single launch vehicle, India has gained accolades for its spacing prowess.
NISAR, or the NASA-ISRO joint satellite, is the world’s first dual-frequency SAR ( Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission to monitor the Earth’s surface. It heralds the beginning of a new era in space cooperation between the India and USA, cemented by New Delhi recently joining the Artemis Accords.
“We are seeing more and more US-India space collaboration emerging between NASA and ISRO, as well as between respective industry partners of the two countries. There are multiple economic areas where we see increasing cooperation and integration – from earth observation to human spaceflight, and even to future commercial space stations”, says MacDonald.
Apart from the US and Russia, India has space collaboration agreements with over 60 countries, notably France, the third country in the world to send a satellite to space on its indigenous rocket.
New Delhi also allows SAARC countries to use ISRO’s NavIC navigation system, and shares satellite imagery for disaster management and hazard mitigation in the South Asian neighborhood. There are also plans to build ground stations and terminals in the broader South Asian region.
Inter-governmental Space Groupings
The ESA (European Space Agency), the space Agency of the 27-member European Union, is quite formidable, with its own GNSS navigation system (Galileo), state-of-the-art Earth observation Copernicus program, and spaceport in French Guiana.
ESA also has active partnerships with other space agencies such as NASA. In 1978, ESA and NASA together launched IUE (International Ultraviolet Explorer), the world’s first high-orbit telescope that operated for 18 years.
It is noteworthy that ESA, founded in 1975, is older than the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the foundational agreement of European integration. This goes on to show that space cooperation in Europe precedes abiding collaboration in a lot of areas.
China, which is known for using its Beidou navigation system as a diplomatic tool, founded APSCO ( Asia Pacific Space Cooperation Organization) in 2008. Its stated aim is to ‘promote and strengthen the development of collaborative space programs among its Member States by establishing the basis for cooperation in peaceful applications of space science and technology’.
More of a broad space forum than a space agency grouping, its members include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Mongolia, Peru, Thailand, and Turkey.
Inspired by the ESA, the African Union formed its space agency in January this year to promote space cooperation, align space policies, and streamline efforts between the African Union’s 55 member states. With headquarters in Cairo, sharing space with the Egyptian Space Agency.
Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa, are some of the main African players in Space. Though, since the formation of its space agency in 2020, Rwanda has been fostering many collaborations with the UN and other agencies to boost socio-economic development.
It is also among the first African countries to join the Artemis Accords. Within three years, the Rwanda Space Agency has also signed a MoU with Esri for the use of geospatial services.
Led by Mexico and Argentina in 2020, 18 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean came together to launch their regional space agency. Based in Mexico City, and with four official languages, the Latin America and Caribbean Space Agency aims to expand cooperation for peaceful space exploration.
Policy Regulations & Sustainability
As per Satellite Industry Association estimates, there could be more than 100,000 commercial satellites in orbit by 2029. With a humungous increase in the number of satellites, and nations vying to put them in orbit, space situational awareness, orbital sustainability, as well putting together a comprehensive framework for a ‘rules-based order’ in space that governs the actions of the state as well as non-state actors is of paramount importance.
Though space is often referred to as the final frontier and common province, the steady efforts towards weaponization, anti-satellite weapons, and electronic warfare measures to jam signals, risk turning it into a contested arena of great power rivalries, and an extension of terrestrial saber-rattling.
While the Outer Space Treaty (1967) unequivocally states that space is a shared resource of all of humanity that shouldn’t be monopolized or restricted, a lot more needs to be done to make the frameworks either widely acceptable to all space-faring countries or legally binding to the signatories.
The Artemis Accords is a step in the right direction, but it remains non-binding. A comprehensive mechanism still needs to be worked out to monitor and mandate space rules for all.
United Nations Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space (COPUOS) is another benchmark. It has over 100 signatories who commit to peaceful civilian use of space.
“Just a few years back, over 90 countries signed an agreement on long-term sustainability guidelines. Now these countries need to make it a part of licensing and authorization for space activities”, says Moriba Jah, a renowned space environmentalist.
In the era of burgeoning private players and states liberalizing access, and divesting control, it may be said that it is hard to determine where the buck stops when it comes to being responsible space actors – with the governments, multi-lateral organizations, or private behemoths. However creating an enabling environment and setting up rules of conduct, safety, and security is the domain of states.
“Governments are ultimately responsible because they bear the legal liability for damage and harmful interference in outer space, as well for authorizing companies and organizations to engage in space activities”, adds Jah.
Drawing an analogy with the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) is responsible for radio frequency allocation to everyone in the world, some similar arrangement needs to be worked out for orbital capacity allocation as well.
We need to make rules for what Jah deems the ‘Wild West’ of space – lack of regulations and a massive spurt in the number of launches.
Another complexity in the New Space Race is precisely what lends vigor, vibrancy, and dynamism to it: a multitude of space actors and ambitious new entrants.
“Multiplicity of space players also adds to the complexity because different countries have varied motives for space exploration. Some may want to focus on national security, while others on economic benefits, enhancing national prestige, or a mix of all. This makes it a little harder to secure agreement on many things between different space players”, asserts Dr. Brian Weeden, Director, Program Planning, Secure World Foundation.
He also stresses the need to enhance space sustainability awareness among the end-users of space data, such as space application consumers and the geo-intelligence community.
Dr. Weeden also cites the example of the working group of COPUOS and over 100+ nations who agree to it, signifying that the awareness and will on space sustainability is already there.
Time to put our act together, channelize our efforts together, align our synergies, and see the celestial as a shared heritage for posterity.
Moribah Jah rues that “there is no global coordination on how space is used, and no joint management of orbital space”, which allows countries to launch whenever they want, and from wherever till the time they incur ‘damages and harmful interference’, which remains ill-defined.
Spawning Innovation
Dividends of space pay-off not just in the form of direct benefits to millions of citizens via precise imagery and analytics, improved communication networks, and reliable early warning systems, but also the force multiplier effect on everyday consumer applications, and the boost to multiple sectors.
On the face of it, what could be a commonality between portable water purifiers and firefighter masks, except that both aim to prevent pollution? Both trace their genesis to the Apollo Space program.
And not just that.
As per Tim Marshall, be it heat-resistant clothing, laptops, wireless headsets, LEDs lights, or memory foam mattresses, all trace their origin to the ‘space race’.
Apart from turbo-charging innovation and catalyzing technology permeation, space holds a lot of other lessons for new business paradigms and sustainability endeavors.
Economist Mariana Mazzucato calls the Apollo space program the epitome of mission-oriented policy and innovation that should serve as a template for policymakers to deal with complex challenges.
Time to re-look at the Apollo and extend its spirit of collaboration, targeted outcome-focused work, and solidarity beyond national frontiers.
The global space economy is expected to hit the trillion-dollar mark by 2030, and space is an integral part of our lives today, from the most mundane applications to highly critical and classified defense operations.
The words of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of rocketry and cosmonautics, ‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but we cannot remain in the cradle forever’resonate as we prepare for a new epoch of technology transition and fast-connectivity.
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