Original subtitles

Viewers like you make this program possible.

Support your local PBS station.

Space.

Long a peaceful frontier,

it's becoming more militarized by the day.

A fight in space could be decisive

to a war on Earth.

In the near future,

we may need to exchange blows in space.

New technologies...

It's like something out of "Star Wars."

Inconceivable even ten years ago.

...are raising new questions.

What would a war in space

actually look like?

Some answers are chilling.

A nuclear-capable weapon in space

that could threaten...

Such a weapon is a doomsday weapon.

Others surprising.

Then it grabbed this other satellite.

First time we've seen that.

What's clear: space is vital not only to daily life...

Nearly every single person on this planet

uses space every day.

...but to the future of warfare.

There has not been a domain

that human beings have not figured out a way to fight in.

Why is space any different?

"Space Wars,"

right now, on "NOVA."

February 5, 2022.

500 miles north of Moscow,

a Russian rocket lifts off,

carrying a satellite named Cosmos 2553.

The U.S. military detects something highly unusual.

Cosmos 2553 was deployed

into a 2,000-kilometer orbit.

That's actually kind of high.

There's not a lot of satellites out there.

The altitude raises concerns.

It went to a very unique place in space,

deep into the radiation belt,

where spacecraft generally do not want to operate.

Congressman Mike Turner,

chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,

issues a cryptic message.

News outlets immediately pick up the story.

CBS News has learned the U.S. has informed Congress...

...we have a "serious national security threat"...

...on Russia's efforts to deploy

a nuclear anti-satellite system in space.

They suspected that the Russians

were actually testing the development

of a nuclear bomb in orbit

that they would be able to detonate

at any time that they desired.

A nuclear explosion in space could devastate

the massive networks of satellites

that underpin the technology of modern life.

Everybody in the United States

makes use of space every day, whether they realize it or not.

It's now become part of everything that we do.

Altogether, more than 12,000 active satellites

are orbiting the Earth,

from 100 to 22,000 miles above our heads.

GPS satellites--

our phones use them to pinpoint our location

almost anywhere on Earth.

Weather satellites--

without them, killer storms could strike without warning.

Communication satellites--

essential for keeping us connected and informed.

And eyes in the sky-- peering down, gathering data,

monitoring everything from crop growth

to the global supply chain.

And peering up,

telescopes, helping us understand

the story of our universe.

Pretty much there's no part of your life

that is not touched by space.

Our society is more reliant on space today

than it was yesterday,

and it will be more reliant tomorrow

than it is today.

And that curve's been moving upward,

really, since we entered the space domain as humans.

Space has also become fundamental

to how the American military operates.

Satellites are essential

for battlefield communication and targeting.

Without them, commanders are blind.

The more sophisticated these space-based systems,

the greater edge they provide

and the more valuable targets they become.

So, in 2019, the U.S.

created the Space Force,

America's first new branch of the military

in more than 70 years.

At the Combined Space Operations Center in California,

service members known as "guardians"

prepare for potential conflicts.

Former deputy commander of U.S. Space Command

Lieutenant General John Shaw

directed many Space Force missions.

The reason that we have a Space Force

is, you need to be able to develop,

organize, train, and equip

for a potential fight in space,

which could ultimately be decisive

to a war on Earth.

Roughly 100 countries

have satellites of all kinds in space,

but the U.S. remains the dominant military player,

far outspending its nearest competitor, China.

And with more satellites launched in the past five years

than in the last six decades combined,

scientists and engineers are being recruited

into the battle to dominate space.

Humans have always looked to the sky,

wondering what lies beyond.

But today, there are eyes looking back,

and increasingly, they are military eyes.

Intelligence analysts for the U.S. government

are alert to the shift.

Chirag Parikh served in the White House

on the National Space Council,

where he prepared for possible space war scenarios.

Imagine an extreme scenario.

Two nations are in conflict.

One decides to detonate a nuclear weapon in space.

Because space has no atmosphere,

there is no mushroom cloud or heat blast,

but there is an electromagnetic pulse, or E.M.P.,

that fries the electronics

of satellites within its line of sight.

On the ground, cell towers,

emergency services, the electrical grid all fail.

Crisis ensues.

Such a weapon is a kind of a doomsday weapon.

It's so indiscriminate.

If Russia were to detonate a nuclear weapon in space,

it would destroy Russia's own satellites,

our satellites, Chinese satellites,

commercial satellites.

It would endanger the International Space Station

and the Chinese space station.

In the 80 years since the first atomic bombs

were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan,

the world has been building nuclear weapons

of all shapes and sizes.

These bombs either split or join atoms

to release huge amounts of energy.

And while, on Earth,

nuclear explosions unleash destructive blast waves,

along with heat, blinding light, and radiation,

in space, they do something different.

In the late 1950s and early '60s,

the U.S. and Soviet Union

conducted eight nuclear tests in space.

The largest was called Starfish Prime.

In 1962,

the U.S. launched a 1.4-megaton hydrogen bomb

and detonated it 250 miles above the South Pacific.

This footage shows a high-altitude explosion.

When you set off a nuclear weapon in space,

there'll be a flash of X-rays and gamma rays that travels out,

and when those high-energy particles hit satellites,

even thousands of miles away,

they can cause severe damage.

The detonation unexpectedly destroyed

about a third of the 24 satellites

orbiting the world at the time.

It took out, like, for example, the U.K.'s first satellite.

Gone.

And it didn't stop there.

The electromagnetic pulse was so severe

that it impacted the electrical grid

and knocked out streetlights in Honolulu.

Dangerous high-energy particles released in the explosion

were trapped by Earth's magnetic field,

continuing to damage satellites for months.

It was a sobering lesson

that led to an international ban on nuclear weapons in space,

but it underscored an unavoidable reality.

There is this idea that,

"Hey, we don't want to weaponize space.

"We don't want to militarize space.

We want space to be peaceful."

And yet, the uncomfortable fact is,

it's really been militarized from the very beginning.

Even in the early 1960s,

most of the satellites we were putting up

were for military purposes.

But that militarization was conducted

largely out of sight,

while public attention focused on NASA's peaceful exploration.

MAN Burn looks good.

For many years, the United States

did not like to talk about offensive space capability,

because the last thing we wanted to encourage anyone to do

was to think about shooting down satellites.

When we sent the astronauts to space in the 1960s,

the intelligence community would've liked

for the astronauts to not take any pictures

looking back at the Earth,

because they were afraid that would remind people

about spy satellites.

NASA said no-- like, you couldn't come back

and say, "Oh, we forgot to look at the Earth."

There was a deep sense of, "We need to keep space secret."

So it is a real change of mindset,

bringing space into the realm of open discussion

as just a regular part of warfare.

There's been a real shift,

I would say just over the past ten years,

in how comfortable the United States is

in talking about its interest in and need for

military capabilities in space.

We are ready to repel all challengers,

and any attempt to defeat the U.S. in space will fail.

Thank you, General.

The White House later clarified

that the Russian satellite, Cosmos 2553,

which initially caused so much alarm,

was in fact not carrying a live nuclear bomb,

but they suspect it was a part of a program

to eventually deploy one.

What's clear is that the militarization of space

is only accelerating.

We have always used space for military purposes.

And we are now starting to think about it

as a domain where, you know,

we, we may need to, you know, exchange blows.

But exchanging blows in space

turns out to be more complicated

than military leaders--

and even some science fiction writers--

have imagined.

You know, as an engineer in aerospace,

I love science fiction movies,

but little of what you see, for example, in "Star Wars,"

is actually physically possible.

In a single scene of "Rogue One,"

there are at least five things going on

that challenge our understanding of physics.

First, most of these spacecraft

that are around this Earth-like planet

are hovering.

We know you're not going to hover in low-Earth orbit.

If you're in low-Earth orbit,

like the International Space Station is,

it's like you're on railroad tracks

and you're going 17,000 miles an hour.

The second thing is,

you're seeing people flying spacecraft,

like TIE fighters and X-wings,

that are flying and diving as though it's a dogfight.

That's not how things work in space.

On Earth, fighter planes turn

by pushing against the air.

But in the vacuum of space,

there's no air to push against,

so spacecraft can't actually turn on a dime

or perform tight maneuvers.

The only way to maneuver is with your rocket engines.

And because you're going so fast,

to change your direction

like you see in a "Star Wars" movie

would take so much energy,

you couldn't carry enough fuel to do that.

The third thing is, they're dropping bombs

as though there's gravity.

That's not how it works.

When you let go of something,

it's just going to fly along with you.

The fourth issue is, space is a vacuum.

So, there's no sound.

There is no medium for sound to travel through.

So no explosions.

And, oh, by the way, those explosions are unrealistic.

It's in a vacuum.

And that explosion will be gone in milliseconds.

So "Star Wars" is great science fiction,

but it's not based in reality.

So what is the reality?

The rules of physics

make movement in space very predictable,

so objects can be easy to track.

But with more than 12,000 human-made satellites

now orbiting the planet,

the U.S. military partners with private companies,

like COMSPOC in Pennsylvania,

to monitor what's actually happening up there.

Paul Graziani is the company's founder and C.E.O.

A satellite is anything

that's orbiting around another body.

So, for instance,

the moon is a satellite of the Earth

and the Earth is a satellite of the sun.

So the term "satellite" can mean an active satellite

or it can mean a very tiny piece of space debris.

There are a lot of objects up there.

Right now, we're tracking around 49,000,

is what the U.S. government tracks.

And of those 49,000,

roughly 12,000 of them are operational satellites.

The rest of them are spacecraft that are no longer operational

or space debris.

Satellites travel around the Earth in predictable paths.

To stay in orbit,

a satellite has to move forward fast enough

to counteract the gravity pulling it downward.

Because the Earth is curved,

if a satellite moves at the right speed,

it can keep falling

but never reach the ground.

This way, it moves in a continuous loop--

an orbit.

So, you need enough speed

to keep going in your constant direction.

But orbits of satellites have all sorts of variables.

We developed software that takes inputs

from telescopes and radars and antennas,

and from those inputs, we figure out

where those objects in space are at any moment

and where they're going to be going.

The term used by the military or national security side

is "space domain awareness."

What is that object and what might it be able to do?

Back in the Apollo days,

there were maybe a few dozen satellites operating in space.

A decade ago, it had gotten up to 1,200 satellites.

Today, we have over 12,000,

and we're looking at maybe another factor-ten increase,

to more than 100,000 satellites,

a decade from now.

Almost all satellites operate in one of three orbital realms.

The three main orbital regimes

are low-Earth orbit,

medium-Earth orbit,

and geosynchronous orbit.

And you can think of low-Earth orbit as being

between 250 and 1,200 miles above the Earth.

What we're looking at here

are the low-Earth orbit satellites

that we are tracking currently.

Joe Callaro is COMSPOC's director of operations.

In LEO, the accuracy of the data in our system

is between 25 and 50 meters.

Low-Earth orbit, or LEO,

is the easiest to get to.

It also allows the fastest communication with the ground,

so today, nearly 90% of all satellites operate there,

including the International Space Station

and the growing number of commercial satellite networks,

like the SpaceX Starlink system.

There's a lot of satellites, there's a lot of debris,

but space is a huge volume.

And so, while it looks

relatively dense with satellites,

there's way more space between these objects than it appears.

The vastness of space is hard to comprehend.

Even the relatively small area

where satellites normally operate

is about 75 trillion cubic miles,

roughly 300 times larger than the volume of Earth itself.

I've shrunk the Earth down to 16 inches across.

This means that every inch is about 500 miles.

Um, most things are actually happening

within arm's reach of the planet, so to speak.

We talked about three orbital regimes:

low-Earth orbit, within about 1,000 kilometers

of the Earth's surface;

medium-Earth orbit,

so about two feet away from this 16-inch globe;

and geosynchronous orbit,

which gets a little bit of an arm stretch,

but about four feet away from the Earth.

So what we're looking at here is the geosynchronous belt.

It is the furthest orbit regime

that we typically use for satellites.

In geosynchronous orbit, around 22,000 miles up,

a satellite moves in perfect sync with the Earth's rotation,

so it can stay over a fixed point,

putting it in a perfect position

for telecommunications, weather forecasting,

or spying.

It was Arthur C. Clarke,

a science fiction writer,

who started to formulate this idea

that satellites that are in orbit in that belt

are actually moving around the Earth

at the same rate the Earth is rotating.

And so they're always in that same spot in the sky.

But some of the most important satellites

sit between LEO and GEO,

in a relatively quiet realm called medium-Earth orbit.

So, this is medium-Earth orbit, or MEO,

and this is where we have put our GPS satellites.

It's not hard to imagine the disaster

if these suddenly stopped working.

A Navy warship is patrolling the ocean.

The ship is guided by GPS satellites.

Suddenly, the GPS signals go out.

They can't navigate, they have decision uncertainty,

operations grind to a halt.

The ship is a massive sitting duck

in the middle of the ocean.

In recent years, the U.S. Navy

has been preparing for just such a scenario.

Sailors used to be taught celestial navigation

to determine where their ship was.

Well, they stopped doing that when they got GPS.

Why waste their time doing that?

But there's a danger in becoming too dependent

on a utility that's vulnerable to attack from an adversary.

The Navy realized there's a non-zero chance

that the Global Positioning System

might not be operating to our satisfaction.

Well, celestial navigation was taught

for nearly 200 years at the Naval Academy,

so they have reintroduced the use of sextants.

They want to have a backup

for a really bad day,

should our adversaries take out the GPS constellation.

The Global Positioning System

is a group of more than 30 satellites

in medium-Earth orbit,

about 12,000 miles above the planet.

GPS was developed to solve a targeting problem.

If you're a ballistic missile submarine,

and you surface and you're, or come near the surface,

and you're ready to launch your missiles,

how do you know where you are?

Well, a really nice way to do it

would be to get precise signals from satellites in space.

Each satellite broadcasts a radio signal

providing its location and precise time

from an on-board atomic clock

accurate to within a billionth of a second.

GPS satellites are all synchronized

on the same clock.

And they rely on communicating that timing signal

back down to the surface of the Earth.

And then our receiver figures out the difference

of when we receive those signals from different satellites

to calculate where we are and how fast we're moving.

The 1990s Gulf War was the first major conflict

that used GPS widely,

and it was a game changer.

It allowed a precision of weaponry

that we had never seen before.

In World War II, it took 1,000 bombs

to destroy a factory that you were going after.

Whereas, in the early 1990s,

one airplane could actually hit targets

with precision with just a few bombs

that are GPS-guided.

So, that revolutionized warfare.

Because it came out of the military,

GPS was classified

and held as a top-secret capability.

But eventually,

the U.S. government said, "No, this is a utility

that should be provided to the world."

At first, the accuracy of the signal

made available to the public

was intentionally degraded.

In the 1990s,

with the civilian version of the signal,

300 feet was as accurate as you could be.

In 2000, President Clinton removed that limitation

for the civilian population.

And that opened up all sorts of uses.

Today, anyone with a GPS receiver

knows exactly where they are nearly anywhere on Earth.

They also have access

to the satellites' atomic clocks.

Modern banking relies on these clocks

to precisely timestamp every digital transaction,

from stock trades to ATM withdrawals.

GPS is crucial for both the modern economy

and modern warfare.

I had the privilege of having

the Global Positioning System under my command

out at Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado Springs.

And the center of GPS

is an operations floor with eight people

that operate that entire constellation

for both military and civilian applications.

The U.S. is not alone in having a global navigation system.

The European Union, the Chinese, and the Russians

all have independent constellations of satellites.

In fact,

your phone is tracking satellites

from all four of those constellations.

But these openly available signals

leave a crucial technology vulnerable to attack.

An adversary could want

to eliminate those GPS satellites.

Right now, though, we've seen adversaries,

when they want to counter a navigation system from space,

do localized jamming on the ground.

The radio signals that GPS satellites send

are weak by the time they reach the ground,

so local jammers broadcasting on the same frequency

can easily drown them out.

It's actually happening all over the world,

and it's affected civilian air traffic.

A plane carrying the E.U. Commission president,

Ursula von der Leyen,

was targeted by GPS jamming

while trying to land in Bulgaria.

Russia regularly jams over Europe,

and recently, the U.S. has done the same

in the Caribbean and Middle East.

But intentional interference

has extended beyond just GPS.

Good afternoon.

Russia launched cyberattacks in late February

against commercial satellite communications networks

in an effort to disrupt Ukrainian command and control

during the invasion.

In the hours before Russia invaded Ukraine

in February 2022,

Russia launched a cyberattack that knocked out

satellite-based communications and internet systems

across Ukraine.

Ukraine turned to Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX

and owner of a satellite constellation called Starlink,

for help.

There were people in the Ukrainian military

tweeting at Elon Musk directly, saying,

"Can you please help us out?", you know.

So, Elon was able to snap his fingers

and get it into the country very quickly.

Starlink provides satellite-based internet

using a novel approach.

Instead of covering the whole Earth

with a few large satellites in geosynchronous orbit,

it uses a constellations of small satellites

in low-Earth orbit.

So instead of sending a signal all the way to geosynchronous

and bouncing it back down,

you just send it up a few hundred miles and back down.

These satellites are communicating

with their nearest neighbor,

and their nearest neighbor is communicating

with their next-nearest neighbor.

That makes this network happen.

Starlink brought Ukraine back online

and helped level the battlefield.

The Russians were not happy.

And the head of the Russian Space Agency

even hinted that Elon Musk personally

might be a legitimate military target.

As the war continued, SpaceX appeared to be

limiting the service for certain regions and uses.

There were a lot of people that said,

"Look," you know, "it's kind of scary that you can have

"this capability you depend upon for your military,

"and it can just be turned off

"not because a government has thought about it

"or a military has said, 'Okay, this meets our needs,'

but a private citizen."

It is concerning that one person has so much control.

In 2025,

there were over 12,000 operating satellites on orbit.

About 70% of those are from one U.S. company, SpaceX,

and their Starlink constellation.

SpaceX has been responsible

for probably around two-thirds of national security launches

in recent years.

They're now putting up 50 satellites

at least once a week.

So, Elon Musk owns something like three-quarters

of all the satellites that the human race has operating.

SpaceX recently began providing the U.S. military

with a customized version of Starlink called Starshield.

It's one of several military satellite constellations

being developed for communications, spying,

missile defense, and GPS.

It's really an entirely new paradigm,

having large numbers of relatively disposable satellites

operating at a low altitude.

But even these satellites

might be vulnerable to another kind of weapon

that people have long imagined--

lasers.

Imagine this.

A series of high-powered lasers

conduct a coordinated attack.

Ground based and space-based weapons

hit our intelligence satellites.

They destroy optics and fry electronics.

Suddenly, we can no longer see behind enemy lines.

Our military and intelligence services

are rendered blind.

General Atomics is one of the world's largest

privately owned defense companies.

In their lab in San Diego, California,

Robert Peterkin demonstrates

how laser technologies can be used

for military purposes.

Since the day the laser was invented,

in 1960,

people have been imagining ways to weaponize lasers.

Lasers work by amplifying and aligning light particles

so all of the energy is focused

into a single, concentrated beam.

One type of laser technology

has been deployed as a weapon for years.

It's called "dazzling."

So this is the small laser

we're going to use to demonstrate laser dazzling.

We're ready to go, so let's turn off the laboratory lights.

I'm going to switch the laser on

and intercept the camera

located a couple of meters across the room.

The green laser is about to hit the aperture of the camera.

And on the camera,

you should start to see some green laser light.

Many satellites rely on optical sensors,

like those in digital cameras.

But these sensors can be vulnerable.

As I continue to slightly move the laser beam...

...I can obliterate the image.

The laser intensity is overwhelming

the electronics in that camera,

but it causes no damage.

So when I move the laser beam away,

the image reappears.

If my laser was powerful enough,

I could, in principle, dazzle a satellite from the ground.

Both the Russians and the Chinese have

a truck-mounted laser dazzling system

that is deployable-- they've, they've displayed them.

It's a weapon-- it's a weapon system.

It's a kind of optical jamming, if you will.

And we're seeing our adversaries fielding this

because we see the attempted interruptions

in our satellite systems.

The U.S., China, and Russia are all known

to have laser dazzling systems,

though none have acknowledged using them

against adversaries' satellites.

The U.S. has claimed that both Russia and China

have used lasers to try and dazzle American spy satellites,

possibly American commercial imaging satellites.

Nobody wants to give many details,

and they also don't, you know, they don't want to...

You know, they don't want to let the Russians know,

was the dazzling effective or not.

And higher-powered lasers can not only dazzle, but destroy,

though the details of the weapon used for this test

remain restricted.

If the power is sufficiently high

and I'm able to keep the beam on the drone

for sufficiently long,

I can defeat the drone,

and this drone will then fall to the ground

and will no longer be able to bother me.

At close range, a 30-kilowatt laser,

the equivalent of 30 million laser pointers

concentrated into one beam,

can burn through solid steel.

This hole was made here, in this laboratory,

with a laser of several tens of kilowatts,

but the details of how weapons-class lasers work

are held at a higher classification level.

Laser weapons have been used on land and at sea,

but putting them in space is a challenge.

Lasers are large consumers of power,

so you need large battery banks, you need large solar arrays.

To date, no nation has acknowledged

putting a laser weapon in space.

But because it can operate over large distances,

and it's not attenuated by an atmosphere,

directed energy will be the weapon of choice

in future space combat.

But for now,

many military satellites are potentially vulnerable

to large-scale attack from a more conventional weapon.

Our spy satellites detect a ballistic missile launch.

But this isn't going to the other side of the Earth.

This is going into space.

These weapon systems,

known as direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons,

attack missile-warning satellites,

communication satellites, intelligence satellites.

Within minutes, these satellites are destroyed.

Our military and intelligence services go dark.

At a Space Force base in Colorado,

missile defense units use satellites

to scan for infrared heat signatures

of enemy missile launches

and coordinate intercepts.

With a handful of these satellites in orbit,

we can surveil the whole world

and see any rocket launch anywhere on the planet.

An attack on these satellites could open the door

for undetected missile launches.

There's been five anti-satellite missile operations

done so far.

And the first was actually conducted by the United States.

In 1985, the U.S. launched an anti-satellite rocket

from an F-15 fighter

and blew one of its old satellites

into hundreds of pieces.

At the time, the Soviet Union had a good number

of satellites operating in low-Earth orbit

that they were going to use

in a potential conflict with the United States.

And we were motivated at the time to say,

"How do we deprive them of that capability?"

The test served as a cautionary tale,

not only for the Soviet Union,

but for anyone with hardware in space.

It's relatively easy to blow up a satellite,

but that generates tons of debris.

And that makes space unusable for everyone.

Despite the risks,

in 2007, China used a missile

to destroy one of their own defunct satellites.

There are countries who are pursuing

very aggressive, very impressive

counter-space capabilities, which I cannot go into here

because of classification restrictions.

People talk about hitting a bullet with a bullet.

The satellite you're shooting at

is probably traveling at about 17,000 miles an hour.

And if you're coming at it from the opposite direction

at 5,000 miles an hour, you,

that's a, that's an incredibly high closure rate.

And kinetic energy is equal

to one-half mass times velocity squared.

That's a big velocity squared.

So you produce a tremendous amount of kinetic energy

at impact

that just totally obliterates the satellite

and creates this large field of debris.

The Chinese satellite strike

created thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.

And the farther an object is from Earth,

the less gravity and atmospheric drag it encounters,

so the longer it stays in orbit.

Now, that altitude was 500 miles.

And debris at that altitude is going to persist

for tens of years, if not a century or longer.

Just a year later, the U.S. announced

that a disabled American satellite

around 130 miles up

carrying highly toxic rocket fuel

was in danger of falling to Earth.

And so the U.S. said, "You know what?

"We have this satellite that's not working.

"It's filled with this chemical.

"We don't know where it's going to crash.

"It'd be bad for people's health.

We better shoot it down."

Officials were concerned

that the satellite's hydrazine fuel tank

might survive reentry and crash in a populated area.

A mission was given to U.S. Strategic Command,

where I was at the time.

And this was truly a mission to protect humans.

You'll see the intercept, you'll see the hit of the mass.

There you go.

And what we're watching right now is this cloud

that's forming right here.

The U.S. will swear up and down it was a safety hazard.

I've always said, "Well, clearly they were doing this operation

in response to the Chinese."

I can tell you that was not the intent

of the mission at all.

But if I was putting myself in a pair of Chinese shoes,

I would, I would assume that that was,

there was a demonstration there.

Some questioned whether the shoot down was necessary,

but because the satellite was relatively low,

the debris quickly reentered the atmosphere and burned up.

Then, in 2019,

India shot down a test satellite with a missile,

and, in 2021,

just three months before invading Ukraine,

Russia made a move.

I was actually on the operations floor

at United States Space Command in November of 2021.

And I was dismayed as we saw the launch happen.

The Russians kinetically intercepted

Cosmos 1408,

which was a defunct intelligence satellite.

And we started to see that we no longer had

one target satellite, but a field of debris.

My assessment is that they conducted an actual intercept

just to prove they could do it

and say that, that no one could keep them from doing it.

Russia defended the test and accused the U.S.

of accelerating the militarization of space.

They did it at an altitude of 250 miles,

which happened to be the same altitude

as the International Space Station.

MAN Hey, Mark, good morning.

Sorry for the early call.

We were recently informed of a satellite breakup

and need to have you guys

start reviewing the safe-haven procedure.

NASA required the astronauts

to shelter in their emergency spacecraft

and they had to begin maneuvering

the International Space Station

to avoid this debris.

The astronauts were unscathed,

but for months, the space station had to maneuver

to stay clear of the fragments.

Much of that debris has fallen out of orbit already,

but a lot remains.

We're still tracking hundreds of pieces of debris

from that particular event.

So far, nations have only

shot and hit their own satellites.

But given the danger posed

by a single tiny fragment of debris,

the prospect of a full-scale, anti-satellite

missile battle in space

is daunting.

A massive barrage of anti-satellite missiles

creates tens of thousands of pieces of debris.

This is when the nightmare scenario begins.

Known as the Kessler Syndrome, this debris cascades

and intersects with other satellites,

causing them to be destroyed, causing more debris.

And in a self-perpetuating chain reaction,

thousands of satellites get destroyed.

Chain reaction or not,

space junk is already a problem.

Just because you're up there moving 17,000 miles an hour

doesn't mean everything is moving

in the same direction as you.

In fact, very little is moving in the same direction as you.

Orbits all have different orientations.

So it's not about the pieces that are in your orbit,

it's about the pieces that are at your altitude

but have different orbital paths.

And the biggest risk is the piece coming at you

from a perpendicular direction

that's going to hit you at 17,000 miles an hour.

Space junk comes in all sizes,

from spent rocket stages, to defunct satellites,

to lost astronaut gloves, to errant screws.

Recently, a small untracked piece of debris

hit the Chinese space station.

It hit their evacuation module

that they were planning to go back home on.

There was no loss of life,

but it could have been much worse.

A massive collision between two satellites happened in 2009.

A U.S. communications satellite inadvertently hit

a defunct Russian satellite

and it created an enormous debris field.

It's not clear how close we are

to reaching a Kessler threshold

that could start a chain reaction

and render orbits unusable.

Or if we'll ever get there.

Space is enormously vast.

Even though there are more than 12,000 satellites

and tens of thousands of more pieces of debris,

stuff is not constantly bumping into each other.

Others believe the chain reaction

is already underway,

even if it looks different than in the movies.

In the movie "Gravity,"

everything got shredded in about half-an-hour.

But really, this happens over decades.

Like most environmental disasters,

it's a very slow-moving car crash.

I think the Kessler chain reaction is already happening.

Certainly, in some orbital regimes,

there's enough debris

that it's not the problem of just waiting

to see if things hit each other

and statistically calculating the probability,

it's, how good are your dodge maneuver schemes

and, and how, how well can you control the flow of traffic.

Most satellites rely on solar panels

to power their onboard electronics.

But they also carry small amounts of fuel

to enable maneuvering with thrusters.

In 2025, SpaceX had to do 300,000 maneuvers

to make sure their spacecraft did not impact

either a piece of debris or another satellite.

So this is really getting, I think,

to the edge of being tenable.

I really worry, if we go from 10,000 satellites

to 100,000 satellites,

it may no longer be possible to successfully do

all the dodging that's needed.

I think we're going to learn the hard way.

Most new satellites are equipped with thrusters,

but the same technology that can help satellites maneuver

can also enable another kind of attack.

Imagine a number of small, agile satellites

approaching some of our key national security assets.

Suddenly, we start losing communications.

GPS starts getting jammed.

Other satellites are being moved out of their orbits.

It's hard to know exactly what's happening,

but it's clear these attacks are something new.

Governments rarely talk openly

about military operations in space,

but in Southern California,

one private company has glimpsed

some of the cutting-edge technologies

that are driving space warfare.

ExoAnalytic runs a network

of small optical telescopes that track objects

in geosynchronous orbit, more than 22,000 miles up.

MJ Jeffries oversees the network.

So here at ExoAnalytic,

we operate a global network of telescopes.

On the map right here,

you're seeing all of our observatories.

We're in South Africa, Morocco, Spain,

France, Greece.

We have them smattered across Australia,

the United States and Hawaii.

We're also down here in both Argentina and Chile.

The telescope network is a series of 40 observatories,

all around the world, about 400 telescopes total.

So right now I'm going to click into telescope 1818.

If you look at the map, in the lower left-hand corner,

it shows you that we have a target symbol

around Western Australia,

and that's where this observatory is.

And I can go in and zoom in on the night sky in real time.

Now, as I zoom in, we're seeing a live picture

coming in from the telescope.

I can jump over to a telescope in Morocco,

come over here to France-- any of them are at our disposal.

ExoAnalytic can detect

the light reflected by even small objects

from 22,000 miles away.

With one telescope and one picture,

we can see something about this size,

but using ten telescopes co-located,

and putting all those frames together,

we can track something down about this size.

All of the observations that we take

with a part of our telescope network

are what's called "not classified,"

because it's just a passive collection of the night sky.

So right now, that's about 700 active objects.

Now, of those 700 objects,

30 of them are not in the public catalogue.

These 30 objects include

classified reconnaissance and military satellites

that the Space Force doesn't publicly discuss.

But because it's hard to hide in space,

even the infrared detection satellites

that anchor the U.S. missile defense system, called SBIRS,

are visible.

Currently, we're tracking SBIRS GEO-4, parked up at GEO.

And we can see that it's positioned

above the African continent.

Since it's a geostationary satellite,

it always maintains this same position.

It doesn't move to the left or move to the right.

And sometimes, ExoAnalytic finds surprises.

In 2021, China launched a satellite

into geosynchronous orbit.

The stated purpose of Shijian, or SJ-21,

was debris removal.

So this gets launched up, it arrived at GEO,

and it does a maneuver to go and rendezvous

around another Chinese satellite called Compass G2.

And then it goes and actually captures Compass G2.

So you've got these two objects, right,

that are orbiting the Earth at thousands of miles an hour,

and you've got to move them close to one another

with imperfect knowledge, right, about what their orbits are

so that when they touch, they don't hit each other

at, like, 100 miles an hour, right?

That would be bad.

So you can see right now, you have SJ-21

and you have Compass G2 next to it that's spinning.

In a moment here, you're going to see,

instead of that square spinning, it's going to be stuck.

Now it's stuck.

SJ-21 may have grabbed onto the other satellite with an arm,

a maneuver ExoAnalytic had never seen before.

That was a pretty big deal.

So now we have to ask ourselves, what are they going to do?

Suddenly, after weeks of orbiting together,

both satellites disappeared.

In January 2022,

I went to go see the location of SJ-21

and there was nothing there.

So it was a pretty big effort for our team

to go and refind the satellite,

but once we did, we saw that SJ-21

was moving very quickly east to west.

Like a tow truck, SJ-21 grabbed another satellite

and moved it 2,000 miles, stopped, released it,

and then SJ-21 returned 2,000 miles back

to the geosynchronous belt.

China is doing

some very cutting-edge things in space

and demonstrating capabilities

that I think the U.S. in general,

and the D.o.D. in particular,

wishes it had.

And so that's causing some, some concerns.

China insists they disposed of a defunct satellite

as part of a debris removal test.

But many instead saw a public demonstration

of a tool easy to repurpose for offense

in the event of a conflict.

Yeah, it, it's worrisome.

Of course, they, they'll tell you it's for peaceful purposes.

The United States has not done anything like that.

And that alone would've been remarkable

for the career of SJ-21.

But then, in January 2025,

China launched another satellite, SJ-25,

to rendezvous with SJ-21.

And then sure enough, right around July of 2025,

we saw them dock.

The publicly available information states

that SJ-25 is some sort of a refueling satellite.

There was a fuel transfer from SJ-25 to SJ-21

that replenished its tanks.

Remember, in space,

if you want to get somewhere fast,

you have to spend a lot of fuel.

Fuel is the most important expendable resource

that you have.

Fuel determines how often you can maneuver,

how fast you can maneuver.

And you can imagine,

if you no longer had fuel as a limiter,

what you could do.

My response to seeing SJ-21 do the towing operation

and then do the refueling operation

was kind of some respect.

And it was a realization

to never underestimate your adversary.

Grabbing a satellite in orbit

isn't the only way to mess with it.

In 2019, observers tracked the launch

of a Russian satellite

and noticed something odd.

The single dot showing the satellite

soon split into two, and then into three.

Russia is unique in using a technique

of deploying spacecraft from other spacecraft.

You can see as many as three of these nesting dolls,

or matryoshka dolls,

where one satellite will release another,

and that'll release a third.

That object could be anything.

It could be a kinetic weapon that's intended to impact.

It could be a weapon that's intended to jam.

You just don't know.

Russia claims these "nesting doll" satellites

are intended to inspect other satellites for damage.

But COMSPOC has observed them following

classified U.S. satellites,

at times coming within 50 miles.

There's no other reason to come up close

to one of our very sensitive and important satellites

than for bad intent.

What they're trying to do is intimidate us

and let us know that if we got into a conflict,

that those satellites would cease to exist.

Small, mobile satellites that can attack

in a variety of ways

might be the future of space warfare.

With little warning,

hundreds of satellites deploy on-orbit weapons

against our national security space assets:

jamming, lasing,

kinetic effects, cyber intrusions.

Billions of dollars of national security satellites

are rendered useless,

leaving our military back on Earth crippled.

Even Rogers is a founder of satellite maker True Anomaly.

He's racing to build small, agile satellites

that might be key to this new style of warfare.

Spacecraft subsystems have become less expensive

and they've become smaller.

Which allows you to deploy more satellites at a single launch

than you would previously,

where a single launch was dedicated

to a single billion-dollar spacecraft.

So we build them smaller, build them cheaper.

This new spacecraft is called Jackal.

Jackal's a multi-role space superiority platform.

It's designed to track and follow highly agile targets.

As our adversaries have built

more and more highly maneuverable systems,

we've needed to adapt to that.

Jackal has extra fuel tanks and highly efficient thrusters

that give it more maneuverability and range

than most traditional satellites.

So these are

the tiny little rocket engines that allow the Jackal spacecraft

to move from point A to point B within an orbit.

Cleanliness is really important,

because if you get dirt or particulates

inside those thrusters,

it can cause jamming and leakage of fuel.

So these have a lot of thrust that allow us

to really quickly maneuver

and get into position to go perform

whatever mission it is that we need to go do.

It's designed to get close to a target,

for now carrying a camera,

but ultimately, perhaps, a jammer,

or even a laser weapon.

There's no technological barrier to deploying a laser on Jackal.

The question is, how far away do you need the target to be

to engage it.

If it's very close, that technology exists.

If it's very far away,

that's a pretty significant technological hurdle.

But for most engagements, you know, a handful of kilometers,

a space-to-space laser is totally achievable.

Carrying even simple weapons, maneuverable, cheap satellites

can potentially take out billion-dollar behemoths.

They can lie dormant in space for months or years

and be hard to identify as weapons.

This ability to have lots of satellites

that can interact with each other,

that, that is going to be a very different sort of future

than what we've been used to in Earth orbit.

International agreements are few and far between

when it comes to the militarization of space.

Nothing governs how close one satellite can get to another,

or most of what companies and governments do up there.

All of those things from the Wild West era, right,

are going to happen in space if we don't

prepare for them.

The main international agreement,

the Outer Space Treaty of 1967,

prohibits nuclear weapons,

but says nothing about conventional weapons in space.

And while the U.S., Russia, and China

are all party to the treaty,

there have been no major new agreements since.

Space is a shared domain,

and actions by one actor can affect everyone's ability

to utilize space.

There's a lot of work being done in diplomatic circles

on space issues.

But at the United Nations,

they've been going in circles, frankly, for decades now.

I think the likelihood

of any arms control for space in the near term

is pretty low.

I'm actually pretty pessimistic.

I'm afraid we are headed towards a higher level

of militarization and weaponization of space.

In 2025, the White House mandated the development

of a new space-based missile defense system

called "Golden Dome."

The Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles

even if they are launched from other sides of the world

and even if they are launched from space.

The program is supposed to include a constellation

of satellites that can actively shoot down missiles.

Critics have pointed out

that, besides the many technical challenges involved,

Golden Dome would be a major escalation.

Satellites that can shoot down missiles

can easily be aimed at other satellites.

We have not yet seen satellite-to-satellite attacks.

I think those will happen in the future.

What if I had a satellite

that had a mechanical arm

and it could grab another satellite?

Would that be a weapon?

Well, I used to fly that weapon.

It's called the space shuttle.

But it wasn't built to be a weapon.

So we don't even have a good definition

of what is a weapon and what is not a weapon in space.

We're now, in my mind, thinking about space warfare

as we thought about air warfare in the 1920s.

We are so early in the testing and training

that it's not even quite clear

how this whole thing will play itself out.

As technology progresses, it's up to humankind

to decide how to use it.

But what's increasingly clear

is that it's no longer possible to ignore

what's happening above our heads.

There has not been a domain that human beings

have not figured out a way to fight in:

underwater, on top of the water,

on land, in the air.

Why is space any different?