‘Most nations are starting to talk about space as a domain of warfare’

Mark Hilborne leads the space security group at King’s College London. He is co-editor of the book “War 4.0”.

Why is Russia-Ukraine being called a “space war”?

Space has a number of military functions that go back to the Cold War. In the Gulf War, [the use of space] became a bit more tactical. But space is now supporting virtually everything the Ukrainians are doing. Satellites allow the high command to communicate, but they also allow Ukraine to pilot its UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and its USVs (uncrewed surface vehicles), which have been responsible for all those very dramatic attacks, both on Russia’s bombers and on their Black Sea Fleet. Despite Ukraine not actually owning any infrastructure in space, it can do all this using Starlink [the satellite constellation operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.]

Connected to that, there’s imagery. The Ukrainians are using very clever platforms – they can take video streams from drones, satellite imagery, and open source data like from your mobile phone, and they can compile all this information, and redraw the tactical map in about 30 seconds. Find where Russian targets are, and then find the closest firing solution. So these capabilities match the Russians. With a much smaller military force, they’re able to level the playing field.

It’s worth noting that almost the first strike in the war was Russia conducting a cyber-attack on all the infrastructure that supported Ukraine’s older satellite communications. Ukraine was no longer able to communicate. That was on day one. So space is of primary importance in this particular conflict.

What about the involvement of private companies? Does Elon Musk’s SpaceX have too much influence?

The commercial sector in space has brought a lot of innovation and cost reductions extremely quickly, in a way that state projects would never have managed to do. At the moment, Musk has such a big chunk of space, and he’s a highly volatile individual. But that will change, as more companies get involved. So the situation will become more balanced.

Of course, commercial companies have been involved in warfare for a long time. Primarily defence contractors like Lockheed Martin or, say, private companies building satellites for the US government. But now we have commercial companies working in a commercial cycle. There is information flowing from US intelligence agencies to Ukraine, but there’s also all the services that we just discussed, coming to the Ukrainians commercially without any state intervention. Some of it is goodwill, provided for free, but some of it isn’t. Ukraine’s Starlink bill, for example, is being covered by the Polish government.

What are counter-space weapons?

Firstly, there’s kinetic weapons, which explode or hit things. There’s direct ascent anti-satellite missiles, which launch from Earth’s surface. And a number of countries have tested those. We know Russia has them. But it creates a lot of debris, flying around at 17,000 miles an hour – it could take out your own satellites as well. And while those systems are good for taking out a single satellite, when we’re talking about Starlink, that’s thousands of them. There are also co-orbital weapons, where one satellite sneaks up on another and bashes into it.

Then there’s remote rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) where a satellite might hover for a long time a bit too close to another one, and it’s difficult to know what they’re up to. Listening? Just trying to irritate you? There was a case in 2020, where Russia had a satellite sitting very close to a US spy satellite. Then it spat out a second, smaller one, like James Bond, and that spat out something that looked like a projectile. But that’s the trouble with space. It’s very hard to see with accuracy.

Weapons can also be used to just knock out data streams. So we have things like “dazzling”, where you blind the sensors of a satellite. You have jamming of GPS signals, or manipulation of data. Russia did this to ships in the Black Sea in 2017, so the GPS systems started telling all the ships slightly wrong information, sending them off course.

What are the implications of jamming?

Many, many functions in modern life rely on GPS systems – like the bank and the stock market. Even if you want your pizza delivered, or you want to drive somewhere. That’s been disrupted locally many, many times in the Russia–Ukraine conflict. What happens if these systems are disrupted in a significant way? What’s the backup? The economic impact if all GPS is jammed is calculated to be at least a billion [pounds] per day in the UK alone.

It seems that nations are testing space warfare capabilities, but are wary of deploying them?

All the big players have these latent counter-space weapons capacities, although the US made a statement in 2022 that they will cease testing direct ascent anti-satellite missiles. So that’s an attempt to stabilise the situation. Increasingly, though, as tensions seem to rise, we find most nations starting to talk about space as a domain of warfare.

Then there’s President Trump’s talk of a Golden Dome, and there are real risks to that. Even though that would be designed to be used against missiles, it would introduce interceptors in space [since intercontinental ballistic missiles travel through space]. And if you can hit a missile, you can hit a satellite. There’s very little way of distinguishing whether a space weapon is defensive or offensive. Critics are saying the Golden Dome could take a decade, maybe two decades, and cost $1 trillion or maybe even $2 trillion – so it won’t happen in Trump’s time, if it does happen at all. But there will be movement in that direction – even if it doesn’t happen at the scale imagined.

How can we discourage space warfare?

The Outer Space Treaty states that space must be maintained for peaceful purposes, but lawyers differ in their interpretation of what that actually means. A more binding arms control treaty in space has been a goal since the 1980s, but these discussions just go round and round. For example, how do we define what is a weapon in space?

More hopefully, the UN has adopted a UK proposal that is the basis for the new Responsible Behaviours in Space initiative – to try to agree on norms of behaviour. For example, it’s considered irresponsible if a satellite is closer than a certain distance to another. This could become the basis of soft law, which hopefully then becomes the basis of binding law. But there’s a lack of trust between the major players and space is a very sensitive environment. We’ve talked about Russia, but probably the biggest competitor is China, which has a very opaque way of doing business. They have a broader policy of what they call “military civil fusion”, where you can never really distinguish between a commercial or civilian or military system. The US is particularly worried about China.

Would you say that the lack of public awareness around warfare in space is a democratic issue?

The public doesn’t understand how much we rely on space as a domain of warfare. But it’s not just the general public. The UK government only really talked about space as a strategic area of warfare in the Integrated Review [a comprehensive articulation of the UK’s national security and international policy] in 2020. In the United States it’s better understood. When we talk about our domains of war the three traditional ones are air, land and sea. Then we have cyber. Space, like cyber, is kind of “out of sight, out of mind”. But the UK is an interesting country because of this strong diplomatic initiative in the UN. There’s also a lot of entrepreneurial thinking about space. But I would agree it’s a democratic issue. We need more awareness.

This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.