From Support Domain to Strategic Theater: Space Power in the 2030s

A: What we’re seeing now the first inkling of in the latest executive order on space superiority and will gather steam over the next decade is the evolution from a looking down Space Force, where it was principally asked to be a support to the joint force and space was seen principally as a support domain, to the Space Force being asked very specifically to extend and protect America’s vital economic interests in space. It will take on a greater looking out role, and that will likely mean an expansion of its missions, and ultimately an expansion of its budget.

What we will see is that space itself will increasingly be seen as a theater of great power competition in and of itself, and not just as a supporting theater, and that the actions taken in the space domain to corral resources, to create new centers of economic value, are going to be perceived as a central theater of geostrategic competition.

A: My formula is that defense space planning should be maximally optimistic about civil and commercial growth and should take those as its basic planning assumptions, or at least the upper boundary of its planning assumptions. It should strongly message confidence in the ability of the United States to achieve that, and it should attempt to structure defense acquisitions in a way that brings about a national grand strategy to incorporate the inner solar system into our economic sphere. But as they program that out and understand what it would look like, they should at every point consider every potential worst case and how they might need to react to it, so they are not caught flat‑footed and have the time to develop the requirements and capabilities.

A: I’m of the opinion that we could absolutely maximize economic value creation without it resulting in an actual confrontation. You might see some friction, like we saw with China and Russia being unhappy with the amount of orbital real estate that Starlink was initially taking on, or grumbling if we maximize orbital shells for space data centers, solar power satellites in or near geostationary orbit, or develop key areas on the Moon rapidly. But those are large spaces, and true monopolies are unlikely, so I don’t think specifically looking for economic value creation is likely to result in confrontation. In practice, confrontation is much more likely to come from what might be perceived as threatening military postures, and I would counsel the United States and its allies to move at utmost haste to maximize economic value creation in the space domain.

A: Starlink provides an excellent example of how a super‑empowered individual or non‑state actor can suddenly make a difference in geopolitics by providing superpower‑like services to disempowered powers. You could imagine an allied equivalent of Starlink that chooses to provide capabilities to a third power in ways that anger an adversary or a neutral state — for example, an allied ISR constellation revealing data a nation considers vital to its security, or providing satellite command and control or drone warfare support that might be seen as escalatory. Once you move data centers to space, that data can be impounded or manipulated, and allied constellations may also have dual‑use counter‑space roles: to jam or not to jam, to maneuver close to other satellites, or to “bodyguard” them.

There are many ways in which such systems could add to deterrence — a commercial deorbit service, for instance, inherently has anti‑satellite capability, and space‑rescue capabilities could similarly influence calculations. But allies always have shades of difference in how they view risk and when they are willing to employ force. That uncertainty can complicate an adversary’s calculus in useful ways, yet it also creates the possibility that an ally might act in a way you were hoping they wouldn’t and cause a situation to escalate more rapidly than you would like.

A: I would say that extractive industries in space, assembly, manufacturing and space mobility logistics are probably the most underinvested areas.

From a strategic perspective, we already have underappreciated the value of global internet — that is a means of information warfare, who gets their story out and how, and whether or not you can broadcast direct to folks. Similarly, we need to be recognizing that in‑space data centers and AI training in space are going to be quite important. While I think that internal to some parts of the Space Force there is an appreciation, I don’t think that in general people appreciate how significant the air moving target indicator and ground moving target indicator missions are going to be. Those will provide such broad strategic utility and importance that they will very likely be the most important new mission areas that are added to the Space Force in the next decade.

Certainly, Golden Dome is going to have immense strategic utility, and its missile defense utility unfortunately can’t be separated from its potential counter‑space utility, so that requires significant thought on the part of strategists. And, as I mentioned above, there is far too little appreciation of how colossally important space‑based commodities — their extraction, manufacture, and mobility and logistics — could be in a space power dominance advantage.

A: I think things that we know are going to mature in this time period are going to provide new critical value. It’s going to be the continued expansion of space‑based internet and all the associated services. Starlink and its competitors will be able to provide alternate position, navigation, and timing. They’re going to provide — and are already providing — some level of space domain awareness. There are likely other sensors that are going to be brought into that, and the ability to put processing in data centers is going to be a key source of advantage in that timeframe to the 2030s.

We have the opportunity between now and 2030 to lay the basis of what will still be nascent industries at that time. There’s no reason we could not, before 2030, have proven the capture of a small asteroid and started to show its extraction; the same thing on the Moon, to start showing extraction and refinement, as well as on‑orbit servicing and assembly. We would be fools not to be racing to have advantage in those capabilities.

A: Every time you create a commercial capability, it typically changes the operating environment for the military in two ways:

First, it changes the tools with which you can carry on conflict — there are suddenly new chess pieces on the board. It usually takes time to understand what they can actually do and how they can be used, and you can’t take them for granted, because most require some level of sustainment and engagement by the military. The bill to keep that capability in place and to figure out how to operationally integrate it is typically underestimated and almost always comes too late. We take way too long to figure out how to use something that already exists.

Second, commercial systems create new centers of value that have to be protected, and that changes what we fight over. Before Starlink was launched, few people were thinking about the need to protect it, or about protecting U.S. commercial interests on the Moon or in captured asteroids. As those things assume greater economic value, or become gateways to long‑term economic value, they become impossible to overlook. Every new capability creates winners and losers — Starlink empowers actors who want connectivity when their government may not and enables beyond‑line‑of‑sight command and control for a country like Ukraine, which makes others, like Russia, the losers. They will inevitably fight back and develop capabilities to undermine, negate, or deny that capability, whether through cyber, jamming, or even a nuclear weapon that could destroy an entire constellation at once.

A: This is very much part of combined arms and cross‑domain thinking. Very often the best attacks are asymmetric. It’s pretty easy for somebody who understands how orbits work to be worried about how they could be attacked kinetically; it’s much harder to think in terms of a different field where you don’t understand the tools. The first time we have a constellation that goes down during an operation from a cyber capability, for example, it will definitely reshape priorities for whoever is the victim of that attack.

It falls to the Department of Defense to ensure you’ve got the right folks always thinking about our vulnerabilities and then projecting how we could turn those vulnerabilities into advantages and attack someone else’s system. Fundamentally, every spacecraft, for it to be useful, has to have some level of connectivity, and that connectivity can be jammed or attacked via software. While I don’t consider myself an expert and don’t spend much of my own time on it, I recognize it is absolutely essential and a critical vector of attack that has to be considered on par with any kinetic activity.

A: I think that having orbital diversity is absolutely important, because orbital diversity complicates any single vector of attack. To use missile warning as an example, a laser might be able to attack satellites in low Earth orbit but would have a harder time attacking the same satellites in higher orbits. The same goes for a nuclear weapon deployed in low Earth orbit. Putting everything purely in higher orbits also doesn’t make sense, because there are typically fewer assets and they don’t have the same graceful degradation as low Earth orbit. There is a lot of utility in having multi‑orbit systems that provide redundancy and complicate a fait accompli attack.

A: I’m not sure it changes the calculus of strategic planning very much, because most of our planning everywhere but space already assumes some level of autonomy by the soldier, the pilot, or the ship’s captain. What changes is how you allocate your human capital. Over time our infrastructure is going to move toward more and more autonomy, and it will look more like how we do mission tasking with human pilots or ship captains today.

But all of that is only as good as your training and your training data sets, and an opponent who understands your training may also know how to manipulate you or your perception. Strategic planning has to take a more meta view and ask: now that our satellites can react to these levels of threat, and our enemies probably know that, how will they attempt to exploit it, and how do we minimize the chance that this will be turned against us?

A: I do actually have an experiment in mind, and unfortunately, I think it’s already being run to our detriment. The experiment I would design is whether sustained investment in space-based solar power leads to space dominance. We’re talking about very large satellites, on the order of 8,000 metric tons, collecting megawatts to gigawatts of power and beaming it down to utilities on Earth. Building those pushes you toward fully reusable launch, robust in‑space logistics, electric transport, space resources from the Moon or asteroids, and in‑space manufacturing and assembly. If you can field those systems at scale, you’ve effectively created the superior industrial base in orbit: you can move thousands of metric tons between orbits, manufacture kilometer‑scale platforms with megawatts to gigawatts of power and tap into the enormous global electricity market. The country that really puts its chips on developing space-based solar power for commercial power is likely to be the dominant space power for the next 100 years or so.

Right now, China is clearly in the lead. The United States has no national program, has not even assigned responsibility to an agency, and is not providing meaningful incentives to its companies. China, by contrast, has a national‑level program approved by President Xi, plans for early testing on its space station, a substantial low Earth orbit demo in the late 2020s, and a megawatt‑class GEO demo in the 2030s that will be as heavy as the ISS. We are in no way prepared to compete with that level of mobilization.