“Hack a satellite constellation and you can leave a country without internet and crash its economy”: how space weapons work and when real space wars will begin

✔️ International law has the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans placing weapons of mass destruction – nuclear and so on – in space. But the treaty does not ban conventional weapons. In principle, you can take a pistol aboard the ISS. The Salyut-era spacecraft carried pistols on purpose, in case cosmonauts landed in the taiga. So during an orbital pass the weapon is inside the spacecraft's zone – and this is where the grey zone of responsibility begins.

❗️ You cannot blow up someone else's satellite. But you can blind it with a laser or jam its signal, change its flight path and so on. Formally the treaty is not violated, yet the satellite is out of action. Today such technologies are called counterspace (anti-satellite) weapons.

✔️ Real counterspace weapons in the familiar sense are kinetic. A robotic arm grabs a satellite, drags it to another orbit, changes its trajectory or disables it. This usually leaves a lot of fragments that get stuck in orbit, interfere with other spacecraft, disrupt scientific observations, threaten crewed flights and so on.

✔️ There are directed-energy weapons – lasers and microwave emitters. They flood the sensor of a satellite's camera or telescope with a powerful beam of light. This can be done directly in space, and even from Earth.

✔️ Today we also see examples of attacking and defending satellite signals at the same time, for instance the GPS signal. Nothing happens to the satellites themselves, but the signal they transmit to Earth is deliberately altered, which cancels out the satellites' work.

✔️ Cyberattacks also count as weapons, when ground control stations or onboard computers are hacked.

✔️ Today counterspace weapons are gradually entering countries' arsenals. In 2021 Russia carried out successful tests of anti-satellite missiles. We now see GPS signal alteration both in the Middle East and in the zone of the special military operation. Yet a great deal of ordinary life on Earth depends on GPS. Driverless transport runs on it, aviation and shipping need it. And in signal-jamming zones ships have to be guided manually.

✔️ Real space wars will begin when we abandon ground cables and internet transmission moves entirely into space. Then, by hacking a satellite constellation, it will be possible to leave a country or a particular territory simply without internet. And since almost every area of life today depends on the internet, economies will collapse very quickly without the use of conventional weapons.

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