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Orbits are now battlefields — and it’s time we admitted it.
Russia is jamming GPS satellite receivers across most of Eastern Europe. Iran has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles through outer space. China has openly contemplated destroying Starlink satellites. Plainly: our adversaries are waging wars in space.
We can ignore this fact and naively hope that China and Russia will abide by treaties for the peaceful use of outer space. If we do, we will cede the orbital high ground to our adversaries — and lose secured access to the space-based communications, reconnaissance, targeting, positioning, navigation, and timing services that shape the modern battlefield.
Or we can choose to treat space as the warfighting domain that it is — and figure out how to win a space war.
Both authors of this report have seen first-hand how America’s adversaries are waging war in space, which is why we thought this subject worthy of spilling this much ink.
Christian spent seven years as a satellite manufacturer and operator, working on both commercial and military missions and closely tracking America’s adversaries in space. Alex Oliver was a military officer for 16 years. Both of us are now at Andreessen Horowitz as partners on the American Dynamism team
So we remember when a Chinese satellite threw another satellite out of geostationary orbit, the many times they buzzed US satellites, and the aggressive lawfare they waged within the International Telecommunication Union. We watched Russia slowly and surely fall behind in the modern space race, only to make headlines with a rumored nuclear weapon on orbit.
But if our time in the space industry has taught us anything, it is to be wary of conflating the way things are done with the way things ought to be done. Over the past 20 years, the space industry has been upended by companies like SpaceX that care little about precedent — Elon Musk famously fired the original Starlink executive team for their traditionalism and associated slowness — and given SpaceX’s success, the space world must surely have learned the difference between a physical law and an industry convention.
In the first part of this report, we will therefore take a page from the Book of Elon and focus not on what is being deployed into space today, but instead on a first-principles understanding of what space is: meaning, how outer space works as a physical domain, and what those physical laws imply for the prospects of fighting and winning a war in space.
Then we will take a more practical look at the ways, means, and ends that are necessary to win a space war. We’ll discuss the importance of maximizing upmass, proliferating military space architectures, winning the cold war in space, and wielding such fearsome offensive capabilities that our adversaries don’t test our resolve.
In order to understand those strategic considerations, we’ll need a firm theoretical footing — so first we will establish three facts about the physical reality of outer space:
You are standing on top of a massive mountain, above the atmosphere, with a baseball in hand.
You throw the ball and it lands 100 feet in front of you. You try again, shooting the ball out of a cannon, and it lands 1,000 feet in front of you. Then you go for broke and attach the ball to a rocket — and the ball never lands. You have launched it “into orbit,” meaning so fast that by the time gravity has pulled it down to “ground-level,” it has already whizzed beyond the horizon.