The Social World

Tag: Space

  • Why the comet 3I/Atlas still fascinates

    Our latest visitor from interstellar space is leaving us. It reached its closest point to the Sun on October 29 and is now heading back toward the stars at great speed, having spent a few months traversing our region of space.

    This visitor – a comet called 3I/Atlas – scared some, fascinated astronomers and thrilled us all as we marveled at its strange journey. 3I/Atlas, which Michael P. Gibson introduced Spectator readers to in the last issue of this magazine, got its name because it is the third object ever found to have entered our solar system from interstellar space – and Atlas is the name of the sky survey that found it as a point of light moving against the distant stars.

    The first interstellar visitor was Oumuamua, a strange, elongated rock detected in October 2017, some 40 days after its closest approach to the Sun. Then came Comet 2I/Borisov in 2019, a chunk of rock and ice from another solar system that, due to the warmth of its solar passage, developed a tail of gas and dust. (This is quite normal.) Because of these visitors, astronomers were on the lookout for another one.

    3I/Atlas was discovered on July 1 as it swooped into our solar system from the general direction of the center of our galaxy. Dozens of the world’s most powerful telescopes have been turned toward it, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope and, when a few weeks ago it passed Mars, satellites orbiting the red planet looked at it as well. You need a telescope to see it.

    Comets are essentially just shards of ice and rock made from the leftovers of planetary formation. All normal stars are formed out of collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Around the nascent star will also be planets and, further out, a cloud of comets. Frozen and lifeless, they will only become active when a gravitational disturbance causes then to fall starward, where they heat up and develop a dusty shroud as well as tails of gas and dust.

    But not all comets will visit their parent star; many will be shaken loose to wander undetectable between the stars. In our galaxy alone there could be more interstellar comets than there are stars in the entire universe. One of the earliest stars to form after the Big Bang created 3I/Atlas. Observations suggest it is older than the Earth and Sun. It may have been traveling for almost as long as the universe has existed. Hence the scientific fascination with this cosmic time capsule.

    The latest leg of its eternal journey through the immensity of interstellar space saw it approach a bright yellow star. Though its previous destinations were undistinguished, this time the comet would approach much closer than usual, passing big and little worlds on its way. One of them was an unusual blue color and from it scientists became, almost certainly, the first sentient creatures to observe it. The warmth from our Sun was increasing, and the iceberg was beginning to thaw. Its surface stirred for the first time in billions of years.

    Imagine if you stood on 3I/Atlas. At a few miles across, its gravity would be slight. You could jump and take several weeks to fall back to its surface. You’d have to be careful where you walked because even though you weigh almost nothing, the comet’s surface is fragile. Perhaps you could get to its equator, make a snowball and hold it out. Release it and it would seem to hover due to the slight forces controlling it. Nearing the Sun, you would see ice and dust geysers form the familiar tail of comets. You could see them sparkling in the sunlight and billowing in the solar wind as they arc out into space.

    How wonderful comets are. Over the ages they have inspired and frightened. A few times in each human lifetime there will be a fine comet. Most were observed in prerecorded history spawning legends, but in more recent times they shook the Chinese emperor’s heavenly mandate to rule; proclaimed doom to Aztec Emperor Montezuma II just before the cataclysmic arrival of Hernán Cortes; and inspired Shakespeare to have Calpurnia say, in Julius Caesar, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” In 1910 there was global pandemonium when some suggested that the Earth might pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet and be poisoned by its trace component cyanogen. It couldn’t have happened.

    Comet 3I/Atlas has brought its fair share of pandemonium. The internet was rife with conspiracy theories and claims it was an invading starship, bolstered by misrepresentations and lies about the data reported with nonexistent standards of assessing evidence and knowledge of basic science. Let them have their fun. But we should not be as dismissive of Professor Avi Loeb, of Harvard University, who, under the guise of “raising awareness” of the issue of possible alien invasion, created waves of publicity saying that, on the one hand, it isn’t aliens – and on the other, it is.

    With the increasing depth and completeness of surveys of the sky, we will find many more of these interstellar visitors. There have been suggestions that we should place a probe in a parking orbit ready to rendezvous with one of these interlopers. But not Comet 3I/Atlas.

    Soon it will be gone – and no human will ever see it again. We wait for the next one as Flaubert said, running like horses in the field of space. Comets, predictable or otherwise, are the marvels of the sky, holding a special place for us. Comets mark our progress, our sense of wonder and our fears.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • 3I, the interstellar object that’s baffling astronomers

    3I, the interstellar object that’s baffling astronomers

    Science began in the skies. Just after sunset, to be exact, on the evening of November 11, 1572 when a young Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, raised his eyes to the night sky. There, above his head, a star was shining brighter than all the rest – a new star that should not have been.

    Brahe thought he was mistaken, that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but others confirmed what he saw. And yet, according to the reigning theory, derived from Aristotle, there could be no change in the eternal heavens. Surely then this object could not be a star. It must be an anomaly in the upper atmosphere, closer to the Earth, within terrestrial realms. But Brahe got to work. Using trigonometry and observations, he found that the impossible had indeed occurred. The radiant object could not be in the upper atmosphere, but must be far beyond the Moon, deep in the heavens. Two thousand years of Aristotelian scholarship was wrong. The scientific revolution had begun.

    The dazzling anomaly Brahe saw turned out to be not a new star but the death of an old one, when a white dwarf exploded into a supernova. We have learned much since Brahe first looked up to the night sky. Five hundred years ago may seem distant, but the age of discovery is still in its infancy. The last week of October brought yet another mystery to the skies above.

    On October 29, an unusual interstellar object named 3I/ATLAS reached the closest point it would come to our Sun before drifting out of the solar system. Discovered on July 1 by the ATLAS telescope in Chile, it’s called 3I because it’s only the third interstellar object we’ve ever seen, and like Brahe, astrophysicists are scratching their heads at its peculiar features.

    To begin with, it’s moving incredibly quickly. Comets are typically born in the Oort cloud, that frozen spherical halo of cosmic debris surrounding Earth’s solar system. Small perturbations can knock one of these icy rocks out of its distant orbit, kicking it down into the well of the solar system. Like a snowball that begins its fall with a nudge, comets have a low initial velocity and gather speed the closer to the Sun they get. But our surprise visitor is moving through the solar system with a velocity too alien in its haste to be a typical comet.

    It is also surprisingly massive. It is at least a thousand times more massive than previous interstellar objects we’ve detected.

    Then there is its tail. Fresh new comets from the Oort cloud have spectacular tails because the chemicals that make up these primordial chunks melt and vaporize for the first time as they approach the Sun. (Older comets have weaker tails because more of their ice has melted on each round trip.) Comet tails appear as a wake fading away from the Sun because solar winds blow the evaporating chemicals off the hurtling core. But our apparition in the sky is doing something no one has ever seen before: its tail up until September was facing toward the Sun, not away from it.

    In a recent study that appeared on arXiv, the open source hub for yet-to-be-reviewed scientific papers, astrophysicists report that 3I/ATLAS is shedding nickel and iron at a rate they can only describe as “exceptional” when compared to typical comets. Freakier still, it is also emitting carbon dioxide and water in a ratio that other researchers have called “unusual” and that, according to one starstruck team, would match the signature of exhaust from a rocket propulsion system. And yet another recent paper found that the object is pulling off some light-bending voodoo – changing the polarization of light – in a way that these scientists say is “unprecedented,” something no rock in our solar system has ever demonstrated before.

    The optimal strategy for living in our universe is to stay silent no matter what

    So what is this thing? Well, it’s probably just a comet, a drifting dusty iceberg birthed in some distant void. We’ve only seen two previous interstellar objects pass through our solar system, each but a brief guest. True, our new visitor might be unusual and unprecedented compared to the typical parade of comets, but we’ve only recently built the tools to detect and observe these travelers. Our sample size is too small. The universe cares nothing for our taxonomies; doubtless there are other dark, fast, and therefore invisible pieces of cosmic debris that currently go undetected. Only once we’ve accumulated enough examples, and with improved sky surveys, might 3I/ATLAS not look so unique after all.

    All the same, 3I’s unusual properties have sparked wild speculation. Internet lunatics and hopped-up podcasters have taken to spinning fantastic tales about an extraterrestrial spacecraft, a glowing neon-lit hot rod pulling a bootleg turn around our Sun, or perhaps just the wreckage of one forgotten by some vast cosmic alien bureaucracy. Avi Loeb, however, is no crank. Loeb is a professor of astrophysics at Harvard and was the longest serving chairman of Harvard’s department of astronomy. Ever since the first interstellar object was detected in 2017, he has argued that they are not rocks, but alien artifacts drifting like sonar buoys. “It could be a black swan event, where something looks natural at first ends up being a Trojan Horse,” Loeb told NewsNation on October 23 when asked about 3I/ATLAS’s approach to the Sun.

    Loeb is calling on scientists to use every asset at their disposal to monitor the mysterious traveler for unusual activity in the months ahead. According to Loeb, the moment at which it is closest to the Sun on October 29 would be the perfect moment to use a gravity slingshot to enter into a controlled skid or even to launch mini-probes out to Venus, Mars and Earth. “Because the implications are so huge for humanity, we must consider it seriously,” he said in the same interview.

    As every game theorist and gang member knows, the optimal strategy for living in our universe is to stay silent no matter what. Why become a target by calling attention to yourself? Better to keep quiet and not attract threats. You never know who is out there who might come to enslave you, eat you, experiment on you or simply just mess with you. If 3I/ATLAS is a glowing mothership, its colorful, dramatic entrance flagrantly flouts all the rules. Aliens brazen enough to announce their existence to others with such fanfare are probably hard-hitting ETs.

    So Loeb isn’t exactly crazy. But the only evidence he has to go on is “unusual activity” that is only unusual because our data is so poor and we’ve only seen two interstellar objects in history. And we say we can “see” these objects, but the images still look like grainy photographs of the Loch Ness monster. We simply need more observations.

    Superstition about the heavens has been with us from time immemorial. Comets have long been considered bad omens. Before the Norman invasion of England in 1066, a brilliant comet appeared in the night sky. As depicted in a scene on the Bayeux Tapestry, sewn to celebrate the Norman victory at the Battle of Hastings, the comet foretells an English defeat. For the English king Harold, the bright anomaly meant the loss of a kingdom. For us, it is the first recorded sighting of Halley’s Comet.

    Understanding natural phenomena may dispel our superstitions, but fear is not unwarranted. The greater danger is not from aliens, but from a cold, indifferent universe. The evidence of the past is before our eyes. The entire surface of the Moon is pockmarked with impact craters from asteroid and comet strikes. One of the largest and brightest, Tycho, a sprawling scar with a diameter of 53 miles, can be seen with the naked eye on its southern edge (named after Tycho Brahe). Here on Earth, the Barringer Crater in Arizona stands out in a flat desert like a half mile-wide scoop gouged out by an angry god. The Tunguska blast of 1908, an asteroid airburst explosion, leveled an estimated 80 million trees over an 830-square-mile area in Siberia. Were such a force similar to these to strike near a city or plunge into the ocean, the blast waves or tsunamis would kill millions in an instant.

    But the mother of them all is the Chicxulub crater across the northern tip of the Yucatán peninsula. Some 66 million years ago an asteroid about six miles across, traveling at 54,000 miles per hour, collided with the Earth in an apocalyptic kaboom that defies the imagination in its horror. The explosion was five billion times more powerful than Hiroshima. Three-quarters of all plant and animal species went extinct. Its most famous victims were the dinosaurs. Unless we too want to become fossils buried beneath silent skies, we must chart all objects in the heavens and develop the technology to disintegrate or corral Earth-crossing asteroids and comets. The scale and vastness of astronomical distances has come to our rescue many times in the past, but the lesson from history is that the status quo equals certain death.

    “The single biggest hurdle in planetary defense is the lack of data,” Matthew Schmidgall tells me. Schmidgall is an asteroid-hunter who is chief executive of ExLabs, a startup building vehicles to visit asteroids and comets. “We have identified less than 10 percent of near-Earth objects. And of that 10 percent, we know the composition of only 10 percent.”

    In April 2029, an asteroid named Apophis will come close to Earth, passing between us and the geostationary satellites we have in orbit – closer even than the Moon. (Not to worry: it’s not on a collision course.) ExLabs is going to send one of its vehicles to rendezvous with the drifting space rock. The mission will carry 11 scientific instruments from eight international partners. Three landers will depart from the mothership to touch down on the asteroid’s surface, study its composition and return to Earth with samples. Missions like this must become routine and frequent. When it comes to planetary defense – deflecting or destroying asteroids or comets – we are currently fumbling in the dark, unable to choose with any confidence between the simplicity of a tugboat push or the apocalyptic gamble of nuclear explosions. But the price tag on the knowledge we need to identify the right move is currently too expensive an education: traditional government missions costing $800 million to$1.5 billion are not realistic.

    So here we are in the dark with grainy images. We can’t risk the future of humanity on a high-stakes coin flip in a pitch-black room. We must leave nothing to chance. We must explore. Commercial interests, fueled by the fire of startups seeking their fortunes, must push the cost of visiting asteroids and comets down. Otherwise we are staring down the cosmic barrel of our own ignorance about what asteroids and comets are even made of.

    Then one day, when the space cowboys can lasso near-Earth asteroids with ease, a fleet of space telescopes can monitor the perimeter and our probes on standby can be thrown on a moment’s notice into gravity-assist slingshots to intercept interstellar comets – on that day, God willing not too far off, we might truly know what objects like 3I/ATLAS are made of. The scientific revolution has only begun.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • The mission to mine the Moon

    The mission to mine the Moon

    There will come a time when the richest people who ever lived will be those who control outer space, in particular the Moon and the asteroids. There are vast resources out there, bound in giant rocks hurtling through space, and in the lunar dust. But the first steps will be taken by the brave, and perhaps the reckless in pursuit of a space dream. If you dream of space, nothing can stop you. Not the disagreement of others or the judgement of experts, neither short-sighted investors nor government regulations. One such dream will happen on the Moon’s surface in just a few months.

    The space company Astrobotic will attempt to land at the Moon’s south pole – a region of extensive shadows where ice may have accumulated and the site of the next US human landing. Its Griffin Mission 1 will deploy a small rover to survey the scene with a multi-spectral camera prospecting for a stable isotope of Helium called Helium 3. Its name brightens the eyes of advocates who point out it’s the most valuable resource in space. If the moon’s surface were scattered with diamonds, it would not be worth bringing them back, but Helium 3 is a different matter.

    It is used in medical scanners. Since 9/11 the US Dept of Homeland Security has also mandated its use in border-control radiation monitors. Since then, US stockpiles have fallen to 20 percent of what they were. It is usually made from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles. This provides the US with between 22,000 and 30,000 litres a year, out of this it releases between 8,000 – 10,000 litres to maintain a national stockpile. The world is running out of Helium 3.

    The Moon could be the answer. Over billions of years it has collected He-3 from the stream of charged particles given off by the sun. Consequently, there could be a million tonnes of Helium-3 in the lunar dust. But how to get it?

    The camera on the lunar rover is a joint venture between NASA and Interlune a private company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and Harrison Schmidt the 12th person to walk on the Moon giving him some first-hand experience of the task. They have a plan for a larger rover that will crawl across the surface collecting and sifting the dust extracting the tiny amounts of Helium 3. Their focus is on its collection and they will be looking for partners to provide the means to return it to Earth. It’s estimated that over a hundred tonnes of dust will have to be processed to produce just a gramme of helium. Yet such is its value it could be worth doing at $20 million per kg.

    If it works Interlune could become the first entity to mine the Moon which is legal in US law. It already has customers. Finnish company Blufors has an option to purchase tens of thousands of litres of spending “above $300 million.” They want the Helium 3 for its chandelier-like devices known as dilution refrigerators. They are used by quantum computing leader IBM to cool their computers to a level 200 times colder outer space. This makes the fundamental computing components of a quantum computer – qbits – more stable. Existing quantum computers have more than a thousand qubits but there are plans for computers with a million or more requiring more Helium 3 than is available on planet Earth.

    The lunar dust contains a much greater amount of many other useful substances. Oxygen and hydrogen in the form of ice will give future colonists oxygen to breathe, water to drink as well as rocket fuel. The dust also has extractable iron, silicon, aluminium and many platinum group metals that will be essential for the long-term function of a moonbase.

    Beyond that there are the asteroids, debris from planet formation that contain their own treasure trove of metals and minerals. All the platinum ever mined in the world would fit into a single room. There is far more than that in even a small asteroid. But asteroids have their own problems.

    You must get there, excavate, smelt, store and return. It’s technologically beyond us but that doesn’t stop the space dreamers. The Asterank.com database provides estimates of asteroid resources and estimates a profit of $30 billion from mining asteroid Ryugu. Significantly we have already been to Ryugu when in 2020 a Japanese spacecraft returned samples from it. Importantly Ryugu is only 900 metres across which might be an advantage.

    I expect the first wave of asteroid miners to pioneer the way with most of them falling by the way. But eventually it will pay off big-time.

    Contemplate this. In the near future the very best restaurants in the world will serve you a glass of water at a fabulous price. It will be no ordinary water but brought back from the Moon. Sometime later super powerful quantum computers will power the Earth’s AI infrastructure, cooled by helium 3 mined on the Moon.

  • Russia, China and the US are preparing for battle in orbit

    Russia, China and the US are preparing for battle in orbit

    Russia is playing a dangerous game in space. Despite its history it’s a declining space power, having abandoned many of its long-term projects due to lack of money and technology. It effectively crippled much of its space activity when it attacked Ukraine, which was the source of many of its high-tech components. This year has seen its lowest launch rate since 1961 – the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go into space. Yet significantly, three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year (the US has launched more than 100) could be potential anti-satellite weapons.

    On May 23, Russia launched the Cosmos 2588 satellite from the Plesetsk launch site situated 500 miles north of Moscow. The Cosmos designation is a general term used to obscure the satellites’ purpose. As soon as Cosmos 2588 was detected by the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado, it attracted immediate attention. Its launch was timed, to the second, to shadow a vital US spy satellite.

    It was the fourth time in five years that a Russian military satellite was placed in orbital proximity to a US spy satellite, this time USA 338, thought to be a so-called Keyhole 11 optical spy satellite the size of a bus. Providing the sharpest images of the ground from space, it is one of the United States’s most prized assets.

    The first time this happened was with the launch of Cosmos 2542 in 2019, which “inspected” USA 245, another Keyhole satellite. But Cosmos 2588 is more than just an inspector. Analysts suspect it houses an anti-satellite weapon equipped with a kinetic missile.

    It is part of Russia’s Project Nivelir. None of the four Russian satellites have gotten closer than a few dozen miles to their quarry – but that’s close enough for a good look. When US controllers tweaked their spy satellite’s orbit slightly, Russian controllers matched it.

    Some of these satellites display what has been termed “Matryoshka doll” behavior. Cosmos 2542 released a sub-satellite shortly after launch. It shadowed USA 245 and after multiple passes in 2020 fired a projectile after backing off. A warning shot from a sleeper anti-satellite weapon, perhaps.

    In June, Russia’s new Angara A5 rocket sent Cosmos 2589 into a complex unique orbit, allowing it to inspect multiple satellites in two key regions of space. Then it also released a sub-satellite and both moved into different orbits. After “sleeping” in space for several years, Cosmos 2542’s sub-satellite recently awoke and lowered its orbit to stalk USA 326, another Keyhole satellite. Then Cosmos 2558 released another unknown object into an orbit that also mirrors USA 326. Russia has also this year launched a trio of formation-flying satellites from the same rocket. One released a sub-satellite while the others carried out complex corkscrew-like maneuvers.

    Russia is stalking many western space assets. Its Luch series of signal-gathering satellites are spending time near Eutelsat Konnect, Thor 7, SES-5 and others. These provide communications and internet to Africa, Europe, South America and the Middle East. In March 2024, just before Luch 2 loitered near Astra 4A, its signals were jammed when it was interfering with Ukrainian broadcasts.

    Intelligence sources suggest that Russia is planning the ultimate in space destruction – deploying a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. In February 2022, it launched a satellite to test components for it. This is deeply concerning; a nuclear detonation in orbit could take out possibly thousands of satellites in one blow. General Stephen N. Whiting, who serves as commander of the US Space Command, said recently: “The idea that the Russians, the original space superpower… that they are considering doing this is incredibly irresponsible.”

    While Russia’s threat might come from desperate actions as it falls behind its rivals, China on the other hand is a rapidly growing space power with an avowed intent to become the world’s premier space nation. It is also performing proximity operations with its satellites in low-Earth orbit. Last year, five different objects were monitored maneuvering in, out and around each other in synchronicity under autonomous control. Vice-chief of US Space Operations General Michael A. Guetlein said: “That’s what we call dogfighting in space.”

    In January, China launched its SJ-25 satellite which moved into a synchronized orbit with SJ-21, which in 2022 grappled a defunct Chinese satellite and pulled it into a graveyard orbit – the orbit satellites are sent to when they have finished operational duties. It is thought that SJ-25 will attempt to refuel SJ-21 for another grapple attempt, a belief reinforced when a so-called inspector satellite moved closer to possibly assist and monitor the procedure.

    China is a rapidly growing space power with an avowed intent to be the world’s premier space nation

    These are significant developments growing the capability to battle in space. There are two ways to knock out an enemy’s satellite: the first is to go into a co-orbit with it and use a missile, laser or electromagnetic pulse to disable it. The problem with this approach is that it requires a dedicated satellite. The other way is more flexible and involves firing a missile from the ground to destroy a satellite. Both China and Russia have already done this to their own satellites.

    The militarization of space is a pressing issue that has been growing more urgent since 2015, when China declared space a war-fighting domain. Since then, it has increased its spy satellites by 500 percent. All sides want space superiority. Space is the invisible infrastructure that underpins all our lives. Modern society, and modern warfare, would be impossible without it. Hence, the first thing to do in the build-up to conflict is to attack the space sector. Even in peacetime, assets have been used to cyberattack satellite ground stations or to gain access to or jam data from satellites. Recall that just before Russia invaded Ukraine it disabled Ukraine’s Starlink internet connections – which also affected many parts of Europe.

    In July, the US Space Force practiced “orbital warfare” in its largest-ever training exercise. Its chief of space operations, General B. Chance Saltzman, said this was to send a “clear message” that the Space Force is prepared to fight and win. The US knows that since it is the nation that most uses space, it is also the most vulnerable. It is not alone in ramping up its space readiness.

    Recently, China reorganized its armed forces, giving space a greater role as it has begun to criticize US military space activities more often. The New Zealand Air Force has just established its first dedicated space unit and recently joined the US-led Operation Olympic Defender – a seven-nation space initiative. NATO is also strengthening its space division.

    The Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 is supposed to restrain military activity in space. Everyone is aware of its legal gaps. It bans nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in orbit, but anti-satellite weapons do not fall into that category. At a time when the global geopolitical situation is complicated, each side says it’s only undertaking necessary defensive measures. In March last year, the US and Japan introduced a draft resolution to strengthen the OST, calling on nations not to put nuclear weapons in space. Some 65 member states co-sponsored the resolution, but Russia vetoed it and China abstained. Shortly afterward, China and Russia circulated their own proposals – and the US responded by saying their ideas were fundamentally flawed.

    We are seeing the deliberate blurring of the distinction between peaceful and hostile activities in space. Many international behavioral norms are gentlemen’s agreements and, as such, are unsound. While jamming, spoofing, laser dazzling and cyberattacks take place, each side points the finger at the others along with accusations of provocation. Wasn’t that one of the motivations for Russia invading Ukraine?

    We might be entering an era when satellites need orbital protectors. France has discussed so-called bodyguard satellites to be stationed near high-value space assets. Last year, the European Commission took up this idea with a study for an “Autonomous SSA Bodyguard Onboard Satellite.” The design of commercial satellites may also have to change; the current crop faced less of a threat when they were made.

    Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome,” the US’s proposed protective shield against nuclear attacks, which would be larger and more sophisticated than Israel’s Iron Dome, is something the US space industry has wanted for a long time. It’s a response to criticism that America has neglected the space arena for decades, distracted by the war on terror. Whatever the outcome of this project, it is a huge signal. It resembles President Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” program which was, at the time, technically unfeasible. This time, the Golden Dome’s initial building blocks are already in existence. Its first iteration would require software automation, integration of space sensors and AI. Space-based interceptors will be needed. They could be dual use: defense and first-strike.

    The US and its allies all have plans for space warfare. Space is becoming more dangerous

    The UK is not a major player in this new frontier. It is a valued partner to the US, but some would say not as much as Canada and Australia. Britain is in the lower half of military space spending among the G20 nations, concentrating more on monitoring what’s going on in orbit – or space situational awareness. Major General Paul Tedman, head of UK Space Command, has spent time with US Space Command and recently said the first strike in a conflict with Russia would be in space.

    What would be the signs of imminent space warfare? In the build-up to conflict in space, the Starlink system is an obvious target. Earlier this year, it was reported that Chinese scientists had used AI to create attack scenarios on Starlink satellites. Nanjing University – described by Chinese authorities as one of the “seven sons” of China’s national defense – suggested that 99 Chinese satellites hunting in packs, firing lasers and microwaves, could disrupt 1,400 Starlink satellites in just 12 hours.

    All this shows how dramatically the space environment has changed in the past decade. Space was seen as a force multiplier for traditional forces; now it is a frontier in its own right. Russia and China are challenging what have been seen as acceptable norms in space. The US and its allies also have plans for space warfare. Space is becoming a more dangerous place. Everyone is watching.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.