First things first
US officials have said a nuclear detonation would render portions of low-Earth orbit useless for up to a year.
Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, delivers a keynote address during the Space Force Association’s 2024 Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida, on December 11, 2024. Credit: US Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich
US Space Command is inviting commercial companies to participate in a new series of classified wargames. The first exercise simulated a scenario involving a potential nuclear detonation in orbit.
Gen. Stephen Whiting, the senior officer in charge of Space Command, discussed the new wargame series Tuesday in a discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Space Command is responsible for military activities in space and is separate from the Space Force, which provides the people and equipment to support those operations.
The new wargames, called Apollo Insight, combine military and commercial expertise to respond to simulated threats in space. Space Command plans to conduct four Apollo Insight “tabletop exercises” this year.
“We’ve done one already,” Whiting said. “We did one focused on a nuclear payload on orbit, which, of course, is a future we do not want to see, and that would violate the Outer Space Treaty. But we brought 60-something companies together at the classified level to share insights into what such a detonation might do, and then get their good ideas about how we could leverage capability to have today or future technologies that might help us going forward.”
The wargame presented a “notional worst-case scenario” and also included participation from US allies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. “While the event was classified, discussions covered a range of topics including the importance of domain awareness for detection and characterization and the threats facing US and allied space superiority,” Space Command said in a press release.
WMDs in LEO
Two years ago, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, publicly warned that Russia was moving to deploy a nuclear weapon in orbit. Officials from the Biden administration later acknowledged that Russia is considering such an action, which would violate restrictions in the Outer Space Treaty on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit.
The detonation of a nuclear weapon in low-Earth orbit would likely destroy or incapacitate thousands of satellites, disabling critical military and civilian networks providing surveillance and communication services. US officials have said the nuclear option would render portions of low-Earth orbit useless for up to a year, with knock-on effects rippling through every nation. One former US defense official characterized a nuclear explosion in orbit as not an attack just on the United States, but an “attack on the world.”
US officials don’t believe Russia has yet put a nuclear weapon into orbit, but they now believe the Russian military is operationalizing conventional anti-satellite weapons. Russia has launched several mysterious satellites into orbits shadowing the US government’s most advanced spy satellites.
Space Command plans to host three more Apollo Insight commercial wargames this year. The next one will focus on orbital maneuver warfare. Later this year, officials will simulate additional scenarios involving proliferated satellite constellations across different orbital regimes and missile warning and missile defense.
The Pentagon, in recent years, has emphasized the importance of commercial technologies and services in 21st-century warfare. The war between Russia and Ukraine has highlighted the utility of commercial satellite networks, like Starlink, to provide communications on the battlefield. Commercial companies are also at the vanguard of drone and anti-drone technology used every day in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
In many ways, the Space Force has led the way in the Pentagon’s push for deeper partnerships with commercial industry. The Space Force has inked contracts with emerging space companies—non-traditional primes, in military contracting parlance—to buy services, manufacture satellites and payloads, and launch rockets. Commercial companies now or will soon provide the US military with not just communications and launch services, as they have for decades, but overhead imagery, navigation, refueling, weather data, and surveillance of other satellites in space, among other things.
“I say often that I think US commercial space industry is a massive advantage for us in the United States,” Whiting said. “Just look at the investment levels, the innovation, the speed at which they’re delivering capability, and we absolutely have to be able to leverage that capability.”
Whiting said Space Command and the Space Force could also use commercial satellites as targets to test the military’s ability to continuously track an object through a “high delta-V” maneuver—a large impulse making a significant change to its orbit. Such maneuvers could be used by an adversary’s satellite to escape detection or set up for an attack on a US satellite.
“Since Russia invaded Ukraine, there’s been some persistent satellite communications jamming, GPS jamming, and frequently these companies are the first to detect that, and so they inform us of that,” Whiting said. “Now, the question of, do these companies need indemnification, or some other contractual mechanism that helps them with the risk level they’re assuming, that is something that the Office of Secretary of War for Space Policy has identified as a national level issue to be worked.”
Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
