The Space Wars are Finally Here

(dramatic music) – [Johnny] A satellite
hurls around the globe at seven and a half kilometers per second. Then it drops a six meter rod that starts falling the 400
kilometers towards Earth. No explosives, just speed. – Things like Rods from God, which is dropping big
tungsten rods from space having them fall very quickly. – [Johnny] Mach 24 at first, but the atmosphere eventually
slows it down to Mach eight. Still going super fast till it reaches the surface of the earth. (bomb exploding) Another satellite waits
in orbit for years. And then when given the
command, it releases a capsule. – [Clayton] That reentry
capsule with hundreds of drones, thousands of drones, you
can put it anywhere you want within a matter of minutes. – Here’s a caravan of a dozen satellites. They’ve got small missiles inside, and they’re just waiting till
a military commander on earth gives them the order to go hit a group of enemy satellites, knocking out the vital communication and navigation capabilities of the enemy. These aren’t sci-fi scenarios, these are real projects that militaries are working
on, powerful militaries. They’ve been thinking about
these things for years, but we’re in a new era of space. It’s a lot easier to get up here. And so as happens, countries
want to control it. – Now we’re getting to the
point where these crazy ideas that people would’ve
said were science fiction are becoming more possible and we should be looking at all
these things on the horizon. Advances in space happen very rapidly. – The new military space race is really between the US, China, and Russia, though less and less Russia. This is really a rivalry between the United States and China. Both countries have a relatively new wing of their military dedicated
to controlling, defending, and preparing for combat in space, or in the words of the US Space Force, to fundamentally transform our approach to space from a combat support function to a warfighting domain. And it’s getting crowded. Lots and lots of satellites
are going up there. There are over 12,000 floating
around the earth right now. Oh, and by the way, I’ve
always had a little trouble with these visuals of like all
the dots that are satellites. This is not to scale. These satellites are not like right next to bumping into each other, but the fact remains there’s a lot of high tech stuff
floating around our earth, and more and more of that is
dedicated to military purposes. It’s become a vital
tool of modern warfare, and that is what this video is about. It’s about these devices, satellites that not only let planes and troops navigate and communicate, but also scan the world
looking for missile launches. They reveal secrets,
looking through clouds and at night to capture
underground submarine headquarters, deep sea cable cutters,
North Korean warships. I’m gonna show you how militaries
are working on technology that they could potentially
use to attack the satellites of their enemy with
grappling hooks, with lasers, with a nuclear bomb. I’ve been talking to experts, including one that you’ll
hear a lot from in this video as I set out to understand war in space, this escalating race to control and dominate a domain shrouded in mystery. One that is hard to police, and it’s all happening right at a time when we’re entering into
an era of global rivalries. They’re heating up again, all
while the most powerful people on Earth have a deeper and deeper interest in
what happens in this space far above our heads. It’s space, it’s the final frontier, and it’s time we start paying attention. – [Voice] Spance, an infinite ocean, where man is not content unless he’s pressing himself to the limits of his knowledge or beyond. (dramatic music) – [Johnny] Okay, first, we
gotta talk about satellites. (gentle music) These little computers
bolted to a metal frame that are orbiting around our planet. – Some are very small, some might be referred to as a cube sat. So a cube sat is something very small, you can fit it in your hand. – [Johnny] That’s Clayton Swope, who’s an expert on space policy here at a think tank in DC called CSIS. – Could be the size of a refrigerator in a college dorm room,
but then you have others that could be the size of a bus. So solar panels will be a lot
bigger than the satellites. So think about it, you’re just
moving your arms out usually, and that’s how the satellite
looks with solar panels. – Some of these satellites are way far out in this orbit
called geostationary orbit. They’re a 10th of the way to the moon, and they’re moving to
the same speed as earth. So if you were to look
at them in the night sky, they would just kind of look like a star. They stay in one place. But most satellites these days are here, in this sweet spot of low earth orbit, about 400 to 800
kilometers above our heads. And look, there’s the
International Space Station hurtling around the earth. This one’s obviously a lot
bigger than a refrigerator. And a reminder of something
that may be obvious to some of you, but was
kind of fuzzy in my head, and now it’s not, which is that these satellites
are not like zooming around the earth with jet engines. They’re actually kind of falling. When a rocket launches
a satellite into space, it goes upwards for a few kilometers, but then it starts to go sideways. And in fact, most of
the energy being blasted out of this rocket is
being used to move it, let’s say horizontally getting close to 30,000 kilometers an hour. – You’re trying to outrace gravity. – Once you’re moving that
fast, you can cut the engines because you’re at this magical speed where you keep missing the earth. – So you’re trying to move so fast while gravity’s pulling you in that you are effectively staying in an orbit around the earth. So you’re trying to defeat gravity. – So people who are floating in the International Space
Station are not floating because they’re not in earth’s gravity. They’re floating because
they’ve kind of reached this perfect equilibrium
of speed and gravity that makes them constantly falling. So before we get to all
the war and defense stuff, let’s just take a moment and appreciate this magical
thing we’ve invented called putting things into
orbit around our earth. (gentle music) These days, a lot of these satellites are talking to one another, forming a constellation where they can send
signals between each other, all to serve a variety of purposes, like helping guide ships and
airplanes or tracking pollution or running scientific
analysis on crops or internet. Starlink has around 7,000 of these satellites in a big constellation that provides internet
access to remote areas that were very disconnected before, and to those fighting
in the war in Ukraine. There’s one satellite constellation that I use more than any
other, and it looks like this. This is a very special constellation. – The biggest thing
that we take for granted is the global positioning system, is GPS. – Around 30 satellites that are flying 20,000 kilometers above us,
run by the American government. At any given time, anywhere on earth, three of these satellites can see us, and this signal allows them to provide a very accurate location of where we are on the earth. If you lock onto four satellites, you can even get your elevation. I mean, this is magic. Not to mention, it’s all delivered to me on an easy-to-use
software like Google Maps that allows me to navigate
anywhere in the world. By the way, Russia has their
own kind of GPS constellation, so does China and the EU. My other big use case for these satellites is
something you’ve seen me do a lot on the channel, this. Incredibly high res photos
that we take from space and stitch together to create
something like Google Earth. I’ve spent hundreds of
hours on Google Earth, sometimes just for fun,
sometimes for work, and I gotta say, it never gets old for me. And it works because a bunch of these satellites have big
advanced cameras on them, like this one. They take high definition
images of our planet, send them back down to earth
with this little antenna. Oh, and these days, it’s
not just visible light that we’re capturing from satellites. Some satellites send out super long waves like microwave radiation and then record how it bounces back. This allows them to see
through things like clouds. It allows them to see elevation and seismic activity, weather patterns, or maybe a secret nuclear
submarine base hidden in a mountain in China, or a missile production
facility in a mountain in Iran. So you see where this is going. We have to remember why these
things were put up into space in the first place, and the answer is war. It was the 1950 and ’60s when space kind of became a war thing. The US and Soviet Union were racing to put satellites in space, not only to flex on each
other scientifically, but also to spy on each other from above. Back then, these satellites
would have huge rolls of film on board that would take a bunch of
pictures of enemy territory and then eject the canister of film, which would barrel back
down into the atmosphere and then be caught in midair by like an airplane, brought
back to HQ, and developed. And boom, you’ve got a bunch of pictures of Soviet missile sites, pretty nuts. So this was like the main
military application of space. But of course, over the decades, militaries floated some pretty crazy ideas on how to actually militarize space, how to threaten the enemy satellites. But it was all really
difficult and expensive, and eventually the Soviet Union fell. So the threat was like, you
know, why are we doing this? But fast forward to today,
and two things have happened. The threat is back, and the
cost for going to space is down. And by 2020, humanity had 3,000
active satellites floating around our planet, and then
right after, yeah, wow. I mean, the graph says it all. It has become way cheaper
to put stuff into space thanks to the rise of innovative
private space companies, most notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX. I mean, there’s so many
satellites up there that some astronomers are complaining that when they look up in the night sky, satellites are getting in the way. And this also comes at a time when global rivalries are heating up. So in 2019, the US Congress passed a law that created the United
States Space Force, the newest branch of the US military, officially classifying space as quote, “A warfighting domain,”
just like the other domains, air, land, sea, and cyber. So let’s quickly go over how
militaries use space today, how space has become so
vital to modern warfare, and then how these countries are preparing to fight war in space. (dramatic music) So first up, militaries still use satellites to spy. – Let’s just say sensing. So that could be taking pictures of things happening on earth. So we wanna know when a
missile gets shot off, we want to see a signal,
we want to be able to see a thermal signature,
we wanna track something. So you could think
surveillance or reconnaissance, things like that. – Countries use this imagery
to keep an eye on their enemy. Like look at how far
satellite imagery has come in just a few decades. So the US immediately knows
if Russia is moving a bunch of troops to the Ukrainian border like they did in February 2022,
right before they invaded. And China and Russia know that the US has recently moved a bunch of B2 bombers onto this tiny
island in the Indian Ocean, potentially preparing to bomb Iran. Who knows? But you can’t really keep
this stuff a secret anymore. Militaries can see each other, and they can see much deeper
into each other’s worlds. This is how we know so
much about the military of North Korea, a
notoriously closed place. There are people spending all
their time looking at maps of North Korea, spotting things like
this concealed submarine. In fact, we’re making an
entire video exploring what we can learn about North Korea purely from the satellite map imagery. And that’s coming out soon,
so keep an eye out for it. So now that it’s much cheaper
to get stuff up into space, you’re gonna expect to see a lot more of these constellations, more and more like swarms of satellites that can direct their
gaze to anywhere on earth and monitor it in real time. This is something that is
actively being worked on actually. According to some reporting from Reuters, SpaceX was awarded a $1.8 billion contract with the National Reconnaissance Office to develop this spy
satellite swarm concept. This stuff will be taking so many photos and feeding back so much
data that no one person or group of people is gonna
be able to sort of process it, which is a perfect time for artificial intelligence to come in. We made a whole video about how AI is transforming war and how huge amounts of data from all these
different sensors can be fed in to a command and control
software to give intel and even target
recommendations to commanders. So that’s a whole other video. Okay, so that’s spying and sensing, and that’s a huge part of the future of how space will be used by militaries. The other is an early warning system. The US, China, and Russia,
and to a limited degree, other countries like India
and France have satellites to just keep an eye on the missile sites of their enemies looking
for something like this, a missile being launched. These satellites are an
early warning system. They can tell the people back on earth that something’s coming their way so that they can shoot it
down before it gets too close. Now, quick accuracy caveat here, we’ve had this tech
for a really long time, but it’s kind of outdated, and it doesn’t have the capability to look for like hypersonic missiles
and all of these things. So the US has this
space development agency that just sent up a new
generation of satellites, with the vision of creating
a big constellation of hundreds of small satellites that surround the globe in low earth orbit and constantly monitor for the heat signature
of a missile launch. – The third thing is GPS, the ability to just know where you are and to have a way to not have to use a map and compass when you navigate. – And then of course, there’s potentially
the most valuable thing for any military, which
is just communication. – So we want to be able to use
space to talk to each other. – So you can see that space for these space-faring militaries
is like a nervous system, an invisible nervous system that gives militaries the
ability to see the whole world, to sense it, to communicate between
it, and to make decisions. It’s a really powerful capability. If your enemy knocks some of these out, the communication, the navigation, that could really hinder
your ability to operate in a combat scenario. – When you disrupt those, and we’ve seen indications
of that in Ukraine, munitions don’t work right, soldiers don’t know where they are, systems just don’t know how to work. If you’re a Marine on a beach
in an island in Indo-Pacific, you’re getting out a
map and compass though, you’re gonna be storming those shores like your great-grandfathers
did in Iwojima. It’s a very different
environment without GPS. – And look, they’re just kind of up here. Nothing’s really protecting them. And this gets us to
the moment of the video that you probably clicked
on this for, the weapons. According to a general
at the US Space Force, there are already attacks
happening in space every single day. The war in space has already begun, but these aren’t like boom
attacks, kinetic attacks. These aren’t like things exploding yet. (dramatic music) – It’s not just missiles
shooting at satellites and blowing up satellites. It’s things like GPS jamming and spoofing, that effectively is a way to
defeat a space capability. If you can’t receive it, you can’t use it. – Jamming is a big one, and
you can do it from the ground. It’s when an attacker uses an antenna to send a super loud radio signal that drowns out the original signal between the satellite
and the ground station so a message can’t get through. And then there’s spoofing,
kind of a silly sounding name, where an attacker sends up
a message to the satellite that throws it off course, tells it to do something
it’s not supposed to. You can render it effectively
useless, at least for a time. Jamming and spoofing is very common. We actually know of locations
that are doing this, that are committing
these types of attacks, that have these capabilities. And then there’s lasers, yes, just as we all imagined when
we hear the words space war, there are lasers. – So if it’s trying to
take pictures of space, if you point a laser at it, that’s gonna disrupt
its ability to do that. So it could be a temporary disruption, or it could be permanent depending on how strong that laser is. – Then there’s good old cyber attacks, hack into the satellite’s software by sending malicious
code to the satellite, you can either steal the
data that’s in the satellite, you can stop it from working, you can take control of it temporarily, or you could even just plant a
little virus in the satellite and just have it sit there dormant until you need to activate it. So again, these are
happening all of the time. We saw it in 2022 just an hour before Russia conducted its full scale invasion of Ukraine, they sent a bunch of cyber
attacks to the satellites that were providing internet and communications to
the Ukrainian troops. It went dark, which again, in a wartime scenario, is a big deal. One Ukrainian official
described the attack as quote, “Catastrophic.” And China is working on a
anti-satellite cyber weapon whose purpose is to quote,
“Seize control of a satellite, render it ineffective to
support communications, weapons, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.” Basically everything a
satellite is good for, this Chinese weapon is just
gonna kind of wipe it out. Again, you don’t have to blow the thing up to make it not useful anymore. Now there’s very little doubt in my mind that the United States
doesn’t have a similar if not superior weapon
that does the same thing. We just don’t know about it. But at least from my reporting, I haven’t seen any evidence
of that kind of weapon. But the US probably has one. In 2023 when the Wagner Group
attempted a coup in Russia, they first packed the Russian
satellite telecom system. That same year, Chinese hackers attacked
Japan’s space agency. These are the types of attacks
that are happening every day. You need to show your
adversary, your capabilities, “Hey, we can do this,” which hopefully avoids an
escalation in conflict, but it’s also a way of just
showing off, projecting power, and in some cases, trying to sabotage the
capabilities of your adversary. – The ability to disrupt
maybe not even the satellite, but maybe the ground station,
the ground infrastructure, which is just as key to be able to use it. If we can’t operate space
launch during a conflict, we can’t replace satellites
that get damaged or destroyed. So a lot of things that don’t really look like bombs going off, but they still have a
chain that quickly leads to this degradation of our ability to use space when we need it. – And the advantage of all
these non-kinetic attacks is that they don’t blow anything up and create a bunch of debris which could hit another satellite and create a cascading effect that could be really, really bad. They are also kind of
more subtle, deniable, they’re not as escalatory. But the disadvantage is
that they are reversible. They don’t actually take the system out, they just kind of mess
with it for a little bit. (dramatic music) Okay, we’ve arrived to the
blowing up part of the video, and I intentionally kind of put it here and didn’t make it the full focus because even though it’s a kind of like more sensational version of this story, these other capabilities, the non-kinetic stuff
is actually the stuff that’s happening right now. It is like the conflict and the war that is
currently happening up there, and it’s the most likely to continue. But we can’t go on without
talking about the kinetic stuff because countries are working on it. And in fact, we already have
a lot of the capabilities to take out satellites. The first one is to actually
just target the ground station. A satellite’s not very useful if it can’t communicate
back down to the surface. Ukraine did this last year in Crimea, they attacked this Russian
early warning satellite station. Another is by shooting
a missile up into space to hit a satellite, which is something a lot of
countries can do already. – So we’ve seen a lot
of countries do that. The US has demonstrated that. We’ve seen China do it,
we’ve seen India do it. – Now these aren’t countries shooting other people’s satellites. It’s shooting their own satellites, like decommissioned satellites. It is the thing that you
do to deter your enemy by being like, “We could blow up your
satellite if we wanted to.” – This creates a lot of debris. The Russia test was in 2021, and it created debris that was
at around the same altitude as the International Space Station. – What the Russians did
today with these 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris poses a risk not only to those astronauts,
not only to those cosmonauts, but to satellites, to the
interests of all nations. – Okay, and now we’re getting
to the kind of cutting edge, stuff that we kind of technically can do, but it’s like in its early stages, which is the ability for
satellites that are up there to attack each other
while they’re up there. This is not “Star Wars” where
everyone’s zipping around and shooting at each other. It’s kinda like if there
was a bunch of cars driving around a race track at like
a hundred miles an hour. If you wanna attack another one, you kind of have to drive up to it and attack it while you’re
going a hundred miles an hour. And put that in three
dimensions and make it, you know, space, and suddenly you’ve got
satellite co-orbital attacks. – You can maneuver in space. It just doesn’t look like airplanes flying in the atmosphere. – And so now we’re seeing
these big militaries develop capabilities to
maneuver their satellites around in more and more sophisticated ways. (dramatic music) – So China has demonstrated
they can put a satellite into geostationary orbit. I mean, it was called SJ-21. – It’s apparently tasked
with cleaning up space junk. So in January 2022, this
Chinese satellite starts to break from just the boring old orbit and starts to do some crazy stuff. They start to go 3,000 kilometers up and down from the orbit. They sync up with one of
China’s dead satellites and they grab onto it with a kind of like grappling hook robotic arm thing. They get back into orbit
with the trash in hand, and they eventually push it out into what’s called graveyard orbit. I mean, we’re looking at
this on like an animation and it looks all simple
and it’s like, well yeah, they just met up and he grabbed it and
he like threw it away, and like, no, this is insane. Like the physics and the
maneuvering and the fuel. – So demonstrating, you could say, the ability to do very
sophisticated maneuvers in orbit, no one’s done something like that before. Those types of capabilities, those could also serve a military purpose. The ability to grab onto
a satellite and move it. – One of the Space Force
folks at the Pentagon characterized this as China practicing- – [Michael] Dogfighting in space. – [Johnny] Dogfighting
meaning like what airplanes do when they fight each other and chase each other,
shoot each other down. – They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to do
on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another. – So why would they do that? Don’t know. They’re testing,
are they showing off? Does this go back into
the deterrence piece that we talked about earlier? It’s hard to say what
the messaging is of that, but what it does show is that they’re operating in an
increasingly sophisticated way in space with their satellites,
around their own satellites, but still concerning. And then two, that they
just don’t seem to care as much about fuel use
as we historically have. – Being able to precisely maneuver to another satellite while you’re in orbit doesn’t just allow you to grab onto it with this claw machine looking thing. You can also do some other
clever military things. For example, Chinese military
researchers published a paper speccing out a concept
for a satellite bomb that you could theoretically
deliver into the exhaust pipe of a satellite in orbit
and just have it sit there. They’re thinking about this stuff. Now I’m making it sound
like China’s the only one who has the ability to
maneuver, that’s not true. The US can do this,
and so can Russia even. And in fact, last year, multiple Russian satellites got close to an American spy satellite
and kind of surrounded it. The US complained and they
eventually backed off. But like there’s movement
happening up there. One of these Russian
satellites even was seen shooting something off, like it didn’t shoot at another satellite, but it shot it off into space. Russia swears this was
perfectly peaceful, but. – So you could say like a projectile from Russian satellites. What is that test? Is that a test of an
anti-satellite weapon? So effectively a projectile that could shoot from
one satellite to another? Is it indicative of some
other type of testing? We really don’t know. I’m suspicious of anything
Russia would be doing like that in low earth orbit. So I’m thinking weapons test. And even if that’s not the intention, I still think that
could serve as a weapon. – A lot of these things look
like civilian operations that can be used for kind of civilian or commercial purposes. But if things got real down here on earth, those same capabilities
could be flipped to be used as attacking weapons from
one satellite to another. Now the US has not
acknowledged whether or not they have any of these kinds of weapons. They have come out and said
that they could develop these types of weapons if they wanted to, but they don’t acknowledge any programs with co-orbital anti-satellite weaponry. But knowing what we know about
this stuff, we can assume, or at least I assume that the US probably has really sophisticated capacity for satellite on satellite attacks. We just don’t really know about it. (dramatic music) One thing we do know about
kind of is this puppy. I mean, this thing looks like space wars, little mini space shuttle thing. Much to my disappointment, this thing is not just
zipping around in space like in “Star Wars,” it is also a satellite that is just going around doing the like falling
through space thing. This space plane is an
experimental aircraft that’s working on all
kinds of crazy new tech, including capturing
solar power from the sun and then converting that into
like high-powered microwaves. And once again, lasers. That could happen too. Lasers and microwaves, that’s space wars. So the US space plane has been up there, 4,000 days worth of
experimenting in space, much of it very confidential. China’s also got this sort of space drone that they’re doing similar stuff with. And let me just pause and remind you that a lot of this stuff that we’re doing now was
thought up decades ago. Like during the Cold War, people were thinking of crazy ideas. There was actually a program
that was nicknamed Star Wars. Rods from God, the thing that
we started the video with, with the rods going down to earth, like that was thought
of during the Cold War. A lot of this stuff was like
conceived during that time. It was too expensive and impractical, but they were thinking of this stuff. One of the programs during that time was called Brilliant Pebbles, and it was a missile defense shield idea. You put a bunch of
satellites up into space, and those satellites are
just going around earth waiting and waiting and waiting. And the moment that
your enemy like launches a rocket towards you,
these satellites go down and they shoot the rocket down and you are safe, Brilliant Pebbles. Incredibly expensive and complicated in the
’80s, but guess what? A couple months ago,
Donald Trump takes office, Elon Musk by his side, and
guess what’s back on the agenda? Brilliant Pebbles, now rebranded as America’s Iron Dome, AKA. – Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield. – And not surprisingly, Elon Musk is the frontrunner to build the Golden Dome Missile Shield. Yeah, that makes sense. Right now, there are no
active weapons in space like blow things up weapons. If this goes forward, there
will be missiles in space that again, are there for defense, but could easily be turned
a little bit this way and be turned into a weapon
to take out another satellite. (dramatic music) And then there’s nukes.
Man, this one freaks me out. So back in the Cold War, there was talk of putting
a nuclear weapon in orbit and just having it there. – I guess the crazy idea was like, are people gonna have
weapons stationed in space that you drop on earth? – But this was the Cold War. Crazy ideas were the name of the game. Soviet Union and the United
States both put nukes super high up into the atmosphere and detonated them just
to see what would happen, kind of testing this idea out. And sure enough, it completely
obliterated a huge portion of the satellites that were
going around Earth at the time. There weren’t a ton back then, but it did some real damage,
not because of an explosion, but because of an
electromagnetic pulse radiation that goes in and kind of
messes with the electronics of these orbiting satellites. So not good. And in fact, so not good
that the Soviet Union and the United States
decided to sign an agreement where they say, “We
promise not to do any nukes or weapons of mass destruction in space.” So at least from orbit, we still send ICBMs with nuclear warheads into space to then go down. But having them in orbit all of the time was just a little too risky. They do have limits it turns out. – [Nixon] We are taking
the first firm step toward keeping outer space free forever from the implements of war. – And that’s been kind
of our one big treaty in governing weapons in outer space. We don’t really have an
international framework around this. And in fact, that very
treaty is now being tested. – Russia is developing a
nuclear weapon in space. (dramatic music) – [Johnny] In a big drama
that occurred last year, US intel came out that said that Russia actually has the capability to put a nuke in space. And for a hot minute, there were people saying that
there is a nuclear weapon in orbit that Russia has launched. – We think Russia has put
a nuclear device in orbit. – Big freak out, super scary. Turns out there wasn’t a
nuclear weapon in space, but there was a weird Russian satellite that was in graveyard
orbit, but it was active. It was kind of doing some weird stuff. And the US military insisted that this was and is a part of a program that Russia has to eventually put a nuclear warhead in orbit. – Some type of anti-satellite
nuclear capability, nuclear weapon that
would be based in space. That’s what the allegation is. – If we are unable to
convince them otherwise to ultimately fly a
nuclear weapon in space which would be a indiscriminate weapon, doesn’t have national boundaries, doesn’t determine between
military satellites, civilian satellites, or
commercial satellites. – And how do we know that they have this? – And here’s where you have
me again at a disadvantage, I’d be happy to have this conversation in a classified session. – So we don’t know.
– We are concerned about it. The department and the
entire administration, and I know this, Congress is
taking this deadly seriously. – So you’d say, “Oh, wow,
would Russia really do that?” I think what has happened though is that Russia is the declining space power. They’re driving around a 1989 Buick. It’s still working. It’s reliable. It’s a testament to Soviet engineers that the systems work as well as they do. They’re not launching new stuff. They’re not making new technology. – Now Russia flatly denies
that they’re doing this. And in fact, Putin has come out and said he doesn’t want an arms race in space. And of course he doesn’t.
Russia’s a declining space power. But he’s framing it as kind
of this moralistic high ground of saying, “We don’t want
an arms race in space.” But the US is like, “No
no no, Putin, we see you. You’re developing a nuclear
weapon to put into space to get the ultimate
leverage over the rest of us because we are surpassing you.” So the next month, April
2024, everyone’s at the UN, it’s the UN Security Council. And the US with Japan puts
out this resolution that says, “Why don’t we all sign a promise that we wanna reaffirm that treaty that says no WMD or nukes in space? Everyone, let’s just reaffirm it.” And guess what? Russia
vetoes the resolution. And boom, the US is like, “Gotcha. We know that you’re actually
not serious about this. You wanna put a nuke in space. Why didn’t you sign this resolution?” – Why, if you are following the rules, would you not support a
resolution that reaffirms them? What could you possibly be hiding? – So then in a kind of
wild defensive gambit in geopolitics, Russia drafts their own
resolution that says we want to ban all
weapons in space, quote, “For all time.” They’re like, “We don’t wanna
just reaffirm the old treaty, we wanna ban all weapons in space. Stop the arms race.” And guess what? The US vetoed this. And now Russia’s like, “Ha. Now you are the one who
wants to weaponize space. We said we want to ban it for
all time and you vetoed it.” I’m painting this picture because I want you to see
that there is a tense set of negotiations that are heating up about what do we do with weapons in space? Where do we pump the brakes? And so far, the countries
can’t quite agree. And so the status quo of it being the wild
west up there continues. And boy, do I hope that that changes soon, because in my opinion, there is no reason why we
can’t cooperate up there. It’s space, it’s not land
and territory and borders and ethnic identities and language. It is space. And it is my hope that
even though space is going to become a bigger, more
crowded, more militarized place, these countries can figure out
a way to talk to each other and put on some breaks on
how far they’re willing to go to weaponize all of this. Because weaponizing it doesn’t
actually help any of us. So until these countries
can come to the table and actually agree on something, stop playing these mind games, it’s going to continue
to be this arms race. China will continue to catch up to the US and their space capabilities. Elon Musk will continue to get
very rich off of all of this. The US will forge ahead with all of its secretive capabilities that we’ll someday learn about. And space up there with
all those satellites will certainly be a big
part of any future conflict.