A China-US war in space: The after-action report

Mention military space operations and most people, even sophisticates in Washington, conjure up images of Star Wars: Laser-powered firearms, star fighters and battleships, and cosmic fireball explosions that propel space rubble to infinity and beyond. What’s presumed is space combat waged between massive, opposed forces armed with dedicated military spacecraft equipped with an arsenal of space guns, zipping to points in space with light-warp acceleration.  What’s expected is that one party will vanquish the other or (better) that they might come to their senses and strike some sort of Westphalian space compact.

Even the studied imagination of reality, though, reaches somewhat different conclusions. If one taps the nation’s leading space experts, as my center did, and games out the most likely near and mid-term threats the United States and its space-faring allies face, space blasters aren’t the worry. Instead, the headaches ahead are relatively slow-moving rendezvous robot satellites, ground-based electronic jammers, and cyber weapons and lasers designed to disable satellites without producing space debris.