MILITARISATION OF SPACE

-VIDHI KUMAWAT AND SANIYA GOYAL

The militarisation of space involves the placement and development of weaponry and military technology in outer space. A successive stage of militarisation of space can be space warfare, combat that takes place in outer space. Space warfare can broadly be classified into three main categories based on their way of attacking- Ground-to-space warfare, attacking satellites from Earth; Space-to-space, satellites attacking satellites; Satellites-to-Earth, satellites attacking Earth-based targets.

Over the course of human history, war has already scaled the ground, sea, and air. Within a short span of time we will turn to space as the new battlefield. The first thing that comes to the mind when we think of space war is laser weapons and sophisticated aircrafts flown by proficient soldiers. It would be the hackers operating from the earth, controlling satellites, creating devastating effects. Unlike the comrades-in-arms who now supervise, authorise, and outline the fortune of a nation, the hackers would be the new prime mover in controlling a nation’s fate during the prospective spare warfare. These hackers would have the power to devastate the whole nations by disintegrating their communication within the country’s military on the ground and with the whole world in a fraction of seconds.

According, to most industry leaders like John Wörner, director-general of the European Space Agency, space is meant to be a peaceful frontier. For decades developed nations have been able to peacefully come together in space to perform operations for the betterment of humanity. In 1967 the US, UK, and USSR even signed the Outer Space Treaty banning the use of nuclear weapons in space. So, if that piece of legislation holds up, then a space war would at least be a nuclear-free zone. In the modern world, countries all across the planet heavily rely on space for day to day activities. World governments are already anticipating that key moments in future wars will play out in space; and our ideas on space and cyber wars are becoming more and more interlinked. While a space war would most probably develop out of cyber-attacks, however, many countries have also already shown their capacity to develop space weapons, meaning that they also foresee the possibility of physical combat. And as recently as 2014, Russia launched another alleged space weapon; one that reports say can change it more quickly than ever before while in orbit. Another possibility in terms of physical conflict in space could be the use of satellites to attack each other. Since the 1960s, some of the world’s leading powers have reportedly been working on advanced, weaponised satellites for the specific purpose of a future space conflict.

The Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical belief predicts just how bad it could get if satellites were to start attacking each other in space. The Kessler Syndrome suggests that a violent space war with satellites crashing into each other would cause so much debris that the orbits of anything circling Earth would become so clogged that it’d become nearly impossible to travel safely through it all. The debris would then continue to collide with more satellites, even the “peaceful” ones, causing a chain reaction of destruction in our sky. And, before long, we have billions of pieces of destroyed satellite dominating our upper atmosphere, perhaps crashing to the ground, and generally ruining our only route off of Earth and into the great beyond. In this case, the war would see space turned into a wasteland. Military experts though have suggestions that it is highly improbable that a space war would ever reach such extreme measures. But there’s still the potential for massive, even life-threatening disruption, but we’d never quit at the point of watching the sky burn above us. The Outer Space Treaty does, in essence, turn space into a neutral zone. So much so that if a conflict arises there, it’ll most likely be more of a cold war.

The discussion over the space war is going on for a quite long time. According to the Kessler Syndrome, one day the orbit of the earth would be covered with debris of satellites; the disfigured satellites would encircle the earth and consequently pull in the operating satellites as well. This would pose a large threat in turn. Now the biggest question here is, how will it affect the normal people?

Some scholarly scientists believe that such an extreme condition will not occur. What we think is that it will definitely occur in the future. A few hundred years back nobody would have envisioned for something like an airplane, floating in the sky, high above the ground. In the contemporary world, the usefulness of airplanes is known to all. Likewise, is it possible that the orbit of the earth might get filled with debris, if this is the case then the results will be menacing, menacing for the whole of mankind. Earthlings will get confined to the earth, no one will be able to transcend the debris; no more expeditions to the outer space, no more knowledge about the solar system, and no more finding life on other planets. We will become caged inside the earth. We, humans, are fond of traveling and discovering new places, we have been discovering the entire solar system for several decades. No one would ever like to lose this opportunity. So, the decision is ours, whether we want to quarrel and cause destruction in the outer space or to give preference to our future expeditions to the outer space and create a way to more technological conquests.