Just months after the White House charged the Kremlin is secretly developing nuclear-armed spacecraft to confront rings of Western satellites aiding besieged Ukraine, Moscow is stepping up its threats of launching a space blitz on these allied spacecraft.
Russian foreign ministry apparatchik Sergey Belousko issued a veiled warning to commercial space outfits that he accused of interfering in the Kremlin’s “internal affairs” – a coded reference to its invasion of Ukraine – and added retaliation could be in the works. Belousko lashed out at these so-called supporters of Ukraine’s resistance during the Outer Space Security Conference hosted by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
Belousko’s message underscored Russia’s potential wartime use of counterspace weaponry to target Western space ventures that have mostly provided humanitarian aid to democratic Ukraine after Russian tanks, missile brigades and jet fighters began blitzing the former Soviet republic.
When Moscow launched bombing campaigns aimed at obliterating Ukraine’s internet infrastructure, Elon Musk began rushing tens of thousands of SpaceX Starlink transceivers into the country – to hospitals, campuses and bomb shelters – while activating his mega-constellation of broadband-beaming satellites overhead.
Foiling Moscow’s attempts to barricade Ukraine inside a bullet-backed Iron Curtain infuriated the Kremlin leadership, and President Vladimir V. Putin began dispatching his lieutenants to warn of potential counterstrikes against these Western space auxiliaries.
Konstantin Vorontsov, a deputy director at the Russian foreign ministry, warned that even these civilian spacecraft could be targeted by Russian defense forces in a series of fiery speeches at UN gatherings in Geneva and New York.
Around the same time, Elon Musk told his handpicked biographer that Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. had personally told him the use of Starlink technology by Ukraine’s resistance fighters could impel Moscow to respond with tactical nuclear weapons. While SpaceX’s founder engaged in frenetic behind-the-scenes diplomacy to prevent any nuclear clash, his satellites were still marked with Russian bullseyes, and the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos even threatened Musk himself for aiding Ukraine’s “fascist forces”.
Then American intelligence agencies discovered the Kremlin’s clandestine project to loft spacecraft tipped with nuclear warheads into orbit, to perpetually stalk allied satellites and capsules.
The new round of threats issued by Sergey Belousko at the UN’s Palais des Nations, near the Swiss border with France, “had the same undertone of warning/veiled threat that other Russian officials have used in regards to Starlink and Western commercial space systems being used in and around Ukraine,” Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Washington-based think tank Secure World Foundation, told me in an interview.
The Foundation, which co-sponsored the global space convention, has a core mission of teaming up with government leaders, international organizations, academics and think tanks around the world to promote “peaceful uses of outer space benefiting Earth and all its peoples,” and Samson, one of the top space security scholars in the U.S., acted as a moderator at the UN gathering – aimed at preventing an arms race in space.
Ironically, Belousko and his backers in the Kremlin fired off the latest challenge to the Western space powers and players at a conclave aimed at preventing “the threat or use of force in outer space” and “the placement of weapons in outer space.”
The Russian delegate’s threats “appear to be echoing early comments by Russian government officials,” Darren McKnight, Senior Technical Fellow at the world-leading spacecraft tracking firm LeoLabs, told me in an interview. McKnight played a central role at the Geneva space assembly, outlining the technological leaps that have honed spacecraft monitoring and their potential role in future arms control and disarmament measures.
Silicon Valley-based LeoLabs is the leading-edge operator of a global web of phased array radars that continuously scan low Earth orbit while tracking more than 20,000 objects in flight – from spent upper stages of rockets to the shrapnel created by anti-satellite missiles crashing into their targets – and warns spacecraft operators of potential collisions on the horizon.
This “living map of orbital activity,” combining radar imagery with AI tools to predict impending dangers around the clock, has likely already prevented countless orbital smash-ups, and LeoLabs has also helped map a safe trajectory for the International Space Station as it speeds through the orbital minefields created by past missile strikes, including Russia’s destruction of a Soviet satellite on the eve of its invasion of Ukraine.
In the hours and days following Moscow’s missile attack on the communist-era Cosmos 1408 satellite, McKnight told me, “LeoLabs mapped out the potentially intersecting orbits of the cloud of shrapnel produced by the Russian ASAT strike and the manned spaceflight corridor.”
An aerospace engineer and co-author of the book Artificial Space Debris (Orbit, a Foundation Series), McKnight headed LeoLabs’ race to map the explosion and its spread of deadly missile shards – traveling at seven times the speed of a bullet – orbiting the planet and threatening anything in its flightpath.
Russia’s robotic assassination of the Cosmos spacecraft, he said, endangered “all spacefaring nations.”
“There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in LEO from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades,” McKnight predicted in a report published just days following the strike.
“While any ASAT test is a terrible idea, this one occurred in one of the worst possible orbits.”
Russia’s blasting its own satellite was carried out “less than 100km above the International Space Station,” he said, “and less than 100km below multiple commercial constellations including SpaceX’s Starlink fleet.”
Immediately after the strike, NASA ordered all the astronauts aboard the International Space Station to take shelter inside their docked capsules, ready to blast off if shrapnel ripped through the Station.
Any new Kremlin ASAT assault on a Western constellation could likewise trigger the ISS spacefarers to prepare for a rapid-fire evacuation, even as McKnight and his team at LeoLabs rush to chart the new dangers and risks of collisions in orbit.
NASA scientists have created intricate guidelines for action if the International Space Station faces a comparatively high chance of colliding with a shard of space debris, according to NASA expert James Cooney, an insider who led a study focusing on the ISS and its collision avoidance options.
Being hit by shrapnel “could be catastrophic” or “mission-ending” for the Station, he says, and could imperil the lives of its entire crew.
Officers at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California monitor the government’s own radar tracking system – operated by U.S. Space Command – and constantly compare the ISS trajectory against all other traced objects in low Earth orbit.
They raise an alarm “if anything is predicted to pass within a ±2 km (local vertical) x 25 km x 25 km (local horizontal) volume within the next 72 hours,” says Cooney, who is based at NASA’s Flight Operations Directorate and helps calculate the Station’s risk of collision with any approaching shrapnel.
A high chance of collision triggers flight controllers to order a “Debris Avoidance Maneuver” – using the Station’s boosters to alter its trajectory just enough to avert any contact with the incoming space object.
During “high-risk conjunctions,” Cooney says, all astronauts are ordered to seek refuge inside their space lifeboats, or capsules – the emergency protocol that was invoked in the aftermath of the last Russian ASAT mission.
Because the ISS boosters are provided by a docked Russian Progress ship, any collision avoidance order has to be carried out jointly by flight controllers in Houston and Moscow, Cooney explains, which points to a potentially catastrophic flaw in the system.
The onetime head of the Russian space agency who personally threatened Elon Musk with retribution for providing Ukraine with Starlink stations also at one point – furious over Western sanctions on Russia – warned that he could abruptly recall the Progress spacecraft docked at the Station.
Without the Progress to periodically boost the ISS into a stable orbit, he threatened, the Station could come crashing down over the U.S. or Europe.
That raises the question of whether, if Russia’s commander-in-chief were to order an ASAT attack on SpaceX satellites that simultaneously endangered the International Space Station, Mission Controllers in Moscow would heed pleas from their American counterparts to carry out collision avoidance maneuvers to save the Station, or whether the Roscosmos team would even have that freedom under Putin’s wartime rule.
