Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

The Artemis Accords are an example of the legal, political and military difficulties space exploration is facing. When it comes to Artemis, Moscow and Beijing are particularly concerned about the articles allowing the signatories to establish ‘safety zones’ on the Moon to protect the area in which a country is working. Nations are asked to ‘respect’ the zones in order to ‘prevent harmful interference’. This throws up the scenario of a Russian spaceship landing within a zone, setting up shop next door to a Japanese or American base, and the new arrivals getting their drills out. By what law could the Japanese or Americans object, and in the absence of law, what would they do about it? They could hardly turn to the now horribly outdated 1967 document popularly known as the Outer Space Treaty upon which most of the rules governing the use of space are based. It says: ‘Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.’ A safety zone looks an awful lot like national appropriation, and the more zones there are and they bigger they are, the more crowded will be the Moon – especially with private companies increasing competition for its resources.

Dolman created a maxim which echoes Halford Mackinder’s famous 1904 ‘Heartland’ geopolitical theory about control of the world beginning, ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.’ Dolman’s version is: ‘Who controls low Earth orbit controls near-Earth space. Who controls near-Earth space dominates Terra. Who dominates Terra determines the destiny of humankind.’

Low orbit is also the area where spacecraft seeking to travel beyond the Moon could be refuelled. Mars is millions of miles further away from Earth than the Moon, but because of the incredible effort required to slip the bounds of Earth’s gravity, more energy is required to get from the Earth’s surface to the Moon than from low orbit to Mars. If one powerful state gained full control of this corridor it would become the gatekeeper and could prevent rivals from refuelling within it and thus hamper their ability to travel further.

These are places where the gravitational effects of the Earth and Moon cancel each other out, allowing objects stationed there to remain in position without having to use fuel. These points may become areas of competition.

Russia and China have both made organizational changes in their military, as have the Americans with the formation of the US Space Force in 2019. There are concerns that this activity violates the Outer Space Treaty, but it only states that weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear missiles should not be placed ‘in orbit or on celestial bodies or [stationed] in outer space in any other manner’. There’s nothing in international law to prevent the stationing of laser-armed satellites. And every page of history suggests that if one country does it, so will another, and then another.

An example of that came in July 2020. Russia’s Kosmos 2542 military satellite had been ‘stalking’ an American satellite, USA 245, at times coming within 150 kilometres of it, a distance regarded as close. It then released a mini satellite from within it – Kosmos 2543. The US military calls these ‘Russian dolls’. This ‘baby’ Kosmos also shadowed the American spacecraft before manoeuvring towards a third Russian satellite. It then appeared to fire a high-speed projectile travelling at about 700 kilometres an hour. The Kremlin says it was simply inspecting the condition of its satellites, but the British Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defense both believe it was a form of weapons test.

Satellites no longer just relay TV pictures and phone calls; they are vital for both daily life and modern warfare. Knocking out or blinding a satellite could mean your car’s GPS system goes blank and your bank cards stop working. When you switch on the TV to find out what’s happening you may find just a blank screen. After a few days the supermarkets’ delivery systems, both to their stores and your house, would be in chaos. Without GPS ships and planes would struggle to navigate, and in an extreme scenario the electricity grid could go down. As for getting a weather forecast – forget it.

The US government is working with Lockheed Martin to develop ‘Space Fence’. This is a surveillance system using ground-based radar to track satellites and orbital debris. The US Department of Defense can currently track more than 20,000 of these; it expects to increase this figure to 100,000, and to be able to identify the exact source of a laser fired at a satellite.

Conflict in Earth Space creates another problem: a huge amount of debris which would hurtle around in orbit, smashing into the satellite infrastructure of all countries and devastating the global economy. This is something that is already a risk given that there are currently 3,000 dead satellites and 34,000 pieces of space junk at least 10 centimetres in size, and many smaller, orbiting the planet. Some countries are trying to address the problem. If you’ve been to Japan you will have noticed the absence of something – litter. Japan’s SKY Perfect Corporation and the Japanese government have been working on a satellite to remove space debris with lasers that will push bits of debris into the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up. The British, dreadful litterers, are researching something similar.

As the NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg said, ‘If I could get every Earthling to do one circle of the Earth, I think things would run a little differently.’ She was talking about environmentalism, but it is an equally effective call for better diplomacy.

The universe is endless, which means that so are the possibilities, which is what makes science fiction such fun. But for the foreseeable future we are both restrained and yet liberated by our current knowledge. We are liberated because it is what allows us to reach for the stars, something that until very recently in our history was impossible; yet restrained because our knowledge cannot overcome the immensity of space and the constraints of natural law.

As the sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke said, every revolutionary idea passes through three phrases characterized by the views of its critics: 1) ‘It’ll never work – it’s pure fantasy’; 2) ‘It might work, but it’s not worth doing’; 3) ‘I said it was a good idea all along.’