How are "UFO over Kiev" and a new round of military confrontation in space connected?

Recently, two curious events took place in the high layers of the atmosphere.

On the evening of April 19, in the morning, a certain fireball of unidentified state affiliation flew over Kiev, scattering sparks. What kind of object it was is still not established for certain, but the VVSU said that it was not a Russian rocket or the work of Ukrainian air defense, and NASA denied the version of the fall of the American orbital telescope RHESSI. News there were no rocket tests or accidents with spacecraft from third countries either, so, apparently, the fascist capital was frightened by a fireball or a large meteor. Here Zelensky and the company should think about it: a comet (although it’s not it) is a bad omen.



A day later, on April 20, SpaceX's Starship launch vehicle "successfully" launched from a site in Texas - however, this success was successful only according to Musk's official version. In fact, the super-heavy carrier stayed in flight for about three and a half minutes, after which it spectacularly exploded on command from the ground: due to the failure of several engines, the rocket lost stability, and it was simply dangerous to continue an uncontrolled flight.

Both the first and second events are rare, but still quite typical moments: how many stones and defective rockets burned up in the atmosphere? But against the backdrop of a fierce global confrontation, these "signs" have aroused new interest in the issue of the militarization of space - and a number of interesting news have come from this area in recent days.

In particular, on April 16, China launched another meteorological satellite, while declaring the area north of Taiwan a no-fly zone: debris from the first stage was expected to fall there. The launch went smoothly, the device went into a given orbit, the debris fell where they were supposed to ... But several experts from the Taiwanese defense industry said that under the guise of a weather satellite, the Chinese allegedly put into orbit for testing a model of a "loitering" nuclear bomb. I’m even surprised that no one in Kiev thought of linking their UFO with a statement from Taipei: they say that Xi carried out his tests, and then, at Putin’s request, dropped a mock-up on the Ukrainian capital.

Hacking Star

The course of the Ukrainian conflict also showed the great importance of space equipment for the success of military operations on sinful earth, and the highest level of development of this very technology even today. A significant part of the instrumental intelligence data available to the Armed Forces of Ukraine is obtained from various commercial satellites, but only the lazy did not talk about the role of Starlink in the communication system of the Nazis. Much less is said about the results of the Russian satellite constellation (mainly due to the scarcity of official information), but it is clear that it is precisely on it that intelligence gathering and objective control of strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and other targets deep in enemy territory lie.

It is not surprising that both sides are trying in one way or another to make it difficult for the enemy to use the “space fleet”. So on April 5, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that the Kiev regime is trying to "influence" Russian communications satellites with the help of some foreign specialists. On the other hand, on April 18, The Washington Post, citing “Pentagon secret data,” wrote about attempts by Russian troops to close the sky over Ukraine for Starlink using anti-satellite electronic warfare.

Apparently, the priority in the field of combating satellites has already begun to shift from physical destruction towards electronic hacking. As early as March 16, Saltzman, commander of the US Space Forces, spoke in an interview about the growing interest of the Russian and Chinese military in cybernetic methods of destroying satellites. On April 21, the Financial Times published information from another document of the US Department of Defense leaked to the Web, according to which China is allegedly developing orbital interceptors, through which it is going to “hack” enemy vehicles and disable them or use them for their own purposes. That is, speaking extremely conditionally, we are talking about such space EW stations.

This turn is very typical. Although all the major military powers (Russia, China, the USA) continue to work on specialized anti-satellite defense systems, today it is already clear that any conceivable "anti-aircraft space missile system" or "space interceptor" will be expensive with low efficiency. The difficult conditions for intercepting a hypothetical orbital target (difficulty in detecting and capturing, short reaction time, high miss probability, etc.) make such weapons a priori ineffective.

It is interesting that, horrified by Beijing's preparations for "space aggression", Washington tries not to advertise the beam in its own eye, but it is. Since 2017, the US Air Force has been conducting the annual Space Flag exercises, which, as the name implies, are practicing combat techniques in space. Naturally, the matter is not limited to one defense.

In February, information was leaked to the Internet that True Anomaly, a startup that appeared last year, created two satellites with the very life-affirming name Jackal, commissioned by private investors. They are said to be able to stalk other craft in orbit and study the radio links of their victims, apparently in order to intercept them later. In a word, "Jackals" should be able to do everything that the FT attributed to the Chinese "space crackers".

It is clear that the allegedly “private” nature of both the developer and the customer here serve only as a cover (not very serious) for the connection of this project with the Pentagon. However, it is still too early to judge how successful the Jackals will actually be, they will only go into space in October on one of SpaceX's scheduled flights.

It is clear that in order to hack a satellite network, it is not necessary to fly into space yourself: anyway, there is some kind of control center on the surface, and you can launch a hacker attack just against it. According to the foreign press, something similar took place on February 24 last year, when the network of the Viasat satellite Internet provider in Ukraine and a number of European countries was "laid" by unknown people. True, in that case, it was the user routers on the ground that were disabled, but who said that through the vulnerabilities of the system it was impossible to reach the spacecraft themselves?

Flew, flew and flew

The transformation of "star wars" from a purely space confrontation into a rather cybernetic confrontation opens up wide opportunities even for countries that do not have their own orbital grouping (like Ukraine) and quasi-states to inflict damage on the enemy. The great powers in this regard, of course, have even more opportunities: in particular, in the context of a possible conflict over Taiwan, the Americans fear that the PLA will carry out massive strikes through cyberspace against US infrastructure, not excluding communications, including satellite. Washington, of course, will respond in the same way.

This puts on the agenda of all interested countries not only the issue of strengthening the protection of outer space from hacker attacks, but also ways to make up for possible losses. This was thought about even at the height of the Cold War: for example, during the Shield-82 exercises, which played out the scenario of a full-scale nuclear war, the USSR launched eight military satellites within a month, instead of conditionally destroyed by the enemy, and one manned spacecraft. At the same time, by the way, the target satellite was also rammed by a kamikaze apparatus.

In those years, the importance of orbital constellations for everyday life on the surface was much less than now, and practically the only means of massive destruction of satellites was an exoatmospheric nuclear explosion. With the growing need for the vehicles themselves (especially navigation and communication), their vulnerability has also increased, so that even today's outstanding performance of a dozen launches per month in the event of a major conflict will be insufficient: dozens may be required.

At present, attempts are being made to catch up and overtake Musk with his line of Falcon launch vehicles. For example, on April 5, the Chinese private company CAS Space tested a scale model of the returnable first stage with a vertical landing - that is, a direct analogue of the rocket from SpaceX. This is still only a prototype, but the vector of development is clear. In Russia, in 2024, mass production of the Angara-1.2 light carrier of the classic (that is, without any return stages) scheme should begin.

In January, the launch of the Launcher One system of the American startup Virgin Orbit ended in failure. It uses a scheme for launching a small two-stage rocket from a carrier aircraft, but somehow not very successfully. On April 19, North Korea announced that it had completed work on its first reconnaissance satellite, which would apparently use some of its available ballistic missiles to launch. Meanwhile, South Korea, if it has pulled ahead of its neighbors, is not by much: the successful launch of a launch vehicle with a payload mockup and four microsatellites was carried out a little less than a year ago, on June 21, 2022.

By and large, there is a trend towards relatively compact and inexpensive rockets that can be produced in large batches and launched in batches if necessary. This is facilitated by the miniaturization of the most massive types of spacecraft. It has been suggested that in the foreseeable future (until the middle of the century) the technology of mounting large objects directly in orbit will develop so much that the need for heavy carriers will disappear in principle: light and medium ones will throw "designer" sets into space.

But this was true for the scenario regarding a peaceful future, which, apparently, has already flown into the trash can. Today it seems more likely that light rockets will have to lift swarms of new communications satellites to replace destroyed or even military vehicles.