The future is out there

Tim Marshall's book sets out the dangers of the growing belligerence of astropolitics and the future race for space

The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change our World

Author: Tim Marshall

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 850

On March 27, 2019, Indians were asked to stand by for an address by the prime minister. Since the PM’s previous major address on November 8, 2016, concerned demonetisation, those who heard the latest speech were exultant, relieved or puzzled. This was no proclamation to match the disruptive event that withdrew 86 per cent of the currency in circulation. Instead, the PM said  India had successfully conducted an anti-satellite (ASAT) test when a ballistic missile interceptor developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation destroyed an Indian satellite in Low Earth Orbit.

This announcement may have had the Make India Great Again hawks celebrating. But it left the uninformed majority puzzled. Why on earth — literally — did this matter? Later, some commentary explained: It was a message to China, which had conducted a far bigger ASAT test in 2007, at a higher altitude, leaving a larger and more dangerous debris field than India’s. With this, India joined only the US, China and Russia in demonstrating ASAT capabilities.

This muscular flexing marked a strategic shift for India from being invested in the peaceful uses of outer space for development — the Indian Space Research Organisation is one of the world’s six largest space agencies  — to a more belligerent power. But the ASAT test doesn’t catapult India into a frontline space power and it is unclear yet how far the signing of the Artemis Accords during the PM’s state visit to the US will change things. In the great beyond, it’s the US, China and Russia —  in that order — that are literally jockeying for space, and Tim Marshall explains why in The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space will Change our World .

Mr Marshall’s previous works were located on terra firma . Two of them,  Prisoners of Geography  and The Power of Geography, were thought-provoking analyses of geopolitics through the prism of climate change. With The Future of Geography,  he introduces us to the world of “astropolitics”.

Mr Marshall is an accessible writer, with a knack for simplifying the complex in a remarkably few pages. It is a skill entertainingly deployed in this well-structured book that contends that the competition for space is not a futuristic concern limited to rich nations. “Many of us think of space as ‘out there’ and ‘in the future’. But it’s here and now  — the border into the great beyond is well within our reach,” he writes.

Despite all the rhetoric about “peaceful cooperation”, though, his book shows that astropolitics is increasingly becoming a belligerent adjunct to geopolitics on earth.

This is to be expected since the space race was rooted in the Cold War. In the initial years, we know the Soviets scored multiple firsts: Created the first man-made object to orbit earth (Sputnik, in 1957), the first spacecraft to land on the moon (1959) and the far side of the moon, the first man, woman and animal in space, the first spacewalk, the first photographs of the moon…. The Americans made their giant leap for mankind on the moon only in 1969.

The Soviet’s early successes are remarkable when you consider the contrast in the key personalities involved. The father of US rocketry was a sheltered Nazi war criminal and ballistics expert Wernher von Braun who created the V1 and V2 rockets of World War II. The Soviets had Sergei Korolev, inmate of Siberian gulag for “confessing” (under torture) to being a counter-revolutionary against the Motherland in the 1930s.  During World War II, Korolev was transferred to a Moscow jail to work on rocket designs.Von Braun died a folk hero in the US. Korolev died in 1966 after complications during a routine surgery. Doctors found they could not insert a breathing tube because his throat had been badly damaged by torture in the gulag.

The Cold War represents the intersection of cutting-edge space science and astropolitics where the great powers stake out territory on the Moon and Mars to corner rare minerals and water. Sci-fi scenarios such as putting humans on Mars and warring spy satellites are the outward manifestations of this competition. There is some collaboration between the three, which Mr Marshall describes in entertaining detail, but this could end when the International Space Station (ISS) is decommissioned in 2030.

Most countries experience the space race between Low Earth Orbit, 160-200 km above earth, and High Earth Orbit, 35,786 km up. The short point here is that “it’s getting busy above Terra”, where more than 80 countries have placed satellites in space taken there by 11 countries that have launch capabilities.
 

The biggest players here are the Big Three with Japan, India, Germany, and the UK positioning themselves as frontrunners. There are private companies (mostly American) offering similar services, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, plus enticements to zillionaires for space cruises and holidays on the moon. There are well over 8,000 satellites hurtling around earth, of which about 60 per cent are active. There will be many more, exponentially raising the risks of collision, even endangering the Hubble telescope or ISS, and outright conflict.

Treaties to deal with the debris are being discussed but the ASAT race is complicating moves towards consensus. Mr Marshall sets out the dangers of the future race for space in section 3, entitled “Future Past”. The two chapters here, “Space Wars” and “Tomorrow’s World,” do not leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling.