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Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here.
This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink.
Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
COLD OPEN
[00:00]
EERIE MUSIC – suspense building, maybe a distant din of brown noise which I would like to hear repeated throughout as a visual indicator that we are ~*in space*~
Ground Control: Station Houston on space to ground two for an early wake up…
Early on the morning of November 15th 2021 Ground Control had a rude awakening for the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station.[1]
Ground Control: We were recently informed of a satellite breakup and need to have you guys start reviewing the Safe Haven procedure.
Safe Haven are two words no astronaut ever wants to hear. The astronauts were instructed to urgently shelter in their safety capsule – The Dragon.[2] The international space station’s orbit was crossing paths with a cloud of Space Debris – thousands of pieces of metal shrapnel.[3]
SUSPENSE/SFX - perhaps the sound of something whizzing by or a sound that indicates movement
Ground Control: Heads up 15 minutes to the next debris field, past TCA
ASTRONAUT: Copy. It is the, uh, conjunction and still yellow risker. Has it changed?
Ground Control: It's an equivalent yellow, uh, for the next debris pass.
[01:00]
The International Space Station and the cloud of debris were hurtling towards one another. At more than 17,500 miles per hour a collision would be catastrophic. Even a small piece of space junk - the size of a penny - would hit the space station at 10 times the force of a bullet. Amazingly, The International Space Station could withstand that.[4] But if it collided with something bigger? Say, the size of a grapefruit? The entire station would be uninhabitable.[5]
And the reason for this particular bit of space junk?
BEAT
CBS: Seven astronauts had to scramble to their safety capsules after Russia blew up one of its own satellites with an earth-based missile.
Russia had fired a missile into space and blew up one of its own satellites. And they did it all for show.[6] It was a warning to the rest of the world: "Nice satellite ya got there.
[02:00]
Be a real shame if somebody blew it up.”
Every 90 minutes, the Space Station’s orbit crossed paths with the orbit of the cloud of space junk.[7] Each pass threatened the lives of the astronauts on board... two of whom, by the way, were Russian.[8]
The US State Department swiftly condemned the Russian action.
State Dept: The Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites. The test has so far generated over 1500 pieces …
This cloud of debris is still in Earth’s orbit … because we haven’t figured out a way to remove the debris. In fact, no one has figured out a practical way to remove any space debris. The 1500 or so big pieces will be tracked. But many are too small to track.
[3:00]
Thousands more of those pieces will be racing around the Earth in orbit at mind-boggling speeds, alongside satellites and space stations, basically, forever.[9]
State Dept: This test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station as well as to other human space flight activities.
THEME MUSIC
INTRO
This episode we take on the diplomatic conundrum of space junk and meet the experts laying the groundwork for an international treaty.
KENNEDY: But I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
HARRIS: Space is exciting. It spurs our imaginations and it forces us to ask big questions. Space. It affects us all.
TRUMP: Space.
[04:00]
Gonna be a lot of things happening in space. Cause space is the world's newest war fighting domain.
I. Kessler
If the whole Russian space missile-Space Station thing rings a bell, it could be because you saw the award-winning film starring the husband of the famous human rights lawyer Amal Clooney …
GEORGE CLOONEY: Well, there's always something we can do.
SANDRA BULLOCK: I tried everything.
GEORGE CLOONEY: Did you try the soft landing jets?
SANDRA BULLOCK: They’re for landing, so..
GEORGE CLOONEY: Well, landing is launching. It's the same thing. Didn’t you learn about that in training?
Gravity is science fiction. But it’s starting to look like a documentary… other than the fact that Sandra Bullock splashed down to earth unscathed.
BEAT
The threat of space junk has been capturing imaginations long before the 2021 crisis, or the making of Gravity.
DONALD: Of course I have a legacy that I can't get rid of.
If you’re going to talk about space junk, you have to talk about Donald Kessler. And yes, the man has a legacy.
[05:00]
There is a whole space junk scenario named after him – Kessler Syndrome.[10]
Kessler is retired now. He doesn't normally give interviews but every time our producer approached him to talk about it, he was open to it – he cares about the cause.
DONALD: I was at our dining facility, and one of the person next to me heard that I used to work for NASA. And she said, ‘oh, when you were at NASA, did you know this person that generated this debris interest?’ I didn't say a word. I just showed him my dining badge that had my name. And they said, ‘oh, it's you,’
Yep, it’s him. A lot of people, like me, worry about space junk now, thanks to Kessler.
He didn’t set out to change how people thought about space. In the late 70s, he was working at NASA's Environmental Effects Project Office, and he wanted to put together a paper about this idea he just couldn’t shake.[11] Even though technically it wasn’t part of his job.
[06:00]
DONALD: It was something that I wanted to do and I had a little bit of extra time to put that paper together and get it published before my management said, ‘There’s other things you ought to be doing right now.’‘
DONALD: I snuck it in.
BEAT
It was 1978. Only two decades into the space age, and human beings had already sent a lot of stuff into space. There were spent rocket fuel containers, defunct satellites and all sorts of nuts and bolts and other garbage that was just par for the course any time someone sent a new satellite into space.[12] And all that junk would just stay up there, orbiting Earth.
Kessler's theory was that, the more things we put up into orbit, the more likely those things would be to collide – and break into smaller pieces of junk. And those pieces would continue to collide, making more and more pieces of junk, causing more and more collisions.[13]
DONALD: it is really a pretty simple concept
If we keep adding stuff to space unchecked and never find ways to bring it back to earth
[07:00]
we’re going to cause real issues in the long term for our use of space. Enough debris could make it virtually impossible to send anything into space through the Earth’s orbit. No more going to the moon. No more GPS. No more satellite internet. And no more Google Earth. Forever. [14]
MUS OUT / BEAT
Kessler’s theory started generating buzz before he even published the paper.
DONALD: Somebody from the United Nations called and asked for information about the paper and wanted a copy of it and, uh, it hadn't been publicly released yet,
His paper turned heads at NASA too.
DONALD: When it finally got published and it received a lot of attention, then management said, ‘okay, let's hear more about this.’
DONALD: And the center director immediately, once he understood what the whole project was about, he just said, ‘it'd be crazy not to continue this work.’
[08:00]
And his assistant then led, uh, a delegation to every major country, made it very quickly into an issue that was being addressed at the international level.
Kessler and his team at NASA traveled around the world to warn other countries about the hazards of filling space with, well, junk. They went to the UK and the Soviet Union. In China, their hosts took them on a tour of the Great Wall and Tiananmen square.[15] In each location, Kessler presented his warning to a room full of powerful people: If we keep mucking up space, he warned, it’ll ruin it for all of us.
DONALD: That got everybody on the page about working with it.
The work of Kessler and his team led to the formation of the Interagency Space Debris Coordination Committee[16] - the first international organization working to keep space sustainable. It was a huge step toward acknowledging that space was not a limitless resource.
[09:00]
Let's give a much deserved round of applause for the act of international collaboration…
BEAT
SFX - something fun here with applause that fades into… i dont know, silence with one person slow clapping in the distance
SFX - ominous, hopeless music
Because you already know it didn't last.
NPR: NASA says an anti-satellite test conducted by India resulted in hundreds of pieces of orbital debris, some of which is at the same altitude as the International Space Station
FOX NEWS 11: Today the State Department announced it was a Russians weapons test that created more than 1500 pieces of space junk.
NEWSCASTER: And so in January, 2007, the US watched as China launched this anti-satellite missile, it went up into orbit and blew up an old Chinese satellite.
BEAT
Despite Kessler’s warnings, the United States and the Soviet Union would continue
[10:00]
on occasion to blow up satellites in space on purpose. Eventually China, and then India joined them.
DONALD: Russia, within last couple of years doing an anti-satellite test that just doesn't make any sense…
SFX - END CUE
The biggest actors in space are knowingly polluting valuable orbits. It's a huge threat to the use of space. So why haven't we reached an international agreement to just stop?
DONALD: When I've brought that up to other people they said you'll never get any, any, any international law changed. That's just almost impossible to do. But that can't really be true or else you've never gotten international law to begin with.
MIDROLL
II. Building Toward Disaster
Let’s take a brief detour because I want to convey the true scale of what's happening in orbit and why concerns about the Kessler Syndrome are coming to a head now.
[11:00]
BEAT
NEWS CLIP: Researchers from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory are busy studying melting glaciers from sea level to space and now with the help of newly launched satellites NASA is hoping to more accurately predict what's ahead.
For 60 years we've been sending satellites into orbit to collect information about the weather and the climate, to take pictures of the earth and the stars, and to talk to each other.[17] Google Earth relies on satellites.[18] So does GPS.[19] A lot of technology we take for granted only works because of satellites. And we’re adding more… a lot more.
Today, private companies are launching constellations of hundreds, sometimes thousands of small satellites into space. Starlink has more than 4500 satellites providing global internet access with plans to have 42,000. There’s also a company called Planet, with a constellation of more than 200 satellites that takes a picture of the earth every day.[20] Other companies with similar constellations include One Web,[21] Amazon,[22]
[12:00]
and there are a bunch of smaller companies like Viasat, and Hughsnet… also building out their own constellations. The number of objects in space over the past five years has doubled.
Most of these satellites hang out in Low Earth Orbit or LEO. LEO is the lowest orbit, anywhere between 200 and 1200 miles above the surface of the earth, making it hot real estate for all kinds of satellites relaying information from the heavens down to us earthlings. We also need to go through it to get to everything else in space. If that orbit is filled with debris, those missions become a lot riskier.
Putting any satellite into orbit is going to create some debris. On the whole, what we’ve gained from our use of satellites, including advancements in science and technology, has outweighed the cost, at least in my opinion. But there are some things we do in LEO that are certainly not worth it. Like when Russia blew up that satellite in 2021.
[13:00]
MARIEL: Basically ever since we have had satellites, the US and the Soviet Union and now Russia developed capabilities to attack those satellites, and so that had been tested in those two countries since the beginning of the space age.
SFX - END CUE
Mariel Borowitz is an expert on international space policy.[23] Like a lot of other space experts, she is very concerned about Kessler Syndrome. She knows that the addition of thousands of privately owned satellites means we need to start being much more intentional about how we use Low Earth Orbit. And one obvious place to start by stopping tests of missiles that blow things up in space.
MARIEL: It's only relatively recently that there's been this increase in once again testing what we would call a kinetic anti-satellite weapon. So it's a weapon that
[14:00]
essentially shoots a missile up into space that either hits the satellite that it's trying to destroy or just gets near that satellite and explodes.
MUS
Why are countries blowing up their own stuff?
Let’s be honest, these are war games. Conducting an anti-satellite test is an implied threat to every other nation’s satellites. We rely heavily on satellites for all sorts of things, but one really important use is keeping an eye on each other's nukes. It might sound counterintuitive, but we actually want our enemies to be able to watch us just as we watch them to confirm that no one is attempting a sneak attack. If we lost that ability, I don't need to spell it out for you. It would be bad.
BEAT
In a more immediate sense, these tests put astronauts in danger.
MARIEL: It could be an actual
[15:00]
collision that causes damage to the space station and potentially harms or kills astronauts.
One of the only things that can be done to protect the space station and valuable satellites is just to track as much of the debris orbiting Earth as possible. The US Department of Defense does this with something called the Space Surveillance Network.
MARIEL: The US is a big leader in a lot of space situational awareness or space domain awareness. So tracking all the objects in space, doing the analysis to see when a, a conjunction might happen, sharing that information.
When the Space Surveillance Network sees that a collision is about to occur, all it can do is issue a warning.[24] You can try to get out of the way although in space maneuvering is pretty hard. If you’re an astronaut, you’re going to hunker down. Otherwise maybe just cross your fingers. Obviously this method has its limitations because some debris is just too small to track.
[16:00]
Still, right now, it’s really the only solution to the problem we have.
III. Taking up the Torch
VICTORIA: It’s hard to point your fingers at someone for acting badly when you can't really point to, okay, what norm are you breaking? Or, you know, what rule or what principle response behavior are you breaking?
That’s Victoria Samson. She works for an organization called Secure World Foundation.[25] They’re focused on keeping space secure, sustainable and peaceful so space can be used to make life better on Earth.[26] More importantly, Victoria is a friend of mine - we’ve been advocating for sustainable space policies for longer than I can remember.
MUSIC - PLAYFUL INTRO MUSIC THAT SETS UP
JEFFREY: I don't actually know the answer to this question, and I'm embarrassed that I don't. How did you first get interested in space?
VICTORIA: Some would argue, I'm still not interested in space.
VICTORIA: I got into space completely by happenstance. My interest was more in international relations.
JEFFREY: I think I now remember this. When I first met you, you were working on missile defense,
VICTORIA: Oh, yeah,
[17:00]
missile defense was my first love
VICTORIA: I even wrote a book that approximately a hundred people bought on missile defense.[27]
JEFFREY: You don’t like writing books no one reads?
VICTORIA: Not for me, I’m more of an Op-Ed kind of gal.
Victoria has been advocating for international policies addressing space debris for many years.
VICTORIA: I always like to say that debris is agnostic. It does not care who you are. It does not care if you're an ally of the country that created the debris. So look, I, I think the kind of anti-satellite weapons that create debris, those are the ones everyone agrees definitely should not be tested, should not be done
Victoria works with another space expert, Brian Weeden.[28] Brian’s also a friend of mine.
BRIAN: It's a big issue for us.
JEFFREY: Okay, so you're as freaked out as I am.
BRIAN: Yes. Uh, where do I start with this, right? I think if there's anything the world should be able to agree to, it's that
[18:00]
deliberately destroying satellites to test weapons of marginal military utility shouldn't be done. And, and, and probably should be banned.
Like Victoria and Brian, I have experience advocating for sustainability in space, so I know first hand how exhausting this can be. Every year, at the same conference in Geneva, I used to give the same talk to the same group of people about preventing the destruction of satellites in orbit.[29] It never went anywhere, but the fondue was great.
JEFFREY: I had this– I don't know if you experienced this frustration but I mean, I remember just constantly saying to people, you know, like, we are just not gonna like this world–that we now live in–where now the US and Russia and China and India have all tested missiles that can smash satellites.
BRIAN: And, and I've said this to, to, you know,
[19:00]
DOD officials in meetings, you know, at some point your freedom of action becomes the other guy's freedom of action. And we may not like that when, you know, the other space powers are able to do the things we can do in space. And, and I think that is part of what's changing the US's position on this, they’re suddenly realizing that.
The more countries that develop anti-satellite weapons, the worse it will be for everyone - space is huge but the parts that we’re interested in aren’t. If anti-satellite testing goes unchecked it will seriously hinder the use of space for countries all over the world, including ones that are just beginning to use space as a resource.
BEAT
Your first impulse might simply be to say “let's just ban all space weapons” but it turns out it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
VICTORIA: For many years, the space security community in the United Nations tried to argue, okay, we need to ban space weapons.
VICTORIA: We're just going in circles in the United Nations going round and round and round and round about what a space weapon is.
[20:00]
How do you ban it? How do you prevent people from having access to it?
It’s hard to ban space weapons because pretty much anything you can put in orbit for a good, helpful reason can be used for a bad reason. That’s what makes it very difficult to define a weapon. For example, if we had a spacecraft to remove space junk - which I’d like to remind you we definitely don't - that spacecraft could potentially remove the satellites of other countries without their permission. How can you be sure that what looks like a space janitor isn’t actually a space saboteur?
VICTORIA: And so it's really hard to have a, um, a conversation about what the threat actually is because it becomes classified, so you have to kind of hint around at it or it becomes wildly hyperbolic. And so either way, you can't have good policy discussions if you don't have an honest grasp of what the issue is.
VICTORIA: Are there norms that need to be explained in terms of what's considered responsible behavior?
VICTORIA: you can't fix a problem if you don't even agree on what the problem is.
[21:00]
In 2022 the United Nations decided to take a different approach: They created something called the Open-Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats. This set out to define responsible norms, rules, and behaviors.[30]
Victoria was invited to speak to the group because she is a technically knowledgeable outside expert.[31] She’s compiled all of the open information about anti-satellite weapons. She can speak knowledgeably about the military uses of outer space, and she doesn’t have to worry about security classifications.
This is an important role that non-governmental experts can play in facilitating dialogue. They don't have to keep anyone’s secrets.
VICTORIA: I defined what a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon is and I talked about which countries have done these tests and you know, why anti-satellite weapons that create debris are considered so destabilizing.
What Victoria was doing was creating a shared universe of facts
[22:00]
and language that this community could use.
JEFFREY: So step one, stop doing dumb shit. Step one A, define dumb shit.
VICTORIA: Exactly. And then I guess step one b, verify whether people are doing dumb shit.
BRIAN: The UN security people in Geneva are no longer solely talking about defining what a weapon is and how do we ban weapons in space. There is now a much bigger conversation involving dozens of countries asking what do they see as space threats? How do they define that? And what are some ideas for how to deal with those space threats, including both legally binding and non-legally binding?
It might not sound particularly sexy, but yes, this is a space junk breakthrough.
BRIAN: Look, this conversation's not gonna solve the problems tomorrow, but it is a huge shift and it
[23:00]
creates, I think, more of an opportunity for progress than we've seen in decades.
BEAT
In April 2022, after years of admiring the problem and remaining resistant to even the slightest restriction on its military activities in space, the US finally stepped up to model better behavior.[32]
VICTORIA: The US made a commitment not to conduct destructive anti-satellite missile tests.
[CLIP] HARRIS: I am pleased to announce that as of today, the United States commits not to conduct destructive, direct ascent, anti-satellite missile testing. Simply put, these tests are dangerous and we will not conduct them.
The reaction to their commitment was resounding global support.
VICTORIA: Over the next six months,
[24:00]
nine more countries joined the United States in making that commitment as well.[33] And then in December of 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution where 155 countries voted not to conduct destructive anti-satellite missile tests.[34] So you could argue that there's almost a norm emerging that this sort of behavior is considered irresponsible and bad.
This was a huge win for Brian and Victoria and really anyone who cares about the sustainable use of space. The years they had spent putting together resources about the dangers of anti-satellite weapons and educating governments around the world were part of a movement to create a more sustainable space environment for everyone. It was finally paying off.
As I’m sure you realize at this point, advocates rarely celebrate for more than a few moments before moving on to the next cause. Victoria and Brian? They’re no different.
IV. Never Enough
BRIAN: To me, I think that is a clear area where we should
[25:00]
be pushing for a legally binding regime around the prohibitions on that kind of testing. In part because we can do it. We can define the activity, we can attribute the activity, there's clear negative externalities, and we can create a verification regime.
When Brian says “legally binding regime,” he means a treaty. Treaties don’t negotiate themselves.They take years of discussion, trust building and diplomacy.
VICTORIA: These treaties don't just come out of nowhere, like Athena jumping out of Zeus's head. They start to be discussed as concepts.
VICTORIA: Basically what you're doing is you're planting the seed of something that you kinda just have to hope that at some point it will bear fruit.
VICTORIA: I'm pushing the conversation along in, what I would like to think is a more helpful direction. And sometimes that's the best that you can do.
Sometimes, most of the time, that's the best you can do. Pushing the world inch by inch
[26:00]
to a slightly better place.
Thanks for listening - I’m Jeffrey Lewis and this is The Reason We’re All Still Here. It's executive produced by me, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
This episode was produced by Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny and Stephen Wood. It was written by Kelsey Albright and me. Story editing from Sara Joyner. Additional editing from Whitney Donaldson.Technical direction and engineering by Nick ‘The Wizard’ Dooley. Music and sound design by Andy Chugg. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Additional production support
[27:00]
from Gemma Castelli-Foley. Show Art by Ronin Wood and Anton Maryniuk.
Special thanks to Jessica Varnum, Christine Ragasa, Megan Larson and Maggie Taylor.
[27:34]
________________
[1] 7 astronauts on ISS on this date.
[2] “Safe Haven” and “Dragon” module.
[3] 1,500 large enough to track plus 100,000s more
[4] ISS can survive impacts up to 1 cm.
[5] Grapefruit-sized space junk has kinetic energy of 25 sticks of dynamite.
[6] Russia’s anti-satellite missile
[7] 90-minute period between passes.
[8] Two Russian cosmonauts on ISS at the time
[9] All claims in this paragraph accurate.
[10] Kessler Syndrome
[11] Environmental Effects Project Office
[12] Loads of space debris up there by the 70s
[13] Kessler’s 1978 paper
[14] These are all potential effects of Kessler Syndrome.
[15] Kessler’s delegation’s destinations included China and USSR, with visits to Great Wall and Tiananmen Square.
[16] ISDCC founded 1993
[17] Sputnik I launched in 1957, 66 years ago.
[18] Google Earth imagery partially provided by satellites
[19] GPS satellites
[20] Planet’s 200 satellites
[21] OneWeb’s 648 satellites
[22] Amazon’s Project Kuiper’s planned 3,236 satellites
[23] Borowitz’s bona fides
[24] SSN tracks, records, and warns
[25] Samson’s bona fides
[26] Secure World Foundation’s mission
[27] Samson’s book
[28] Weeden’s bona fides
[29] Jeffrey’s Geneva conferences
[30] Open Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats founded 2022
[31] Samson has spoken at OEWG
[32] National Security Norms…in Spaaaaaaaace
[33] Nine countries join ASAT test ban in 6 months
[34] 155 nations approved space-junk-producing ASAT test ban resolution