Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb. Joe's out today, so I'm going
Speaker 2: to present an interview here with Paul Samansky, co author
Speaker 2: with Jerry Drew of the new book The Battle Beyond
Speaker 2: Fighting and Winning the Coming War in Space. Paul Smansky
Speaker 2: has forty nine years of experience in all fields related
Speaker 2: to space control, policy, strategy, simulation, surveillance, survivability, threat assessment,
Speaker 2: long range strategic planning, and command and control. I do
Speaker 2: want to advise listeners that this one gets a little
Speaker 2: more into topics of contemporary and near future warfare. I
Speaker 2: realize that is not everyone's cup of tea, so just
Speaker 2: fair warning about that. But without further ado, let's get
Speaker 2: right into this fascinating chat. Well, Paul, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: The new book is The Battle Beyond Fighting and Winning
Speaker 2: the Coming War in Space, co authored with Jerry Drew.
Speaker 2: It's a detailed breakdown of the emerging technologies and ideas
Speaker 2: that are going to define war and warfare in space.
Speaker 2: And you've certainly a great deal of expertise in this field.
Speaker 2: How did you become interested in outer space and how
Speaker 2: did your career end up moving into this domain of
Speaker 2: space systems and space warfare.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, I actually have six books out.
Speaker 3: They all begin with the title you know that you mentioned,
Speaker 3: and then there's various details. One is about how to
Speaker 3: fight and win space wars. Another one is on sun Zoo,
Speaker 3: the ancient Chinese philosopher translated from two thousand years ago
Speaker 3: to space. I always liked the bigger picture thought, and
Speaker 3: so I've always worked at think tanks, you know, not
Speaker 3: for fit semi government kinds of things. And the first
Speaker 3: thing tank I worked at decades ago, I had the
Speaker 3: option of either working nuclear war or space war. And
Speaker 3: for a space war, you know, sounds like the what
Speaker 3: do you call it? Star wars and sort of thing
Speaker 3: you know from when I was growing up. So is
Speaker 3: that sounds cooler? I guess I'll go that way. So
Speaker 3: it was almost a random sequence of events.
Speaker 2: Let's say the book does a great job of breaking
Speaker 2: down a lot of the core concepts, you know, forcing
Speaker 2: the reader to re examine basics that a lot of us,
Speaker 2: especially general science faders like myself, probably take for granted.
Speaker 2: So getting down to brass tax as they say, could
Speaker 2: you remind the listeners what we're talking about when we're
Speaker 2: talking about the space domain from a military perspective.
Speaker 3: Well, one thing, and you know, I'm on I've been
Speaker 3: on the board of directors of Air Force Research Lab
Speaker 3: with you know, retired general officers and vice admirals, and
Speaker 3: one was an astronaut who has been up in space
Speaker 3: five times, you know, and none of them understand how
Speaker 3: to fight space wars. Really comes down to it when
Speaker 3: you really think about it, You're not attacking a satellite,
Speaker 3: You're attacking the mission. Oh, this satellite's providing imagery for
Speaker 3: the battlefield. We're about to do a sneak attack. We
Speaker 3: better take out the guy's imagery, you know, So you
Speaker 3: need to take out the mission. Oh, by the way,
Speaker 3: the commander in the particular theater is going to say,
Speaker 3: deny the adversary imagery of the battlefield over these latitude
Speaker 3: launch coronets and resolution over the next seventy two hours.
Speaker 3: You know, you figure out how to do it within
Speaker 3: the laws of armed conflict. So you not only have
Speaker 3: to take out that satellite, you have to take out
Speaker 3: the drones you know, doing the same mission, or the
Speaker 3: guy on a camel with binoculars, So you have to
Speaker 3: think that bigger picture. And you know, the guys I've
Speaker 3: worked with, they love the technology. We love the technology
Speaker 3: in this country. But the whole point of war, and
Speaker 3: even the ancient Greeks understood this two thousand years ago.
Speaker 3: The whole point of war is make the other side
Speaker 3: change their mind, you know. So getting back to you're
Speaker 3: not attacking the satelle attacking the mission, and you're not
Speaker 3: even really attacking the mission. You're attacking the mind of
Speaker 3: the adversary commander who's using that imagery information. So you know,
Speaker 3: it's kind of information warfare, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of hard to figure. Like, you know,
Speaker 3: how do you model human mind? Did he get this
Speaker 3: information or not? Did he attack left or right? You know,
Speaker 3: if you had like an extra one hundred million dollars
Speaker 3: some fiscal year and he said, well, gee, should I
Speaker 3: buy one of these fancy new space weapons that we've
Speaker 3: never tried before? Or should I re equip an army
Speaker 3: brigade with newer tanks or something like that. Now, Okay,
Speaker 3: there's politics and this and that, but really, what is
Speaker 3: going to make the war end sooner? With fewer casualties,
Speaker 3: I guess, or get your point across, you know. And
Speaker 3: so the army they're very used to, you know, they
Speaker 3: invented what's called operations research, so they're very used to
Speaker 3: figuring that out, Like, well, if we take out this bridge,
Speaker 3: it'll take them twelve hours to get bridge laying equipment,
Speaker 3: and so we delay the forces, you know, maybe fourteen hours,
Speaker 3: and we can calculate in general the war ends two
Speaker 3: days early and there's you know, three percent fewer casually
Speaker 3: something like that. I mean, something you could kind of say,
Speaker 3: is that worth a hundred million maybe? You know, but
Speaker 3: if you could say, oh, this crusty old general in
Speaker 3: I don't know, North Korea or something like that, who
Speaker 3: doesn't really believe in space, and you know, even if
Speaker 3: he gets information from it, he's going to do what
Speaker 3: he's going to do. He's mind to set. And so
Speaker 3: is it worth one hundred million dollars for that space
Speaker 3: weapon program to deny something he doesn't care about anyway?
Speaker 3: You know, I'm being a wise guy here at this,
Speaker 3: of course. You know. Let me tell you something a
Speaker 3: very wise guy, and that is what is the biggest
Speaker 3: threat from space, and that is something called fobs fractional
Speaker 3: orbital bombardment system and that's something that the Russians invented
Speaker 3: in the nineteen sixties. And you know, instead of sending
Speaker 3: nuclear icbm's north you know, North Pole, they sent they
Speaker 3: put it into space, the rocket and it comes from
Speaker 3: the south and avoids American radars and all that stuff,
Speaker 3: you know. And it was like two three years ago
Speaker 3: the State Department or military I forget who said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, China has fobs now the fractional orbital bombardments system,
Speaker 3: And I'm thinking, okay, you have to again think the
Speaker 3: bigger picture.
Speaker 2: So we.
Speaker 3: If I don't know if any of our listeners have
Speaker 3: heard of Mayhan the control of the sea. You know,
Speaker 3: several hundred years ago you're saying about you know, great
Speaker 3: Britain and controlling say, well, no one's that. I've been
Speaker 3: able to control really the seas, you know, great Britain, Oh,
Speaker 3: the English Channel, maybe the Mediterranean, maybe around Hong Kong
Speaker 3: and India. I've been and all that. But let's theorize
Speaker 3: and going back to Mayhean, the US is a sea power,
Speaker 3: it is not a land power. Good luck marching one
Speaker 3: hundred thousand soldiers across the Atlantic ocean to defend Europe,
Speaker 3: and we've gotten kind of arrogant that, oh, we're just
Speaker 3: going to do all these wars around the world and
Speaker 3: they'll never affect us because we got these oceans, the barriers,
Speaker 3: and no one could send landing craft that far, you know,
Speaker 3: and all that, and so we you know, we can
Speaker 3: get away with a lot. Let's say, now, let's theorize.
Speaker 3: Let's say you take you know, I'm being facetious here,
Speaker 3: but two tons of concrete in space and you drop
Speaker 3: an all eleven American aircraft carriers around the world within
Speaker 3: forty minutes it comes down mock, I think twenty four
Speaker 3: Anything coming from space comes that fast, three times hotter
Speaker 3: than the surface of the Sun. It holds the carrier.
Speaker 3: There's gonna be you know, gleaming orange, jagged metal. It's
Speaker 3: gonna hit the ocean, the cold ocean, and a huge
Speaker 3: steam explosion. The think sinks in a matter of minutes.
Speaker 3: Now I'm talking about nineteen sixties technology in order to
Speaker 3: achieve this. And oh, by the way, some reason we
Speaker 3: screwed up and we don't have hypersonic weapons, but the
Speaker 3: Russian have been merrily using them in Ukraine, taking out
Speaker 3: command centers four hundred feet underground, and China the only
Speaker 3: reason they develop their own hypersonic weapons is, oh, guess what,
Speaker 3: take out American aircraft carriers. Because it's a point target thing.
Speaker 3: You know, if you use it on the ground and
Speaker 3: forces attacking on the ground, oh maybe kill fifty hundred
Speaker 3: people whatever, But you know, take out command centers aircraft carriers.
Speaker 3: So I guess what I'm emphasizing is you better control
Speaker 3: space or you suddenly become a second rate power. What
Speaker 3: can we do if we no longer have our aircraft carriers,
Speaker 3: we no longer control the sea. Let's say China controls
Speaker 3: the sea. They you know, all that oil in the
Speaker 3: Middle East is worthless if you can't ship it out,
Speaker 3: And so China starts charging transit fees, you know, anti
Speaker 3: piracy fees or something. If you don't pay it, we'll
Speaker 3: sink your ship too. You know, it's real easy nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties technology. You know, we're not actually talking about the future.
Speaker 3: It could happen tonight. So China, you know, essentially controls
Speaker 3: the world. Seems to me, I mean this theoretical, but
Speaker 3: I don't I can't think of any holes in that
Speaker 3: at the moment, and I actually I'm writing a novel,
Speaker 3: a seventh book, and that it will be out in
Speaker 3: a few months. So okay, that's something to worry about. Now,
Speaker 3: getting back to the the domain of space, everyone I
Speaker 3: know keeps in the space force, and you know this
Speaker 3: has been true of the Air Force I worked with. See.
Speaker 3: The trouble is, can you think of the last time
Speaker 3: that the air war was in doubt for the Air Force?
Speaker 3: And it's like, well, early World War two, not even
Speaker 3: late World War two, Vietnam, no, you know, in the
Speaker 3: Middle East. No. So I think there's a certain degree
Speaker 3: of lazy thinking that goes on because quite frankly, you
Speaker 3: learn more from defeat than from victory. I mean, we're
Speaker 3: teaching Russia how to really fight worse nowadays. So probably
Speaker 3: ninety five percent of space for US is Air Force.
Speaker 3: So I talked to these generals and you know, lieutenants
Speaker 3: or colonels and all that, and they keep thinking, tactically, oh,
Speaker 3: we're kind to you know, slowly maneuver to this satellite
Speaker 3: and observe it, or maybe shoot it with a pelggon
Speaker 3: or the French are telling me they were putting up
Speaker 3: a laser, you know, and all that. But they're not
Speaker 3: thinking this strategic big picture and that is well, a
Speaker 3: satellite is strategic. It covers the world. You know, you
Speaker 3: think you're doing something tactical. Not only are you doing
Speaker 3: something strategic. And oh, by the way, maybe you're fighting
Speaker 3: in the Middle of East or Ukraine or something of that,
Speaker 3: but you're going to attack that satellite in the South Atlantic,
Speaker 3: you know, from a ship or something, you know, with
Speaker 3: a laser or direct assent weapon. You have to think
Speaker 3: the bigger picture global and then you have to think
Speaker 3: political too, I mean wars, you know political. Unfortunately, we're
Speaker 3: used to killing people on the ground during war. We're
Speaker 3: not used to space war. Now. I've noticed this space
Speaker 3: force the last few years is getting people used to
Speaker 3: that concept. You know, they keep their marketing campaign getting
Speaker 3: more and more severe or something like that. But if
Speaker 3: you take out someone's satellite, you know, it has consequences.
Speaker 3: Now there's a problem and a beauty with space too,
Speaker 3: and that is conflict escalation letter and I go over
Speaker 3: that in the book too. I've started learned that countries
Speaker 3: are just like children. They'll do anything they want if
Speaker 3: they can get away with it from their parents. Parents
Speaker 3: being the United Nations, their own people or whatever. And
Speaker 3: so you could think you could go to CIA headquarters
Speaker 3: in Virginia. There's a wall with all the stars of
Speaker 3: the agents who died in the line of duty. You know,
Speaker 3: did any of those start a war? Do we even
Speaker 3: know who they were? I heard I think it was
Speaker 3: two years ago there was an incident between an American
Speaker 3: and a Russian submarine in the Sea of Japan. You know,
Speaker 3: I just read in the paper and that's all they say,
Speaker 3: an incident because there's no news camera taking it. You know,
Speaker 3: they don't know. So what I'm getting at is spy warfare,
Speaker 3: undersea warfare, space warfare. You can get away with a lot,
Speaker 3: and we have. There's been more intense space war since
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties. I can, you know, show you a
Speaker 3: bunch of those. And like I said, this the war
Speaker 3: that happened in twenty fourteen Ukraine. I could mathematically prove
Speaker 3: that through the orbital dynamics. So you really have to
Speaker 3: thank the bigger picture. You can't think, oh, this satellite
Speaker 3: is going to come snuggle up to me and start,
Speaker 3: you know, messing with me or something like that, because
Speaker 3: that takes days and weeks to accomplish. Well, my simulations
Speaker 3: have shown space wars over with in twenty four to
Speaker 3: forty eight hours. You know, a real one. Oh, I've
Speaker 3: got fifty space weapons going out right now, so you know,
Speaker 3: I think in some sense we would self deter You know,
Speaker 3: I've heard at least years ago that we wouldn't attack
Speaker 3: a satellite that attacked us unless we knew who owned
Speaker 3: this satellite, you know, And that's kind of hard to do.
Speaker 3: They're kind of arrogant too, and say, oh, we know
Speaker 3: what satellites have been launched, and blah blah blah and
Speaker 3: all that. And I say, well, you know, every two
Speaker 3: weeks I download the official Air Force Satellite Orbital Catalog,
Speaker 3: and forty percent of the objects there are considered unknowns.
Speaker 3: We don't know who launched them, who owns them, and
Speaker 3: what the mission is, so you know, you know of
Speaker 3: what's really happening. And so the first step to defeat
Speaker 3: in space is over confidence. Oh yeah, you know, we're
Speaker 3: Air Force. We've won every single air war we've had,
Speaker 3: and we'll win the space war. It doesn't take much.
Speaker 3: The most popular method is cyber warfare. Any country on
Speaker 3: Earth has clever young kids who can be hackers and
Speaker 3: hack a satellite. Every country on Earth has university with
Speaker 3: high powered lasers that you can kind of gin up
Speaker 3: and make more accurate and or whatever and mess with satellites.
Speaker 3: I mean, I have a laser I got on Amazon
Speaker 3: seven want laser handheld that'll start my furniture on fire
Speaker 3: across the room in a fraction of a second. You know,
Speaker 3: we'll put that out of satellite or whatever.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I don't think people are really thinking these big pictures
Speaker 3: and getting at the popularity of cyber warfare. Let me
Speaker 3: do a thought experiment, and that is let's say you're
Speaker 3: in a trench in Ukraine and you can hear the
Speaker 3: Russian tanks revving up, you know, ready to come attack you.
Speaker 3: And some egghead scientists comes into your trench and he
Speaker 3: has this black box with the big red button. He says, oh,
Speaker 3: I've been developing this for years. It's a cyber weapon
Speaker 3: that you know, if you push that red button, the
Speaker 3: Russian tanks will stop. You'll mess with their computers or whatever,
Speaker 3: you know. And you know, I haven't tested this in
Speaker 3: the field, but it worked in the lab. Don't worry.
Speaker 3: And and the poor soldiers there, well, what about a
Speaker 3: bazookah I said, oh, sorreh, well, used up all your
Speaker 3: funding on this, you know, cyber weapon. You know, so
Speaker 3: the Russian tanks attack, Oh, they push that button, you know,
Speaker 3: the tank stop and thirty seconds later they reboot and
Speaker 3: squish you. You know. So I don't know about you,
Speaker 3: but as a guy, I find it much more emotionally
Speaker 3: satisfying to see a burning hole in the ground where
Speaker 3: the tank used to be, you know, as I did
Speaker 3: the job. And it's the same kind of with space. Now,
Speaker 3: of course, I have a whole other briefing. I can
Speaker 3: present sometime ninety four ways to attack satellites without creating debris.
Speaker 3: You really don't have to do the debris thing, but
Speaker 3: you're really not sure. You know, people when they're about
Speaker 3: to die get very clever. So you're really not sure
Speaker 3: if the satellite's faking its death, especially if you use
Speaker 3: the cyber means. You know, you're not even sure exactly
Speaker 3: who attacked you. I mean, let's say we're at war
Speaker 3: in the Western Pacific, China, Taiwan, whatever, and you wake
Speaker 3: up one morning and several of your satellites stopped working. Well,
Speaker 3: you know, my computer stopped working last month. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe that same thing happened. Maybe a solar flares irradiated
Speaker 3: too much, maybe a micro meteorite hit it. Oh it's
Speaker 3: human cause. Oh this you know, Romanian satellite came too
Speaker 3: close accidentally you know, Oh, no human cause and intentional. Okay,
Speaker 3: what is the intent now? Let's say, oh, it's the
Speaker 3: Chinese attacking us where we were the Well, maybe it's
Speaker 3: the Russians of the North Koreans messing with you and
Speaker 3: starting to stir the pot. How do you know who's
Speaker 3: doing it, what their intent is? Are they going against
Speaker 3: command and control, decapitation, communication satellites, are the imagery satellites navigation?
Speaker 3: Are they doing a demonstration attack, like, well, we're showing
Speaker 3: we're really serious now kind of thing.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I found really interesting in
Speaker 2: the book was talking about these various ways, and I
Speaker 2: believe these are a mix of proven technologies and maybe
Speaker 2: some of them are more possible for the future, but
Speaker 2: the ways that satellites can and will do battle with
Speaker 2: one another. I believe you already mentioned grappling as a
Speaker 2: mechanical grappling, but there are some other techniques in there,
Speaker 2: and I thought you might discuss some of those.
Speaker 3: Well, I've come up with some on my own head.
Speaker 3: But you know, most of not all satellites have to
Speaker 3: point very accurately at the Earth, their antennas, their imagery, whatever.
Speaker 3: So they had what are called star sensors, you know,
Speaker 3: in the back of satellite, look at the stars, and
Speaker 3: they could orient themselves because there's no up so to speak,
Speaker 3: in space. And I theorize, well, if you've got one
Speaker 3: of these inspector maintenance satellites, whatever, and you float behind
Speaker 3: it and present an upside down star chart to it
Speaker 3: with the satellite flip over, because these are just dumb machines,
Speaker 3: you know, So there's a lot of techniques. I don't know,
Speaker 3: you know, if that would work. Certainly to my mind,
Speaker 3: it's most effective weapon, not timeliness wise, but if someone
Speaker 3: comes up there with the manipulator and you know China,
Speaker 3: they gleefully told us about one of their supposedly dead
Speaker 3: satellites and they used a satellite, came up close with
Speaker 3: manipular arm and pulled it to what's called well sort
Speaker 3: of graveyard orbit. It's very suspicious, but any rate, so
Speaker 3: you can pull satellite out of orbit. But it's an
Speaker 3: ideal weapon. A satellite coming up close to you, because
Speaker 3: it's sort of like taking a satellite, putting in a wheelbarrow,
Speaker 3: going in your garage and going at it. Well, let's
Speaker 3: drill a hole, let's cut this wire, let's bend this,
Speaker 3: let's all that. You know. Oh, let's paint the optics
Speaker 3: with something that you know floats away a few weeks
Speaker 3: later or something. You know. So you do a lot
Speaker 3: of messing and there's a lot of people and unfortunately
Speaker 3: one of them's Eline muss And I love Musk, but
Speaker 3: who want to play the commercial entities who want to
Speaker 3: play with army soldiers like children, And you know, Musk said, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm going to give Ukraine these starlink terminals and all that.
Speaker 3: And I'm pretty sure Russia attacked his systems for that,
Speaker 3: but they don't really understand the consequences. And it's sort
Speaker 3: of like Merchant Marine in World War Two. Well they
Speaker 3: got sank two, you know. And I think I believe
Speaker 3: there have been attacks on multiple satellite systems, not only
Speaker 3: cyber attacks but others during the Ukrainian conflict. So this
Speaker 3: thought that oh, I'm just going to play war and
Speaker 3: the military is doing that too, that we're going to
Speaker 3: take these satellites commercial statists and use them. And you know,
Speaker 3: the commercial ones have really cool technology and probably cheaper
Speaker 3: and so forth, But who pays for them when they
Speaker 3: get attacked? I don't know how that works. And you know,
Speaker 3: they live in what I consider Disney fantasy worlds like Starlink.
Speaker 3: I don't know, ten fifteen thousand satellites, Well, you got
Speaker 3: to attack each one. No, you know, I've seen cyber
Speaker 3: warfare techniques like thirty five years ago, going through the
Speaker 3: electrical plug into your computer and all. I mean, people
Speaker 3: are very clever. They'll always find a way. And I've
Speaker 3: you know, theorized well Elon's Starlink satellites have a they
Speaker 3: can tell how close they're coming to each other and
Speaker 3: have an algorithm to say, oh we're too close, let's
Speaker 3: go away. Well, you do a cyber attack. You put
Speaker 3: a negative sign in that algorithm, and when they get
Speaker 3: too close to the satellites start moving even closer and
Speaker 3: you kill them all at once. You know, I mean,
Speaker 3: there's always a way on that. So I think it's
Speaker 3: easy for us to lose a war in space due
Speaker 3: to overconfidence, due to not thinking strategically. You know, what
Speaker 3: exactly are the consequences, I guess militarily politically, and also
Speaker 3: getting back to your teaching your adversary how to fight
Speaker 3: you better ten years later or whatever. So maybe it
Speaker 3: should withhold some weapons and shape not only the future
Speaker 3: battlefield but the future political environment of well, oh gee,
Speaker 3: look at this, we want that space war. Look at
Speaker 3: all the junks flown around. Well, now all your allies
Speaker 3: hate you. Now they are all these treaties restricting you.
Speaker 3: Maybe you should have thought of that beforehand and said, well,
Speaker 3: let's do it this way, maneuver this way, or whatever,
Speaker 3: and so more improbable this new treaty won't be so
Speaker 3: bad or something. I mean, think of the political now.
Speaker 3: For years I've said, oh, look at this cool multi
Speaker 3: billion dollar space weapons program, you know, And I said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, we're starting to develop this now, why don't
Speaker 3: we get the State Department in on this early on?
Speaker 3: Because they're going to be part of I don't know
Speaker 3: what used to be called National command authorities, but they're
Speaker 3: going to be in the room with the President's deciding
Speaker 3: whether attack or not. And if the State Department got
Speaker 3: on early, they could say, well, if you tweak it
Speaker 3: slightly later on, there would be more probably will prove
Speaker 3: it or something, you know. And I was always told, oh,
Speaker 3: we can't truss the State Department. You know, they'll just reveal,
Speaker 3: you know, what we got or whatever. And you know,
Speaker 3: all governments are like that, each department hates each other
Speaker 3: and all that. But I've got over twenty eight thousand
Speaker 3: members in my space warfare discussion group on LinkedIn, and
Speaker 3: one of them is a former assistant Secretary of State,
Speaker 3: and he says, yeah, they're right. State Department never knew
Speaker 3: a treaty. It didn't like for space, you know, restricting
Speaker 3: something in space. You know. So we've got all these
Speaker 3: kind of undercurrents and getting back to children playing with toys,
Speaker 3: it's conceivable that let's say the Space for US attacks
Speaker 3: the satellite. They're certainly not going to tell the State Department.
Speaker 3: There's certainly probably not going to tell the Navy or
Speaker 3: the army or whatever. You know, we all have our secrets,
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 2: You know. When I first started reading about the various
Speaker 2: like anti satellite strategies in the book, I was reminded,
Speaker 2: almost vaguely of a childhood viewing of the nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: seven James Bond film He only lived twice, in which
Speaker 2: we see early on in the picture a mysterious orbital
Speaker 2: spacecraft capturing essentially kind of consuming another.
Speaker 3: Space clamshell, if I recall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you know, I don't know how this roughly
Speaker 2: relates to the idea of mechanical grappling, or if this
Speaker 2: is like a snapshot of some you know, filtered through
Speaker 2: fiction sort of, you know, nineteen sixties, late nineteen sixties
Speaker 2: understanding of conflict between spacecraft.
Speaker 3: Uh. Yeah, well it's certainly the Chinese did the grappling
Speaker 3: the Urugo or something. Certainly, but though that was a
Speaker 3: supposedly dead object. If the satellite's non cooperative, though, you
Speaker 3: can certainly do the grappling, you know, over the South
Speaker 3: Pacific where we don't have any radars or something. Maybe
Speaker 3: you could do it fast enough before we understand or
Speaker 3: we don't have any ground control stations to say tell
Speaker 3: the satellite, oh, start spinning or something like that. You know,
Speaker 3: so as soon as you're accomplishing a counter space thing
Speaker 3: or something that you know is trying to defend yourself, Uh,
Speaker 3: the enemy has won, because if you start spinning, you
Speaker 3: can't do your mission anymore, you know, and he's probably
Speaker 3: attacking at some critical time in the battlefield, and so
Speaker 3: he's you know, he's done his job. You don't have
Speaker 3: to necessarily kill the satellite. And quite frankly, there's three
Speaker 3: major areas that we've talked about for years. I mean,
Speaker 3: you go against satellite, you can go against the ground controller,
Speaker 3: or you can go against the link between the two.
Speaker 3: And that's all three ways to do it. So there's
Speaker 3: multiple ways to skin a cat I guess or something
Speaker 3: like that that doesn't necessarily involve debris generation. But the
Speaker 3: James Bond thing, you know, capturing, yeah, you probably could
Speaker 3: do that. As a matter of fact, you could look up.
Speaker 3: I think NASA had some net to capture satellites they
Speaker 3: were doing research on. I remember seeing that, and I
Speaker 3: suppose the net might work if it's you know, spinning
Speaker 3: or something. But I've had my own theories, like what
Speaker 3: I call the porcupine defense, and that is, you know,
Speaker 3: in the nineteen sixties, satellites used to have the long
Speaker 3: antennas sticking out of the ball. You know, well, if
Speaker 3: you had these long wires that you inferled out going
Speaker 3: out I don't know, half a kilometer or something like that,
Speaker 3: nobody could approach you they tangle up in the wires.
Speaker 3: Maybe the wires you have them electrostatic, and they give
Speaker 3: them a shock or maybe somehow acidic or I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think some simple defenses like that. Maybe for close approaches.
Speaker 3: People talk about, oh, well we'll start maneuvering out of
Speaker 3: the way we see it coming. Oh. You know, first
Speaker 3: of all, if you let's say you had a space
Speaker 3: weapon where I called lagrange points, they're equal gravitational potential
Speaker 3: to retain the Earth and the Moon, and so they
Speaker 3: just sort of sit their way out, you know, I
Speaker 3: don't know, hundreds of thousands of miles something like that,
Speaker 3: and all it takes is just a little bit of
Speaker 3: feel to you know, hit it and have it come
Speaker 3: screaming back down the gravity. Well, and come attack your satellite.
Speaker 3: And if your satellite, oh I see something coming, I'm
Speaker 3: going to maneuver a kilometer or two away. Well, well,
Speaker 3: just looking at the physics the geometry. If you're fifty
Speaker 3: thousand miles away and you sell how removed a few kilometers, Well,
Speaker 3: I change a micro radian or something of my trajectory,
Speaker 3: and I'm coming in like really fast, And I don't
Speaker 3: know if there's much you can do. I mean, everything
Speaker 3: can be easily hypervelocity in space, and it's not like
Speaker 3: you're going to have fifty feet of concrete on your
Speaker 3: satellite trying to defend from something coming in. I don't
Speaker 3: think you can defend anything. And you know, the Air
Speaker 3: Force all, oh, we're going to defend these commercial satellites,
Speaker 3: and I don't know what that really means. Maybe you
Speaker 3: try to jam the weapon coming at you or something
Speaker 3: like that. But I think a lot of people living
Speaker 3: in fantasy world's when it comes to space warfare.
Speaker 2: Now, speaking of fantasy and James Bond, science fiction, science
Speaker 2: fiction in general has of course been long obsessed with
Speaker 2: visions of space warfare. Can you think of any examples
Speaker 2: that tackle the technology or just sort of the concept
Speaker 2: of space warfare as we're discussing it now in a
Speaker 2: way that lines up with the technologies and strategies we're
Speaker 2: actually facing.
Speaker 3: I can't think of any at the moment. First of all,
Speaker 3: you know, you have tie fighters. I don't think you
Speaker 3: can be manned. Man. You have all this extra weight
Speaker 3: of oxygen and all the warmth, and they couldn't take
Speaker 3: the G forces. If again, you're doing this maneuvering. You know,
Speaker 3: all these things seem to have aliens and all because
Speaker 3: there's more exciting. I don't know if I know of
Speaker 3: any thing. I think the expanse I think that got
Speaker 3: the closest to some of those space battles, you know,
Speaker 3: between opposing space cruisers or whatever. I suppose you'd still
Speaker 3: have to have kinetic one way or the other, because oh,
Speaker 3: you got these great lasers. Well if you had a
Speaker 3: mirror like finish on their spacecraft and you know, if
Speaker 3: you spin it, it'd be you know, depositing the radiation
Speaker 3: all around. And it's like we have ground based lasers,
Speaker 3: but they can't go out to geosynchronous orbit. It just
Speaker 3: isn't powerful enough. So if you're talking about I don't
Speaker 3: know if battles would be from fifty thousand kilometers apart
Speaker 3: or something. I just don't know about how all that
Speaker 3: would work. And you know, maybe we're really talking about
Speaker 3: AI and the machines will be fighting the machines in
Speaker 3: one way or the other, you know, getting back to
Speaker 3: space war, and why would you rather have a bunch
Speaker 3: of satellites broken in space, hopefully without debris, because you
Speaker 3: don't have to use debris causing things, then a bunch
Speaker 3: of broken Ukrainian cities, and you know you're not killing anyone.
Speaker 3: There's no sense to attack the International Space Station though,
Speaker 3: just as a funny aside, who knows, twenty five thirty
Speaker 3: years ago it is as some space conference in coverall springs,
Speaker 3: you know, Air Force and the general giving the presentation, who,
Speaker 3: by the way, dressed up in a World War two
Speaker 3: outfit and acted like patent, you know, with a big
Speaker 3: American flag bearing. Anyway, I stopped him on the way
Speaker 3: out and I says, well, you know, the Russia is
Speaker 3: on the International Space Station and we are doing like
Speaker 3: the left hook or whatever. And he had binocas the
Speaker 3: Russian cosmonaut had binoculars on there. What would you do?
Speaker 3: And his first response was I'll shoot him. You know, well,
Speaker 3: I don't know about discharging a weapon in you know,
Speaker 3: putting a hole through the sides letting oxygen out, and
Speaker 3: even the political implications, but of course, you know, generals,
Speaker 3: I guess sort of think that way on it. I
Speaker 3: even had some if he used five point seven by
Speaker 3: two to eight bullet, it can penetrate the was a
Speaker 3: Lexan armored goggles of an astronaut and the what is
Speaker 3: the bulletproof suits, but it can't penetrate the bulkheads, the
Speaker 3: metal bulkheads, you know, oh, kevlar suits. So boarding space stations?
Speaker 3: Would we ever board the Chinese one?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: My book does that. But because it's a theoretical sort
Speaker 3: of theoretical. There's a lot of things in the book
Speaker 3: that have happened to me in the past, but I
Speaker 3: won't say which.
Speaker 2: Now we've been talking about space weaponry and the near
Speaker 2: future of space warfare. But what does all of this
Speaker 2: mean for say, the future of space exploration as well
Speaker 2: as like planetary defense against near Earth objects.
Speaker 3: Well, I remember there were something on YouTube that's saying, boy,
Speaker 3: if NASA had the budget of the military, this is
Speaker 3: what they could do. So you know, what's more important
Speaker 3: to you self defense military wise, or well science and
Speaker 3: oh this is kind of cool and maybe fifty years
Speaker 3: from now will be on Mars or something, you know,
Speaker 3: So it's all a matter priority. And you could say, well,
Speaker 3: what about exploring under the sea and things like that.
Speaker 3: So I don't know, it's you know, it's an emotional
Speaker 3: decision for countries to say, well, what's more important to us?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 3: I think we're probably almost there or very soon that
Speaker 3: if a country loses the war in space, they lose
Speaker 3: the war in the ground. I mean, think of the
Speaker 3: US again in the Western Pacific. Would they be able
Speaker 3: to communicate to the carrier battle groups without satellites? I
Speaker 3: don't know if they u tropal scatter calm anymore? You know,
Speaker 3: would we have our aircraft flying when we don't even
Speaker 3: know where we're flying, We don't have imagery, and we
Speaker 3: don't know how to avoid the you know, the anti
Speaker 3: aircraft and what targets to service and all. I mean,
Speaker 3: you get to the point where war in space maybe
Speaker 3: is morally better than war on the ground. So how
Speaker 3: important is that to a society versus Oh, yeah, NASA,
Speaker 3: we're exploring this and that. Now I could again be
Speaker 3: a wise guy and say, boy, elon, the commercial world
Speaker 3: sure did a better job of trying to get to
Speaker 3: the Moon than NASA, did you know? They really seemed
Speaker 3: to be failing there and all that. So yeah, they
Speaker 3: pour money into NASA, and or maybe we should just
Speaker 3: fund the commercial world to do that kind of thing,
Speaker 3: or maybe we should just get contributions from people who
Speaker 3: think it's really cool to go to the moon, or something.
Speaker 3: I mean again, I might be an old fogy here,
Speaker 3: but the Mars, you know, the dust is extremely poisonous
Speaker 3: and the radiation is extremely bad, and so you're gonna
Speaker 3: end up being underground ninety nine percent of the time.
Speaker 3: You're gonna get really tired of that red not sing
Speaker 3: blue and all that. So I can see, you know,
Speaker 3: if I was younger, Oh yeah, you know, go, you know,
Speaker 3: colonize Mars and all that. Yeah, someday maybe we put
Speaker 3: atmosphere on that, but you're talking beyond our lifetimes. And
Speaker 3: same with the Moon.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: The Moon is really weird. I remember when I first
Speaker 3: started out in the seventies and someone telling me, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: NASA asked the Air Force, well do you want a
Speaker 3: base on the Moon? You know, and the Air Force
Speaker 3: sort of scratched his heads, like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: kind of far away. I guess not, you know. And
Speaker 3: no one in my entire career, no one's cared about
Speaker 3: the Moon except the last five, six, seven years. And
Speaker 3: they're all sorts of like here at Albuquerque, Oh, we're
Speaker 3: gonna put cell phone service on the Moon. What the
Speaker 3: hell you're talking about? You know, you're gonna pay ten
Speaker 3: thousand dollars a minute for three astronauts, you know, and oh,
Speaker 3: you're putting these surveillance sensors on the dark side of
Speaker 3: the moon, you know, surveilling what. And everyone seems very
Speaker 3: worried about the whole thing. Now, I could be a
Speaker 3: conspiracy to alien this, and I don't think so, or
Speaker 3: maybe am I I theorize that. You know, when China,
Speaker 3: when they land their TAKEO knots on the Moon, they
Speaker 3: plant the flag abrogate the outer space treaty that says
Speaker 3: you can't own crestal bodies, abrogate that. Ten minutes where
Speaker 3: they land on the Moon, say now we own the Moon,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of like Spain and Portugal I guess
Speaker 3: did for the Western hemisphere. Cour it's good luck defending
Speaker 3: that kind of So I wonder if they're worried about
Speaker 3: that in some sense. And I also point out we
Speaker 3: have this nineteen sixty seven outer space treatise as you
Speaker 3: can't own celestial bodies. Well there's over eighty countries that
Speaker 3: never sign that. I theorize that Elon can take one
Speaker 3: of his es. He was building some launch ships. I
Speaker 3: don't know he gave up on that, but you ship
Speaker 3: it out to the territorial waters of one of these
Speaker 3: countries and launched the moon and say, and now we
Speaker 3: own the moon, or that country Ecuador or whatever owns
Speaker 3: the moon and leases it back to Eline for ninety
Speaker 3: nine years, like Hong Kong. You know, I'm not a lawyer,
Speaker 3: but sounds like you could do that.
Speaker 2: Fascinating. Well, Paul, where can people follow you online? Obviously
Speaker 2: the book again is The Battle Beyond Fighting and Winning
Speaker 2: the Coming War in Space or this is one of
Speaker 2: the books. This is the one that I looked at
Speaker 2: for the interview that's out now. But if people just
Speaker 2: want to follow you, keep up with your work, learn more,
Speaker 2: where can they find you?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm mostly on LinkedIn, so you can, like say,
Speaker 3: twenty eight thousand members of people who are interested in
Speaker 3: space warfare, So you can communicate through there, you know,
Speaker 3: just send me a request I guess or that and
Speaker 3: tell me who you are or whatever. Also, if you
Speaker 3: looked up The Battle Beyond How to Fight Win Space
Speaker 3: Wars on Amazon, you'll see all six books, and there's
Speaker 3: way I think they have ways of liking me there
Speaker 3: and you know, communicating that way. I think there's even
Speaker 3: a website associated with it and all that, and that's
Speaker 3: that's probably the best way.
Speaker 2: All right. Well, thanks again for coming on the shows.
Speaker 2: Has been very insightful.
Speaker 3: Okay, thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 2: All right. Thanks again to Paul Samanski for coming on
Speaker 2: the show and chatting with me again. The book, co
Speaker 2: authored with Jerry Drew, is The Battle Beyond Fighting and
Speaker 2: Winning the Coming War in Space and it is available now.
Speaker 2: If you would like to reach out to Joe and myself,
Speaker 2: well you can do so in a number of ways.
Speaker 2: I'll share that email in just a second. But hey,
Speaker 2: you can follow Stuff to Blow your Mind the podcast
Speaker 2: feed anywhere to get your podcast core science and culture
Speaker 2: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Monday's short
Speaker 2: form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside
Speaker 2: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 2: on Weird House Cinema. Thanks as always to the excellent
Speaker 2: JJ Possway for producing the show. And if you want
Speaker 2: to shoot us that email, you can do so at
Speaker 2: contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio, app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 3: Not the f