COLUMN- 'Orbital dogfights': Taiwan's worries drive new space warfare era: Peter Apps

By Peter Apps

WASHINGTON, June 13 (Reuters) - At the headquarters of U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs, military planners are racing to a very earthbound deadline as they draw up plans for how they might fight the first major war in space.

That could be 2027, the year by which the U.S. government believes Chinese President Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to invade Taiwan.

Just as with recent earthbound wars in Gaza and Ukraine, any such confrontation is expected to be a hugely complex and fast-evolving battle heavily reliant on satellite communications. It would also include electronic jamming, autonomous drones often controlled by artificial intelligence and increasingly also spacecraft that can follow and attack each other.

While much of that face-off inevitably takes place in secret, developments in the last two years have included U.S. claims Russia was developing a nuclear device to explode in orbit, a classified U.S. unmanned “spaceplane” that landed in Florida in March after a reported record 434-day mission in orbit, and President Donald Trump’s mooted new U.S. “Golden Dome” missile defense shield.

The latter is already becoming a major priority for Space Command as well as the U.S. Air Force and associated agencies, despite having only been announced by Trump in January, shortly after his return to the White House.

New developments continue almost every week.

Last month, a Chinese space scientist announced his government was considering arming its manned space station “Tiangong” with what would effectively be weapons attack drones to defend it against other approaching spacecraft.

With relations between the U.S., Russia and the other foreign partners on the International Space Station at their chilliest since the project began in the early 1990s, it is now due to be decommission in 2030 and sent crashing into the Pacific not long after.

That will leave the Chinese “Tiangong” – launched in 2021 – the only permanently manned platform in orbit.

If it were to be “armed” in any way, even in what China might claim as “self-defense”, it would mark the beginning of a dramatically different phase in the geopolitics of space.

Even without that, however, the speed of progress is increasing – as are the resulting complexities and risks.

The number of nations now operating in orbit or beyond is one major difference between the first Cold War “space race” and what is now unfolding. So too is the speed of technological advances and the role of the private sector, particularly SpaceX and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk.

The U.S. and its Western allies are currently in a race with a combined Chinese-Russian collaborative project to return humans to the moon.

With Beijing looking to set up a permanent robotic lunar presence as a precursor to a base, that race is increasingly becoming not just about prestige but resources as well as military advantage.

The new split between Musk and Trump, who this week appeared to be trying to de-escalate what had become a fierce public spat, now adds another wild card to that dynamic.

Both the U.S. civilian space program under NASA and its more secretive military operations under Space Command depend heavily on SpaceX for launches, while the U.S. military and its allies are also heavy users of Musk's Starlink system for communications.

Ever since Musk reportedly denied Ukraine’s government the use of Starlink over Russian-occupied areas of the country, multiple governments have been working to transfer some of their sensitive communications systems onto other similar low Earth orbit systems such as OneWeb, partly owned by the French and British governments.

'DOGFIGHTING IN SPACE'

Last month, the White House pulled its support from its initial nominee to head up NASA, the Musk-backed Jared Isaacman, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the billionaire’s goal of getting a manned mission to Mars and would also have inherited NASA's upcoming but struggling “Artemis” manned moon missions.

That appears to worsen an already widening divide with Musk, who has also criticized Trump’s budget and briefly threatened to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon manned capsule crucial to current U.S. human space flight plans.

While he quickly rescinded that threat, space industry insiders say it may well have an impact on long-term confidence in SpaceX, suggesting it might abandon hugely expensive long-term contracts at its founder's whim.

The fact that Trump has signaled he intends to ask the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Daniel Caine, for advice on the next NASA administrator has worried those who believe firmly the civilian agency should be independent of the military.

But it likely also points to a growing view in the Trump administration that a greater focus on space is now a military necessity.

That, of course, includes the regions of low to high Earth orbit above every potential ground or naval battlefield.

In April, Chinese news agency Xinhua announced China had completed the first deployment of a three-satellite constellation in “cis-lunar orbit” for the area of space between the moon and Earth where their competing gravities can hold satellites in place.

Such satellites would be vital for communications with any human-occupied base or drone activity on the far side of the moon. But they also offer a vantage point to look down on other satellites in lower orbits including spy communications platforms, and perhaps even attack them.

In March, the Vice Chief of Space Operations at the U.S. Space Force, General Michael Gutlein, told a defense conference that his personnel had observed what he described as five Chinese “objects” practicing what he called “dogfighting in space ... maneuvering in about around each other in synchronicity and in control”.

Last week, a U.S. military spokesperson told Breaking Defense that another Russian “space object” launched at the end of May appeared to be closely tracking a U.S. government satellite.

Private sector analysts Slingshot Aerospace said the Russian object – dubbed Cosmos-2588 – was likely deliberately “chasing” its U.S. counterpart and might have the capability to destroy it.

Beijing is now making its own such allegations – as well as declaring an intent to then take action.

Last month, the South China Morning Post reported that senior scientist Sun Zhibin from the National Space Science Center in Beijing had told a public event at Nanjing University that the Chinese space station was being repeatedly approached by unidentified other “spacecraft”, and that the agency was working on a “rapid response” defense system.

What that would likely mean, he said, was equipping the station with drones propelled by robotic thrusters that could latch onto the other craft and push it further from the station.

“In such cases, we first try to assess their intent,” he said, reportedly in answer to a question. “Then we choose how to respond – whether by dodging, adjusting our orbit or releasing a small robot to try and grab the object.”

TAIWAN URGENCY

In the past few months, civilian analysts have noted that U.S. space commanders have become much more willing to talk of their own preparedness for war fighting and deterrence.

According to the commander of U.S. Space Command, General Stephen Whiting, the U.S. government assessment that China might be ready to attack Taiwan by 2027 has delivered “urgency” to his command.

While Chinese officials deny any instruction to prepare for a Taiwan invasion has actually been given – and U.S. officials say they do not believe any direct decision has been made to launch such an operation, every element of the U.S. military has been told to be ready for that date.

While any fighting in the immediate Taiwan region would be the primary responsibility of the U.S. Indo Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, few doubt that Space Command – or SPACECOM – would be in action from the start.

In the words of its commander, General Whiting, while most combatant commands have specific geographic responsibilities, his start 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface – and then stretch out “to infinity” across vast distances of space.

“What we are doing every day is planning so that we are ready to conduct operations in space if there is a conflict,” he told the Chicago Council for Global Affairs last month.

Like other combatant commands, he said, his team was also continually “campaigning”, tying together its training and other activity to show any potential enemy that they were ready for a fight.

That includes hefty and growing collaboration with other allies including NATO structures.

U.S. SPACECOM also collaborates with Britain, Australia and others on its “Joint Commercial Operations” cell, which works with commercial satellite operators to alert them to potential threats including rogue hostile satellites.

As SPACECOM's commander frequently reminds commercial audiences, satellites are vital for everything from the tea time signals that coordinate global markets to the detection of ballistic missile launches.

In the event of another major war, however, all those capabilities are likely to be targets – and it remains to be seen how the world might handle such disruption.

“There has never been a war in space and we don't want a war to start in space to extend into space," Whiting told the conference in April. "But we must apply our best thinking to be ready."