Weapons in Space

In November 2021, Russia launched a Direct Ascent Anti-Satellite Missile (DR-ASAT) to destroy its own defunct satellite, Kosmos 1408, littering space with 1,500 pieces of microscopic debris which posed an immediate danger to both the Chinese space station “Tiangong” and the International Space Station (ISS). Russia was not the first nation to conduct an ASAT; China in 2007, the USA in 2008, and even India in 2019 had done the same. But the increasing frequency of such tests by space-faring nations indicates the increasing militarisation and weaponisation of space. (Read More)

In “Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age” (Routledge, 2001), Professor Everett Carl Dolman from the US Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College applied Halford Mackinder’s famous Heartland Theory of 1904 to space. Space, according to him, is not featureless but “a rich vista of gravitational mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers of resources and energy.” Dolman divided space into four territories: (1) Terra, sur- rounding the earth and up to the limit where a spacecraft can orbit without being powered, (2) Earth Space, up to the GEO, (3) Lunar Space, up to the lunar orbit and (4) the unlimited Solar Space, beyond the lunar orbit. (Read More)