Taiwan’s worries drive new era of space warfare

At the headquarters of US 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.

- Peter Apps

That could be 2027, the year by which the US 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 con-trolled by artificial intelligence and increas-ingly 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 US claims Russia was developing a nuclear device to explode in orbit, a classified US unmanned “spaceplane” that landed in Florida in March after a reported record 434-day mission in orbit, and President Donald Trump's mooted new US “Golden Dome” missile defence shield.

The latter is already becoming a major priority for Space Command as well as the US Air Force and associated agencies, despite having only been announced by Mr 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 US, 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 decommissioned in 2030 and sent crashing into the Pacific not long after.

That will leave the 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-defence’, it would mark the beginning of a dramatically different phase in the geopolitics of space.