The Kremlin’s threats to escalate Space War I – by firing its anti-satellite missiles against any allied spacecraft aiding Ukraine – are imperiling Western plans to loft a cluster of independent space stations into orbit.
Upping the stakes by developing nuclear-armed spacecraft that would skulk low Earth orbit like stealth space assassins, Russia has cast a virtual mushroom cloud surrounding the planet.
Yet the globe-spanning partners co-creating the Starlab Space Station – which will glitter with next-generation technologies – say they are on still on track to launch the new outpost aboard SpaceX’s revolutionary Starship rocket.
Starlab will be patterned after the International Space Station, built by an alliance of space-tech leaders based in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada, says Manfred Jaumann, head of Low Earth Orbit Programs at Airbus, a co-founder of Starlab Space LLC.
But unlike its forerunner, which was constructed over the course of a decade, via dozens of flights of the American Space Shuttle and Russian rockets, Starlab will be launched on a single mission of the colossal Starship capsule, Jaumann told me in an interview.
The three-deck Starlab, with circular interiors for astronaut habitats and space physics labs that echo the fantastical ringed station in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, will instantly outshine the International Station, he predicts.
“A lot of the ISS technology started in the 80s, in the 90s, of the last millennium,” Jaumann muses. “The Starlab technology is incredibly more advanced than the ISS.”
Starlab, which has already sealed a pact with the European Space Agency to host ESA astronauts and spacecraft, will be open to spacefarers and scientists around the world – except for cosmonauts or cosmologists from the Russian Federation, Jaumann says.
The ISS was co-built by NASA and Roscosmos, ESA and JAXA, during a halcyon era of space collaboration with Russia, when Boris Yeltsin led a democratic revolution that briefly transformed the post-Soviet federation, says Jeffrey Manber, President of International and Space Stations at Voyager Space, the American co-founder of Starlab.
Manber, a space investor and visionary who was briefly ensconced inside the Russian aerospace hierarchy during Moscow’s fleeting embrace of Western liberalism and internationalism, even helped Moscow negotiate an agreement to co-construct the ISS.
Yet since then Russia has transformed itself into an outcast on the global stage with its campaign to conquer democratic Ukraine and warnings it could use nuclear weapons against any Western ally that directly enters the fray.
After Elon Musk rushed tens of thousands of Starlink satellite terminals into Ukraine, plugging the blitzed country back into the internet, President Vladimir Putin’s emissary began telling UN gatherings that Moscow could fire its missiles on SpaceX satellites.
Even more ominous – Musk recounted to his official biographer – Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. personally told him the use of SpaceX technology by Ukrainian designers of weaponised drones could impel Moscow to start detonating tactical nuclear bombs to end Kyiv’s resistance.
The U.S. Department of Defense, in its Nuclear Posture Review released around the same time, stated: “In brandishing Russia’s nuclear arsenal in an attempt to intimidate Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia’s leaders have made clear that they view these weapons as a shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors.”
“Our goal,” the Pentagon added, is to “reduce the risk of a nuclear war that could have catastrophic effects for the United States and the world.”
Yet the Kremlin is stepping up its brinkmanship by developing spacecraft armed with plutonium warheads that would perpetually circle the Earth.
Rather than enter a nuclear arms race in space, Washington called out Russia’s clandestine project by introducing a resolution in the UN Security Council that sought to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on stationing atomic warheads in orbit.
Moscow’s abrupt veto of the resolution confirmed its “intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space,” declared White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Yet the United States has no intention of matching Russia’s future nuclear orbiters by developing its own, says Spenser Warren, a scholar on Putin’s nuclear modernization drive at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
“We are entering a new era where it’s as easy to envision a conflict in space as a conflict on Earth,” Manber, one of the original conceptual designers of the Starlab Station, told me in an interview.
Manber says he hopes Roscosmos’s ongoing partnership in the ISS, which hosts Moscow’s cosmonauts, and the lofting of a flotilla of independent space stations piloted by astronauts across the globe, will prevent Russia’s Space Forces from launching attacks on orbiting spacecraft.
Yet scholars who focus on Russia’s drive to enhance its space weapons and nuclear arsenal say sending new Western space stations into orbit could actually embolden Putin and his militaristic cohort to escalate their threats against the allies.
“From a signaling standpoint, the presence of more independent U.S. space stations may make Russia more likely to threaten the use of ASAT weapons or a nuclear device in low Earth orbit,” says Warren, who is now transforming his doctoral dissertation, “Russian Strategic Nuclear Modernization Under Vladimir Putin,” into a book.
The allies’ new orbital stations could fuel a revamped round of Russian “ASAT blackmail,” says Elena Grossfeld, an expert on Moscow’s military and civilian space programs in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
The ring of new Western space havens “will make the threats of ASAT use more likely,” she told me in an interview.
The ban on Russian cosmonauts visiting the Starlab Station, she adds, could trigger the ire of Moscow’s political and space leadership.
Both space defense scholars agreed that Russia’s launch of a nuclear ASAT would overturn a decades-long consensus on preserving space as a demilitarised zone.
They also agreed that there is one bright star on the dark horizon of future space missions and stations.
Roscosmos Chief Yury Borisov in July sketched out details of blueprints to fly the Russian Orbital Station, with the first two modules set to blast off in 2027, according to the government news agency TASS.
The 608-billion-ruble project would place cosmonauts on a long-lived platform circling the globe, and could therefore represent the Kremlin’s own deterrent to exploding conventional or nuclear ASATs above the Earth, say the Russian military experts.
Yet Spenser Warren told me in an interview that Russian strategic forces could still launch their nuclear-armed orbiter.
“Russia may still want to place a nuclear-armed weapon of some sort in space for a few reasons,” he says. “They may want to leverage its coercive abilities.”
Alternatively, he adds, “Russia may be placing a nuclear-armed weapon in space for status purposes: ‘Look at our new weapon with no analogues, not even in the U.S. or China!’”
Airbus executive Manfred Jaumann, meanwhile, says the Starlab allies are “now using astronauts to test out our mock-up of the Starlab Station in Houston.”
He adds the leading-edge AI/defense outfit Palantir is providing Starlab with a suite of artificial intelligence tools to operate the Station, including a next-generation automated collision avoidance system.
Starlab’s collision avoidance system, Warren says, might even enable the Station to change its trajectory to avoid being hit by a ground-launched Russian ASAT missile.
But that cutting-edge capability may depend on Starlab’s being linked up with an advanced missile warning/missile tracking system, he says.
Russia’s ongoing barrage of nuclear threats, combined with its staging of simulated nuclear war drills, are propelling an equal and opposite reaction around the world, with more countries signing or ratifying the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, according to leaders of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
ICAN credits an incredible line of forerunners with laying the foundation for the adoption of the Treaty, which calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons from the face of the planet, including Albert Einstein, the first super-icon of the anti-nuclear movement.
Einstein was quick to recognize the threat posed to humanity and civilization by atomic arms, and began calling for a freeze on their deployment even before their first use in 1945.
In a manifesto penned during his last days on Earth, Einstein, along with a circle of fellow Nobel Prizewinners, warned: “The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.”
After a decade of leading appeals for abolishing atomic arms, Einstein made an even more radical proposal: universal military disarmament.
Even an agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons across the continents, he warned, would not prevent their resurrection in times of war.
Yet he added, in his last open letter to the world: “The abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons” would represent a remarkable “first step” toward long-term global peace.
“If you can do so,” Einstein predicted, “the way lies open to a new Paradise.”
