‘Conflict in Space’ World powers turning orbit into ‘contested environment’ amid tech boom

Space is a 'contested environment' says Daniel Ceperley

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Space entrepreneur Daniel Ceperley has warned that a conflict in the cosmos could become inevitable if deterrents are not put in place to curb military action. The CEO of LeoLabs, which tracks satellite debris, believes that as space becomes increasingly commercially important the world’s largest militaries will begin to pay even closer attention to the sector.

Mr Ceperley told Express.co.uk: “With the growth of the space industry with all these new commercial developments, I think governments are going to take advantage of them too.

“US Space Command has said a lot about space being contested environment, and I think it’s true.

“I think we’re going to continue to see plenty of military investment in space, and they’re probably going to leverage a lot of the commercial activities.

“So I think it’s always going to be kind of a part of the space industry.

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He added: “I think deterrence is going to be key though, militaries are going to continue to level up their capabilities and the calculation just needs to be that if you’re actually going to take that aggressive action, that might create debris, you just need to know it’s going to be watched it’s going to be reported on.

“Hopefully, that really can drive effective deterrence that we don’t see more weapons tests, we don’t see more or we don’t see a conflict in space. B

“But I don’t see how we get rid of the military element to space.

“It’s sort of like any other domain, maritime, air, land. They’re economically important so nations take an interest.

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“Space for the first time is becoming very economically important. So I think it will be a focus of militaries from here on out.”

The space CEO warned that a growing number of fragments from crashed military and commercial satellites has made operating in large areas of space “more expensive and riskier”. 

Mr Ceperley told Express.co.uk: “In 2009, we saw this Iridium-Cosmos collision, a dead satellite and a commercial satellite collided and created 1000s of pieces of debris, just in an instant.

“Two satellites were turned into 1000s of pieces of debris, and a lot of that debris is still up there in space.

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“And it spreads out so it initially starts kind of like a shotgun blast or two shotgun blasts like a cluster of debris and then over the course of weeks, it kind of spreads out into a shell around the Earth.

“So you end up with this kind of debris shell and so we saw that from the collision there was also another weapons test in 2007 that created 1000s of pieces of debris.

“A lot of it’s around the altitude of 750 kilometres, 800 kilometres, an altitude that was used a little more heavily in the past but now it’s got about the densest debris population. So it makes sense for satellite operators to use other altitudes.

“That’s what we see when these sorts of events occur it just becomes more expensive and riskier to operate in a certain portion of space.”

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