Europe girds for celestial war

Weeks before Russia began blitzing Ukraine in a fireworks of missile attacks, while threatening a doomsday nuclear war with Europe and the US, it sent out a signal that the battle could be extended into space. But that piece in the puzzle of its war plans was only later decoded.

Russia’s rocket attack on its own Soviet-era satellite as it amassed shock troops along its borders was a warning to the world’s democratic space powers contemplating aiding Ukraine that their tiny cubesats and spacecraft could likewise be targeted, says US General Thomas Ayres.

Moscow’s ASAT missile strike could presage an even more ominous scenario: Anthony Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says an aggressor plotting a surprise mass attack with atomic arms would first assail the enemy countries’ satellites.

This Pearl Harbor-style orbital blitzkrieg could wipe out the space-based components of the target nations’ launch detection and missile defense systems, rendering them helpless to track the firing of nuclear-tipped ICBMs or to deploy interceptor rockets, he says.

This would trigger chaos that ricocheted across the countries under attack: Google Maps would freeze as automated cars swerved out of control, aircraft would lose their GPS guidance systems as satellite TV stations turned black - all before the atomic warheads began detonating.

Long before they signed a nonaggression pact, pledging to jointly oppose NATO’s expansion and pro-democracy movements like the one liberating post-Soviet Ukraine, Moscow and Beijing raced to expand their anti-satellite missile forces. Europe is now building up its counter-forces.

During a summit of European Space Agency leaders, staged as Russian tanks and rocket squads surrounded Ukraine, French President Macron warned Europe had to strengthen its ground and orbital defenses: “Without mastery of space, there can be no strategic or military sovereignty.”

Satellites are vital “to observing the movements of armed forces across the planet,” Macron said, even as “the space field becomes one of today’s new theatres of conflict.” “Without mastery of space, ultimately there is no power capable of controlling its own destiny.”

Alarmed by Russia’s development of weapons like “assassin spacecraft” that can take out military

satellites, Macron recently launched the French Air and Space Force, and urged his fellow EU leaders to rally around NATO “on the path to a European military space strategy.”

Macron’s metamorphosis into a potential Space Age Napoleon likely helped him win 2022’s presidential race against a right-wing nationalistic rival who long touted, then tried to downplay, her star-crossed axis of friendship with Vladimir V. Putin.