| Fifty-five years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the moon, the vast vacuum of space is more crowded, and its future more contested, than ever. It’s not just the threat of Russian space nukes. Last month, a lunar rover from China planted the Chinese flag on the far side of the moon, escalating a rivalry that is as much ideological as scientific. Two weeks ago, it returned to Earth with soil samples from the moon’s south pole, where Beijing is pursuing plans to build a lunar base. And yes, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are still at it. These emerging space rivalries — U.S. vs. China, public vs. private — aren’t just abstractions. What’s literally happening up there right now matters a great deal, and could shape the human future just as much as the European colonial race shaped global civilization centuries ago. This mix of science and long-view analysis is the specialty of Everett Dolman, professor of strategy at the Air Force’s Air War College. A veteran of the U.S. Space Command, Dolman is known as the intellectual godfather of “Astropolitics” – the application of Halford Mackinder-style geopolitical analysis to the space beyond Earth’s atmosphere. So what do we need to worry about, and why? DFD caught up with Dolman about China’s space grab, D.C.’s leverage over Musk and why more space intelligence should be declassified. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. What’s hot right now in the geopolitics of space? What’s really got us going right now is the south pole of the moon and the far side of the moon — and what the Chinese are doing. There are five points around two bodies orbiting where the gravity kind of cancels out and allows you to stay in the spots without expending any fuel — and there's one on the far side of the moon that the Chinese are orbiting around. It’s a communications relay satellite that allows that satellite to be in view of the entire dark side of the moon 100 percent of the time and is able to relay streaming video communications from the far side of the moon continuously. The south pole is just a fascinating place and the Chinese have done some really interesting things that in retrospect seem obvious. They realized that the south pole, if you put a base there, would be able to get solar power 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Whereas everywhere else you get solar power two weeks and then don't have solar power for two weeks. And it also has probably the largest concentration of water ice in a number of craters around there and that water ice could be used to create oxygen. It could be used as a rocket fuel if you're going on to Mars, or if you want to put a base to put some fairly hidden things there. Could China just annex the most strategically valuable parts of the moon? There are some laws against taking territory, but there are also some laws in international international relations that if you're doing scientific experiments you have the right to have a zone around you where people aren’t doing experiments that might interfere with you. So it’s a way of taking territory on the pretense of scientific exploration. What other parts of space are the Chinese focused on? I referred to it as the 21st century Great Wall of China in space. They seem to be preparing for, that in a crisis, they could dominate low Earth orbit and prevent us from reconstituting space [power] from low Earth orbit. Because from low Earth orbit you get everywhere. We have relay satellites. We used to have stations all around the world that could get a line of sight to any satellite. We don’t need that because we just relay to a satellite that just relays to another satellite. If China can seize low Earth orbit or prevent the U.S. from using low-Earth orbit, just that, we would not be able to defend Taiwan. We would not be able to think about any long-distance overseas offensive operations. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are increasingly important to the U.S. space program. How can Washington make sure the private sector is keeping itself in line with the national interest? It’s a huge challenge. Right now there’s a stopgap, and that's the fact that they can't do anything without a license. Plus, until they get their own fully capable launch facilities, which also have to be licensed by the state. In other words. If they're doing something you don't like you simply pull their license. Insurance is also a big thing. You can require them to have really expensive insurance if you want to. All of those things could be challenged, I suppose. The thing is we don’t necessarily want to do that. There’s a lot of aging with NASA and civil servants who have been on for a long time, and it’s getting very, very expensive to have super safe procedures. The private companies can fail early and fail often. You can’t do that in government. Congress will shut you down. So, we’ve outsourced the risky innovation to the private sector? The bad side of that is, we started saying, “We don't even need to think about this. We’ll just let the private companies figure out the best way to exploit space and we'll just pick up the good ideas.” It makes sense from a transactional standpoint, where it’s all about business and profit. War is one of those things that should not be done for profit. It’s certainly never been a good idea for democracy. What if they came up with a system or a weapon or a capability that nobody was working on or expected and we just say “oh that’s a great idea,” and we end up changing our entire strategy off it? It may not be in the national character or the interest to do so. What should policymakers do about it? We ought to be driving the technologies that we think are appropriate for our strategies and for our people and for our form of government, rather than seeing what comes up and hoping that we can adapt it without changing too much. What’s something the U.S. should change about its approach to the new space race? We have got to lower our levels of classifications. We could have a war in space and nobody knows about it. It won't be televised. People won’t see it. It won’t be on CNN or Fox News. If we say to the world, “Hey, the Russians are doing something that looks like it could be a weapons test in space” and they say “Well, how do you know?” and you say, “I can't tell you” — well, nobody believes you. For many of our really strong allies, we still aren’t giving that information. We especially aren't giving it to the global public. If we could show them the pictures, if we could have livestreams and say “here’s what our capabilities actually are, and here’s what we think the Russian and Chinese capabilities are,” that could be hugely deterring and very, very valuable. It would also get the world to understand how valuable space is.
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