The rapid commercialization of space is launching the world into an “era of astropolitics,” journalist and author Tim Marshall tells host Allegra Stratton on this episode of Voternomics.
Commercial companies are driving “Space Race 2.0,” from commercial fleets of satellites a few hundred miles above Earth to NASA’s search for private companies to bring back a piece of the moon. Ultimately, Marshall says, entities are eyeing the lucrative prospect of mining extraterrestrial objects for resources needed to provide renewable energy. “As a country or a company, you cannot afford not to be part of this.”
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Hello Votonomics listeners. It's Alegristratton and it is time for another edition of our Summer Reading special. While Adrian, Stephanie and I are off for a portion of the next month, we thought it'd be good to offer up a useful summer reading list. We each selected an author whose nonfiction work we felt was relevant and informative on the state of politics and economics right now. Last week Adrian spoke with Varied Zakaria about his latest release, The Age of Revolutions. It is a great listen, of course, so please check it out if you haven't already. But this week I'm bringing you a conversation with Tim Marshall. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography The Power of Geography. You've probably read those on previous summer holidays, but now more recently The Future of Geography. Now this is the addition where Votonomics goes astronomic. When I'm not at Bloomberg, I helped run the UK's first spaceport, sax of Ord, which is based in the Shetland Islands. What has been striking to me week after week of recording Voteronomics with Stephanie and Adrian is that all the dynamics of diplomacy that we discuss can also be seen in the space domain. Space has the capacity to impact voters' lives and boardrooms too, but despite the best efforts of Elon Musk etal, it still remains a weirdly liminal area, very far away from mainstream discourse. So to help bring space into votonomics, I wanted to bring in author and geographer broadcaster Tim Marshall, who wrote the best selling Prisoners of Geography and a number of other best sellers, and has now applied or rather published a book last year applying his signature erudition and wit to space. Welcome Tim, very kind of you.
Thank you.
I'm a big fan, always have been when you were Sky News diplomatic editor.
When I was at Newsnight that sort of thing. Yes, it does feel because you did the big brain stuff they did.
They did cross though I was trying to remember there was a summit, wasn't there where I think we both almos raised eyebrows and had our head in our hands at some point. Look, Tim, in your book, you are clear that we are now to quote you we're now in the era of astropolitics. Tell us what that means.
Astropolitics is when geopolitics moves out into space. Geopolitics is where you look at resources, populations, people, well everything really and there is a geography to space which is not properly explained usually, and that geography does inform part of the decision making that the big countries and indeed companies make. And so we're now deep, I would say, into the era of astropolitics and also what I would call space race two point zero, because there are many similarities with the sixties and seventies, but there are also major differences. They are well, in those days, there were no such things as lasers. There were no commercial companies in space. We weren't shooting basically things of the size of fridge freezers asteroids to see if we can deflect them. We never dreamt of mining the Moon, and the commercial aspects of it were I wouldn't say peripheral. I mean, you know Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Of course they always had a relationship with NASA. But one of the biggest differences in space race two point now is just how front and center commercial companies are and I don't just mean elon musk. You know, there's a raft of companies who are pumping billions of you know, it's a billion more than billions of dollars industry, and it's growing rapidly, very high risk industry in many ways. So you know, it is different to the first iteration.
So, Tim, let's talk about low Earth orbit, which people call LEO for short. There's lots of definitions for it, aren't there, But essentially it's anything under one thousand kilometers up.
This is another problem. You know I mentioned earlier about the differences between space race and space rates two point oh. Another problem is we don't have the legislation or even the guidelines for space rates two point oh because the space regulations and guidelines are written in the nineteen sixties. Out of Space Treaty is nineteen sixty seven, and we can't even agree exactly where space starts. But you asked me about LEO. It's very worrying talking to someone who really knows more than you do about this. I had no idea.
The Scottish the same, Tim.
The Scottish version of Cape Canaveral low Earth orbit is where a vast majority of the satellites are. There are about eight and a half thousand working satellites, about three thousand defunct satellites, which is a lot. And you know, my generation grown up in the sixties and seventies, there were only really two space powers at two people who really had a presence in space that we were all aware of. There's eighty countries in space now, and I know there's a lot of space up there, but it is getting crowded. And the conservative estimates are that there will be at least thirty thousand satellites by the end of this decade. That's a conservative estimate. The Chinese will probably put up twenty thousand, musc will put up ten thousand, and that's just two examples. And although the satellites are getting smaller and smaller, some of them the size of a Rubik's cube CubeSats as they're known, it's getting crowded, it's getting competitive. He said in the introduction about how you know it's pretty sort of out there and not part of our lives. And it's true we don't think about them, but it's absolutely integral to all of our lives. Every time you put petrol in a car, every time you get on a plane, every time you do a bank transaction, and thousands of other examples. They are connected to space, and it's a growing industry.
You've summarized the companies and the money to be made, the big business that is being made out of satellites up up in space right now. But you also alluded to if we've got thirty thousand satellites going up in the near future, twenty thousand of those will be Chinese, and then some of those will be Musk and American. Right there in that sentence, you've given us the kind of great Game of Earth transposed to space. Just talk us through and this is I think probably what your astropolitics is all about. Us talk us through how geopolitics is playing out right now.
Go back to the beginning of the last century when everyone realized that oil was going to replace coal in the military terms, economic terms. You would not find a major company or country that, when a massive oil discovery was made, said you know what, we won't bother. We're not sure about this one. They had to go, They had to compete, and it's the same and so you cannot leave this newish domain to your rivals, whether it's the satellite industry, whether it's experiments scientific experiments in space or the big one and the most difficult at the moment, mining space for the very minerals that we need for renewable energy here on Earth, which of course is a very finite resource. And so the great powers and the big companies are competing against each other. Now, obviously the American companies are in bed with the American space companies, and ditto the other side of the Chinese and the Russians. But if you look in broadbrush terms, there is a block going up led by the Americans via the Artemisa courts. Forty two countries have signed on. And then there is a block going up led by China, which is the senior partner, with Russia as its dune a partner played Iran and North Korea clutching onto their coattails. And that is exactly the two blocks that we see dominating the global picture on Earth. It is absolutely mirrored with what's going on in space.
And then there was great excitement because the Europeans put up Arian six listeners can't see, but has just smiled on the camera that I'm talking to him on. So what's the impact going to be of for the first time in a wild Europeans returning to be able to launch.
It's positive if you believe that this a is our future and B on balance or adventures in space are a good thing, and I do fall down on that side of the argument. The Europeans in the shape of the ESA European Space Agency, but also in the individual countries. The UK is a major space player in the second tier, the EU in the second tier, which is folded into the ESA. Germany I think you could argue was the second tier of space power of France, definitely, Italy definitely, along with people like the UAE, Japan and Israel. So these second tier companies they can't do what the Americans and the Chinese do, mostly because of budget constraints. But the French, by by launching out of French Guiana that rocket, have sort of nailed their colors to the mass that you know, we're not going to get left behind. I mean, the Europeans accept they can't match the Big two or the Big three actually because Russia's in the top tier as well. But it is a statement of intent and the Europeans really are a player.
But this matters, doesn't it. It's not just sort of the Europeans showing that they have the toys too, it is the Europeans showing that they have the access the ability to get to space. So that means that they can access their lucrative, important, vital infrastructure relying on satellite systems. So in the event that they cannot at some point ask the Americans.
To do it. Yeah, I mean, there's many historical echoes there because one of the reasons the French really ventured out on their own, I mean, there's a whole bunch, including the Forster Frapp. Then their independent nuclear capabilities is that. And this goes all the way back to the seventies when there was a coup in one of the North African countries that France takes a great interest in still and they were invited to intervene on the basis of some American satellite information and they just didn't trust it. And it is murky whether the Americans sort of fed them the best bits of the satellite information to try to drag them into taking some action in the African country. And this was one of the triggers France thought we need our own independent eyes on via the satellite. I mean, this is the military aspect of it, and off they went with you know, as well as their independent nuclear force. They needed their independent satellites because they do not wish to be reliant upon the United States, as so many Western countries are. So that's the sort of genesis of that, and it continues to this day. And of course there's the commercial aspects to that. You don't want to be reliant upon American technology when your own industry you will be harmed by that. I mean we're seeing a little bit of this at the moment in the defense industry. The new Labor government is very keen to forge links back with the EU countries and actually get a place around the table and talking about the European defense industry. I'm not talking about you know, how many soldiers you have armaments. And it's the French that is leading the fight back within the EU saying hang on a minute, do we want to let Britain into the decision making process when it's not in the EU of the European defense arms industry. Sorry, I've gone off at a bit of a tangent, but it is related back to why the French insist.
On that but it's central to what we're looking at right here, which is that these are terrestrial geopolitical tussles and relationships that are sort of having an amplified or expression in the space domain.
Of your sovereignty in a way. And that will go even further on the moon. About sovereignty on the moon, I mean, nobody's going to use that word and say we have sovereign rights, but they will certainly stake their claims, they just won't use the word sovereignty.
Let's come on to the moon in a second, which is a sentence you don't often.
Utter, well, not for about about fifty years in fact.
A the suggestion we could saunter onto the moon, but b just the sentence let's move on to the subject that is the moon. That's not something I have said often in my journalistic career. But before we do, just switching focus slightly, which is Elon Musk Starlink was critical in supporting Ukraine and giving it access to the Internet and the rest during the Russia's invasion. Clearly that was benign and something to be celebrated. But is there any queasiness around the idea that it is a private company that has that kind of power, and you know, at some point which is not yet on the horizon, but at some point is they can turn it on and they can turn it off.
I'll accept your use of the word benign. In the original effort by Musk he sent the Starlink terminals into the urban region, thousands of thousands of them to link to his Starlight satellite system to deliver the Internet to them, and that was benign. Then it was good. But of course the Ukrainian military jumped on it and used it to target Russian soldiers and kill them. It was inevitable. So I put it to you, members of the jury, does that make Starlink a legitimate military target for Russians to fire upon? Discuss because I referred earlier to the the treaties of the sixties. Are they out of space treat in nineteen sixty seven? It doesn't cover this because you couldn't do anything in those days, whereas now you can fire a ballistic missile from the surface of the Earth and you can hit a satellite and knock it out. That has been done to test by four countries Russia, USA, India, China. They haven't done that this time. You can spoof the satellites. You send up packets of information which can fuse the chipboard, put them out of action perhaps, and you can dazzle them. You send up direct energy beam so much light floods into it it blinds the camera. And those last two the Russians have been doing. They have been taking military action against an American company in space because it has been used by their Ukrainian foes on the ground. This is new territory and we don't have the rules and regulations required because it's hardly going to stop there. We now have weapon direct energy weapons that cannot drones out at a range of about seven kilometers. The Americans have perfected them, the Brits have got them, so you can find it fired a laser beam at a drone several kilometers away, knocking out the sky. What happens if somebody sticks one of those on a satellite in order to target other satellites. The moment one country does, every country will have them. So we urgently need I hesitate to say laws because international law is an oxymoron sometimes, but we definitely need guidelines.
Any prospects of those coming no, everyone.
Knows we need them. Everyone suspects they will eventually come. Go back to the early days of the nuclear race, when the Americans had the bomb, the Russians got the bomb, and the immediate response was both sides built more and more and more of them until they had tens of thousands of warheads. And then at that point they thought, we really need to talk to each other about this. And I think that will be the case in space. There is an arms race going on in space. Many countries now have space commands. China got the first, Trump introduced the second. UK has won, France, Germany, India, et cetera. These space forces, and so it is inevitable. But I think we're going to go through this period of x years before we realize how dangerous it's got because and then we realize, hang on minute, all these satellites are integral to the world economy.
You know.
The last thing we need is people knocking into them or firing at them. And then we will have treaties. And the people are working on the texts already, but hasn't percolated to the senior levels of industry and politics. The urgency of it.
You just mentioned Donald Trump yourself. What does President Trump two point zero mean for the space race.
It's difficult, isn't it, Because it all comes down to budgets. The budgets are actually smaller than they used to be. People think you must spend, spend. These countries are spending more in real terms. They're not the USA for the space race, which was part of a war, the Cold War. You know, they had to win that as part of winning the Cold War. I think it was zero point five percent of GDP well, and I think the budget now at state level is zero point three percent roughly of GDP. So it was Trump that introduced space force amid much mirth, which you know, for me, I'm not a supporter of him, but when when you use something like that to make fun of him, it betrays that you're not understanding him. He too bously trying to laugh at him, and it's an issue that has been gone on for years now. So he realized space force good idea in the context of China's got one. Everyone's going to have them. We need to up the game. Trump is aware of how much the Chinese are spending on space and doesn't want to get left behind.
But Musk helps him. I mean, Musk has helped him in the number of ways. In the last in the last, he'll make the case. Yeah, indeed, but Musk helps him in that his company space X is doing a lot of the heavy lifting and they've got billions and billions of pounds of US funding. So it's a kind of you know, an ecosystem where the one is scratching the back of the other and assisting the space effort.
It is and just as you'll know the I think it's something like ninety percent of the US budget that goes on armaments for Ukraine is spent in the United States first building them. You know, it is very beneficial to American industry. But it's a similar argument when it comes to space. And yes, Musk has his ear because he's such a big player in the space industry. But also a lot of the things we've been talking about come together here space Marase two point zero, and the centrality of private enterprise because, as I said, Boeing, lockeed Martin, many other companies, yet NASA went to them and said can you build me that widget or that, But it was very much a government driven It's now a rough percentage fifty percent is private enterprise and that's the same in China, although all companies are controlled by the CCP, but there's a lot of startups there. So private enterprise in America is a major, major part of this. Private enterprise across the world is a major part of this.
I just wonder whether governments have had the conversation with the electorate about everything we've just been discussing, the role that it plays in people's lives. The centrality the you know it is, if any of these satellites were taken down, it's many billions of pounds of economic damage per day, right, and so in order to make sure that they are safe and protected and so on, there probably will in these years ahead need to be greater money spent on them. So I wonder, given we'd never have that conversation whether it's a sort of going to be a shock to prime ministers and their you know chances and so on when the economic impact of them being vulnerable is fully understood. It's very striking in your book that passage where you talk about how once America had put a man on the moon, not long after they can the funding for it. Because once you've done the kind of TV gold and the historic moment. You know, we're we're in a different area now, and so there is there is plenty more to do. But at the time they made a different decision. They made a decision that there were there were you know, terrestrial policy programs they wanted to put that money into.
That I think would be relatively easy if you came to the military side of it, people kind of understand that protecting satellites from debris by cleaning up space, which is a huge, huge issue. I thought war was going to be the biggest issue, and then the experts explained to me that what keeps them awake at night is debris because in case the systems go down and as you said, cost economy is billion.
Well this is just to explain, this is just all bits of old satellite and junk from stations and so on flying through space and knocking out satellite.
Which then knocks out of satellite, which then knocks out of satellite, et cetera. So yeah, it's in the film gravity, which they nicked off the Kesseler syndrome, which was the sort of worst case scenario where they all crash into each other in the world, economy collapses and goes dark. So I think you can make those cases. It gets harder when you just talk about exploration. You know why you cutting budgets here so we can go and explore there. That's much harder. But I think as we gradually become more and more aware of how important space is to our economic livelihoods, and also if you can make the very contentious case that it is worth burning all that fuel and taking all those risks to go and mine for and despoil the Moon. Yes, for the metals we need for renewable energy. That's a hard sell as well. But no, we're not really having these arguments. But I think we'd be having more of them if it wasn't private enterprise making so much of the running.
Just to explain to the listeners, I mean there's a lot of the scientific exploration on the Moon that is. I mean, do you think it's pointless? I don't think you do think it's pointless trying to use the Moon as a stop ahead to Mars and so on.
I go back to what we said at the beginning, and the race for oil, you can't afford not to be there. The background to this is the Indians proved there was water at the south pole of the Moon, and they're the ones, the only ones who landed a craft there. It's very hard to land the South Pole. It's very rugged terrain, caves, mountains, boulders, and they've done it. And that's because it is also very very likely that there are large amounts of many of the metals. There's a small amount of lithium, quite liganite, all sorts of stuff, and there's water. Therefore there's oxygen and hydrogen, and therefore there's fuel and things to drink. So you've proved that it's theoretically possible to go there. Now, get in there, which everybody's trying to do, is also doable. It's weather. Is there enough of the stuff down there? And can you make it profitable to dig it up? Stick it in some sort of space shuttle, because there are now space planes. The Americans and the Chinese have got them robotic they look like the shuttle. They can go up from one two years in orbit. And further, is it viable at the moment The economics don't add up, But lithium, as you know, is destined. It is thought to go up and think something like forty times its current value over the next decade, and so as those prices of these precious metals go up and the finite resource here goes down, so the economic modeling of the moon becomes potentially more viable. But even though you're really I wouldn't say you bet in the farm, but you know it's high, high risk. But as a country or a company, you cannot afford not to be part of this one. I know we're going to run out of time. One last example, and this is even more theoretical, but it goes back to what I said about oil, and you're not gonna it's.
A beauty podcast him. We've got as long as you want past.
Try and be brief. There's helium three on the moon. We don't have very much of it here, there's lots and lots of it in the soil and the rocks up there. If AI could possibly crack nuclear fusion, not fission, not breaking it apart the way we do now, not smashing atoms apart, but fusion. If AI can do that, because we've been told for years and years, it's we're in the customer it. The helium three that's on the moon can be used as fuel, but radiation free fuel, and the head of the Chinese Space Agency, an eminent scientist, believes there is enough helium three on the Moon in those circumstances to fuel all of humanities and needs energy needs on Earth for the next ten thousand years. Now. I don't know if we're going to crack fusion. I don't know if the economic modeling can go and get the helium three. But the point I'm making is with those sorts of stakes there, which major player is just going to say, nah, I'm not going to bother And that is one of the reasons why we're going to go. Another reason is much more romantic. There is something in the human spirit, which is why we've always climbed to the top of a mountain to see what was then gone across an ocean, because we wondered what was on the other side. And that is our restless spirit. So I've spent forty five minutes talking economics and politics to you, but you know there is also that side of us, and that is another reason why we are going to keep going.
I'm trying to think forward to the moment when our country and which country will it be, says do you know what We're going to start digging you know that moment when they start digging in any kind of industrial way on the Moon. There's all sorts of legal and ethical issues, not least that for many many people around the world, the moon is spiritual. Sorry to go all spiritual on.
You, but you know, no, there are legal and ethical issues. And I don't you know, I don't want to sound too cold saying that it's more cynical than cold, all right. I mean this brings us back to the Artemist Accords America series of bilateral agreements with more than forty countries now, and in the Artemist Accords, it's clearly states that if you've invested all that money in going to the Moon, and then you've invested digging, and then you strike gold, the new gold, you can then declare a safety zone. Well how big, Well you choose for how long you choose? Now that sounds to me like sovereignty under another name. And you can quote to me as much as you like the nineteen sixty seven Out of Space Treaty, which was not ratified by everybody and it's completely out of date. But I'm going to keep digging, so you know, I accept these ethical and legal challenges the ethical challenges to mining lithium in the DRC may be correct, but they haven't won the argument and the legal aspects of X, Y and Z. Well, you and whose army were? You're gonna fly me at the moon and stop me. So I'm sorry to sound so cynical, but you know this is big industry, big government, and big stakes for winning, potentially winning, but certainly being involved in one of the big energy questions of the twenty first century. So I suspect that has more weight than the objections that are already being sounded.
How many years away is it?
I think in the twenty thirties we will have moon bases. I think in the twenty thirties we will have started mining at what scale I don't know, but everything I see at the moment points that that is going ahead. Another legal point out of Space Treaty, you cannot own any part of space or a planet or the moon. Fine, who owns those rocks that were brought back? And NASA is currently tendering for a company and I think a Japanese company may have won it. I want you to go at the Moon, dig up a rock, bring it back, and sell it to me for a dollar. Now, what's in it for the company, what's in it for NASA. The company's going to get a lot more tenders and a dollar. But NASA are going to prove norms. They're going to establish norms because once you've bought that, you have established that, Yes, you owned it, you sold it to me. I own it, and I know it's only a dollar and a rock. But the point is you're establishing norms. Another one the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which I'm sure you read most evenings. Only a few countries signed out when it started. Now it is the norm. The Artemis Accords were signed by only twelve countries when it launched, and now it's more than forty. It is establishing the norms. And the Artemist Cause allows for drilling and bringing back and selling. So you know, we're in a new era. I just think we still think about space that where we thought about it in the sixties and seventies, we've moved on.
It was very striking, wasn't it a few months back to have the Americans let it be known that they believe that Russians will target satellites, so that to the expression the public admission that now satellites are part of warfare.
Yeah, something has happened there which is obviously so classified. We don't have the details because before they did that, several months prior to that, they said that the Russians were working on a new weapon in space, and I was trying to figure out what. And there's two obvious scenarios. One genuinely is a nuclear bomb in space, which yes, I know it's forbidden, but you know, so is invading Ukraine. You can explode a very small yield nuclear bomb in space, probably without setting the atmosphere on fire. And the reason you would want to do that is that at the moment you can fire a ballistic missilet big satellite and knock it out, hitting a bullet with a bullet. It's incredibly hard and incredibly expensive, but if you were just to the second problem is that because the satellites are now so small, and you have an array of satellites, it's very small ones maybe twenty of them in a constellation, and if you hit one of them, well they still work, and then you go and you just put another one up there, so to wipe out the whole twenty or fifty, a very very small nuclear bomb or some other form of explosion will do it. So that's one scenario, and the other one is this idea of a direct energy weapon, which now exists on Earth. They hit the drones, are these lasers laser beams burn them out? Again? It could be sticking one of them. So the Americans have done two things. They've warned they're looking at a weapon in space, and now they're saying, and it's to hit the satellites. It's not inevitable that it's going to happen. It's inevitable that space will be weaponized, because if you disbelieve me, you have to just ignore the last twelve thousand years of recorded history. So why would given that we've weaponized pretty much every other year we've gone into, why we're not going to weaponize this one. It's why the French are already working on bodyguard satellites, putting a satellite between one that's really important and has perhaps their nuclear codes early warning system in it and the potential aggressive satellite that might be approaching it. These things are in train.
Tim Marshall, that was fantastic. Now Votomics for its next episode will have to come firmly back to Earth, but for this one, thank you very much. Thank you good stuff.
Tim. Yeah, it was fun, wasn't it.
Thanks for listening to this week's Vota Nomics from Bloomberg. This episode was hosted by me Alegri Stratton. It was produced by Sumersadi, with booking support from Chris Martlu, production support and sound designed by Moses and am Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Head of Podcasts and special thanks to Tim Marshall. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts