Lijian Zhao is the spokesperson and deputy director of the information department of the Chinese foreign ministry. He is not an ordinary person but an authoritative voice of the government, and known to be the symbol of the new Chinese course for international relations, and embodies an assertive, harsh and uncomplicated approach. A few days ago, during a meeting with the press, he bluntly accused the United States of “failing to comply with its international obligations” following the risk of repeated collisions in space between the Starlink satellites and the Tiangong orbital station.
“This event represents a serious threat to the life and safety of Chinese astronauts” said Lijian Zhao without ever mentioning the rightful owner of the Starlink satellites, namely Elon . Musk . According to a document sent by Beijing to the United Nations Office for Space Affairs in Vienna in early December, the space agency had to move the Tiangong twice in a few months to avoid American satellites. Unfortunately, similar events are becoming more and more frequent. In twenty years, the ISS has maneuvered more than thirty times to avoid debris on a collision course, and in 2019 the European space agency ESA had contacted SpaceX – to no avail, as the company responded late to European requests – before move his Aeolus satellite in an emergency to avoid a Starlink. Now, however, an influential Chinese politician directly calls into question the objective responsibility of the United States government for the activity of an American private company.
It should be noted that there are no similar statements against Russia when in November it carried out an anti-satellite test that had caused about 1500 debris at a height between 440 and 520 kilometers, therefore just above the ISS (which travels at 400 kilometers) and Tiangong itself (which has a perigee and an apogee at 350 and 450 kilometers respectively). Immediately after the test, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea accused Moscow of irresponsibility for endangering satellites and low-orbit stations.
Indeed, the question to ask was, and still, why Russia chose to try an anti-satellite weapon just now. The main motivation that the international press had embraced was that Moscow had achieved two objectives: to improve its defense and deterrence capabilities vis-a-vis of the US and China and to ensure that it could be part of any international regulatory process having shown publicly to possess such an offensive capacity. Undoubtedly acceptable but superficial theses in their simplistic ciphering. On the other hand, it is possible that it was a real pre-war action, a term here that must be understood not only in a military but also in a commercial sense.
It is on this last aspect that, in my opinion, the Chinese protest against the US government for the maneuvers of the SpaceX satellites fits into an integrated interpretation. As we have often repeated in the past, the space activities of the 21st century are changing from an almost entirely governmental paradigm to another in which, without prejudice to military strategy, the private economic model is added, that of the “rich boys” like Donald Trump defined Musk and Jeff Bezos himself .
The boundary between the strategic-institutional priority and the commercial priority, which is already unstable in the terrestrial economy, is canceled out in the exo-atmospheric limes and therefore the planetary geopolitical confrontation between the space superpowers – USA, Russia and China – should not be read for separate episodes but as a whole. In recent months, the Russian Duma has considered the opportunity to legislate restrictions for individuals and companies who use Internet services based on the Starlink and OneWeb satellite networks that are monopolizing low orbits.
Duma members said Internet access with those satellites would bypass the national media and communications control system. The parliamentary initiative followed precise statements by the head of the space agency Roscomos,Dmitry Rogozin , who had criticized NASA and the Pentagon for subsidizing Musk with government contracts in order to then be able to use Starlink to provide uninterrupted and global communications services to the military. Last July, SpaceX obtained Federal communication commission approval to move its first group of 1,584 satellites – 2,814 are expected by 2022 – into a lower orbit than planned in 2019.
The company then began lowering the altitude of its satellites from 1,150 to 550 kilometers. The two Starlinks that infuriated Beijing were numbers 1095 and 2305 which, respectively on June 1 and October 21, maneuvered in an orbit at about 380 kilometers high and arrived a few kilometers away from the station: 28 the first and 7 the second. Both were probably lowering their altitude with active de-orbiting maneuvers for a destructive re-entry into the atmosphere, but in the absence of information, the Chinese had decided to move their space station in advance.
We then arrive in November to detect that the Russian anti-satellite test was carried out in an orbital area completely contiguous to that where SpaceX is placing its satellites, to the point that Musk himself declared that some Starlinks had to dodge the debris, and now in the face of Chinese protests he puts his hands forward by declaring to the Financial Times that “around the Earth there is enough space to put tens of billions of satellites into orbit”.
In putting the pieces of the puzzle together, one cannot escape the bitter realization that all these events are in some way linked to each other and above all that they are shaping over our unsuspecting heads a next world order, on Earth and in Space, whose features are unknown today. These are the first acts of exo-atmospheric warfare and not muscle demonstrations.
And that is because today the risk of monopolizing the space around the Earth becomes real, however far from our eyes. Of the more than nine thousand satellites put into orbit since 1957, Space X alone has already launched more than 1800 in three years, which means that today 35% of all operational satellites belong to a single private company which in the next three years could reach have more than half. And also considering the other satellite constellations – Britain’s OneWeb (which already operates 394 satellites today) and Bezos’s Kuiper (which plans to launch 3,200) – this means that most of the resources of low orbits are becoming a private monopoly with all the risks that such a situation entails.
In the articulated Encyclical Letter of Pope FrancisLaudato si, on the care of the common home in paragraph 57 we read: “It is foreseeable that, faced with the exhaustion of some resources, a favorable scenario will be created for new wars, disguised with noble claims. War always causes serious damage to the environment and to the cultural wealth of peoples, and the risks become enormous when one thinks of nuclear and biological weapons ”. And however vast and even infinite the Cosmos may be, the race for its resources has already begun.

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