Over the weekend, I accidentally showed my four year old daughter a video of the Iranian attack on Israel. Seeing missiles streak against a black sky somewhere over Iraq, she exclaimed “Wow, daddy, I didn’t know rockets went into space in real life!”
To be clear, the cruise missiles that Iran fired at Israel did not go into space. They actually travel extremely close to the ground in order to avoid radar. But without meaning to, my little girl had put her finger on a disconnect that lies at the heart of our modern relationship to space. For all of the associations that exist in popular culture between space, peaceful exploration, and scientific advancement, our chief use of space in real life is military. Exposed only to the products of popular culture, my daughter sees a rocket and thinks about peace. Knowing the reality, I see a rocket and think about war.
This is a paradox that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently since reading Daniel Deudney’s book Dark Skies, a comprehensive skewering of what the author calls “space expansionism”. In the book, Deudney takes apart the idea that further expansion into space is likely to serve humanity by enabling scientific advancement, commercial opportunity, or new settlements. He argues that our achievements in all of these areas thus far are meager and overshadowed by the military uses of space. The most enduring space-based edifice that humanity has constructed is the network of technology which supports, controls and enables intercontinental ballistic missiles, which travel through space on the way to their target. Further space expansion, Deudney argues, would bring new military threats, primarily through enabling asteroid bombardment.
Ever since the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite into orbit in 1957, some observers have referred to the time that we live in as the “Space Age”. It’s a grandiose term, seeming to suggest that space has the potential to touch upon every aspect of the era in which we live. Compared to the actual record of what we’ve accomplished in space, the label seems ludicrous. But perhaps there’s a better label for our age, one that will certainly seem more appropriate if it ends how many people fear it will end, in an exchange of nuclear weapons. That label is “the missile age”.
Although it didn’t involve ICBMs or nuclear weapons, Iran’s attack on Israel highlighted some of the defining feature of the missile age. The first is the ability of one country to inflict mass destruction on another at long range. Israel almost entirely avoided death and destruction, but only because it has the best air defenses in the world. You only have to look at what is happening to Ukraine on a daily basis to see the damage that drones and missiles can do when a country’s defenses are inadequate. The Space Age is said to have begun with Sputnik in 1957, but the Missile Age began in 1944, when the Nazis first launched their V-weapons at London - some of them via space.
The second feature of the missile age is tightly compressed schedules for making decisions about life and death, including the life and death of humanity itself. Iran launched its first wave of drones as I was going to sleep on Saturday night, and their impact was expected about three hours later. By contrast, missiles have a much shorter travel time, measured in minutes rather than hours. Israel still had time to respond, particularly because its defenses meant that its own strike capabilities were unlikely to suffer much damage even when the drones hit. In nuclear war, that’s unlikely to be true. A land-based ICBM traveling via space could reach the United States from Russia in about 30 minutes, giving the American president even less time to decide whether to launch his own arsenal in response. That’s just enough time for some videos of launches to circulate on Twitter and panic to set in before the lights go out - potentially for ever.
The third feature of the missile age is the concentration of decision-making power in a very small group of individuals, who consequently hold the fate of humanity in their hands. In the United States, it takes only one person - the president - to order a launch, and the group is hardly much bigger in other nuclear powers. Their reasoning, mental state, and the levels of adrenaline and alcohol in their blood are not open to democratic scrutiny before they press the launch button. This small group of men can end the world, and everything in it, before the rest of us even know what is happening.
Placed next to the promises of the Space Age, the Missile Age seems grim indeed. Popular culture representations of space exploration are replete with stories of discovery, exploration, and bountiful resources. This, at least, has been the ideology behind what Deudney calls space expansionism - the idea that space represents an ever-widening frontier in which there is enough room for all to enjoy a democratic and prosperous future. What was once the realm of 1960s dreamers is now the bread and butter of California capitalists like Elon Musk, who promise a “New Space Age” to the benefit of all. Even children like my daughter, who is far too young to understand and absorb all of this, somehow get the message that space is exciting, enriching, and overall benign. Wow, daddy. We get to do that in real life?
Actually, sweetheart, no. Most of us never do. But we all have to live with these other features, and probably always will - until the age comes to an end, one way or another.