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Nov. 9, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:04
America is at Risk of Losing its Superiority in Space: Greg Autry
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An electromagnetic pulse weapon is a large nuclear explosion detonated at a high altitude outside the Earth's atmosphere.
If one of these were detonated over, say, Taipei, you would find out that instantly everything in Taipei stopped working.
And again, phones, laptops, iPads, that's bad enough.
Hospital equipment, cars, every single car would stop.
The whole city infrastructure is completely frozen.
Greg Autry is Director of Space Leadership, Policy, and Business at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management.
He's the co-author of Red Moon Rising, How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier.
Space is the ultimate high ground.
It took eight years the first time for Kennedy.
You think you could do that 60 years later with everything that we've learned, but we haven't done it in eight years.
We are at risk of having the Chinese eclipsing us.
While the American space industry is experiencing a rare industrial boom, China has committed massive resources to its space effort.
Just what would losing the second space race mean for America and its allies?
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Greg Autry, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Glad to be here.
Thank you.
So you highlight quite a few different things in the book.
But specifically, there's two threats from Communist China that sort of stand out in my mind.
One of them is the military threat in space.
And this is something that they've been developing quite a bit.
I want to get you to We weigh in on what that looks like.
But the other part, it's the messaging, right?
It's the idea that we're the ones who have conquered this next frontier and not America, that would be a very powerful tool for the regime.
Yeah, indeed.
And first of all, on the military side, space is the ultimate high ground.
Anytime, and Sun Tzu tells us this very clearly, that you can capture the superior position, you want to do that, because then you can force your enemy to capitulate without fighting.
And whoever controls Earth orbit and the Moon will be telling the people on Earth what they're going to do.
There'll be no point The U.S. has controlled space, essentially, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and used it to an incredible advantage to project force around the world.
We've been able to take out the huge army in Iraq with very, very little losses on the American side, spend many, many years Fruitless, perhaps, in Afghanistan, again, without a lot of losses compared to previous wars.
And a lot of that has to do with America's superiority in space, our ability to know where everything on the battlefield is at any time and communicate that to people on the battlefield.
Not having that superiority would be a huge loss.
On the geopolitical credibility stage, though, It makes a huge difference.
And we talk a lot in the book about Space Race 1.0 with the Soviet Union back in the 60s, which was part of Cold War 1.0.
And Kennedy laid down the Apollo program very clearly as a challenge to the Soviet Union because he wanted to demonstrate to the entire world the superiority of the United States in technology and economic development and our ability to execute on a very difficult task that didn't involve going to war with the Soviet Union and killing millions of people.
And we won that.
And from that moment on, the Soviet Union was very much in a decline in its global credibility.
Until that point, they were on the rise and highly respected around the world as the future of humanity.
But their failure to execute on the Moon program was a national shame.
It demoralized people inside the Soviet Union.
And it gave everybody else in the world an amazing respect for the amazing capabilities of the U.S., and by extension, our system.
So we're at that same point again.
In 2016, I served on the Presidential Transition Team and helped set the agenda that President Trump put in place to return Americans to the moon, this time permanently, as well as other space-related decisions.
And we understood that, again, we were kind of throwing down the gauntlet, and we had assumed that by 2024 we would be on the moon.
That was eight years ago, right?
It took eight years the first time for Kennedy to being on the moon.
You think you could do that 60 years later with everything that we've learned, but we haven't done it in eight years.
We are at risk.
Of having the Chinese, who have a very reasonable program in place, eclipsing us.
And even Senator Administrator Nelson, President Biden's NASA Administrator, has recently said he's concerned about that.
What is China's space capability as we speak?
What have they developed and what is the threat?
And you describe some pretty significant military threats in the book.
So they have a very credible space program.
It's very clearly number two.
They've eclipsed the Russians, former Soviet program.
The United States is a clear leader in civil space, human spaceflight, space science, commercial space for sure, and in military space.
But that doesn't mean we should go to sleep comfortable.
Because it doesn't matter where you are in the race, it matters how fast the person behind you is catching up.
And that should be of significant concern because China's vector, their trajectory, is stupendous.
They are moving forward in every one of these categories successfully.
You might have noticed that China just had another landing near the South Pole of the Moon on the dark side of the Moon with a sample return, their Chang'e 6 mission.
We've tried twice this year to land a robotic lander on the moon, and the U.S. missions have failed both times this year.
And NASA just canceled Viper, one of our next major moon rover programs.
So we're not looking good in this race right now, even though we have the lead.
It should concern us.
On the military side, it's a similar situation.
Our stuff's better, but they're moving quickly.
They're very good at copying, stealing, and buying whatever it is they need from us or from the Russians on the open market and then improving it and making a lot more of it because they're blessed with having the workshop to the world and a supply chain that is bar none.
What does that look like from a military sense?
We don't really think about space weapons that much when we think about military.
We think often about conventional forces, the sorts of things we're seeing in Israel, in the Palestinian conflict, Russia, Ukraine.
We talk a lot about information warfare and using the three warfares, these kinds of asymmetrical warfare methods that the regime uses here.
But we don't think a lot about space warfare and what that looks like and what kind of weapons are already developed to be deployed there.
And we open the first chapter of the book with a discussion of an electromagnetic pulse weapon, which is a weapon that I think is very likely to be used if, God forbid, any space weapons are used at targets on the Earth.
An electromagnetic pulse weapon is a large nuclear explosion detonated at a high altitude outside the Earth's atmosphere, perhaps 400 or 500 miles up.
And the area underneath it is bathed in radiation.
The radiation from the bomb excites the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere and essentially causes an electromagnetic wave or pulse to go through the area.
And what that does, first of all, is it overwhelms any electronic systems that...
are exposed to it and in most cases it will actually permanently destroy those systems because it induces an electrical field and flow inside the wires and circuits of your iPad, your phone, your laptop, hospital equipment, anything.
And what this could mean is if one of these were detonated over, say, Taipei, You would find out that instantly everything in Taipei stopped working.
And again, phones, laptops, iPads, that's bad enough.
Hospital equipment, cars.
Every single car would stop.
The electric ones might explode and catch fire, honestly.
The internal combustion engine ones that all require computerized ignition systems and fuel control systems would become bricks.
And no tow truck or anybody's coming to get them out of the way, so the whole city infrastructure is completely frozen, right?
All the aircraft, military, civilian, would be down.
The ones in the air would probably crash, but the ones on the ground aren't going anywhere.
All the communication systems are gone.
The electrical grid itself, including the transformers that supply the power to every home and business, would be out.
And if this were to happen in the United States, we'd have no opportunity to fix this stuff anyway because almost all of our supply chain is now in Asia, either in China or areas that China could easily cut off our access to within hours.
This would be a really bad situation.
Now, the scariest thing about this, in my opinion, is that China has doctorally, and the Russians have too, classified these nuclear blasts in space as not strategic nuclear weapons, but rather as cyber weapons.
They don't view them as a nuclear attack on a city, they view it as a cyber attack.
And we of course know that they are using cyber attacks against the West, against the United States and all our allies in Europe and Asia on a daily basis.
They believe cyber attacks are a perfectly legitimate method of open warfare that they conduct regularly.
So I'm very concerned to see This doctrine that says these weapons are not really nuclear weapons, they're cyber weapons.
I would suspect it would be one of the first major tools they might deploy, again, in an attack on Taiwan, on Korea, Japan, or any target.
Well, the Chinese regime thus far seems to be using all sorts of what we would call gray zone methods, basically things for which there's plausible deniability.
We know the fentanyl supply chain.
They're involved in every step along the way.
But they can say, well, no, it's not us.
It's the Mexican cartels really doing the fentanyl.
What's happening in the South China Sea now with the Philippines?
Well, there seems to be a bit of aggression, but it's not.
It's water cannons, and it's a dispute over some land, and so forth.
But it's certainly not a military confrontation of any sort.
So that doesn't require a strong response.
And similarly, cyberattacks.
We know there's cyberattacks constantly.
We at Epoch Times are very aware of the cyberattack capabilities and have to ward those off.
But again, it's sort of, is it really the Chinese state?
Or maybe it's just some hackers in China?
And there's always this kind of, you might even say implausible deniability in these methods.
But this type of an EMP attack would be obviously a completely different thing.
And you're correct.
They have been very careful to cause as much disruption economically, militarily, socially, and politically in our country and in the countries of our allies as they can get away with every single day.
We are at war, but they're keeping that war at the point where we dare not respond.
It's an excellent strategy, and it's served them very well.
On the fentanyl, I recall many years ago when I was working on the book Death by China, and I was in Shanghai, you know, and on the streets of Shanghai at that time, every single corner had a stand selling DVDs, bootleg copies of Hollywood films.
And there was a whole counterfeit mall, basically, for watches, DVDs, iPads, everything.
Underneath the Science Museum in Shanghai and I spoke to a Communist Party official about this clear violation of intellectual property and the response was, of course, we can't control that.
It's just not possible.
And I said, you know, if these were videos of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, do you think you could get them off the streets?
Of course, that was the end of my discussion and interview.
The fact of the matter is they could control the fentanyl.
They don't want to control the fentanyl.
They want to see dead Americans and they, more importantly, want to see chaos, misery and economic degradation in our country.
But you're right, they get away with it.
The EMP is another level, but if they were actually to take military action, It's a level where they might not get the same level of world condemnation as obviously if they kill a bunch of people.
They can literally shut a country like Taiwan down without killing hardly anybody.
So it would be the equivalent of using Tear gas on a rioting crowd or whatever, a non-lethal weapon system, and then they can go in.
In fact, I assume Taiwan would basically beg them for help after they began to run out of food, and they would be able to say they were invited in.
So I hope they wouldn't do that, but I think it's more likely than an actual invasion.
I believe that The Chinese again following Sun Tzu, the last thing they want to do is actually fight a traditional war that we're preparing for.
Let's talk about the supply chain, because one of the things we've highlighted quite a bit on this show over the years is this deep dependence of the U.S. supply chain on China and on Chinese manufacturing, as you suggested earlier.
This is where a lot of the world's manufacturing is done today.
And that, of course, has been a very deliberate project on the side of the Chinese.
And in the U.S., many, many companies have been very happy But with space, it's actually quite interesting that we actually do have a robust manufacturing and tech innovation front.
Elon Musk loves to put up videos of these amazing rockets You know, landing on their own after they've been deployed to space.
And you get a sense.
There's something really significant happening.
There's technological development.
There's all sorts of satellites being put up into space.
We have Starlink.
I mean, I don't know how many satellites that is.
But there's a lot of activity on the U.S. side.
And it has been an amazing revolution in manufacturing in a country where we seem to be incapable of manufacturing very much these days.
And many other attempts to get manufacturing going in the U.S. outside of the space industry have not been terribly successful.
There's been a lot of struggling trying to get Foxconn to set up a factory in Wisconsin or for Taiwan Semiconductor to get factories making ships in Arizona.
Space, we're doing it ourselves.
We're doing it with passion and speed and in a volume that eclipses anything that's been done before in that industry.
If you go to SpaceX Factory in Hawthorne, California, there are literally thousands and thousands of good blue-collar jobs there.
People doing welding and people You know, bending metal and putting in wiring harnesses.
There are of course people developing software and testing rocket engines and all the things that you need to do to build a successful vehicle.
They've got another large facility in South Texas building their Starship rocket and a testing facility in Texas.
Jeff Bezos has built a factory that's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square feet and employs thousands of people in Florida right outside the Gates of the Kennedy Space Center.
And these are creating the sort of manufacturing jobs that change people's lives, in which you can go and support a family without having to accumulate $200,000 in college debt.
And it's working.
In 2012, when SpaceX first started launching commercial payloads, the U.S. had basically zero percent of the commercial space launch business.
If you were an Israeli Communications company or Malaysian TV station or somebody in Africa that wanted an agricultural satellite.
You went and you asked the Chinese, the Russians, or the Europeans to launch your satellite.
Nobody came to America.
Today, basically every satellite that wants to get launched in the world comes and asks a US launch company to do it first.
And the only reason they go to these other countries is because they can't get a ride on SpaceX or one of the new competitors that are popping up.
We own 80% plus of the global launch market.
And in the satellites, in 2010 there were about a thousand operational satellites in the world.
There are more than 10,000 today.
Ten times as much.
Essentially all of those are made in America.
It's been a complete revolution.
And one of the reasons is simply because there were laws that prevented American companies from taking that manufacturing and doing it in China or transferring the technology licensing and know-how.
As we finish here, let's talk a little bit about the opportunities that exist in space for humanity.
Yes, I'm happy to talk about the beautiful upside to space, which is what made me fall in love with it to begin with.
So first of all, I've mentioned there are raw materials in space that we can access, and we can access them and process them and do the heavy manufacturing without polluting anything here on Earth.
Now, that doesn't mean we're going to be mining materials and bringing them back in space trucks.
In five years or something.
It means, though, that as we develop a human future in space, we're going to be able to do it without having to lift everything out of the atmosphere.
There are also things that you can do in the microgravity environment of space that cannot be done on planet Earth.
We can make biomedical devices and even biology that works better.
Stem cells grow orders of magnitude faster in zero-g than they do in a two-dimensional petri dish.
If, you know, gosh forbid, you should need a new liver, You've got to sign up for the donor list and wait for some poor person to be killed in a car accident or for the CCP to kill a Falun Gong member and sell you their liver.
We can take your stem cells to space, grow them in microgravity at a remarkable speed, differentiate them into a liver, and actually grow a liver organ or organoid that could be implanted back to you with your DNA. There are a couple of things that are important about that.
One is, again, we don't have any donor.
And two, you have this DNA match so you don't have to be on immunosuppressant drugs, which put you at risk your whole life of secondary infections and cost a whole lot of money.
To maintain.
You try to grow the liver on Earth, in gravity you get a liver pancake basically.
There's a lot of exciting things happening in microgravity research and it promises to transform our lives.
Another company I know is making artificial retinas that hopefully we're going to be testing in a few years that will be able to save people who have macular degeneration or other degeneration of their retina and allow them to see again.
And it can only be done in microgravity because of the fact you need to put these chemicals perfectly on a film substrate in a way that doesn't work in gravity.
Greg, it's really interesting that you mention the liver being forced organ harvested from a Falun Gong member.
As there is this in Congress right now, there's the Falun Gong Protection Act that has passed the House by voice vote unanimously, and now there's a Senate companion bill.
So it looks like the first federal U.S. legislation to counter this barbaric practice might actually come into force sometime in the future.
I'll refer people to other episodes of American Thought Leaders that have covered this issue.
A little bit back to the idea of the opportunity in space.
It is, in some sense, very much the final frontier as we hear in Star Trek.
I'm excited to see what the future holds.
I am too, and I'll look forward to seeing you there.
Well, Greg Autry, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Great conversation.
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