Placed In Orbit Above Moscow Missiles, Starlab Hopes Space Truce Hold

The Kremlin’s threats to escalate Space War I – by firing its anti-satellite missiles against any coalition airspace that helps Ukraine – jeopardize Western plans to raise a fleet of independent space stations to circulate.

Raising the bar by creating a nuclear-armed spaceship that would glide over Earth like space assassins, Russia created a cloud around the planet.

However, the global partners who have joined forces to create the Starlab Space Station – which will shine with the latest technology – say they are still on track to launch the new station aboard SpaceX’s revolutionary rocket. of the Starship.

Starlab will be modeled after the International Space Station, built by a consortium of space technology leaders based in the US, Europe, Japan and Canada, says Manfred Jaumann, head of Low Earth Orbit Programs at Airbus, co-founder of Starlab Space. LLC.

But unlike its predecessor, which was built over the course of a decade, with multiple American Space Shuttle flights and Russian rockets, Starlab will be launched on a single mission of the massive Starship capsule, Jaumann told me. in conversation.

Starlab is a three-story, circular interior for the astronomy and space physics laboratories that echoes the funky space station of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. 2001: A Space Odysseyit will immediately pass the International Station, he predicts.

“Most of the ISS technology started in the 80s, the 90s, the last millennium,” Jaumann recalls. “Starlab technology is more advanced than the ISS.”

Starlab, which has already confirmed an agreement with the European Space Agency to host ESA astronauts and spacecraft, will be open to astronauts and scientists worldwide – except for cosmonauts or cosmologists from the Russian Federation, Jaumann he says.

The ISS was built jointly by NASA and Roscosmos, ESA and JAXA, during the halcyon period of space cooperation with Russia, when Boris Yeltsin led a democratic revolution that briefly changed the post-Soviet society, says Jeffrey Manber, President International and Local. Voyager Space Stations, American co-founder of Starlab.

A space entrepreneur and visionary, Manber was briefly accepted into the Russian air force during Moscow’s embrace of Western liberalism and nationalism, and even helped Moscow negotiate an agreement to build the ISS .

However, since then Russia has turned itself into a villain on the world stage with its campaign to seize democratic Ukraine and warnings that it could use nuclear weapons against any Western ally. go straight into battle.

After Elon Musk rushed tens of thousands of Starlink satellite channels to Ukraine, connecting the devastated country to the internet, President Vladimir Putin’s envoy began telling UN meetings that Moscow could fire its missiles. on SpaceX satellites.

Even more alarming – Musk told his official correspondent – the Russian ambassador to the US himself told him that the use of SpaceX technology by the designers of armed drones in Ukraine could motivate Moscow to start detonating strategic nuclear bombs to eliminate the resistance in Kyiv.

The United States Department of Defense, in its Nuclear Posture Review report released around the same time, said: “While targeting Russian nuclear weapons in an attempt to intimidate Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russian leaders have made it clear that they are looking at these things. weapons as a shield behind which they can attack their neighbors without reason.”

“Our goal,” the Pentagon added, is “to reduce the risk of a nuclear war that would have devastating consequences for the United States and the world.”

However, the Kremlin is raising its profile by creating a spaceship armed with plutonium warheads that would circle the Earth forever.

Instead of entering a nuclear arms race in space, Washington called out Russia’s secret plan by introducing a resolution at the United Nations Security Council that sought to uphold the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on launching warheads. of atomic warfare on the way.

Moscow’s sudden announcement of the decision confirmed its “intent to put nuclear weapons in space,” said White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Yet the United States has no intention of matching Russia’s nuclear systems in the future by building its own, says Spencer Warren, an expert on Putin’s nuclear development policy at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. .

“We’re entering a new era where it’s as easy to see conflict in space as conflict on Earth,” Manber, one of the designers of the Starlab Station, told me in an interview.

Manber said he hopes Roscosmos’ continued cooperation with the ISS, which carries Moscow’s cosmonauts, and the launch of a group of independent space stations piloted by scientists around the world, will deter the Army. of the Russian Space Agency to launch attacks on orbiting spacecraft.

However, experts focused on Russia’s plans to upgrade its space and nuclear weapons say that sending new Western space stations into orbit could empower Putin and his military to increase threats to see against partners.

“From a demonstration point of view, the presence of independent space stations in the US could make Russia more likely to threaten the use of ASAT weapons or a nuclear device in the lower part of the Earth,” says Warren , who is currently turning his doctorate, “Russian Strategic. Nuclear Modernization Under Vladimir Putin,” into a book.

Elena Grossfeld, an expert on Moscow’s military and civilian space programs at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, says Elena Grossfeld.

The calls to the new Western locations “will make ASAT threats more usable,” he told me in an interview.

The ban on Russian cosmonauts visiting the Starlab Station, he added, could provoke the anger of Moscow’s political and regional leadership.

Both space defense experts agreed that the launch of Russia’s nuclear ASAT would overturn a decades-old agreement, bound by the Outer Space Treaty, on keeping space a demilitarized zone.

They also agreed that there is a new display, which could be useful, which is a good view of the works and the space stations, from Moscow in a strange way.

The head of Roscosmos Yury Borisov in July wrote the details of the plan to fly the Orbital Center of Russia, and the first two modules will explode in 2027, according to the state news agency TASS.

The 608-billion-ruble project would put cosmonauts on a long-duration platform orbiting the earth, and thus could represent the Kremlin’s ban on launching ASATs conventional or nuclear on the surface of the Earth, say Russian military experts.

However, Warren told me in an interview that Russia’s strategic forces could still launch their nuclear weapons program.

He says: “Russia may still want to deploy a nuclear weapon for a number of reasons. “They may want to improve their coercive abilities.”

Instead, he adds, “Russia may have put a nuclear-tipped weapon into space for strategic purposes: ‘Look at our new weapon that has no analogues, even and the United States or China!’”

Meanwhile, Airbus CEO Manfred Jaumann said Starlab’s partners “are now using astronauts to monitor our satellites at the Starlab Station in Houston.”

He adds the most AI / security outfit Palantir gives Starlab a lot of artificial intelligence tools to work on the Station, including the next generation collision avoidance system.

Starlab’s collision avoidance system, Warren says, may have helped the Station change its course to avoid being hit by a Russian ASAT missile that had been shot down.

But that self-sustaining capability would depend on Starlab being connected to an advanced missile detection/tracking system.

Russia’s continuing nuclear threats, as well as its ongoing nuclear war drills, are prompting mixed and mixed reactions around the world, as countries many sign or ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, according to UN leaders. Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its role in mobilizing “people around the world to convince their governments to support the prohibition of nuclear weapons.”

ICAN thanks a constellation of leading lights – from Albert Einstein to Pope Francis – for the final declaration of the Treaty, which calls for the elimination of nuclear weapons from the face of the planet.

Einstein, the first major figure in the anti-nuclear movement, was quick to recognize the threat posed to humanity and civilization by atomic weapons, and began calling for a halt to their deployment. even before they came into use in 1945.

In a manifesto written during his last days on Earth, Einstein, along with a group of fellow Nobel laureates, warned: It may end the human race. ”

After a decade of leading calls for the abolition of atomic weapons, Einstein made an even more radical proposal: a universal military arsenal.

He warned that even an agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons on all continents will not prevent their resurgence in times of war.

However, in his last open letter to the world: “Abolition of nuclear weapons” would represent a remarkable “first step” towards long-term global peace.

Einstein predicted: “If you do that, the way will be open to a new Paradise.”