The First Space War?
On October 31, 2023, the Houthi forces in Yemen launched two cruise missiles and one ballistic missile across the Red Sea towards Israel in a self-declared act of solidarity with the people of Gaza. The Houthi ballistic missile, closely modelled on Iran’s medium range Ghadr (“Intensity”) missile, travelled around 1,000 miles before it was intercepted by Israel’s Arrow-3 anti-ballistic missile system 150 kilometers above the earth as it made its descent.
Medium range ballistic missiles are often referred to as “exo-atmospheric” because they temporarily leave Earth’s atmosphere during their flight. Indeed, during its westward passage towards Israel, the Houthi rocket briefly left the atmosphere and became a satellite. As a result, this incident was widely reported to be the first “space battle.” Given that all wars have long involved satellite-enabled weapons systems, this event might better be characterized as the first use of weapons within Earth’s orbit as part of active combat (as opposed to a weapons testing exercise). Where the earth ends and where outer space begins is a matter contested in both philosophical and technical terms, but whether or not Israel really intercepted the Houthi missile “in outer space” has had little impact on how media reports have framed this event.1
On November 17, 2023, Popular Mechanics published an article entitled “This Groundbreaking Ballistic Missile Intercept was also the First Combat in Space.” The magazine noted that, although the first space battle might not have been “the space war you’d expect,” a “psychological barrier, the idea that space is a domain unspoiled by mankind’s vicious infighting, has been breached, and there is no going back.” The British tabloid The Sun ran an article on December 6, 2023 titled “Israel wins world’s first SPACE battle as Arrow-3 shoots down rocket.” The previous day, the marginally more respectable London Times had run with “How Israel’s Arrow-3 intercepted a missile in first space battle.”
Neither The Sun nor The Times mention that it was the Houthis who had fired the missile in their headlines. “Rebel armies,” especially Islamist ones, are not meant to have access to ballistic missiles in the popular Western imaginary. Yet, both newspapers mention Israel’s Arrow-3 anti-ballistic missile system, which is hardly a weapon system that their editors can expect the average reader to know. These reports emphasizing Israel’s technological prowess and military supremacy seem to be designed to restore the image of Israeli invincibility that was badly shattered by the October 7 attacks. They prefigure the reportage on the so-called “pager attacks” against Hezbollah in Lebanon almost a year later in the genocide, which was generally described by the Western media in glowing terms.
On September 28, 2023, less than two weeks before the October 7 attacks, Germany and Israel announced plans for Germany to spend $4.3 billion on acquiring the Israeli-made Arrow-3 system, with the first delivery set to take place later in 2025. The sale (which was approved by Washington) is to make up part of NATO’s new “European Sky Shield,” designed to protect Europe against Russian missile attacks. Germany is financing this new air defense system and it represents a key element of Germany’s Zeitenwende; the historical “turning point” announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.2 This deal is immensely important to Israel diplomatically but also in economic terms, representing the largest single sale in the history of its extensive arms industry. It is reported that Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that (along with Boeing) produces the Arrow-3 system, has hired additional workers and lengthened shifts to meet the 2025 production target.
The era of low Earth orbit as a battle space has arrived. This development brings with it profound planetary-scale risks, notably from the production of space debris. In an increasingly interconnected and satellite-dependent global economic system, a cascading collapse of the satellite ecosystem due to space debris (the so-called Kessler Syndrome) presents an existential threat to global systems of communication, transport, industrial production, agriculture, trade, etc. More broadly, however, the Houthi/Arrow-3 incident reveals that the two dominant and most concerning tendencies within the everchanging human relationship to outer space—commercialization and militarization—are not only intimately linked but also systematically integrated. The rapidly evolving and expanding space economy must be understood as having a fundamental and systemic relationship with geopolitical competition, and indeed militarization, rather than being distinct from, let alone opposed to, it.
Contemporary analyses that oppose “state” and “commercial” actors in the changing human face of outer space—as many liberal accounts do—obscure the true nature of the current conjuncture. In contrast, analyses that draw on Marxist political economy and studies of imperialism, where “state and capital” are understood to be working together, are much more useful in identifying and tarrying with the relationship between the exponential growth of the space economy and the increasingly tense domain of space geopolitics. However, there is a broader point to be made here about the coordinates of contemporary analyses of global politics.
Current moves to undermine the “international rules-based order” (such as it is) in order to advance a new vision of world order explicitly based upon a return to “Great Power” politics should be resisted. Yet it is imperative to understand that, for the United States, this “rules-based order” has chiefly served as a useful fiction to achieve its own national interests, which include ensuring that no other state or group of states is an equal partner or peer. Hence, although the corrosive impact of the new Trump administration’s foreign policy on the “rules-based order” should not be underestimated, it is crucial to recognize that “America First” has been the fundamental geopolitical principle underlying US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War, even when it has been dressed in more sophisticated appeals to shared values and common interests. The space sector is merely one domain where the ends (domination) and the means (militarized competition) have been stated most explicitly, and the structural, strategic continuities across administrations have been most apparent.
Salvaging, and radicalizing, what multilateral possibilities remain in the architecture of the “international rules-based order” is essential, but this should not prevent a clear-eyed recognition that this framework neither accurately describes existing geopolitical conditions nor adequately accounts for global political economic dynamics. Any sober analysis of contemporary conditions and dynamics must approach the United States, and its allies in Europe and beyond, as an imperial system, even if it is a system beset with contradictions. These contradictions might undermine its operation as an imperial system, but they do not render analysis of it as such inaccurate, unwarranted, or inappropriate. It is only through an analysis of imperialism that the current relationship between the expanding commercial space sector and increasing geopolitical competition over access to and control of outer space becomes apparent.
The Geopolitical Economy of Outer Space
The governance of outer space is a rapidly evolving arena that is challenging customary concepts and established practices in international law, economics, and geopolitics. Yet it is possible to locate current developments in this domain within longer histories of state power, imperial expansion, and capitalist resource exploitation. What I call the “geopolitical economy of outer space” indicates that, to understand the changing nature of the human presence in outer space, it is important to simultaneously approach it from two structurally interconnected conceptual lenses: geopolitics and political economy.3 Geopolitics is understood here as the relationship between states and other powerful actors, and the way those relations are shaped by competition over the control of territory, resources, and movement. Political economy is understood as the relationship between the capitalist economy and the state, including the forms of regulation, investment, and coercion through which the latter seeks to manage the former. Geopolitical economy offers a framework for systematically analyzing the interaction between the two most important dynamics currently shaping the human presence in outer space: commercialization and militarization.
One of the most pressing challenges facing the governance of outer space over recent years has been the emergence of the private sector as a major actor. Companies of all sizes, from scrappy startups to industrial titans, are developing an assortment of commercial activities in space, from communications, navigation, and logistics to tourism, earth observation, and space mining. This new array of commercial activities and actors—often referred to collectively as “NewSpace”—is reshaping the governance of outer space and altering the fundamental motives, calculations, and horizon of the human presence off-Earth. The emergence and exponential growth of the NewSpace sector has signaled a paradigm shift from space exploration to space exploitation.4
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida in 2015. Source: SpaceX
There is a risk that, in emphasizing the novelty of the private sector’s role in outer space, the crucial role of the state is overlooked. There has been a tendency in some of the critical literature on NewSpace, and even in popular critiques of controversial figures like SpaceX’s Elon Musk, to characterize the private sector as the primary actor responsible for changes in outer space. Such accounts mirror claims made by space sector lobbyists who emphasize the ingenuity of entrepreneurs and the dynamism of unregulated capitalism, however unwittingly. It is important resist the lure of these libertarian industry narratives and remember that the state remains the central and determining player in the human presence in outer space, whether as investor, customer, researcher, legislator, regulator, infrastructure provider, diplomatic enabler, or security guarantor.
However, it is not only state power that needs to be kept in sight to understand the geopolitical economy of outer space. So too must we remember the category of empire. In recent years, discussions of empire and imperialism briefly passed out of theoretical fashion, after having enjoyed renewed intellectual currency in the early 2000s with the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, and in keeping with attempts to wrestle with histories of colonialism and their afterlives in the racist structures of the present, concepts of coloniality and decolonization have come to the fore. While the latter are indispensable to any critical analytic toolkit, the category of empire must remain central if we are to understand contemporary geopolitical formations or the fundamentals of the global capitalist economy.
Understanding imperialism is crucial to understanding the rapid militarization of outer space. In recent years, outer space has once again become the object of acute geopolitical competition, with powerful states and alliances—notably the US and China, but also old and new “space powers” (Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan, and India)—increasingly jostling for control over the development of space technologies and infrastructure. Technological innovations and mounting economic competition have led to an increasing emphasis on the military significance of outer space within the broader arena of geopolitical competition. Most notable here is the launch of the US Space Force in 2019, a new wing of the US military tasked with securing “the Nation's interests in, from, and to space.” Although this new state agency, launched by Trump during his first stay in the White House, was the subject of considerable scorn and mockery, it was neither dismantled nor defunded during Biden’s presidency, and is now firmly established within the architecture of United States military power.5 The subsequent launch of the People's Liberation Army Aerospace Force by the Chinese state in April 2024 served to underline how the emerging “new Cold War” has transformed from the chatter of Beltway think tanks into a geopolitical reality structuring global power relations.
Making Markets for “Space Resources”
While it is commonplace for “the market” or “the markets” to be evoked in political discourse as if they were naturally occurring phenomena, political economy reveals how markets are produced and shaped, if not necessarily wholly controlled, through state authority and regulation. Speculative markets for so-called “space resources”—minerals, water, sand, and other materials that can be extracted from celestial bodies—have been summoned into existence over recent years. Many different types of actors have been involved in this economic divination, including space industry lobbyists (such as the market fundamentalist think tank Space Frontier Foundation), space mining companies like Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, banks and financial service consultants including Goldman Sachs and Knight Frank, as well as government ministries, international organizations, and a diverse set of media outlets who dutifully repeat bombastic reports of the untold bounty lying in wait for industrial deliverance.
Of all the actors involved in the collective fabrication of a market for “space resources,” states have been particularly decisive. This is largely because markets must be supported by legal and regulatory architectures to function, as captains of industry and their friends in the press have argued. These are services that only the state can provide. Despite the libertarian delusion of outer space as the “free market frontier” popular among the most ardent “space capitalists,” the not-so-invisible hand of the state is needed to recognize, regulate, and enforce property rights, even in outer space.
Four states currently recognize private property rights for materials extracted in outer space in their domestic legislation. The United States was the pioneer in granting legal status to such “space resources” in 2015, and was followed by Luxembourg (2017), the United Arab Emirates (2019), and Japan (2021). Yet, the status of such private property rights in international law remains a topic of intense legal and political debate, with many legal experts questioning the applicability of these domestic legal arrangements in the context of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967, the foundational treaty governing international law in outer space.
The OST is a complex legal document that has been subject to extensive debate since it was signed at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, the document bears the imprint of that brief bipolar era, having been designed principally to ward off the possibility of a military conflict between the nuclear “superpowers”—the United States and the Soviet Union—being fought in or over outer space. The OST fundamentally aims to demilitarize the realm beyond Earth. To this end, one of its most important provisions is Article II, which states that: “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” How these final words—“by any other means”—should be interpreted lies at the core of contemporary debates about space mining and the evolving geopolitical economy of outer space.
Legal contestation around this article turns on whether private property claims made by private actors to resources extracted in outer space constitute, or require, territorial claims. Those advocating for property rights in outer space are quick to note that private enterprises extracting resources in outer space are interested in property, not in territory: in profiting from celestial bodies, not holding power over them. Even if such claims are taken at face value—and there seems to be no good reason why they should be—the picture is more complex. This is because, again, private property rights in outer space rely on the recognition and the regulatory architecture of the state.
When the governments of the United States, Luxembourg, the UAE, and Japan recognized private property rights to “space resources” in their domestic law, they did so to support the development of a space mining industry that might potentially benefit their national economies by ensuring privileged access to new resources and industries. Without property rights to the materials extracted in outer space being guaranteed by the state, it would be impossible for private businesses to persuade investors to support extremely costly and risky mining operations.6 Hence, property claims by private enterprises rest upon the regulatory power and the economic guarantee of the state. As on Earth, the brazen appropriation of common resources becomes the just accumulation of private wealth via the alchemy of statutory law. This fundamental relationship between private appropriation and state power, which has underpinned the history of capitalist development and imperialist expansion, troubles any neat distinction between property claims and territorial claims, whether on Earth or off.
Image of fires burning in the Jambi Province of Sumatra, Indonesia (detail). Taken on September 5, 2015, by the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite. Source: NASA
Resource Frontiers, On and Off Earth
Private property claims amount to territorial claims “by other means.” The history of European colonialism and the historical development of the global capitalist economy both indicate that the private appropriation of natural resources goes hand in hand with the spatial expansion of state power and processes of territorialization. The mutual interdependence of making territory and appropriating resources long familiar from the expanding frontiers of modern colonial empires also characterizes the emerging geopolitical economy of outer space today.
Jason Moore has argued that frontier dynamics are crucial to understanding the nature and history of capitalist development and the co-constitutive relationship it has had with colonial expansion.7 Moore demonstrates that Europe’s colonial empires were dynamic spaces of expansion, where processes of dispossession, displacement, and destruction advanced in lock step with processes of political, economic, and environmental ordering. Likewise, Anna Tsing has argued that these frontier dynamics continue to characterize contemporary capitalism, especially in those spaces rendered marginal to the centers of global power and where resources and labor can be most readily stripped with the least regulatory friction.8 For Tsing, capitalist frontiers are contradictory spaces, conjured as simultaneously empty and full: empty of order and value but full of potential profit, in the form of exploitable resources. Frontiers are therefore born out of the processes whereby such spaces are brought under the control of the state and into regimes of property and capitalist value that allow natural resources to be abstracted into profit-bearing commodities.
The emerging geopolitical economy of outer space is characterized by just such a frontier dynamic. Discourses around space mining offer an almost crystalline distillation of capitalist frontier imaginaries: an untapped bonanza of resources nestled amid an empty, orderless void. Yet no matter how fantastical the idea of a space mining industry may seem in the present, it is not simply a matter of fanciful rhetoric, but of tangible practices that have material effects. In a sense, space mining already exists, even if it never takes place: it is being materialized in legislation, public funding packages, angel investors, rocket launch sites, industry lobbyists, academic conferences, financial reports, news articles, and corporate promotional videos. Space mining is a concrete fantasy.
From Space Mining to Space War
The geopolitical economy of outer space takes place not just off-Earth and in some far-off future but principally on Earth and in the present. The concrete fantasy of space mining orients energy, attention, and care away from the crises, injustices, and struggles of the present. Making markets for “space resources” is not geopolitically or environmentally innocent. Those driving the geopolitical economy of outer space are not simply engaged in honest economic activity, nor are they merely well-intentioned entrepreneurs creating the industries and jobs of a better future. They are contributing to the intensification of geopolitical competition for control over natural resources and industrial development.
We find ourselves in a grave moment of escalating geopolitical competition between “Great Powers,” of which the US remains the most militarily powerful, expansionist, and aggressive. This might seem counterfactual to many in light of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but even the most cursory analysis of the incomparable sprawl of US military bases across the globe, the vast scale of its military budget relative to rival states, and the number of wars and coups it has participated in since its rise after World War II leave it without parallel or peer.
International Space Station (ISS) emblem. Source: European Space Agency
Many in the US security establishment and media commentators already talk openly about a “new Cold War” with China and the risk that it might spill over into one or many hot wars. Familiar geopolitical “hot spots,” such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, have already been identified as sites for the potential emergence of such conflicts (as if the numerous military conflicts around the world involving US proxies and allies are not “hot” solely due to the absence of its main geopolitical rival, China). However, outer space is also increasingly considered a potential site for a planet-altering military confrontation.
The drive to expand capital accumulation into outer space in the form of space mining risks smuggling territorial contestation in through the backdoor, escalating geopolitical competition and increasing the possibility of a major military conflict. Frontier fantasies of control over endless resources exert a powerful draw on states, especially those who see themselves to be in zero-sum competition with rivals. Imperialism abhors a vacuum. The history of capitalist expansion likewise indicates that those who scent profit grow restless in the face of the frontier, regardless of the cost to others or any conception of the common good. The ascent of Elon Musk to an unparalleled position of unaccountable power within—or rather above—the US state signals the significant place that commercial space interests occupy within US foreign policy. There are interests at work whose horizons far exceed the democratic exit strategy of four-year terms. Those of us who do not wish to be conscripted into catastrophic military competition, and who want instead to nurture and share a common world, should not dismiss space mining as the absurd phantasm of toxic tech bros in the mistaken assumption that it will remain a quirky technology story, last on the news. While a more robust multilateral system for governing the commercial space sector and constraining the militarization of outer space must be developed under the auspices of the United Nations—an ever more arduous prospect—it is the task of civil society actors (including academics, writers, and artists) to expose the stakes of expanding extractivism into outer space and to advance actionable analyses of the imperial present.
The so-called Kármán Line, about 100 kilometers above the earth’s mean sea level, is often adopted as an informal marker of this boundary. More common are the distinctions between low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, and high Earth orbit. Identifying where low Earth orbit begins and ends is a matter of some disagreement, but it is conventionally considered to begin somewhere around 160 kilometers above Earth and end somewhere around 2,000 kilometers above Earth. The elliptical shape of the planet means that locating this fundamental geophysical boundary is complex even where this convention is followed.
The Arrow-3 deal clearly indicates that the Zeitenwende should not be understood only in relation to the threat of Russian expansion in Eastern Europe, but also in relation to the increasingly close military and diplomatic relationship emerging between Germany and Israel. What direction the Zeitenwende will take under the new security conditions being forged by the current Trump administration remains to be seen, but it seems certain that Germany’s path to militarization will only intensify, regardless of whether or not a gulf emerges between the US and Europe regarding the latter’s security.
My conceptualization of geopolitical economy is indebted to the work of Radhika Desai and her important 2013 book Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (Pluto Press, 2013), although I mean it in a somewhat broader sense. Desai’s concept of “the materiality of nations” and her analyses of the importance of imperialism in managing capitalist crises are crucial for grasping the nature of contemporary geopolitical relations. However, I depart somewhat from her critique of theories of United States hegemony as mistaking ideological claims to dominance for dominance itself, insofar as the US remains by far the most militarily and financially powerful state. While unipolar control is clearly beyond its capacity, even with its vastly disproportionate military might, and its economic dominance continues to decline, the US continues to occupy a uniquely powerful geopolitical position. The account of US imperial power found in so-called “campist” publications, such as Monthly Review and The Tricontinental, which Desai partly theorizes geopolitical economy against, remains compelling even as such analyses sometimes fall into the trap of the “dialectic enmities” with which they are too often caricatured. See for example “Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage,” an online report published by The Tricontinental in January 2024, and John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review (November 2024).
This is not to assume that a golden era existed when the human presence in outer space was defined by purely scientific endeavor, free of geopolitical or economic interest. This is clearly a fiction that does not describe the history of space programs since the 1950s. Rather, the point is that commercial motivations have become central within the diverse set of factors driving the development of the space sector over the last decade.
The US Space Force was surely the first state body anywhere in the world, let alone the first branch of a national military, to be launched at the same time as a satirical sitcom with the same name mocking its existence.
Indeed, without decades of public money being channeled into university research and national space missions it is unlikely that these operations will even be technically viable.
Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York and London: Verso, 2015).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers,” Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 48 (2003): 5100-5106.
