(by Biagino Costanzo, Company Manager and Head of SEC Observatory of Aidr) Talking about it or seeing hypersonic weapons used in wars is no longer science fiction.
For example, in Syria and today in Ukraine, the use of killer drones and laser weapons have appeared and today not only the superpowers can manage them given their onerousness because a parallel black market has arisen.
There should never be wars but anyhow, it is useless to pretend that there are no conflicts for the world. Humanity has always been characterized by the evil of conflicts and wars whether global or local or as they say lately "in pieces"
There are many scientific programs that demonstrate the importance of the development of these programs to be able to fight conflicts both in defensive contexts and in offensive phases both if we are talking about wars of the present but above all of the future. We are talking about missile detection and tracking, geolocation, navigation, target identification and detection/control of military activities in general.
Today the theater of confrontation becomes more and more Space. Numerous scientific programs and applications in the field of military industry have demonstrated that it is also necessary to dominate the dimension of Space and Cyber Space.
An area which is contested daily by powers such as the United Kingdom, India, Israel, but above all superpowers such as China, the United States and Russia which are among the first countries on a global level to have experimented with weapons to destroy their now obsolete military satellites, however generating a another non-secondary problem, that of the so-called space junk, innumerable space debris which by now has reached unacceptable and dangerous quantities for constellations of satellites for civil use such as telecommunications and GPS, essential for daily life on Earth.
At the moment, over thirty thousand space debris roams in orbit, which are monitored, identified but the various statistical models indicate an estimate that probably approaches more than a million with dimensions exceeding one centimetre, and their number is constantly increasing.
This domain requires regulatory legislation that avoids the birth of a new far west in the digital and spatial age.
In recent weeks, the 2nd National Space Day was celebrated, established by the Draghi Government in 2021, to make the general public understand that space activities also bring many benefits in daily life in terms of growth, well-being, image and role on the global level of Italy.
There are many events and initiatives organized by institutions, companies, universities, schools but also by the foreign network of Italian embassies, consulates and cultural institutes.
But why is Space so attractive? First of all, there is a high demand for data, the need for connectivity and monitoring of the territory.
The satellites sent, for example, in 2019 alone, provide telecommunications and earth observation services, and also the generation of small satellites, changes regarding satellite technology and nano satellites can be glimpsed.
In the USA there is already a real force, the Space National Guard, in fact Space is by now identified, by many States, as a new military domain making them rise from the traditional three to five, with Space and Cyber-space to arrive at the domain of domains the cognitive one.
We remind you that the military presence in space is not prohibited, the satellites in their various functions are activators of essential operational functions.
Space warfare is already a reality through the constant and permanent use of cyber space of cyber attack and cyber exploitation and there are operational satellites such as government, commercial and military ones.
It is estimated that an average of 990 satellites a year will be launched until 2028 and in that time 68% of the satellites will belong to constellations, a figure which demonstrates the variation, for example, from 2018 where 70% were in the presence of individual satellites.
The new satellite constellations serve for information, control, surveillance, recognition, communication and interception of missiles and hypersonic warheads.
In fact, already the war in Ukraine is the first conflict that is mainly observed by satellites, with a high-precision or very high reconnaissance capability when associated with these satellite systems.
Where there are offensive weapons there are clearly defensive weapons and therefore already at the time of the Cold War there were space anti-system weapons and now they have only been enhanced with concrete possibility of attack through the use of lasers, direct energy, cybernetic attacks.
Roscomos (Russian Space Agency) director Dmitry Rogozin said that “a cyber attack on its satellites from wherever it originated would be considered by Russia as a valid reason to go to war.”, Another? But almost identical claims have been made by the US for cyberattacks if they have caused harm to national security.
This world has always fascinated many. Let's not forget the many fans of the Star Wars saga, How can we forget characters such as Skywalker and his father Anakin who later turned into Darth Vader. Or, Ian Solo, C-3PO and RU-D2.
In that case, it was precisely science fiction, while here now the war in Space is already underway with the use of the cybernetic domain which is very pervasive and little perceived (it is invisible) and the use of electronic warfare.
It is important to remember that there is still no international regulation for the military use of the two domains Space and Cyber and this produces the budding of continuous threats, representing the real risk in the new era that we live and will live in, the digital and spatial one. As Yoda said “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger to hate; hate leads to suffering. Ah… I feel a lot of fear in you. We are blind if the creation of this army has escaped our eye!”.