Vladimir Putin has been only partially successful in his latest endeavors. On the one hand, the Russian Luna-25 mission - which was supposed to end with the landing of the station on the dark side of the Moon - ended in complete failure. On the other hand, he managed to liquidate Yevgeny Prigozhin and the leadership of the Wagner group, probably by planting a bomb in their plane.
Either way, both missions were left with burning wreckage. But that contrast is ominous. Russia's military-industrial complex excels at low-tech killing, as its victims across Ukraine can attest. On the other hand, capacities in the domain of high technologies have been degraded by the action of Western sanctions, brain drain and oligarchic incompetence.
The plan was to land Luna-25 on the lunar surface with the help of a camera manufactured by Airbus. However, the European Space Agency canceled the delivery in February 2022. So the station is burdened with heavy Russian navigation equipment, which reduced the free space for research equipment.
Previous Russian space missions also ended in failure due to the use of low-quality components, and the cosmodrome from which Luna-25 was launched is under investigation for embezzlement.
Prigozhin's assassination and the failure of the Luna-25 mission point to a broader asymmetry in Russia's ambitions to participate in great power politics. Wagner was Putin's agency for the destabilization of the Sahel region in Africa, with the aim of limiting Western countries' access to crucial mineral deposits there and encouraging the outflow of refugees to the Mediterranean.
However, in order to play the games of great powers at the highest level, it is necessary to have a presence in space, which in the last 20 years has become a fully developed "domain" of warfare, as important as land, sea, air or cyberspace. Despite its spectacular infrastructure and long history of spaceflight, Russia now lags behind the United States and China in this domain.
According to the function they perform, military satellites are divided into four groups: reconnaissance, navigation, communication and early warning of an attack. Reconnaissance is carried out using high-resolution cameras; GPS and GLONASS systems are used for navigation and guidance of units and missiles; communication satellites allow ground units, ships and aircraft to see the battle zone and communicate; early warning systems warn of ballistic missile launches.
Russia uses all four types, but has fallen far behind in the field of optical reconnaissance satellites in the last decade. Currently, only two such satellites are in operation, and those that were recently launched failed to solve the problem because bad components failed quickly. Also, Ukraine uses Musk's Starlink system for battlefield communication, while Russia, where that segment is under complete state control, has nothing similar.
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There are no private entrepreneurs in Russia that Putin can rely on, and key high technologies are unavailable due to Western sanctions. That's why Russia ended up with the wrong ratio of the share of land, naval and space technologies in its military industry. And although it is one of only three countries that are currently capable of shooting down a satellite, Russia did not do so in this conflict. Probably, the diplomatic analysis of the benefits and costs showed that it would not be worth it, and certainly would not be particularly useful, because it is very likely that Ukraine receives real-time data from American satellites that Russia cannot attack.
As India's successful moon landing demonstrated, space is becoming the domain onto which earthly conflicts and ambitions are projected. This forces strategists to reexamine some of their fundamental assumptions.
We are witnessing the rapid development of events on two parallel streams: political and technological. Politically, we are faced with an open challenge to the "rules-based global order" in the form in which it was established after 1945: this is the central tenet of the consensus reached by Putin and Xi Jinping and laid out in the statement of February 4, 2022.
Until recently, diplomats and generals thought of space the way oceans were once thought of: as a domain that no country can own or control and where "right of passage" is implied. You can set up stations and move wherever you want, regardless of ground restrictions. In fact, all previous attempts to establish international legal norms for space have been based on the provisions of maritime law.
But if the very concept of a rules-based order is called into question, as some countries try to justify annexation, brutal human rights abuses and the closure of sea lanes, then every part of space from the Moon and Mars to the low-Earth orbits of communications satellites becomes the subject of competition between earthly forces.
At the same time, while the prices of space technologies are falling and they are becoming more and more important to our daily lives, conflicts in space can easily threaten the ability to make a phone call, send an e-mail, drive a car or deliver a package. Of course, it is also possible to disable the military equivalents of these technologies, such as communications, reconnaissance and guidance.
Instead of being built as a domain of peaceful cooperation, modeled after the seas and oceans, space becomes a game field where there are no rules, similar to saloons in the wild west. If this is already happening with the earth's exosphere today, what awaits us on the moon in twenty years?
Russia's failure and India's success in conquering space should be a warning to Great Britain. Our space industry excels precisely in those areas where Russia lags behind: high-tech sensors and devices for navigation and control. But all previous attempts to build a reliable launch platform have failed, including Virgin Orbit in May of this year.
After decades of neglect, it is time to seriously consider the space program as a national security priority: as in all other areas, the rise of China means that Western dominance is no longer certain. And as the fate of the Luna-25 station shows, traveling into space is a very serious and difficult task.
(The New European; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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