Seems like the end of the world...
Elon Musk’s Starship Heavy Could Revolutionize Warfare
The U.S. could keep powerful munitions in orbit to be deployed quickly and without risk to American troops.
ET
Elon Musk’s revolutionary Starship Heavy aims to reach Mars, but it may sooner redraw the map of Earth by fundamentally changing the geography of warfare.
To strike Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, a fleet of B-2 bombers each carried two 30,000-pound bombs. The round trip took 37 hours. B-2s cost around $135,000 per travel hour. Total costs for the attack amounted to about $5 million for each plane. (That excludes tankers, fighters and other components of the mission.) If Iran’s air defense had still been functioning, this strike would have been even riskier and more expensive.
The Defense Department has explored ways to reduce money and time required for military strikes. It has spent billions over decades developing hypersonic weapons to strike anywhere in the world within an hour. By decreasing the cost to place materiel into orbit, however, Starship makes possible major new alternative military options that would be at least as effective and a lot cheaper.
Right now, the cheapest launch platform in the world is Falcon Heavy, at about $1,500 a kilogram, or $700 a pound, to reach low Earth orbit—compared with more than $10,000 a kilogram for competitors like the Delta IV Heavy. With Starship, Mr. Musk intends to bring that cost down to $10 a kilogram, though reducing it to $100 would be revolutionary. If so, then launch costs will no longer restrain the blasting of cheap, disposable equipment into space. Sending equipment to land anywhere on Earth will also become cheap. And fast—it takes about an hour in a suborbital path to travel between any two points on the globe.
Starship will make it possible to use low Earth orbit as a parking lot for a giant space-based arsenal. This would allow the U.S. to pre-position conventional munitions with ablation shields and inertial guidance systems to strike anywhere on Earth within minutes. Putting tens of thousands of small munitions into orbit would become cost effective, by my estimate, at around $100 a kilogram. Munitions could include bunker busters, kinetic weapons, antipersonnel, incendiaries, fuel-air explosives, cluster munitions, and antitank, antiaircraft and antiship capabilities with sophisticated terminal guidance. Starship’s payload capacity promises to be so great that it will enable the deployment of much larger single munitions than today’s biggest airplanes, enabling conventional effects of a greater magnitude against even the most deeply buried targets.
New kinds of strikes would become feasible. Imagine a strike package of thousands of 200-pound bombs, each landing precisely, at the same time, on electric grid sites, government buildings, railway crossings, border stations and road intersections—without putting planes or military personnel at risk. This wouldn’t be limited by the number of available missile launchers or by the need for multiple sorties by strike aircraft. Such a system would obviate the need to establish air superiority before bringing in bombers and the need for large numbers of expensive cruise missiles. From an appropriately chosen low Earth orbit, munitions could be deorbited with very little warning.
Space-based munitions could solve various enduring military problems. Targeting runways presents a special difficulty because they can be rapidly repaired. Not so if there is a stream of munitions in space, to be delivered instantly every time the runway is close to being rebuilt.
Drones, too, could be deployed from space, revolutionizing intelligence and surveillance: Satellites can’t see through clouds, but a satellite-delivered drone can. Ditto for logistical essentials, critical life-saving equipment and medical supplies.
The great military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan talked about the profound psychological effect of a “fleet in being” of battleships, hidden over the horizon, that could show up without warning. This space-based arsenal will have a similar effect on the minds of adversaries.
Defending against these munitions will be beyond the capability of any but the most sophisticated adversary. A space-based fleet-in-being will have a very different deterrence effect from nuclear ballistic missiles: The destructive capability against key targets would be similar but the credibility of the threat to use them would be much higher.
It is crucial that the U.S. deploy this capability first. Key technologies going into Starship need to be treated as national secrets, and leaking these ideas to China should be regarded as treason. Driving launch costs toward zero creates a natural monopoly; we must use all the tools of statecraft to ensure that China, Russia and other adversaries are frozen out. U.S. and allied companies should be banned from participating in the space-launch ecosystems of adversary regimes, and adversary regimes should be prevented from participating in the Western space-launch ecosystem.
This could be the new way of warfare. The U.S. must get there first.
Mr. Hochberg is a physicist, a semiconductor entrepreneur and a visiting scholar at the Center for Geopolitics at Cambridge University.
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