Dr Bleddyn Bowen is an associate professor in Astropolitics at the School of Government and International Relations, Durham University. Dr Bowen specialises in research on space warfare and space security from the discipline of war studies, being described as “Britain’s leading thinker on Astropolitics” and “a leading expert on the politics of space”. Dr Bowen has advised several national governments on space policy including the UK Ministry of Defence, the US National Space Council, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Cabinet Office. Dr Bowen is currently the Co-Director of the Space Research Centre at Durham University, Co-Convenor of the Astropolitics Working Group at the British International Studies Association, and an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. Dr Bowen has published two books on Astropolitics, Original Sin: Power, Technology, and War in Outer Space, and War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics. In this interview, we discussed Dr Bowen’s research on Spacepower from military and commercial contexts, and the changing importance of Astropolitics in an increasingly unstable world order.
Can you explain your position on Spacepower, in regards to it’s civilian and military applications, and its nature as a zone of contestation?
As a scholar in the discipline of war studies, I primarily look at the power politics of space, and of course the concept of power, or ‘Spacepower’ is central to that. This can be either material power, such as military satellites, or soft power, such as using prestigious achievements like India landing a robot on the moon. ‘Spacepower’ is the concept that captures issues like these, and ‘Astropolitics’ is broadly any politics in space, or activities on earth linked to space. Activities in space are ultimately linked to human activities and needs on earth, and therefore it is important that humanities and social sciences are included alongside scientific disciplines when studying space.
I developed the idea of space as a “Cosmic Coastline” in my PhD thesis, which I then turned into my first book War In Space, published in 2020. I created this theory to contrast with other established theories of war in space which saw it as analogous to ocean warfare, which emphasises domination and power projection. The cosmic coastline perspective proposes a more continental style of thinking, where the earth’s orbit is the only important space strategically, and is analogous to a ‘cosmic shoreline’. This space is quite close, is a constrained space, and is becoming increasingly cluttered with satellites and debris, mirroring something like a narrow maritime strait or coastline. This makes land-based weapons effective against space infrastructure, and space-based instruments important to land combat, unlike ocean warfare. Space also differs in the capacity for smaller states to have agency. In ocean warfare, only large powers with the capacity for big navies are relevant, whereas in space, like coastal wars, smaller states are able to project more power.
Why has this perception of space as separated from worldly politics endured in our political system?
I approach this question in my book Original Sin, which looks at the militarised origins of space technology. In this book I argue that space technology would never have been developed without the military application of things like Inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). These technologies were highly temperamental, and required huge investment from the US and the Soviet Union at the time, as well as other powers developing their own capabilities. Following this, the narrative has become much more focused on things like space flight and robots, and the human achievements like going to the moon. People generally seem to think that nothing has been developed in space technology between the Apollo missions and Elon Musk, which is absolute nonsense; there has been huge developments in the military and economic uses of space technology in this period. For example, the National Reconnaissance Office, set up by the US in 1960, was the agency tasked with developing and deploying all of the US’s strategic reconnaissance and imagery satellites, and it was entirely classified until 1992. That secret history of space still needs to be told to audiences, which is what Original Sin is trying to do.
Has this perception of space been misused in political contexts? You mentioned Elon Musk, someone who often looks to space technology as a catch-all solution to earth-based problems; have individuals like him misappropriated the space technology narrative?
Lots of different people have used the optimism and utopian thinking that surrounds space technology to justify their own actions in space, or to act as a smoke screen. The historian Walter McDougall said that Eisenhower managed to “hoodwink” the American scientific community into working on the space race to further the military interests in satellite technology. However, scientists are often equally willing to participate in the military aspects of space technology if they are able to further their own interests or contribute to national security.
There are a lot of people with genuine beliefs about the transcendental potential of space technology, and there are also those who seek to manipulate that kind of thinking for their own political ends. Lots of companies use this rhetoric as a corporate propaganda tool. For example, Elon Musk may genuinely believe that he will go to Mars at some point, but it has also been a highly effective marketing tool for SpaceX. I think a lot of the decisions SpaceX has made shows that it is primarily a commercial venture, and is not really aiming to get to Mars. There are still plenty of questions to be answered about the role of these narratives in relation to the military applications of space technology.
What are the implications of the rise of public-private partnerships for the politics of space in the twenty-first century? Does it reduce state oversight, or increase state capacity?
This is something I am researching right now, about misperceptions of the private sector in space. There’s a lot of talk about the development of private companies in the space industry, which people are calling the ‘new commercial space age’. There are definitely many more private companies and investments in the space industry now, but the fundamental misunderstanding is that people conflate private companies with private markets or private sector demand. As far as I know, the demand is still entirely coming from the public sector, where these private companies are competing for government contracts, funding or investment. I don’t know of a single company or sector that would survive without the public sector.
Do you think we are seeing an increase in state investment in the space sector under the current climate of instability? Is it a priority or a need?
In certain areas you are actually seeing a decrease in funding, like space science and research, because governments want to fund projects on security and defence, or economic infrastructure. You can see that in the latest budget for NASA and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), where space science funding is being gutted to a shocking degree. These organisations provide really important data on things like the climate, which will now be reduced if Congress doesn’t reinstate the funding.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also demonstrated how important space is for warfare. It’s not necessarily anything new in the big picture of Spacepower, but it really demonstrates the impact of space infrastructures which are easy to deploy and use. What’s new in Ukraine is the ease of use of space technology, and the scale of it that is able to be deployed at the eleventh hour.
The EU is also throwing a lot more funding at defence and security in space now, with their commitment to the Galileo satellite navigation system being vindicated. Back in 2002-2003 so many people were complaining that the EU didn’t need their own satellite navigation system, because the American GPS system would always be available. But now, the GPS system is looking dated, and European faith in American security guarantees has been shaken significantly with the Trump administration. Europe has its own navigation system now, with its own defence applications, and this is being built on. It’s a good time to be in the defence space industry at the moment, but that’s not a good thing, as it means things are becoming more unstable, and it’s at the expense of space science.
Why is it important to distinguish space not as a position of dominance but as a ‘cosmic coastline’? And what are the implications of this view for the proliferation of war in space?
The coastline analogy mainly seeks to open people up to more imaginative thinking about how warfare would be conducted in space. It also points to the potentially more subtle nature of conflict in space, such as targeting logistical networks and infrastructure to support other forces. The cosmic coastline theory is also about tempering expectations, that even if you dominate the control of space it doesn’t mean you are going to win the war as a whole. Look at the NATO intervention in Afghanistan, the US had complete control of space in that conflict but weren’t able to win overall.
Space warfare also has an economy of force behind it. It’s really expensive to pursue war in space, so you need to be able to justify it within the political goals of the war, like any other action. There are also a lot of small actions that can be taken in space with the ability to have big implications. Space is also not the ‘Ultimate High ground’ as the US Space Force likes to call it, although it is very useful for observation there will always be ways of controverting the military advantages it offers. You can’t just sit on that high ground and expect everything to go in your favour, you have to exploit that advantage. The war theorist Clausewitz emphasised that good positioning alone is not a strategy at all, a good strategy is about inflicting decisive blows on the enemy and disabling them. This means you can’t just have amazing technology in space, you have to put it to use on the ground.
Has this subtle side of space conflict encapsulated in the ‘cosmic coastline’ something we have seen in conflicts already?
Yes, this has already been used for decades as a military strategy to support forces on the ground. Electronic and cyber warfare strategies have been used extensively to target assets in space. These strategies, like jamming communications, have always been consistently used in space warfare, but overlooked in theoretical analyses. There have also been a lot of anti-satellite weapons tests, like anti-satellite missiles, although these haven’t been used yet.
You point out that space has traditionally been seen as bipolar, a field of contest between the two leading powers. How important are those secondary powers in the wider picture of space power, what is their military relevance?
There are a variety of opinions on the question of other space powers’ relevance to Astropolitics. There is currently more engagement from different states on space than ever before. The UK recently led an effort at the UN General Assembly to try and identify common threats and create common understandings of best practice in space. This was a reaction to the inability of other bodies of the UN to provide agreements on things like space arms proliferation and space operations. This effort by the UK brought in a lot of new countries, such as the Philippines and Rwanda, that hadn’t previously engaged with space diplomacy, who had an appetite for more discussions and regulation of space. The increasing amount of space traffic is also an issue, as there are no rules around things like rights of way or standard operating procedures like there are in airspace or the sea. A few weeks ago, the African space agency was formed in order to pool resources in Africa in areas like space research and capabilities. The US has also sought to widen participation in its Artemis accords by getting new states to join lunar exploration efforts, and developing plans for collaboration on lunar exploration, with countries like Nigeria signing up. There are definitely some practitioners in the Astropolitics space who only really consider the US and China as important actors, but I think these people are increasingly in the minority.
UK Forum on a Multipolar World 
Leave a comment