America is at Risk of Losing its Superiority in Space: Greg Autry

an electromagnetic pulse weapon is a large nuclear explosion detonated at a high altitude outside the Earth's atmosphere if one of these were detonated over say Taipei you would find out that instantly everything in Taipei stopped working and again phones laptops iPads that's bad enough hospital equipment cars every single car would stop the whole city infrastructure is completely Frozen Greg atrey is director of space leadership policy and business at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management he's the co-author of red moon rising how America will beat China on the final frontier space is the ultimate High Ground it took eight years the first time for Kennedy you think you could do that 60 years later with everything that we've learned but we haven't done it in in 8 years we are at risk of having the Chinese eclipsing us while the American space industry is experiencing a rare industrial boom China has committed massive resources to its space effort just what would losing the second space race mean for America and its allies this is American thought leaders and I'm Yan [Music] Kell Greg ay such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders glad to be here thank you so you highlight I mean you highlight quite a few different things in the book but specifically there's uh there's two threats from communist China that sort of stand out in my mind one of them is the military threat in space and this is something that they've been developing quite a bit quite a bit I want to get you to weigh in on what that looks like but the other part it's the messaging right it's the it's the idea that we're the ones who have conquered this next Frontier and not America that would be uh a very a very powerful tool for the regime yeah indeed and first of all on the military side space is the ultimate High Ground uh anytime and sunu tells us this very clearly that you can uh capture the uh the superior position you want to do that because then you can force your enemy uh to capitulate without fighting and whoever controls Earth orbit and the moon will be telling the people on Earth what they're going to do there'll be no point in fighting uh the US has controlled space essentially uh since the collapse of the Soviet Union and used it to incredible advantage AG to project Force around the world we've been able to take out the huge Army in Iraq with very very little uh uh losses on the American side spend many many years fruitless perhaps in Afghanistan again without a lot of uh losses compared to previous Wars and a lot of that has to do with America's superiority in space our ability to know where everything on the battlefield is at any time and communicate that to people on on the battlefield not having that superiority would be a huge loss uh on the geopolitical credibility stage though it makes a huge difference and and we talk a lot in the book about space race 1.0 with the Soviet Union back in the 60s which was part of Cold War 1.0 and Kennedy laid down the Apollo program very clearly as a challenge to the Soviet Union because he wanted to demonstrate to the entire world the superiority of the United States in technology and economic development in our ability to execute on a very difficult task that didn't involve going to war with the Soviet Union and and killing millions of people and we won that and from that moment on the Soviet Union was very much in a decline in its Global credibility until that point they were on the rise and highly respected around the world as the future of of humanity but their failure to execute on the moon program was a national shame it demoralized people inside the Soviet Union and it it gave everybody else in the world an amazing respect for the amazing capabilities of the US and by extension our system so we're at that same Point again and in 2016 I served on the presidential transition team and helped set the agenda that President Trump put in place to return Americans to the moon this time permanently uh as well as other space Rel at ated uh decisions and we understood that that again we were kind of throwing down the gauntlet and we had assumed that by by 2024 we would be on the moon that was eight years ago right it took eight years the first time for Kennedy to being on the moon you think you could do that 60 years later with everything that we've learned but we haven't done it in in eight years we are at risk of having the Chinese who have a very reasonable program in place uh eclipsing us and even uh senator administrator Nelson uh President Biden's NASA administrator has recently said he's concerned about that what is China's space capability as we speak what have they developed and what is the threat and you described some pretty significant military threats in the book so they have a very credible Space Program it's very clearly number two they've eclipsed the Russians former Soviet program United States is a clear leader in civil space human space flight space science commercial space for sure and in military space but that doesn't mean we should go to sleep comfortable because it doesn't matter where you are in the race it matters how fast the person behind you is catching up and that should be of significant concern because China's Vector their trajectory uh is is stupendous they are moving forward in every one of these categories uh successfully you might have noticed that China just had another Landing uh near the South Pole of the moon on the Dark Side of the Moon with a a sample return there Chang E6 uh Mission we've tried twice this year to land an uh robotic uh Lander on the moon and the US missions have failed both times this year and NASA just canceled Viper uh one of our next uh major moon rover programs uh so we're not looking good in this race right now even though we have the lead it should concern us on the military side it's a similar situation our stuff's better but they're moving quickly they're very good at copying stealing and buying whatever it is they need uh from us or from the Russians on the open market and then improving it and making a lot more of it because they're blessed with having the workshop to the world and a supply chain that is uh Bar None what does that look like from a military sense we don't really think about military about space weapons that much when we think about military I mean it's we we start with we think often about conventional forces the sorts of things we're seeing uh you know in Israel uh in the Palestinian conflict you Russia Ukraine um we talk a lot about information Warfare and using you know the three warfar these kinds of asymmetrical Warfare methods that the regime uses here but we don't talk or we don't think a lot about Space Warfare and what that looks like and what kind of weapons are already developed to be deployed there sure and we open the the first chapter of the book with a discussion of an electromagnetic pulse weapon which is a weapon that I think is very likely to be used if God forbid any space weapons are used at Targets on the earth an electromagnetic pulse weapon is a large nuclear explosion detonated at a high altitude uh outside the Earth's atmosphere perhaps 4 or 500 miles up and the area underneath it is bathed in in radiation the radiation from the bomb uh excites the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere and essentially causes a uh electromagnetic wave or pulse to go through the uh the area and what that does first of all is it overwhelms any electronic systems that uh are uh exposed to it and in most cases it will actually permanently destroy those systems because it induces an electrical uh field and flow inside the wires in circuits of your iPad your phone your laptop uh hospital equipment anything and what this could mean is if one of these were detonated over say taipe you would find out that instantly everything in taipe stopped working and again phones laptops iPads that's bad enough hospital equipment cars every single car would stop the electric ones might explode and Catch Fire on honestly the uh the internal combustion engine ones that all had require computerized uh uh ignition systems and uh fuel control systems would become bricks and no tow truck or anybody's coming to get them out of the way so the whole city infrastructure is completely Frozen right all the aircraft a military civilian would be down the ones in the air would probably crash uh but the ones on the ground aren't going anywhere all the communication systems are gone the electrical grid itself including the uh the Transformers uh that Supply the the power to to every home and Business would be out and if this were to happen in the United States we'd have no opportunity to fix this stuff anyway because almost all of our supply chain is now in Asia either in China or areas that China could easily cut off our access to within hours uh this would be a really bad situation now the scariest thing about this in my opinion is is that China has doctrinally and the Russians have too classified these nuclear blasts in space as not strategic nuclear weapons but rather as cyber weapons they don't view them as a nuclear attack on a city they view it as a Cyber attack and we of course know that they are using cyber attacks against the West uh against the United States and all our allies in Europe and Asia on a daily basis they believe cyber attacks are perfectly leg legitimate uh uh method of of open Warfare that they conduct regularly so I'm very concerned to see this doctrine that says these weapons are are not really nuclear weapons they're cyber weapons I would suspect it would be one of the first major tools they might deploy again in an attack on Taiwan on Crea Japan or or any Target well the Chinese regime thus far seems to be using all sorts what we would call you know gry Zone methods but basically things which for which there's plausible deniability right we know the fenel supply chain they're involved in every step along the way but they can say well no we're it's it's not us right it's the it's the Mexican cartels really doing the fenel or you know what's happening in the South China Sea now with the Philippines well there seems to be a bit of aggression but it's not you know it's water cannons and it's sort of you know dispute over some land and so forth but this it's certainly not a military confrontation of any sort right so that doesn't require kind of a strong response and similarly cyber attacks I mean we know there's cyber attacks constantly I mean we at Epoch times are very aware of the Cyber attack capabilities and and have to ward those off but uh again it's sort of is it really is it really the Chinese state or maybe you know maybe it's just some hackers in China and there's always this kind of you know well I don't you might even say implausible deniability but um in in these methods but this type of an uh EMP attack would be obviously a completely different thing yeah and you're correct um they have been very careful to cause as much disruption uh economically militarily socially and politically in our country and in the countries of our allies as they can get away with every single day they are we are at War uh but they're keeping that war at the point where we dare not respond uh it's in that excellent strategy uh and it it's it served them very well on the fentol I I recall many years ago when I was working on the book death by China and I was in Shanghai um you know and on the streets of Shanghai at that time every single Corner had a a uh stand selling DVDs of bootleg copies of Hollywood films and there was a whole counterfeit M uh Mall basically for watches DVDs iPads everything and uh uh underneath the science museum in Shanghai and I spoke to a a Communist Party official you know about this clear violation of intellectual property and the response was of course we can't control that that's just it's just not possible and I said you know if these were videos of the tendam and Square massacre do you think you could get them off the streets and of course that was the end of my discussion and interview but um the fact of the matter is they could control the fentanyl they don't want to control the fentanyl they they want to see dead Americans and they more importantly want to see chaos misery and economic degradation in our country but you're right they get away with it the EMP is another level but if they were actually to take military action it's a level where they might not get the same level of world condemnation as obviously if they kill a bunch of people they can literally shut a country like Taiwan down without killing hardly anybody uh so it would be the equivalent of using uh you know um tear gas on a on a rioting crowd or whatever a non-lethal weapon system and then they can go in in fact I assume Taiwan would basically beg them for help after they began to run out of food uh and they would be able to say they were invited in so um I hope they wouldn't do that but I think it's more likely than an actual Invasion uh I believe that the Chinese again following sunu the last thing they want to do is actually fight a conditional traditional war that we preparing for um let's talk about the supply chain because one of the things we've highlighted quite a bit on this show over the years is this you know deep dependence of the US supply chain on China and on Chinese manufacturing as you suggested earlier right this is this is where a lot of the world's manufacturing is done today and that of course has been a very deliberate deliberate project on the side of Chinese and and in the US you know many many companies have been very happy to to to ship the manufacturing over there so in that sense we're at a disadvantage but with with space it's actually quite interesting right that we we actually do have a robust uh uh you know manufacturing and Tech Innovation front which has been you know we we've been uh Elon Musk loves to put up videos of these amazing Rockets you know landing on their own uh uh after they've been deployed to space and and you get a sense there's something really significant happening there's technological development there's all sorts of um uh satellites being put up into space we have starlink I mean I don't know how many satellites that is but but there there's a lot of activity on on the US side and it has been an amazing revolution in manufacturing in a country where we seem to be incapable of of manufacturing very much these days and many other attempts to get manufacturing going in the US outside of the space industry have not been terribly successful there's been a lot of struggling trying to get foxcon to set up a factory in Wisconsin or for Taiwan semiconductor to get factories making chips in Arizona um space we're doing it ourselves we're doing it with uh uh with passion and speed and in a volume that eclipses anything that's been done before in that industry uh if you go to SpaceX Factory in Hawthorne California there are literally thousands and thousands of good blueco collar jobs there people doing uh welding and uh people uh you know bending metal and putting in wiring harnesses uh there of course people developing software and testing rocket engines and all the things that you need to do to uh to build a a successful vehicle they've got another large facility in uh South Texas uh building their starship rocket and a testing facility in Texas Jeff basos has built a factory that's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square feet and employs thousands of people in Florida right outside the uh Gates of the Kennedy uh Space Center and these are creating the sort of manufacturing jobs that that change people's lives and which you can go and support a family with without having to accumulate $200,000 in college that uh and it's it's working U 2012 when SpaceX first started launching commercial uh payloads uh the US had basically 0% of the commercial space launch business if you were a Israeli uh Communications company or Malaysian TV station or somebody in Africa that wanted an agricultural satellite you went and you ask the Chinese the Russians or the Europeans to launch your satellite nobody came to America today basically every satellite that wants to get launched in the world comes and asks a US launch company to do it first and the only reason they go to these other countries is because they they can't get a right on SpaceX or one of the new competitors that are popping up we own 80% plus of of the global launch market and in the satellites uh in 2010 there were about a thousand satellites operational satellites in the world there are more than 10,000 today 10 times as much essentially all of those are are made in America uh it's been a complete Revolution and one of the reasons is is simply because there were laws that prevented American companies from taking that manufacturing and doing it in China or transferring the technology uh licensing and and and knoow uh to China they had to do it in the US and guess what it turns out you can as we finish here let's talk a a little bit about the opportunities that exist in space for Humanity right yeah so I'm happy to talk about the the beautiful upside to space which is what made me fall in love with with it to begin with so first of all I've mentioned there are raw materials and and space that we can access and we can access them and process them and do the heavy manufacturing without polluting anything here on Earth now that doesn't mean we're going to be mining materials and and bringing them back in in space trucks uh uh in 5 years or something it means though that as we develop a human future in space we're going to be able to uh to do it without having to uh to lift everything out of the atmosphere there are also things that you can do in the microgravity environment of space that cannot be done on planet Earth we can make uh biomedical devices and even biology that works better stem cells grow orders of magnet itude faster in Zerg than they do in a two-dimensional petri dish if uh you know gosh forbid you should uh need a new liver you know you've got to sign up for the donor list and and wait for some poor person to be killed in a car accident or for the CCP to kill a Fallon gong member uh and sell you their liver we can take your stem cells to space grow them in microgravity at a remarkable speed differentiate them into a liver and actually grow a liver organ or organoid that could be implanted back to you with your DNA and the couple things that are important about that uh one is again we don't have any donor and two you have this DNA match so you don't have to be on immunosuppressant drugs which put you at risk your whole life of secondary infections and cost a whole lot of money uh uh to maintain uh you try to grow the liver on Earth in gravity you get a liver pancake basically it's a there's a lot of exciting things happening in in microgravity research and it promises to transform Our Lives um another company I know is is making artificial retinas that uh hopefully we're going to be testing in a few years that we'll be able to uh save people who have macular degeneration or other uh uh degeneration of their their rtina and uh allow them to see again uh and it can only be done in microgravity because of the fact you need to put these these chemicals perfectly on a a film substrate uh in a way that doesn't work in gravity you know uh Greg it's really interesting that you mention uh you know the liver being forced organ harvested from a Fen gong member uh as there is this in Congress right now there's the felong gong protection act that has passed the house by Voice vote unanimously and now there's a senate companion bill so it looks like the First Federal us legislation to counter this barbaric practice might might actually uh come into Force sometime in the future um I'll refer people to other episodes of American thought leaders that have that have covered this issue um a little bit back to the the idea of uh I guess the opportunity in space it is in some sense very much the final frontier as we hear in Star Trek and uh and uh you know I'm excited to see what the future holds I am too and I'll look forward to seeing you there well Greg ay it's such a pleasure to have had you on thank you a great conversation appreciate it [Music]