A satellite hurls around the globe at 7 12 km/ second. Then it drops a 6 m rod that starts falling the 400 km towards Earth. No explosives, just speed. Things like rods from God, which is dropping big tungsten rods from space, having them fall very quickly. Mach 24 at first, but the atmosphere eventually slows it down to Mach 8, still going super fast till it reaches the surface of the Earth. Another satellite waits in orbit for years and then when given the command, it releases a capsule, a re-entry capsule with hundreds of drones, thousands of drones. You can put it anywhere you want within a matter of minutes. Here's a caravan of a dozen satellites. They've got small missiles inside and they're just waiting till a military commander on Earth gives them the order to go hit a group of enemy satellites knocking out the vital communication and navigation capabilities of the enemy. These aren't sci-fi scenarios. These are real projects that militaries are working on. Powerful militaries, they've been thinking about these things for years. But we're in a new era of space. It's a lot easier to get up here. And so, as happens, countries want to control it. Now, we're getting to the point where these crazy ideas that people would have said were science fiction are becoming more possible, and we should be looking at all these things on the horizon. Advances in space happen very rapidly. The new military space race is really between the US, China, and Russia, though less and less Russia. This is really a rivalry between the United States and China. Both countries have a relatively new wing of their military dedicated to controlling, defending, and preparing for combat in space, or in the words of the US Space Force, to fundamentally transform our approach to space from a combat support function to a warfighting domain. And it's getting crowded. Lots and lots of satellites are going up there. There are over 12,000 floating around the Earth right now. Oh, and by the way, I've always had a little trouble with these visuals of like all the dots that are satellites. This is not to scale. These satellites are not like right next to bumping into each other. But the fact remains there's a lot of high-tech stuff floating around our Earth. And more and more of that is dedicated to military purposes. It's become a vital tool of modern warfare. And that is what this video is about. It's about these devices, satellites, that not only let planes and troops navigate and communicate, but also scan the world looking for missile launches. They reveal secrets, looking through clouds, and at night to capture underground submarine headquarters, deep sea cable cutters, North Korean warships. I'm going to show you how militaries are working on technology that they could potentially use to attack the satellites of their enemy with grappling hooks, with lasers, with a nuclear bomb. I've been talking to experts, including one that you'll hear a lot from in this video, as I set out to understand war in space, this escalating race to control and dominate a domain shrouded in mystery, one that is hard to police. And it's all happening right at a time when we're entering into an era of global rivalries. They're heating up again. All while the most powerful people on Earth have a deeper and deeper interest in what happens in this space far above our heads. It's space. It's the final frontier. And it's time we start paying attention. An infinite ocean. For man is not content unless he's pressing himself to the limits of his knowledge or beyond. [Applause] Okay, first we got to talk about satellites. these little computers bolted to a metal frame that are orbiting around our planet. Some are very small, some might be referred to as a cubat. Uh so a cubat is something very small. You can fit it in your hand. That's Clayton Swopee who's an expert on space policy here at a think tank in DC called CSIS. Could be the size of a refrigerator in a college dorm room. But then you have others that could be the size of a bus. So solar panels will be a lot bigger than the satellite. So think about it. You're just moving your arms out usually and that's how the satellite looks with solar panels. Some of these satellites are way far out in this orbit called geostationary orbit. They're a tenth of the way to the moon and they're moving at the same speed as Earth. So, if you were to look at them in the night sky, they would just kind of look like a star. They stay in one place. But most satellites these days are here in this sweet spot of low Earth orbit about 400 to 800 km above our heads. And look, there's the International Space Station hurling around the Earth. This one's obviously a lot bigger than a refrigerator. And a reminder of something that may be obvious to some of you, but was kind of fuzzy in my head and now it's not, which is that these satellites are not like zooming around the Earth with jet engines. They are actually kind of falling. When a rocket launches a satellite into space, it goes upwards for a few kilometers, but then it starts to go sideways. And in fact, most of the energy being blasted out of this rocket is being used to move it, let's say, horizontally, getting close to 30,000 km an hour. You're trying to outra gravity. Once you're moving that fast, you can cut the engines because you're at this magical speed where you keep missing the Earth. So, you're trying to move so fast while gravity's pulling you in that you are effectively staying in an orbit around the Earth. So, you're trying to defeat gravity. So people who are floating in the International Space Station are not floating because they're not in Earth's gravity. They're floating because they've kind of reached this perfect equilibrium of speed and gravity that makes them constantly falling. So before we get to all the war and defense stuff, let's just take a moment and appreciate this magical thing we've invented called putting things into orbit around our Earth. [Music] These days, a lot of these satellites are talking to one another, forming a constellation where they can send signals between each other, all to serve a variety of purposes, like helping guide ships and airplanes or tracking pollution or running scientific analysis on crops or internet. Starlink has around 7,000 of these satellites in a big constellation that provides internet access to remote areas that were very disconnected before and to those fighting in the war in Ukraine. There's one satellite constellation that I use more than any other and it looks like this. This is a very special constellation. Biggest thing that we take for granted is the global positioning system is GPS. around 30 satellites that are flying 20,000 kilometers above us run by the American government at any given time anywhere on Earth. Three of these satellites can see us and this signal allows them to provide a very accurate location of where we are on the Earth. If you lock on to four satellites, you can even get your elevation. I mean, this is magic. Not to mention, it's all delivered to me on an easy to use software like Google Maps that allows me to navigate anywhere in the world. By the way, Russia has their own kind of GPS constellation. So does China and the EU. My other big use case for these satellites is something you've seen me do a lot on the channel. This incredibly high-res photos that we take from space and stitch together to create something like Google Earth. I've spent hundreds of hours on Google Earth. Sometimes just for fun, sometimes for work. And I got to say it never gets old for me. And it works because a bunch of these satellites have big advanced cameras on them like this one. They take highdeition images of our planet, send them back down to Earth with this little antenna. Oh, and these days it's not just visible light that we're capturing from satellites. Some satellites send out super long waves like microwave radiation and then record how it bounces back. This allows them to see through things like clouds. Allows them to see elevation and seismic activity, weather patterns, or maybe a secret nuclear submarine base hidden in a mountain in China or a missile production facility in a mountain in Iran. So, you see where this is going. We have to remember why these things were put up into space in the first place. And the answer is war. But before we talk about the weapons, I need to thank today's sponsor, who is Rocket Money. Rocket Money? Wow. Rocket Money sponsoring a video about space. Did we plan that? I apparently have been paying triple for a streaming service because I signed up for it with one email and then I signed in on my TV and like signed up for another email and then apparently my wife signed up for it as well. Anyway, I didn't know this was happening until I started using Rocket Money. They allowed me to quickly catch all of the wasteful spending that is happening behind the scenes for me. Rocket Money is like this all-in-one financial app. You download it, you give it access to your bank account, and then it goes and it intelligently searches all of your transactions, and it looks for patterns, looks for duplicates, it looks for opportunities to lower your bills. Like, it will go out and negotiate lower bills for you. You can cancel these subscriptions right there on the app. All of this, in addition to smart tools like being able to create a budget or set savings goals, it gives you a much clearer view of your finances all in one place. I sometimes just go into the app to explore and look and make sure that I am not being charged twice or three times for like random subscriptions that I just forgot about. You can go try this out right now. If you want all the features that I talked about, you can subscribe to the premium plan, which has saved customers up to $740 a year. So, it kind of pays for itself. If you do do that, make sure to use my link. It is rocketmoney.com/jny Harris. It's in the description. Clicking that link is important so that they know that you found it through this video. I'm a big fan of what they're doing over there. It's definitely given me more insight onto my finances. So, thank you Rocket Money for sponsoring today's video. Let's go back up to space to see what countries are doing up there. It was the 1950s and60s when space kind of became a war thing. The US and Soviet Union were racing to put satellites in space, not only to flex on each other scientifically, but also to spy on each other from above. Back then, these satellites would have huge rolls of film on board. They would take a bunch of pictures of enemy territory and then eject the canister of film, which would barrel back down into the atmosphere and then be caught in midair by like an airplane. brought back to HQ and developed and boom, you've got a bunch of pictures of Soviet missile sites. Pretty nuts. So, this was like the main military application of space. But of course, over the decades, militaries floated some pretty crazy ideas on how to actually militarize space, how to threaten the enemy's satellites. But it was all really difficult and expensive, and eventually the Soviet Union fell. So, the threat was like, you know, why are we doing this? But fast forward to today, and two things have happened. The threat is back and the cost for going to space is down. By 2020, humanity had 3,000 active satellites floating around our planet. And then right after Yeah. Wow. I mean, the graph says it all. It has become way cheaper to put stuff into space thanks to the rise of innovative private space companies, most notably Elon Musk's SpaceX. I mean, there's so many satellites up there that some astronomers are complaining that when they look up in the night sky, satellites are getting in the way. And this also comes at a time when global rivalries are heating up. So, in 2019, the US Congress passed a law that created the United States Space Force, the newest branch of the US military, officially classifying space as quote, "a warfighting domain, just like the other domains, air, land, sea, and cyber." So, let's quickly go over how militaries use space today, how space has become so vital to modern warfare, and then how these countries are preparing to fight war in space. So, first up, militaries still use satellites to spy. Let's just say sensing. So, that could be taking pictures of things happening on Earth. So, we want to know when a missile gets shot off. We want to see a signal. We want to be able to see a thermal signature. We want to track something. So you could think surveillance or reconnaissance, things like that. Countries use this imagery to keep an eye on their enemy. Like look at how far satellite imagery has come in just a few decades. So the US immediately knows if Russia is moving a bunch of troops to the Ukrainian border like they did in February 2022, right before they invaded. And China and Russia know that the US has recently moved a bunch of B2 bombers onto this tiny island in the Indian Ocean, potentially preparing to bomb Iran. Who knows? But you can't really keep this stuff a secret anymore. Militaries can see each other and they can see much deeper into each other's worlds. This is how we know so much about the military of North Korea, a notoriously closed place. There are people spending all their time looking at maps of North Korea, spotting things like this concealed submarine. In fact, we're making an entire video exploring what we can learn about North Korea purely from the satellite map imagery. That's coming out soon, so keep an eye out for it. So, now that it's much cheaper to get stuff up into space, you're going to expect to see a lot more of these constellations, more and more like swarms of satellites that can direct their gaze to anywhere on Earth and monitor it in real time. This is something that is actively being worked on. Actually, according to some reporting from Reuters, SpaceX was awarded a $ 1.8 8 billion contract with the National Reconnaissance Office to develop this spy satellite swarm concept. This stuff will be taking so many photos and feeding back so much data that no one person or group of people is going to be able to sort of process it, which is a perfect time for artificial intelligence to come in. We made a whole video about how AI is transforming war and how huge amounts of data from all these different sensors can be fed in to a command and control software to give intel and even target recommendations to commanders. So that's a whole other video. Okay. So that's spying and sensing and that's a huge part of the future of how space will be used by militaries. The other is an early warning system. The US, China, and Russia, and to a limited degree other countries like India and France, have satellites to just keep an eye on the missile sites of their enemies looking for something like this, a missile being launched. These satellites are an early warning system that can tell the people back on Earth that something's coming their way so that they can shoot it down before it gets too close. Now, quick accuracy caveat here. We've had this tech for a really long time, but it's kind of outdated and it doesn't have the capability to look for like hypersonic missiles and all of these things. So, the US has this space development agency that just sent up a new generation of satellites with the vision of creating a big constellation of hundreds of small satellites that surround the globe in low Earth orbit and constantly monitor for the heat signature of a missile launch. The third thing is GPS, the ability to just know where you are and to have a way to not have to use a map and compass uh when you navigate. And then of course there's potentially the most valuable thing for any military which is just communication. So we want to be able to use space to talk to each other. So you can see that space for these space fairing militaries is like a nervous system, an invisible nervous system that gives militaries the ability to see the whole world, to sense it, to communicate between it, and to make decisions. It's a really powerful capability. If your enemy knocks some of these out, the communication, the navigation, that could really hinder your ability to operate in a combat scenario. when you disrupt those, but we've seen indications of that in Ukraine. Munitions don't work right. Soldiers don't know where they are. Systems just don't know how to work. If you're a marine on a beach in an island in the Indoacific, you're getting out of math and compass, though. You're going to be storming those shores like your great-grandfathers did in Euima. It's a very different environment without GPS. And look, they're just kind of up here. Nothing's really protecting them. And this gets us to the moment of the video that you probably clicked on this for the weapons. According to a general at the US Space Force, there are already attacks happening in space every single day. The war in space has already begun. But these aren't like boom attacks, kinetic attacks. These aren't like things exploding yet. [Music] It's not just missiles shooting at satellites and blowing up satellites. It's things like GPS jamming and spoofing that effectively is a way to defeat a space capability. If you can't receive it, you can't use it. Jamming is a big one and you can do it from the ground. It's when an attacker uses an antenna to send a super loud radio signal that drowns out the original signal between the satellite and the ground station so a message can't get through. And then there's spoofing. Kind of a silly sounding name, where an attacker sends up a message to the satellite that throws it off course, tells it to do something it's not supposed to. You can render it effectively useless, at least for a time. Jamming and spoofing is very common. We actually know of locations that are doing this, that are committing these types of attacks, that have these capabilities. And then there's lasers. Yes, just as we all imagined when we hear the words space war, there are lasers. So, if it's trying to take pictures of space, if you point a laser at it, that's going to disrupt its ability to do that. So, it could be a temporary disruption or could be permanent depending on how strong that laser is. Then there's good old cyber attacks. Hack into the satellite software by sending malicious code to the satellite. You can either steal the data that's in the satellite. You can stop it from working. You can take control of it temporarily, or you could even just plant a little virus in the satellite and just have it sit there dormant until you need to activate it. So again, these are happening all of the time. We saw it in 2022, just an hour before Russia conducted its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They sent a bunch of cyber attacks to the satellites that were providing internet and communications to the Ukrainian troops. It went dark, which again in a wartime scenario is a big deal. One Ukrainian official described the attack as quote catastrophic. And China is working on a anti-satellite cyber weapon whose purpose is to quote seize control of a satellite, render it ineffective to support communications, weapons, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Basically, everything a satellite is good for, this Chinese weapon is just going to kind of wipe it out. Again, you don't have to blow the thing up to make it not useful anymore. Now, there's very little doubt in my mind that the United States doesn't have a similar, if not superior, weapon that does the same thing. We just don't know about it. But at least from my reporting, I haven't seen any evidence of that kind of weapon, but the US probably has one. In 2023, when the Vagner group attempted a coup in Russia, they first hacked the Russian satellite telecom system. That same year, Chinese hackers attacked Japan's space agency. These are the types of attacks that are happening every day. You need to show your adversary your capabilities. Hey, we can do this, which hopefully avoids an escalation in conflict. But it's also a way of just showing off, projecting power and in some cases trying to sabotage the capabilities of your adversary. The ability to disrupt maybe not even the satellite, but maybe the ground station, the ground infrastructure, which is just as key to be able to use it. If we can't operate space launch during a conflict, we can't replace satellites that get damaged or destroyed. So, a lot of things that don't really look like bombs going off, but they still have a chain that quickly leads to this degradation of our ability to use space when we need it. And the advantage of all these non-kinetic attacks is that they don't blow anything up and create a bunch of debris, which could hit another satellite and create a cascading effect that could be really, really bad. They are also kind of more subtle, deniable. They're not as escalatory. But the disadvantage is that they are reversible. They don't actually take the system out. They just kind of mess with it for a little bit. Okay, we've arrived to the blowing up part of the video. And I intentionally kind of put it here and didn't make it the full focus because even though it's a kind of like more sensational version of this story, these other capabilities, the non-kinetic stuff is actually the stuff that's happening right now. It is like the conflict and the war that is currently happening up there. and it's the most likely to continue. But we can't go on without talking about the kinetic stuff because countries are working on it. And in fact, we already have a lot of the capabilities to take out satellites. The first one is to actually just target the ground station. A satellite is not very useful if it can't communicate back down to the surface. Ukraine did this last year in Crimea. They attacked this Russian early warning satellite station. Another is by shooting a missile up into space to hit a satellite, which is something a lot of countries can do already. So, we've seen a lot of countries do that. The US has demonstrated that. We've seen China do it. We've seen India do it. Now, these aren't countries shooting other people's satellites. It's shooting their own satellites, like decommissioned satellites. It is the thing that you do to deter your enemy by being like, "We could blow up your satellite if we wanted to." This creates a lot of debris. The Russia test was in 2021 and it created debris that was at around the same altitude as the International Space Station. Uh what the Russians did today with these 1500 pieces of trackable orbital debris uh poses a risk not only to those astronauts, not only to those cosminauts, uh but to satellites, to the interests of all nations. Okay. And now we're getting to the kind of cutting edge stuff that we kind of technically can do, but it's like in its early stages, which is the ability for satellites that are up there to attack each other while they're up there. This is not Star Wars where everyone's zipping around and shooting at each other. It's kind of like if there was a bunch of cars driving around a racetrack at like 100 miles an hour. If you want to attack another one, you kind of have to drive up to it and attack it while you're going 100 miles an hour and put that in three dimensions and make it, you know, space and suddenly you've got satellite co-orbital attacks. You can maneuver in space. It just doesn't look like airplanes flying in the atmosphere. And so now we're seeing these big militaries develop capabilities to maneuver their satellites around in more and more sophisticated ways. So, China has demonstrated they can put a satellite into geostationary orbit. It was called SJ21. It's apparently tasked with cleaning up space junk. So, in January 2022, this Chinese satellite starts to break from just the boring old orbit and starts to do some crazy stuff. They start to go 3,000 km up and down from the orbit. They sync up with one of China's dead satellites and they grab onto it with a kind of like grappling hook robotic arm thing. They get back into orbit with the trash in hand and they eventually push it out into what's called graveyard orbit. I mean, we're looking at this on like an animation and it looks all simple and it's like, well, yeah, they just met up and he grabbed it and he like threw it away. Like, no, this is insane. Like the the physics and the maneuvering and the fuel. So demonstrating, you could say the ability to do very sophisticated maneuvers in orbit. No one's done something like that before. Those types of capabilities, those could also serve um a military purpose. The ability to grab onto a satellite and move it. One of the Space Force folks at the Pentagon characterized this as China practicing dog fighting in space. Dog fighting meaning like what airplanes do when they fight each other and chase each other, shoot each other down. They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to do onorbit space operations from one satellite to another. So, why would they do that? Don't know. They're testing. Are they showing off? Is this go back into the deterrence piece that we talked about earlier? It's hard to say what the messaging is of that. But what it it does show is that they're operating in an increasingly sophisticated way in space with their satellites around their own satellites, but still concerning. And then two, that they just don't seem to care as much about fuel use as we historically have. Being able to precisely maneuver to another satellite while you're in orbit doesn't just allow you to grab onto it with this claw machine looking thing. You can also do some other clever military things. For example, Chinese military researchers published a paper specking out a concept for a satellite bomb that you could theoretically deliver into the exhaust pipe of a satellite in orbit and just have it sit there. They're thinking about this stuff. Now, I'm making it sound like China is the only one who has the ability to maneuver. That's not true. The US can do this and so can Russia even. And in fact, last year, multiple Russian satellites got close to an American spy satellite and kind of surrounded it. The US complained and they eventually backed off. But like there's movement happening up there. One of these Russian satellites even was seen shooting something off. Like it didn't shoot at another satellite, but it shot it off into space. Russia swears this was perfectly peaceful. But so you could say like a projectile from Russian satellites. What is that test? Is that a test of an anti-satellite weapon? So effectively a projectile that could shoot from one satellite to another. Is it indicative of some other type of testing? We really don't know. I'm suspicious of anything Russia would be doing like that in lower Earth orbit. So I'm thinking weapons test. Um and even if that's not the intention, I still think that could serve as a weapon. A lot of these things look like civilian operations that can be used for kind of civilian or commercial purposes. But if things got real down here on Earth, those same capabilities could be flipped to be used as attacking weapons from one satellite to another. Now, the US has not acknowledged whether or not they have any of these kinds of weapons. They have come out and said that they could develop these types of weapons if they wanted to, but they don't acknowledge any programs with co-orbital anti-satellite weaponry. But knowing what we know about this stuff, we can assume, or at least I assume, that the US probably has really sophisticated capacity for satellite onsatellite attacks. We just don't really know about [Music] it. One thing we do know about kind of is this puppy. I mean, this thing looks like Space Wars. Little mini space shuttle thing. Much to my disappointment, this thing is not just zipping around in space like in Star Wars. It is also a satellite that is just going around doing the like falling through space thing. This space plane is an experimental aircraft that's working on all kinds of crazy new tech including capturing solar power from the sun and then converting that into like highowered microwaves and once again lasers. That could happen too. Lasers and microwaves. That's space wars. So, the US space plane has been up there 4,000 days worth of experimenting in space, much of it very confidential. China's also got this sort of space drone that they're doing similar stuff with. And let me just pause and remind you that a lot of this stuff that we're doing now was thought up decades ago. Like during the Cold War, people were thinking of crazy ideas. There was actually a program that was nicknamed Star Wars Rods from God. The thing that we started the video with with the rods going down to Earth. Like that was thought up during the Cold War. A lot of this stuff was like conceived during that time. It was too expensive and impractical. But they were thinking of this stuff. One of the programs during that time was called Brilliant Pebbles. And it was a missile defense shield idea. You put a bunch of satellites up into space and those satellites are just going around Earth waiting and waiting and waiting. And the moment that your enemy like launches a rocket towards you, these satellites go down and they shoot the rocket down and you're safe. Brilliant Pebbles. Incredibly expensive and complicated. in the 80s. But guess what? A couple months ago, Donald Trump takes office, Elon Musk by his side, and guess what's back on the agenda? Brilliant Pebbles. Now rebranded as America's Iron Dome, aka Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield. And not surprisingly, Elon Musk is the front runner to build the Golden Dome Missile Shield. Yeah, that makes sense. Right now, there are no active weapons in space like blow things up weapons. this goes forward, there will be missiles in space that again are there for defense, but could easily be turned a little bit this way and be turned into a weapon to take out another satellite. And then there's nukes. Man, this one freaks me out. So, back in the Cold War, there was talk of putting a nuclear weapon in orbit and just having it there. I guess the crazy idea was like, are people going to have weapons stationed in space, then you drop on Earth, but this was the Cold War. Crazy ideas were the name of the game. Soviet Union and the United States both put nukes super high up into the atmosphere and detonated them just to see what would happen. Kind of testing this idea out. And sure enough, it completely obliterated a huge portion of the satellites that were going around Earth at the time. There weren't a ton back then, but it did some real damage. not because of an explosion, but because of an electromagnetic pulse, the radiation that goes in and kind of messes with the electronics of these orbiting satellites. So, not good. And in fact, so not good that the Soviet Union, the United States decided to sign a an agreement where they say, "We promise not to do any nukes or weapons of mass destruction in space or at least from orbit. We we still send ICBMs with nuclear warheads into space to then go down." But having them in orbit all of the time was just a little too risky. They do have limits. It turns out we are taking the first firm step toward keeping outer space free forever from the implements of war. And that's been kind of our one big treaty in governing weapons in outer space. We don't really have an international framework around this. And in fact, that very treaty is now being tested. Russia is developing a nuclear weapon in space. In a big drama that occurred last year, US intel came out that said that Russia actually has the capability to put a nuke in space. And for a hot minute, there were people saying that there is a nuclear weapon in orbit that Russia has launched. We think Russia has put a nuclear device in orbit. Big freakout. Super scary. Turns out there wasn't a nuclear weapon in space, but there was a weird Russian satellite that was in graveyard orbit, but it was active. It was kind of doing some weird stuff. And the US military insisted that this was and is a part of a program that Russia has to eventually put a nuclear warhead in orbit. Some type of anti-satellite nuclear capability, nuclear weapon that would be based in space. That's what the allegation is. If we are unable to convince them otherwise to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space, which would be a indiscriminate weapon, doesn't have national boundaries, doesn't determine between military satellites, civilian satellites or commercial satellites. And how do we know that they have this? And here's where you have me again at a disadvantage. I'd be happy to have this conversation at classified session. So, we don't know. We are concerned about it. The department and the entire administration and I know this Congress is taking this deadly seriously. So, you'd say, "Well, wow. Would Russia really do that? I think you know what has happened though is that Russia is the declining space power. They're driving around a 1989 Buick. It's still working. It's reliable. It's testament to Soviet engineers that the systems work as well as they do. They're not launching new stuff. They're not making new technology. Now, Russia flatly denies that they're doing this. And in fact, Putin has come out and said he doesn't want an arms race in space. And of course, he doesn't. Russia is a declining space power. But he's framing it as kind of this moralistic high ground of saying we don't want an arms race in space. But the US is like, "No, no, no, Putin. We see you. You're developing a nuclear weapon to put into space to get the ultimate leverage over the rest of us because we are surpassing you." So the next month, April 2024, everyone's at the UN. It's the UN Security Council, and the US with Japan puts out this resolution that says, "Why don't we all sign a promise that we want to reaffirm that treaty that says no WMD or nukes in space? Everyone, let's just reaffirm it." And guess what? Russia vetos the resolution. And boom, the US is like, "Gotcha. We know that you're actually not serious about this. You want to put a nuke in space. Why didn't you sign this resolution?" Why, if you are following the rules, would you not support a resolution that reaffirms them? What could you possibly be hiding? So then in a kind of wild defensive gambit in geopolitics, Russia drafts their own resolution that says, "We want to ban all weapons in space, quote, for all time." They're like, "We don't want to just reaffirm the old treaty. We want to ban all weapons in space. Stop the arms race." And guess what? The US vetoed this and now Russia is like, "Ha, now you are the one who wants to weaponize space. We said we want to ban it for all time and you vetoed it." I'm painting this picture because I want you to see that there is a tense set of negotiations that are heating up about what do we do with weapons in space? Where do we pump the brakes? And so far, the countries can't quite agree. And so, the status quo of it being the Wild West up there continues. And boy, do I hope that that changes soon because in my opinion, there is no reason why we can't cooperate up there. It's space. It's not land and territory and borders and ethnic identities and language. It is space. And it is my hope that even though space is going to become a bigger, more crowded, more militarized place, these countries can figure out a way to talk to each other and put on some brakes on how far they're willing to go to weaponize all of this. because weaponizing it doesn't actually help any of us. So, until these countries can come to the table and actually agree on something, stop playing these mind games, it's going to continue to be this arms race. China will continue to catch up to the US and their space capabilities. Elon Musk will continue to get very rich off of all of this. The US will forge ahead with all of its secretive capabilities that we'll someday learn about. And space up there with all those satellites will certainly be a big part of any future conflict. [Music] [Applause] Hey, thanks for watching. I hope it was a useful video for you. Um, do you know that we have two other channels? We are building a media company with a lot more channels just like this. Search party covers geopolitics and sports and is run by Sam Ellis. And the channel we just launched in December is run by my friend Kristoff. He launched a show called Tunnel Vision that is just how do you even describe how cool Tunnel Vision is? I mean, you'll see if you go over it. But make sure to go check out those channels. There's a lot of amazing work being done over there. And you probably will like it if you like this stuff. So, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Oh, and we also have merch. Bye. 5 4 3 2 1 [Music]