Space is the new frontier of geopolitics

From the moment early humans carved boats to cross rivers and oceans, the drive to master nature and overcome its limits have propelled our greatest leaps. That same spirit and ambition are now focussed on space – the next great frontier for humanity to cross. In reaching beyond Earth, we are not just defying gravity – we’re also continuing a timeless quest to turn the unknown into the known.

Last month, this ambition took a significant step forward when Amazon’s Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the first 27 satellites of what the company plans to be more than 3,000. This marked the start of Project Kuiper, whose goal is to expand internet access to the roughly three billion people worldwide currently without it.

Project Kuiper is ambitious and inspirational, yet Amazon is not the only private venture seeking to reach the stars. In fact, it is playing catch-up to its main rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and its satellite branch, Starlink, which already has more than 7,000 flat, car-width satellites in Earth’s orbit and plans to add some 30,000 more.

This competition between two of the world’s wealthiest billionaires – Amazon chair Jeff Bezos and Musk – divides opinion, particularly when it comes to their motivations. Clearly, communications satellites are big business. Starlink has more than five million customers, generating $6.5 billion in annual recurring revenue. Bezos is investing $20 billion to get a piece of the action.

But it would be extremely cynical to regard this simply as a pissing-contest between two billionaires. There is much more at stake than mere profits or egos, and who can boast the biggest rocket booster (which Musk is winning hands-down at present). Space exploration might be a business opportunity, but it has also become the new frontier of geopolitics.

For evidence of this, we need only to observe how many nations are clambering to establish themselves in space. Today, satellites from 91 countries orbit the earth, compared with just 14 at the turn of the century. When the first Starlink satellites were launched in May 2019, there were barely 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth. Now there are more than 12,000 – a number set to dramatically increase as China realises its Qianfan (‘thousand sails’) mega-constellation, which sent its first satellites into orbit at the beginning of last year. It has 197 satellites in operation, with plans for 14,000 by 2030.

The speed of China’s rise as a space-faring nation has been dizzying. Beijing only sent its first astronaut into orbit in 2003, more than four decades after the Soviet Union and America. In 2021, the Tianwen-1 (‘Heavenly Questions’) mission drove a rover around the surface of Mars. In May 2024, China became the first country to return samples from the ‘far side’ of the Moon. Although a late entrant into the space race, China is already at the forefront of space-based communications infrastructure. If recent developments are anything to go by, it could redefine how the world accesses high-speed internet and processes satellite imagery.

Of course, the new space race isn’t just about improving internet speed in less-developed parts of the world. As The Times recently reported, the US, China and Russia believe the ‘space assets’ of adversaries could be used to monitor troop deployments in the event of a major war breaking out. A US colonel has described Beijing’s satellite network as a ‘kill web’, providing it with potential hypersonic missile targets. As a result, the US is also developing space ‘weapons’ that would protect Western satellites if they came under attack.

There is no doubt that, for now at least, America still leads the space race. But the ultimate victor will need more than ingenuity and technological capability. Above all, it is a question of which nation has the resilience, self-belief and overarching sense of purpose to see it through.

Does the US still have the self-belief it once had as a nation? America won the Cold War-era space race, despite tearing itself apart over the Vietnam War for most of it. Yet as Henry Kissinger later noted, America may have been divided in this period, but the national interest was not ‘in itself a subject of debate’. There was a common belief that America at least had a national interest.

Today, that is very much in doubt. America increasingly lacks any sense of common, national purpose. A culture war rages against the Founding Fathers, national monuments and Western civilisation more broadly. To seriously compete in the space race today, without the full support of most Americans, will be very difficult.

For now, America is lucky to have billionaires like Musk and Bezos who aspire to conquer space. But the frontier it needs to conquer to stay ahead is far closer to Earth.

Dr Norman Lewis is a writer and visiting research fellow at MCC Brussels. His Substack is What a Piece of Work is Man!.