The Real Star Wars

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This episode is supported by The Great Courses Plus.

Outer space, used and shared peacefully, offers incredible benefits to humanity in communication, science, and soon resource gathering and even settlement. But there are some who eye the heavens with distinctly... Unpeaceful, Even Warlike Motives.

The decades directly following World War II were a time of optimism in many ways. Industrialization was finally improving the quality of life for a lot of us. Science was making incredible bounds, and our sights were set on the stars. It seemed to many that we were on a trajectory to a space fairing technological utopia. The United Federation of Planets was just around the corner.

But the possibility of a much darker space age also loomed. One in which the space around the Earth became highly militarized and, in fact, massively weaponized. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. They also tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile, ICBM. The space race had begun, and it inspired some incredible advances in science and exploration, culminating in the moon landing in 1969

It also inspired a race to win the military advantage of low Earth orbit. By the early 60s, the United States and the USSR were regularly launching satellites of different types and rapidly accumulating increasingly advanced ICBMs. Those ICBMs were the first space weaponry. While they don't actually enter orbit, they exceed the altitudes of most low Earth orbit satellites, hitting around 1,200 kilometers at the peak of their trajectories. Despite definitely being in space, these are called suborbital trajectories because they don't actually reach orbital velocity. Ballistic means that most of the journey is unpowered. ICBMs follow the parabolic path dictated by gravity when they're between an initial boost phase and an optional final guided phase. ICBM technology quickly developed to the point that a single missile could deliver multiple nuclear warheads several thousand kilometers away in a half hour.

One Soviet program, the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, actually did enter true orbit and would allow multiple warheads to be delivered anywhere in the world from any direction.

As the arms race proceeded, both superpowers also turned to space to defend against this rising existential threat. Reconnaissance satellites, Spysats in particular, provided a level of intelligence gathering previously impossible across the iron curtain. This was really the only effective way to monitor the rapid proliferation of launch facilities.

Those early Spysats came long before digital cameras, and so film canisters were ejected by the satellites and retrieved either on the surface or in mid-parachute descent. The Soviets did build one spy satellite that contained actual spies. These were the Almaz space stations, crews of two to three cosmonauts slash peeping toms could develop film on board for rapid response to anything they spotted. Only two of these were ever actually crewed for brief periods between 74 and 77 The first Almaz station, Salyut-3, was also the very first weaponized satellite. It was equipped with a 23 millimeter autocannon designed to defend against enemy anti-satellite measures. It was only ever fired once as a test. But if we're talking about satellite weapons platforms, we should talk about Star Wars. And by that, I mean the Strategic Defense Initiative, announced by Ronald Reagan in 1983 It was an attempt to break the stalemate of the arms race and transcend the dubious security of mutually assured destruction by vastly increasing the United States missile defense capabilities. It included much-expanded surface-launch anti-ballistic missile ABM networks, but also, get this, an atomic bomb-powered X-ray laser satellite. This was the Excalibur program and it very nearly saw the launch of what could only be described as a space-based superweapon. A quick review on lasers. They work by exciting electrons in a substance to high-energy states, then by passing electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength tuned to an energy level transition in that substance, stimulated emission can occur. The excited electron releases its energy as a photon that exactly matches the phase and direction of the seed photon. This produces a beam of coherent light, making it possible to deliver very large intensities in very narrow beams.