Laura Grego wasn’t smiling when she told me we are living inside a doomsday system. It was late May. We were in a tent on the Welsh border, heat pressing down, the air thick with the smell of dry grass and urgency. Grego, a physicist turned anti-nuclear activist, said something I haven’t been able to shake: Most people don’t know what we’ve done in the sky.
She’s not wrong. The average person’s view of space is still stuck in the 1970s—stars, wonder, occasional streaks. But that’s over. SpaceX has just asked regulators for permission to launch one million satellites. Imagine that. A layer of artificial stars that never fades. It’s not science fiction anymore. It’s paperwork.
The Hidden Military Backbone
Grego’s career is a study in contradictions. She’s a physicist who looked for the hardest problem she could find in college because she wanted her time to matter. Then she went into observational cosmology. Then she ended up at the Union of Concerned Sciences, working to stop governments from treating science like a weapon. She sees herself in the lineage of Leo Szilard—the guy who tried to warn politicians not to drop the atomic bomb.
The goal? Stop the misuse of science. The method? Irritating people in power.
Take “space weapons.” When George W. Bush was in office, Grego had to explain that the movies were wrong. You can’t have Marines zip around space firing lasers. It doesn’t work. Physics is a harsh critic of Hollywood.
Now, we’ve got a new administration that treats war like a video game. The rules? Made up as they go. The danger? Real.
Here’s the thing about space: it’s always been military. Sputnik 1 in 1957 wasn’t just a beep. It was a message. We are technologically superior. Checkmate. The rockets that carry satellites into orbit are barely disguised ballistic missiles. Once you build a rocket that can go up, you can flip it down. Fast.
“ICBMs, if you’re sending them from one country to another, pop up above the atmosphere in minutes. They spend most of their time in the same zone as satellites. Space is the military zone.”
We forget how close space actually is. The Kármán line is just 100 km up. That’s the distance from London to Portsmouth. Not far. Once you’re up there, you’re not in airspace. You’re in a high-speed orbital track. And militaries have loved that since day one. Overflights. Spying. Checking if the other guy is keeping his word on arms treaties.
The Vulnerability of the Sky
Our entire modern life runs on satellites. GPS. Banking. Weather. Drone warfare. All of it. And those satellites are largely undefended.
This creates a terrifying asymmetry. You have one of the most powerful militaries in the history of the world, relying on a handful of machines floating in the void that anyone with enough juice can jam, spoof, or blind.
Earlier this month, Russia allegedly tried to jam Starlink signals to mess with Ukrainian drones. Not shoot them down. Just blind them. It’s a cheap, effective way to break the link between the battlefield and the sky.
No one has blown up another country’s satellite yet. That line hasn’t been crossed. But everyone is testing the ways to do it without creating debris. Want to stop a rival satellite? Don’t shoot it. That creates shrapnel. Just fly next to it. Make it spin. Spray it with paint. Blast it with lasers. Render it useless. Clean. Quiet. And terrifying.
The Doomsday System Explained
Then there’s the nuclear piece. This is where Grego’s voice drops.
Netflix’s A House of Dynamite got it right. The Pentagon hated it. They claimed the movie said our missile defense was less than 60% accurate. Grego confirmed that. It’s true. The tests fail more often than they succeed. But the movie also portrayed a scenario where an enemy launches a single, naked missile with no tricks. Unrealistic.
The realistic part? The timeline.
Here is how it works:
* An ICBM is launched.
* It spends most of its 30-minute flight in space.
* US satellites detect the launch within minutes.
* The President is given less than 10 minutes to act.
This is the mutually assured destruction balance. The key is “use it or lose it.” If you don’t launch your nukes in those 10 minutes, the incoming missile might destroy your silos on the ground. You’ll be left unarmed. So you have to fire. Now. Before it’s too late.
It’s a system built on panic. On imperfect humans making split-second decisions based on incomplete data.
“If the president launches a counterattack—even if the first was an accident—the other side retaliates,” Grego says. “That’s a civilization-ending day.”
She laughs when she says it. She has to. It’s hysterical. But she’s right. We have built a doomsday machine that requires constant vigilance and zero room for error. And we are still building it.
The Race to Claim the Heavens
It’s not just governments. It’s companies.
SpaceX is leading the charge. Starlink already connects internet in 160 countries. But the IPO hype isn’t about internet. It’s about space-based data centers. Putting server farms in the vacuum. Cooling is hard, sure, but the potential is massive. Musk wants a Mars colony. He wants control.
Grego points to the small print in Starlink’s user agreement. For services in Earth orbit or around the Moon? Texas law applies. For Mars? No Earth government has authority. It’s settled by “self-governing principles” established when Mars is settled.
That’s not a legal framework. That’s a claim. A de facto independence before the first boot hits the red dust.
Is this appropriation? The Outer Space Treaty of 1966 says no nation can claim a celestial body. But it says nothing about claiming resources or orbital slots. If you put a million satellites in a specific orbit, you’ve essentially claimed that corridor. You’ve changed the landscape. You’ve made it impossible for others to enter without permission.
We are racing to the Moon again. Not because we love science this time. But because the South Pole has water ice and near-perpetual sunlight. Strategic resources. And whoever builds first, owns the ground.
The Colonial Mindset in Orbit
Grego is worried. She sees the same extractive colonialist mindset playing out in space. On Earth, we’ve had centuries to argue about borders, rights, and sustainability. In space? We have minutes. The commercial momentum is faster than the law.
We are letting the most powerful tech billionaire rewrite the sky before we’ve even agreed on what the sky means.
“A civilisational move,” a recent article called the Artemis missions. The public is audience only. We’re not participating. We’re just watching.
If we don’t slow down, if we don’t ask the hard questions, we’re going to repeat our worst mistakes among the stars. We’re going to bring the same greed, the same secrecy, the same nuclear paranoia into the void.
We can dismantle the doomsday system. We know how. We’ve just chosen not to.
And as for Mars?
It’s not coming soon. But the intent is printed right there in the terms of service. Ready for whoever gets there first. And that’s a future worth fighting against.
