A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The United States is operating weapons in space. Now, what sounds like science fiction was confirmed by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink earlier this week. It was the first public acknowledgment of this capability by a U.S. military official. Now Meink did not specify what type of weapons the U.S. has in orbit, only saying that the government is willing to use them to defend American troops. For more on this, we've called Laura Grego. She's a space security expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Laura, what kind of a weapon you think this might be?
LAURA GREGO: Well, we don't know. We didn't get any details. But if the weapon is in space, it most likely is a type of satellite that can get itself up close to another satellite that's not actively helping it do that. And once you get close, there's lots of things you could do. You could interfere with its communications. You could spray paint it. You could set it spinning. There's all sorts of things that you could do. Probably not something that would blow it up or destroy it.
MARTÍNEZ: Could they have dusted off President Ronald Reagan's old "Star Wars" program, the space-based missile defense system that was intended to defend against Soviet missile attacks?
GREGO: Well, that's not what this program is, but that is actually...
MARTÍNEZ: OK.
GREGO: ...What's happening. The President's Golden Dome program has proposed to put space-based interceptors into space, and that would be quite a sea change in the number of weapons that would be in space as proposed. While they're defensive, they could also be used against other satellites. So that is definitely a "Back To The Future" moment.
MARTÍNEZ: How significant is it, Laura, that the U.S. has weapons in space?
GREGO: Well, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, of which almost every country in the world is a signatory, sets the broad strokes for our operations in space. And it says space is for peaceful purposes and the province of all humankind, and that we shouldn't interfere with other countries' peaceful uses of it.
At the same time, space has - while most of us think about space as something for wonder, and space provides a lot of great commercial and economic capabilities, space is also really important from a military standpoint. It's the backbone of modern militaries. And so the competition we see on the Earth is also reflected in space. And that's one reason why militaries have been seeking ways to deny the use of space to others. And while this has been going on for a while, the U.S. military has been famously secretive about its operations in space. So admitting that this is something that they're doing is something new.
MARTÍNEZ: Laura, in 1957, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson famously declared, what American wants to go to bed at night by the light of a communist moon? So publicly, I think that effectively got the space race going between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. So when we think back to Meink's admission here, is this the start of some other kind of space race in the world?
GREGO: Well, A, we've been heading towards a military space arms race for a while. That's not new. That starting gun happened some years ago, but I think Meink's announcement may have told the runners to pick up the pace. And now we've found ourselves in a more overt competition that we'll have to think about how best to manage to secure our future in space.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. Laura Grego is a space security expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Laura, thanks.
GREGO: Thank you.
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