Review of 'Red Moon Rising'

A new book by Greg Autry and Peter Navarro paints a stark picture of the challenged posed by Chinese space ambitions.

I recall when China placed its first man in space in 2003 aboard Shenzhou 5, there was a lot of talk of a coming US-China space race - not least because at the time of that mission, NASA was still reeling from the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which perhaps fed into the perception that the US was a declining space power and China a rising one. Despite the recovery of the American space program from that low point, and the triumphs of SpaceX, there to this day remains in some quarters a sense of threat.

Red Moon Rising is an attempt to characterise this threat in specific terms - what China is getting better at in the space domain, what the US is not doing so well, and what the consequences could be if the free world falters and space ends up, as President Kennedy warned in his famous 1962 Rice University address, “governed by a hostile flag of conquest”.

The authors, Greg Autry and Peter Navarro, presumably would like to stir a policy response as robust as Kennedy’s call to arms did. Autry is a space policy expert who server on the Trump transition team, and Navarro an economist who also served under that administration where they both were involved in the decision to launch the Artemis program to send Americans back to the Moon. They are well qualified to speak on this subject and even though they are affiliated with one side of the US political spectrum, there is no partisan axe grinding going on here. It is purely about their view on the national interest.

I would recommend this book for those wanting to learn about current strategic thinking in US-China space competition. I make some criticisms below, but that is simply because disagreement is more interesting than agreement. I broadly agree with the thesis of the book, that we are on the cusp of a clash of civilisations in space. It is aimed at a general audience, so readers here might find some of the introductions to space technology a bit basic - but it is still a worthwhile read for what it adds to the debate.

You can find the book on Amazon here.

Space Pearl Harbour

The book opens with a description of the damage that could be inflicted by a surprise EMP attack on the United States. No doubt such an attack would be devastating, and in the short term no doubt cripple the US. What this threat lacks though is any perspective from the attacker - why would China do this?

The spectre of another Pearl Harbour is perhaps useful to drum up support for military projects in Washington - but the actual historical attack was, from a strategic perspective, a disaster that the Japanese Empire was forced into out of desperation. Any short term tactical advantages it gave them in the Pacific were far outweighed by the degree to which it unified and mobilised American society, and committed them to total war until the end.

China is not desperate. They aren’t months from a collapse of their navy and their economy, as the Japanese were in late 1941 due to the oil embargo. Modern revisionist powers like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea seem to prefer brinkmanship and slowly chipping away at the international order. They don’t provide such stark inciting events that would bring the full force of the global hegemon against them. China will probably continue to take aggressive actions to improve their strategic position, but instigating a direct war with the US by killing thousands of Americans would serve no purpose.

It is useful to remind readers how vulnerable the US is to space based attack, compared to other domains in which it is practically untouchable by peer adversaries. But I feel that more credible scenarios could do this. Fortunately, the book covers such things.

The Struggle for Control

The subsequent chapters go over many different space capabilities - Earth observation, communications, navigation - and explains how China could use these capabilities aggressively. They mention that the war in Ukraine has shown how much can be done by a power such as the US lending its space capabilities to a friendly force. China doing something comparable and providing powerful space based capabilities to some smaller power or non-state actor that the West ends up in conflict with seems like a bigger risk than a direct attack.

One thing I will take exception with is the viability of Helium-3 as a resource to drive space development and potentially conflict in space. I just don’t see it being a resource in our lifetimes - not only because we have got several generations of fusion reactors to get through before we can use it, but also because if it becomes an in demand commodity on Earth it isn’t that hard to make relative to importing it from the Moon. It is the decay product of tritium, which is made by neutron activation of deuterium from seawater, and this is how it is currently manufactured. While this process is expensive, so is going to the Moon and sifting it out of tonnes of rocks per gram of material. I am yet to be convinced of the case for doing it. China has expressed an intention to mine Helium-3, but this may be just talk.

On the matter of anti-satellite weapons, the authors are correct to raise the alarm on the matter - I myself have done so in these pages - but I think this threat can be deterred in the case of China. An aspiration to become the dominant space power in 20 years is not compatible with shredding Earth orbit with a potential Kessler syndrome. The Chinese seem to realise this and have conducted more recent ASAT tests at lower, and thus safer, altitudes. It is Russia that really concerns me with such weapons because they are a declining space power instead of a rising one, and could potentially gain a relative advantage by blanking out the space domain. Arguably the approach here should be to work with China to deter Russia from doing this or from conducting more ASAT tests that would pose risk to space assets.

The book covers a huge number of aspects of space in a relatively brief section, much more than I have mentioned here, and is likely to spark off more strategic discussion of this type.

The Clash of Civilisations

My main concern, one that is reflected in the later part of this book, is the long term trajectory of human civilisation. When we expand out into the solar system, will the society spawned mostly reflect our values, or some other set of values?

The Outer Space Treaty comes in for a bashing here, unsurprisingly as it is not popular with many people interested in space policy. The authors argue that it is even worse than most suspect, because China cannot be trusted to abide by it and thus it pointlessly ties the hands of the US and its allies in this great contest. Further evidence of their perfidy is presented in the form of their disregard for range safety when disposing of their rocket stages - something that most other space powers are scrupulously careful about.

The distrust of China is understandable given, for instance, its actions in the South China Sea and its breach of agreements on Hong Kong. But it seems unlikely that Beijing views the US as any more trustworthy. Paranoia and mistrust rarely unidirectional. I am not attempting to ‘both sides’ issues here - but it is important to always bear in mind that the adversary never sees themselves as a villain.

The authors are also skeptical of international organisations such as the UN as a means to resolve competing national interests in space, and I am inclined to agree. It was national competition that bought down the USSR, and it was inter-state war that destroyed Nazi Germany. The ideals of permanent cooperation among all nations seem mostly helpful towards tyrants, as it places them on the same level in such organisations as liberal democracies and thus legitimises them. There will be no meaningful or useful “United Federation of Planets” and so Autry and Navarro are probably right to prefer an approach of peace through superior firepower.

Recommendations

The book summarises each chapter and provides policy recommendations - one which I will highlight here is that the US should expect its free world allies to pay a lot more. As a citizen of the UK, I definitely agree.

A lot of the issues raised in the book about western deficiencies are a downstream result of peculiarities around US space policy making. The outsized role of the US in space makes these near universal problems, and having more robust allies may dilute their impact. Were the UK to have a space agency whose size relative to NASA were the same as the relative sizes of our economies, the UKSA would have ten times its current budget and be spending almost as much as the entire European Space Agency does. If this complaint about allies letting the side down gets elevated to decision makers in the US, I will certainly be doing my best to apply pressure from this end as well (and I know others in Europe who feel the same). Red Moon Rising assumes that control of space comes down to a binary between US and Chinese control, and unless other nations step up soon and put resources into the endeavour themselves, that will remain accurate.

Their chief recommendation though, is to ensure that the US occupies the Moon permanently before China does - so that the US is not subject to whatever rules China imposes by being the first mover there. Perhaps some policy wonks in Beijing are thinking the exact reverse of this right at this moment. A classic security dilemma.

And therein lies probably my main complaint about this book - the adversary is a poorly characterised evil empire. An all out shooting war with China is unlikely, and so even taking an aggressive posture towards them in the name of freedom ultimately ends with them coming to the bargaining table on Western terms. That’s great - but what do they want? Autry and Navarro describe the PRC as having a “neofascist political model and state-capitalist economic system” but I don’t think that is accurate. “Fascism” is a set of specific political doctrines (not just a derogatory term for authoritarianism) that doesn’t really fit China, and “state capitalism” is a term Trotskyites came up with to discredit all the states that were practicing Not Real Communism™ so it doesn’t apply unless you’re railing at Deng Xiaoping for being a revisionist. China is still most accurately described as a socialist or communist state, despite the presence of Coca-Cola and Gucci, as argued here by someone with good knowledge of the country.

Of course, for what this book is attempting to accomplish, this detail might not be necessary. You needn’t be familiar with the ins and outs of Jim Jones’ theology to know you wouldn’t want to be part of his church. The target audience in the US likely doesn’t need to be convinced that the American system is better than the Chinese one. And if a civilisation can maintain such a confidence in itself, it will surely fight for its place in the stars.

Red Moon Rising is available now from Amazon.

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