Could a first mover lock everyone out of outer space?

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Abstract

In this piece, we ask whether a first mover could prevent others from accessing outer space, or at least raise the cost of doing so. If this is possible, by force or otherwise, they would have a way to cement their lead.

We define two broad kinds of lock-out: soft and hard.

By soft lock-out, we mean capturing scarce, non-substitutable assets and denying them to rivals, which raises their cost of entry into the space industry. We think this could help a first mover entrench their early lead, making it more difficult for followers to catch up. In particular, the main strategies we consider are excluding rivals from orbital bands by occupying them with data centres or claiming the best sites on the Moon. We estimate a first mover could plausibly make a comparable presence in space ~$49–73B more expensive, a premium of roughly 5–7% on a ~$1 trillion build, which is small given the stakes. Soft lock-out falls far short of completely excluding later entrants from the space industry.

By hard lock-out, we mean using force to prevent followers from accessing space. The mechanism we focus on is space-based interceptors that destroy rockets as they launch from Earth. Using existing launch and hardware costs, we estimate a first mover could set up a system to attempt hard lock-out with interceptors for ~$150–390B (~$0.6–1.6T on a 20-year horizon) sized against today’s fixed launch sites. These costs are accessible to the US, which is already pursuing a similarly capable system for missile defence (estimated at ~$1.2T over a 20-year horizon).

Rivals could respond by overwhelming the interceptors with rapid launches, destroying them with anti-satellite weapons, or threatening war on Earth. If they can maintain lock-out while supporting the development of a space industry into an industrial explosion, then they could eventually outgrow the world and achieve a decisive strategic advantage. Overall, we think there’s a ~85% chance that space-side growth compounds into a big but recoverable lead for the first mover, with lock-out adding to it at the margin, and a ~5% chance that it enables a decisive strategic advantage.

Introduction

An intelligence explosion could trigger a wave of space activity, largely through autonomous operations and robotics. This motivated our concern that first movers who can make productive use of space resources may be able to seize control of the long-term future. In particular, we are interested in whether an early lead in space could confer a decisive strategic advantage (DSA): an advantage sufficient to achieve complete domination over everyone else without facing effective opposition.

This is a very high bar. The balance of power in space could just reflect the existing balance of power on Earth. Indeed, we would call this the baseline case: that space is strategically important but does not offer anyone a decisive strategic advantage because early space activity¹ is dominated by pre-existing terrestrial power asymmetries. However, in this piece, we investigate new technological developments and military strategies that could move us off this baseline.

We focus on lock-out: a first mover, or leader, securing access to space while denying it to rivals. Launch from Earth is the chokepoint that would make this possible, and a leader that held it would have exclusive access to practically unlimited resources. This piece asks whether such a lock-out is possible, by force or otherwise, and whether it would be decisive. There are other plausible pathways to a DSA through space expansion, but we focus on lock-out because we think it is the most concrete and concerning.²

In the conclusion we distinguish three cases: the baseline case above; a serious case, in which space-side growth compounds and lock-out adds to a lead that a well-resourced follower could still recover; and a decisive case, in which hard lock-out confers a DSA. We end up placing ~10% of our probability in the baseline case, ~85% in the serious case and ~5% in the decisive case.

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1. The space industry currently represents ~0.6% of the global economy, driven by various support services like communications, remote sensing, and navigation. Space systems are also a backbone of modern military activity. There are also various emerging industries in space that are estimated to be sizeable markets, like space mining (~$3B), in-space manufacturing (~$1.5B), and space-based solar power (~$790M), and others that are attracting major capital, like orbital data centres (contributing to SpaceX's $75B IPO).

2. Dolman’s Astropolitik argued in 2002 that control of Earth orbit converts into terrestrial dominance. But nothing like the lock-out story we describe here has ever been priced as far as we know. Boost-phase interceptor constellations themselves have been costed many times (e.g. by the US Congressional Budget Office).