Russia’s Arming For Space War I, Targeting SpaceX Satellite Systems

As Russia deploys advanced fighter-bombers and missiles in its battle to obliterate SpaceX Starlink terminals across Ukraine, it is also developing an arsenal of weaponry that might be aimed at winning an all-out Space War I with the West, says a leading space defense scholar in Washington, D.C.

Following a barrage of threats – fired off by Vladimir Putin’s lieutenants at UN outposts in Geneva and New York – to shoot down Western satellites aiding Ukraine, Moscow is testing its Nudol anti-satellite missile, which has already been launched to blast a Soviet-era spacecraft in low Earth orbit, and could in theory likewise smash into any of SpaceX’s 7000 satellites, says Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Secure World Foundation.

Samson, one of the world’s leading experts on space security and space arms, tells me in an interview that the Russia defense ministry might be considering arming these Nudol ASATs with nuclear warheads, but adds that the evidence is not conclusive.

In an extensive chronicle of the latest advances across the world’s competing space weapons programs that Samson co-authored, she says: “Depictions of the Nudol transporter-erector-launcher have features … typically associated with nuclear-armed missiles.”

The Russian defense complex producing the direct ascent missile has pitched the Nudol as a potential threat to every U.S. spacecraft in low Earth orbit, Samson reveals in the report.

Spacecraft within the Nudol’s range would include everything from the colossal International Space Station (ISS) to the SpaceX Starlink satellites beaming broadband connections to besieged Ukrainians and the Planet Labs imagery spacecraft that produce astounding high-resolution photographs charting the movement of Russian tanks and missile brigades during their invasion.

Samson adds in the report, “Global Counterspace Capabilities 2025,” that the Soviet Russian defense ministry fielded a similar nuclear-tipped interceptor, which NATO called “Gorgon,” as part of Moscow’s missile defense system during the twilight era of the Soviet Union.

If the Kremlin’s weapons specialists are racing to develop new nuclear warheads for the Nudols, that could mark the second class of atomic arms delivery systems that Russia is working on for potential space wars of the future with the West.

Since the White House revealed last year that American intelligence agencies had discovered a top-secret Russian project to produce nuclear-armed spacecraft that would perpetually stalk Western satellites in low Earth orbit, there have been no signs the Kremlin has abandoned that quest.

Although President Putin has denied the existence of this clandestine project, the U.S. called him out by introducing a resolution in the UN Security Council last April calling on all the nations of the world to reaffirm allegiance to the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on stationing nuclear weapons in orbit.

Despite Moscow’s ratification of that treaty, Putin’s emissary at the UN abruptly vetoed the resolution, prompting Jake Sullivan, then National Security Advisor, to remark: “We have heard President Putin say publicly that Russia has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space. If that were the case, Russia would not have vetoed this resolution.”

Samson, who previously served as a senior researcher at the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, and at a defense think tank where she worked on war-gaming scenarios for the Missile Defense Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, tells me it is still unclear “how many nuclear-armed satellites Moscow would launch.”

“I would guess more than one, just to have back-up in case there are issues with the first one,” she says, “but it would be such an effective ASAT weapon, a whole fleet would not be needed.”

The detonation of a powerful nuclear bomb in orbit could not only destroy thousands of satellites, but also swiftly cause the deaths of any nearby astronauts, Samson tells me in the interview.

She says nuclear arms experts at the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, who conducted a series of simulated nuclear explosions at varying altitudes in orbit, stated in a sweeping report that the explosion of a 5000-kiloton nuclear bomb near the ISS would bring swift deaths to all its spacefarers.

The blast, these experts predicted, “would cause radiation sickness to the astronauts within approximately one hour and a 90% probability of death within 2-3 hours.”

When the Kremlin last tested the Nudol – without a nuclear weapon aboard – on the eve of launching its battle to crush the democratic pro-Western leadership of Ukraine, it shattered a massive inactive satellite, creating a speeding minefield of shrapnel that quickly approached the orbital pathway of the ISS and its international crew.

“NASA flight directors ordered the crew onboard the ISS to take emergency shelter in the Dragon and Soyuz lifeboats,” Samson says.

“The US military condemned the test,” she adds, “stating that it demonstrated a ‘deliberate disregard for the security, safety, stability, and long-term sustainability of the space domain for all nations.’”

With the start of their missile blitzkrieg on Ukraine, the Russian invaders attempted to destroy the internet infrastructure across the country, while their cyber-shock troops attacked the ground stations of the ViaSat satellite system Kyiv’s government and military elites were using to communicate with each other and map out the nation’s defenses.

With bombs bursting across the capital, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, sent out an urgent SOS, via Twitter, pleading for Elon Musk’s help:

“@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations.”

Within days, SpaceX began sending hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of life-saving Starlink terminals to Ukrainian medical centers and bomb shelters, government enclaves and universities, and activated the satellites flying above.

The airlift saved Ukraine’s leaders from being blockaded inside a new Russian Iron Curtain, but infuriated the Kremlin.

Since then, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency has issued a stream of dispatches charting Moscow’s all-out assault on Starlink stations – depicted as high-value military targets – across Ukraine: The Kremlin has deployed sophisticated Su-34 fighter bombers, Tornado-S multiple launch rocket systems and Lancet kamikaze drones to seek out and destroy these Starlink transceivers.

Musk told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. had personally told him the use of Starlink technology by Ukraine’s resistance fighters could impel Moscow to respond with tactical nuclear weapons. The democracy’s defenders, he told Isaacson, had devised a squadron of robotic unmanned submarines “packed with explosives” that would autonomously cross the Black Sea and ambush the Russian fleet.

They apparently reverse engineered SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system to develop an advanced navigation technology to guide the drone subs on their clandestine mission. In a terse Twitter exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Musk warned: “Trying to retake Crimea will cause massive death, probably fail & risk nuclear war.”

When SpaceX’s founder began rushing the Starlink stations into Ukraine, Samson says, he warned users of the potential for Russian forces to track their ground-to-space satellite transmissions, and to target the stations.

Musk also revealed that Moscow’s specialists in electronic warfare had mounted sporadic attacks aimed at jamming Starlink communications, and that SpaceX was fighting digital skirmishes, via software updates to the terminals, to counter these campaigns.

“Russia places a high priority on integrating electronic warfare into military operations and has been investing heavily in modernizing this capability,” Samson explains in the new Counterspace 2025 report.

Recent upgrades include tactical systems that can jam satellite user terminals, and interfere with the guidance systems of drones and guided missiles.

“Russia has a long history of using electronic warfare during conflicts,” Samson says, and since the start of the Ukraine war has sent some of its top electronic warriors into the fight.

It is also enhancing its Tobol system – designed to attack foreign satellite transmissions. “Leaked US military documents,” Samson says, “suggest that Russia has used at least three Tobol installations to try to disrupt Starlink commercial satellite signals over Eastern Ukraine.”

Since last year, she adds, Ukrainian military units have reported sporadic interruptions in their Starlink connections.

The Kremlin is also developing a new attack technology, called Kalinka, “intended to detect and disrupt signals to and from Starlink satellites,” Samson says.

“Starlink has proven to be very useful for the Ukrainian military to communicate,” Samson tells me, so “Russia is trying to take away that battlefield advantage.”

Even while the Kremlin expands its deployment of counterspace weapons across Ukrainian battlefronts, Samson says, Russia’s overarching focus is on trying to recapture the near-parity it once held with the U.S. in overall space power during the Cold War.

While Russian power swiftly declined upon the break-up of the Soviet Union a generation ago, she says, Putin’s weapons designers are now attempting to catch up with the U.S.

After observing American defense strategists integrate space technologies into their war maneuvers over the last decades, she says, “The Russian political and military leadership have come to see the military aspect of space as essential to modern warfare and winning current and future conflicts.”

As a result, Samson adds, “the Russian military is aggressively pursuing capabilities to degrade or destroy adversary space-based assets.”

Yet Russia has never truly regained its status as a space superpower, or as a military peer of the U.S., says Elena Grossfeld, an expert on Moscow’s military space program and nuclear modernization drive in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

But the Russian Federation does retain one feature of its superpower past – as holder of the world’s largest nuclear weapons stockpile – so brandishes its atomic arsenal in face-offs with the West, she says.

“Russia is indeed capable of putting a nuclear warhead on its ASAT missile,” Grossfeld says.

“I am, however, skeptical of their intent to actually use it in any case except for a full blown war.”

While some defense experts have predicted that the Kremlin might detonate one or more nuclear warheads in space as an asymmetric attack that could wipe out at least part of the far superior American rings of satellites, Grossfeld says that strategy would carry immense risk for Russia.

If the atomic attack in orbit destroyed even one American satellite deployed to monitor Moscow’s nuclear-capped ICBMs, she points out, “that in itself could be viewed as a precursor to a nuclear attack,” and in turn trigger a devastating U.S. counterattack, with its own silo- and submarine-based thermonuclear missiles hitting targets across Russia.

“I think the threat of the Russian nuclear ASAT is more useful as a saber-rattling device – since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine there have been multiple instances of that – than actually taking out US satellites.”

Vladimir Putin, despite his nuclear brinkmanship over the last three years, Grossfeld ventures, does not want to see the world end in nuclear flames.