Canadian space companies need measures to protect their security as satellites pivot to help efforts such as the ongoing war in Ukraine, a Parliamentary committee recently heard.
The Standing Committee on National Defence meeting took place days before the Nov. 6 U.S. federal election in which Donald Trump was named President-elect. Trump’s close advisors for the new administration include SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has already taken actions in international security with his SpaceX Starlink constellation regarding Ukraine.
Musk is additionally a vocal advocate of deregulation in favour of more frequent launches, while Trump may be considering changes to the NATO agreement. The implications for U.S. security are thus a little bit different than when the committee met on Oct. 31.
“Satellites will always be much easier to attack than to defend. They are acutely vulnerable,” said Michael Byers, co-director of the Outer Space Institute and the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He was testifying as an individual before the committee.
“Canada has several space companies that have satellite systems in orbit right now that are being used to support the Ukrainian military in an armed conflict with Russia,” Byers continued.
While Canada is seeking to avoid direct confrontations with Russia, MDA Space has provided synthetic aperture radar and Telesat, communications support to the Ukrainian military. Byers noted the Canadian government gave Telesat “an extra billion dollars for its Lightspeed constellation very shortly after Elon Musk limited Starlink coverage in the Black Sea” for the Ukrainian military, which he believes is related. (Telesat has said it was seeking extra government funding for Lightspeed after inflation costs and a vendor switch changed the composition of its constellation, as SpaceQ has written about several times.)
Byers nevertheless said Canada’s defence community should have backup plans if these satellites are disabled by the Russians. “This is quite normal. Lots of satellites are dual use,” Byers said, with “dual use” referring to both commercial and military applications. “The challenge is that – by engaging in this kind of support – arguably these Canadian companies are making their satellites legitimate targets under the laws of war and therefore, potentially implicating Canada in a role in the conflict that we might not want,” he added.
Byers had several recommendations. He urged Canadian companies not to “tell anyone about this” should they be working with a foreign military, although he individually is in support of helping Ukraine. He named MDA Space’s press release announcing such, in March 2022, as “a very bad decision, with all respect to the CEO.” (The CEO is Mike Greenley.)
Byers asked Canada not to remove backup infrastructure for space services, such as fibre optic cables or ground-based air navigation systems, as this would provide redundancy if a GPS or communications satellite was disabled. Additionally, Byers cited a previous recommendation – made with UBC professor and Canada Research Chair in Planetary Astronomy Aaron Boley, to the Department of National Defence – to move satellite systems “across multiple altitudes to spread them out and make them less vulnerable.”
Byers also discussed a related threat to satellite systems, which is space debris induced by deliberately destroying a satellite – such as what Russia did in an anti-satellite test in February 2022. That said, he noted the “mutually assured destruction in low-Earth orbit” if any country were to do this regularly, as all launching states would be subject to “catastrophic collisions.”
“My big concern into the future is that there are countries that are not very dependent on space that are acquiring the capacity to cause a lot of debris in space. I’m thinking about Iran, and I’m thinking about North Korea,” Byers added.
“When North Korea develops the ability to launch half a million steel pellets into low Earth orbit to create a pellet ring, we have a serious problem. This is all part of arms control. It’s part of our attempt to restrain rogue nations like Iran and North Korea. We do it with nuclear weapons. We now do it with parts of space.”
Upon a clarification question from committee member Don Stewart (Conservative – Toronto-St. Paul’s), Byers emphasized he does not have access to classified information and is not suggesting such an attack is imminent from these countries. He added in that answer that China, in his mind, would not pose the same kind of threat as North Korea or Iran: “China has the exact same interest that western countries do in keeping space a safe place for its satellites. There’s a huge opportunity for diplomacy with China on this issue.”
Cassandra Steer, the chair of the Australian Centre for Space Governance and also speaking as an individual to the committee, said in her opinion cyberattacks pose more of a threat than “direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons” that Byers brought up, as only four countries are capable of doing so. (She did not mention the four countries.)
“It’s a highly unlikely kind of interference precisely because of the debris it creates and the risk that it creates to their own capabilities. Cyber-attacks and other forms of link segment interference, like jamming and sending a false spoofing signal, are happening every single day already.”
She added space is just one forum in which there are tensions internationally, and emphasized Canada should lean upon its reputation in diplomacy to navigate these tensions.
“It [Canada] works together with allies and partners, including smaller nations, to advance the agenda of responsible behaviours at UN [United Nations] discussions in Geneva and in New York,” Steer said. It was the first country to join the U.S. in committing not to test direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, and it’s also very much recognized for bringing clarity on the international law applicable to space security in those international discussions.”
Treaties, she noted, would likely not be helpful for international armed conflict discussions because history shows that it is difficult to make discriminations in the fog of war between military targets and civilian infrastructure, especially given the dual-use implications. She emphasized that Canada’s reputation remains strong in international negotiations.
“One … thing that Canada does exceptionally well is the corridor diplomacy and behind-closed-doors diplomacy, where it works with smaller nations to make sure that there is shared understanding, to strategize about how to really push that vote forward to get a single open-ended working group, and to also – outside of the UN multilateral discussions – keep working together with other nations on space literacy,” she said.
Should any country move upon a Canadian satellite such as RADARSAT-2, the Canadian government would have the option of invoking Article 5 under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), of which Canada is a member. The article states in part: “each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.”
Byers, emphasizing he is not a security expert, said he feels Article 5 would not be invoked if only one satellite was hurt: “It would be an attack on an important piece of Canadian infrastructure, but it would not be an attack within Canadian territory,” he explained. “We would be conscious that invoking Article 5 would signal that we were into a direct conflict with a nuclear-armed state, which would be seem to be highly undesirable. It’s a self-judging invocation.”
Unfortunately, the loss of RADARSAT-2 would have implications far beyond the military, he noted – with implications for climate change science, oil pipeline monitoring and icebreakers looking for near-real time information about safe passageways in the north, among other effects. There are certain backups for northern satellite systems, such as the private SpaceX Starlink constellation. Committee Chair John McKay (Liberal – Scarborough-Guildwood), however, said he has concerns about SpaceX: “Being dependent on Elon Musk does not give me warm fuzzies.”
Looking ahead, aside from sheer military security matters the committee also asked how artificial intelligence would be deployed in defense situations. Satellites use machine learning and artificial intelligence for space traffic management and data processing, among other things.
“One of the challenges is the competition for the skill set. The people with the technical understanding are probably going to take jobs in the private sector, where they’re higher paid. It’s hard to get them to come into government jobs, civilian or military, so that is one challenge,” Steer noted.