Welcome to the inquiry with me, Tanya Beckett, one question for expert witnesses and an answer.

In the final chapter of the Cold War four decades ago, the Soviet Union launched a spy

satellite called Cosmos 4008. For years, everyone knew it was there, but nobody ever really thought

much about it. And anyway, shortly after it was sent into space, it became inactive.

So, since 1984, it's been left circling in a perpetual and meaningless journey around planet Earth.

Until that is November 2021, when Russia pointed a missile at it and blew it up.

At that point, a lot of people sat up and started to take notice.

Now, we might wonder why, after all, China and America had done the same in the past.

However, this time, the destruction seemed more wanton. It left a stream of untracked debris

that could interfere with other satellites. Russia had shown it could do what it wanted without

breaking any laws, and also that it had the capability to take out a satellite, and next time,

it could be someone else's. So, in this week's inquiry, we're asking, are we heading for space wars?

Part 1. The Soup in Space

People don't realize how much their lives are integrated without a space now, and it's a huge

trillion dollar economy, right? So, it's not just this little scientific and military

corner anymore. It's really part of what humans do, and it's part of how the infrastructure

of our society keeps going. Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian

Center for Astrophysics. He says that far from the vision of space many people have as empty and

eerily calm, several hundred kilometers above Earth, around 5,000 satellites are whizzing around

at incredible speeds. Everything is travelling at 17,000 miles an hour, and it's going in

all different directions. So, it's sort of like a big, incredibly fast dogems game up there.

Spacecraft need to travel this fast just to stay in orbit, and this means that a satellite,

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