Following Artemis II, space as humanity's shared frontier is once again in the spotlight. And most nations purport to agree, space should be reserved for peace. In the build-up to HowTheLightGetsIn's debate this May, One Giant Conflict for Mankind, space security researcher Jessica West argues that "peace" has become so stretched as a concept that it now covers almost anything — including blowing up satellites. This ‘fog of peace’ is allowing military build-up in space and threatens to spread to the moon. This could have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth, if the satellites we rely on to detect missile launches and communicate in crises are disrupted.
“We came in peace for all mankind,” reads the plaque left on the Moon by Apollo 11 in 1969. In space, peace has long mattered as both aspiration and political language. It has helped legitimize exploration, cooperation, and free access. Yet over time, the idea of peaceful use has also stretched to accommodate not only military support functions but capabilities with clear weapons implications. That is the paradox. Space is supposed to be peaceful. But peace has too often remained a broad political concept rather than a substantive standard capable of setting limits.
Peace itself is not the problem. It remains a foundational principle of space activity, one that has helped give space its legitimacy and purpose. The problem is that peace has too rarely been translated into clear expectations, meaningful restraints, or judgments about which activities create unacceptable risks. In that sense, the weapons problem in space is not separate from the politics of peace. It has grown in the space between invoking peace and making it real.
That failure matters now more than ever. Space is no longer a distant dream or a symbolic arena of rivalry. It is woven into the ordinary functioning of modern life. Weather forecasting, video calls, financial timing, emergency response, navigation, air and maritime traffic, and key public infrastructure all depend on space-based systems. All of this depends on space remaining reliable, accessible, and secure. In other words, peaceful. But what happens when the idea of peace is too thin to distinguish between shared use and military advantage?
___
It is difficult to control weapons that few are willing to call weapons.
___
This tension was there from the beginning of the space age. From the Eisenhower era on, outer space was publicly framed in terms of peaceful purposes, even as military interests and capabilities shaped its development. Sputnik captured both at once: a symbol of human possibility and a reminder that the same rockets could carry weapons. What emerged was not simply hypocrisy, but a durable ambiguity. That ambiguity was soon embedded in governance as well. In 1958, the UN General Assembly affirmed the peaceful use of outer space and established COPUOS, making peace not only an aspiration, but an organizing principle of space governance.
So despite early promises, “peaceful” did not come to mean non-military. It came to mean something closer to not openly aggressive in space, even if activity in space directly supported armed conflict on Earth. Some military uses were not only tolerated but welcomed. Reconnaissance satellites, for example, helped reinforce arms control agreements and reduce the risk of surprise attack or misinterpretation. In that sense, space could be both peaceful and militarized. The difficulty is that this more permissive understanding of peace left unresolved where restraint should actually begin.
Over time, some of the same capabilities in space came to support both civilian life and military operations. GPS captures the pattern well: a system embedded in everyday activities, from travel to banking to emergency response, also helps militaries navigate, guide weapons, coordinate operations, and communicate across the battlefield. Likewise, commercial Earth imagery used to monitor floods and crop failure is also used to track troop movements and support battlefield logistics in conflict zones such as Ukraine.
___
What was long absorbed into the rhetoric of peaceful use is now more openly described by some states as a warfighting domain.
___
Once war on Earth came to depend on satellites, those satellites were always going to become targets. The weapons problem in space did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of the same entanglement that the language of peaceful use had long helped to normalize.
Today, many ways to disrupt, degrade, or destroy satellites are grouped under the heading of “counterspace.” Secure World Foundation’s 2026 report maps 13 countries across five types of capability. Yet even now, the language often stops short of calling them what they are.
That reticence has long been part of the fog of peace. China described its 2007 anti-satellite test as an experiment, emphasizing its commitment to peaceful use. The United States framed framed Operation Burnt Frost in 2008 as a public safety measure. India, after its 2019 ASAT test, reiterated its commitment to peaceful purposes. Russia described what many believe was the testing of an on-orbit interceptor capability as an “orbital servicing” experiment. Different cases, same pattern: capabilities with clear military effects are made to sound technical, defensive, or benign. It is difficult to control weapons that few are willing to call weapons.
This helps explain why space arms control efforts have struggled for decades. The problem was not only disagreement over how to define a weapon, but that peaceful use remained politically powerful while substantively underdeveloped. So long as emerging capabilities could be described as technical, defensive, or otherwise compatible with peaceful purposes, the harder work of drawing limits could be deferred. Diplomats continued to speak of preventing an arms race in outer space even as many of the capabilities associated with one developed in plain sight.
The result is a familiar but dangerous gap. Space is not lawless. But save for nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, international law says relatively little about how weapons-related capabilities in orbit should be constrained or how hostile acts against space systems should be addressed.
SUGGESTED READING Space is a critical battlefield, and the West is losing By Bert Chapman
The language is changing too. What was long absorbed into the rhetoric of peaceful use is now more openly described by some states as a warfighting domain. This does not create a new reality so much as expose an old one more directly. The military significance of space is not new. What is changing is the willingness to name it, even as the legal and political frameworks needed to govern it remain underdeveloped.
The consequences do not stay in orbit. Interference with GPS signals has become so widespread that UN aviation bodies now warn it poses “an urgent threat to public safety.” Between 700 and 1,300 civilian aircraft encounter jammed or misleading GPS signals every day, forcing pilots to rely on backup systems or alter their routes. In 2025, a Ryanair flight approaching Vilnius was diverted because of GPS interference.
Anti-satellite weapons tests create another kind of hazard. They leave behind clouds of shrapnel that can circle for years, threatening satellites far removed from the original attack. In 2013, a Russian satellite was fatally struck by debris from China’s 2007 anti-satellite test. Debris from Russia’s 2021 ASAT test later forced astronauts on the International Space Station to shelter in place.
And even though nuclear weapons are formally banned from orbit, the shadow of nuclear war still hangs over space. Satellites help states detect missile launches, communicate in a crisis, and understand what an adversary is doing. If those systems are disrupted or misread, the danger is not just technical failure. It is that a state could mistake the loss of warning or communication for the start of a much larger attack. In the nuclear context, that kind of uncertainty can be catastrophic on Earth.
The point is not only that space is becoming more dangerous. It is that the systems modern life depends on, and the rules that will shape the next phase of space activity, are being built under language that can make risks harder to see until they are already taking hold. The Moon is where that next phase is now coming into view.
The breathtaking imagery of Artemis II has revived visions of space as peaceful, shared, and open to all. That language matters. But we have seen before how the fog of peace can make gradual change hard to recognize.
The Moon is subject to different rules than Earth’s orbit. Under the Outer Space Treaty, it is reserved for “exclusively peaceful purposes,” and military bases, weapons testing, and military maneuvers are prohibited. Even here, though, the line is not absolute: military personnel are allowed for scientific or other peaceful purposes, and the treaty’s clearest prohibitions only apply to the Moon itself rather than all activity around it. The special status of the Moon is real. What remains uncertain is how peaceful purpose will be understood once states and companies begin building systems to operate there.
The issue is not that weapons are about to appear openly on the Moon. It is that systems built for communication, navigation, monitoring, and resource use may begin to take on purposes that are not clearly peaceful, even if they are still described that way. Just as military competition accompanied us into orbit around Earth, it is likely to follow us toward the Moon. The question is whether we recognize the slippage sooner this time, and act to prevent it.
That is why the Moon matters. It is the next place where the meaning of peaceful use may either be renewed or further emptied out.
The lesson from Earth’s orbit is not that peace failed. It is that peace was never made substantive enough. As a political concept, it helped legitimize cooperation, shared use, and restraint. But it was rarely translated into clear standards for judgment, limits on acceptable behaviour, or guidance for what should follow when those limits were crossed.
That has to change. Peace in space cannot remain only a label or aspiration. It has to do more practical work: distinguishing what supports shared use from what enables coercion, exclusion, or advantage without accountability. It has to guide judgments about which capabilities and behaviours create unacceptable risks, and what should follow when they do. Peace cannot simply be invoked; it has to set limits. If everything is peaceful, nothing is. The question is whether we are prepared to make peace in space substantive enough to do that work.
Book tickets now to HowTheLightGetsIn's debate this May, One Giant Conflict for Mankind, for more on this topic and hundreds of other events with world-leading thinkers over one weekend.
