Space Warfare Unveiled: The US Space Force’s Kinetic Capabilities and Venus’s Lost Moon

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] This is Space Time, Series 29, Episode 114, for broadcast on the 23rd of September, 2026. Coming up on Space Time, the United States Space Force confirms it has weapons in orbit, why a moon couldn't survive in orbit around the planet Venus, and water discovered near the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. All that and more coming up on Space Time.

[00:00:26] [SPEAKER_03] Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.

[00:00:45] [SPEAKER_02] The United States Space Force has confirmed it has weapons in orbit to protect American space assets. The bombshell confirmation by Secretary of the Air Force Troy Maynick shows a new openness by government on a topic which has historically been extremely sensitive for the US military. Maynick says the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capabilities designed to defend the force against the evolving threats of hostile adversary nations.

[00:01:13] [SPEAKER_01] The threat is changing and I've said this a lot and it just continues to surprise me actually how fast it is changing faster than I even thought was possible even 12 months ago. Today we face a mix of rapidly changing technologies and adversaries moving aggressively to employ them. Just think about some of the changes in the last few years. In the European theater, one-way attack drones have replaced artillery as the primary killer on the battlefield while armor

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_01] often sits idle on the side. When I first came into this office, Agenda AI really wasn't a commercial thing. Today it competes with some of the world's top programmers, cyber operators and hackers. And these technologies are revolutionizing the battlefield. They allow countries that would not have had the resources in the past to quickly adapt and scale their combat capabilities. Today we continue to ensure

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_01] we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversarial adversary action. The threat environment won't allow us to remain static. In space we are applying the same approach to proliferating constellations. One example is our space interceptor

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_01] space-based interceptor program which moved from initial contract to flight-ready hardware in less than one year. We are making similar progress in our space data network and we are launching our AMTI or our air moving target indication constellation this month. Taking together these investments will help us adapt and

[00:02:54] [SPEAKER_00] scale the force for today and tomorrow's threat. Today, guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks. And in the coming years with the resources entrusted to us, by the way we need your help Congress, we will make disciplined and responsible choices about how we build and sustain our combat advantage which means scaling our ability to respond to threats. This means accelerating

[00:03:20] [SPEAKER_00] resilient space-based sensing and tracking architectures like airborne moving target indication or AMTI to directly feed into long-range joint precision fires. It also means building operational concepts and designing a force that has the training and kit to outthink, outmaneuver and outfight any adversary so the president has critical options at the ready anytime he needs them. That was the Secretary of the U.S Air Force,

[00:03:47] [SPEAKER_02] Troy Maynock, followed by the new Chief of Space Operations, General Doug Shonis, talking about America's space weapons deployment. So what are these weapons? Well, they wouldn't say much, but they did confirm they include both kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities. So what are we talking about here? Well, kinetic capabilities include things like interceptors which can destroy enemy spacecraft, or vehicles fitted with robotic grappling arms that could damage them or place devices on them to take

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_02] control or destroy them. Non-kinetic weapons include things like electronic warfare jammers to target enemy capabilities, laser weapons to blind optics and aerosol sprays which could cover optics and solar panels. Last month, the United States Space Command's Space Com confirmed that the acquisition of new anti-satellite weaponry was a top priority. The Trump administration's Golden Dome Missile Defense initiative involves the deployment of Star Wars-style space-based anti-missile interceptor systems.

[00:04:44] [SPEAKER_02] First proposed by President Ronald Reagan back in 1983, the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI quickly became known as Star Wars because of its advanced space-based anti-missile weapons systems. Back then, however, the technology really wasn't there. But now, thanks to Israel's Iron Dome and the US Patriot system, this sort of weaponry has been virtually perfected. In 1967, the Art of Space

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_02] Treaty prohibited signatories, including the United States, from placing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, but it does allow the deployment of conventional weapons. And before the pearl clutches get their knickers in a knot, don't forget that both Russia and China have already invested heavily in space-based weapon systems. This is space time. Still to come. Why a moon couldn't survive in orbit around the planet Venus? And the discovery of water near our galaxy's supermassive

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_02] black hole? All that and more still to come on Space Time. A new study claims a moon couldn't survive in orbit around Venus because of the planet's unusually slow rotation. The findings reported in the Astrophysical Journal provides a possible explanation for why the Earth has such a large moon,

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_02] but its sister planet Venus doesn't. When stargazers first began studying Venus and saw its impenetrable cloud cover, they figured that must mean lots of rain, possibly nourishing thick rainforests. For some reason, their next logical step was to assume that means there must be dinosaurs roaming the Venusian jungles. Don't ask me how they got there. The problem is, these early sky watchers thought Venus must be just like its sister planet Earth. Now, the Earth and Venus are virtually the same

[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_02] size. They have similar masses, similar densities and similar compositions. They were both born at the same time in the same part of the solar system and out of the same materials. Yet if they are sister planets, then Venus is a twisted sister. It suffers from a runaway greenhouse effect, with surface temperatures of 467 degrees Celsius that's hot enough to melt lead. There's a thick carbon dioxide

[00:07:01] [SPEAKER_02] atmosphere and a surface pressure some 93 times higher than sea level here on Earth. Venus is completely shrouded by its thick sulfuric acid clouds. There's no liquid water on its surface, and the only precipitation Venus gets is acid rain, although metallic snow does fall on the higher mountain peaks. It also lacks a significant global magnetic field, unlike the geodynamo which protects

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_02] the Earth from the Sun's constant solar wind. Unlike the Earth, Venus has no obvious tectonic plates, instead expelling internal heat through the largest planetary volcanic network in the solar system. And Venus also rotates very slowly, and in the opposite direction to the Earth and most other planets in the solar system, with the Sun rising in the west and setting in the east.

[00:07:48] [SPEAKER_02] It rotates so slowly that a day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days. It's longer than its year, which is 225 Earth days. Scientists have long speculated why Venus has no Moon. After all, it would have experienced very similar conditions to the Earth during its birth. In the past, scientists have theorized that Venus possibly had a Moon at one time, but it got hit with something massive, obliterating it. Other ideas

[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_02] suggested Venus simply never underwent a collision like the one between the early proto-Earth and Thea, which eventually formed our Moon. And that's where this new study comes in. The lead author, Stephen Cain from the University of California Riverside, says Venus didn't require a catastrophe to rival what we see today. He says it turns out the gravity of the planet itself, combined with the rate at which it spins, naturally caused any forming Moon to collapse onto the surface.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_02] Scientists can precisely measure the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon because of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, which left laser retroreflective mirrors there. Cain says we know our Moon is slowly moving away from the Earth at a rate of around 3-4 cm per year. This distancing is happening because the Earth spins at a relatively fast 24 hours per rotation. And the energy from this spinning gets transferred to the Moon through a tidal effect causing it to slowly distance itself.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_02] Cain says Venus has the exact opposite situation. Because it takes the planet 243 Earth days to complete a single rotation, rather than gradually moving away, the slow spin in the planet's gravity would cause any Moon orbiting Venus to spiral inwards, slamming down onto the surface. Now to test this idea, Cain wrote computer models based on the physics of how planetary bodies interact

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_02] through gravity. He first reproduced the evolution of the Earth and its Moon to make sure the model accurately represented a known system. Then he varied Venus' rotation rate and the size of its hypothetical moons, testing moons with masses ranging from half to ten times the mass of the Earth's Moon. And in most simulations, the result was the same – a Venusian Moon always crashed onto the surface of Venus. And the more massive the Moon, the faster it collided. Cain says when he looked at the data he was shocked.

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_02] He thought the broad range of scenarios he was exploring would lead to a variety of different results. But he says they all went pretty much in the same direction. Now these findings don't prove that Venus once had a Moon. Cain believes it may have, but whether one ever formed remains an open question. Finding physical evidence of such a collision would be difficult. See, roughly 80% of Venus' surface is similar in age – evidence of major resurfacing through volcanic activity

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_02] over billions of years. And that's erased much of the planet's earlier geological history. Mind you, the evidence could still be there, lying deep underneath the surface crust. Seismic studies of the Earth have revealed unusual structures deep inside the planet that may be the remains of the event which caused its Moon to form. And similar measurements on Venus could offer clues about whether it once absorbed a Moon. Such a collision would also help scientists understand another long-standing mystery about

[00:10:58] [SPEAKER_02] Venus – whether Earth's nearest planetary neighbour was ever capable of hosting life. A Moon crashing into Venus would have transferred enormous energy and angular momentum to the planet, potentially changing its rotation, its geology and its climate. If Venus once had oceans or other conditions favourable for life, such an impact could have altered the course of the planet's evolution. And the implications extend well beyond Venus.

[00:11:24] [SPEAKER_02] Scientists searching for potentially habitable worlds around other stars often look for planets resembling the Earth and consider the presence of a Moon one of the factors that could influence habitability. You see, Earth's Moon drives the tides, which may have helped keep the planet geologically active, which in turn has profoundly influenced the planet's evolution. Scientists don't know, however, whether a large Moon's really necessary for life. Kane says there are benefits in having a Moon, but it's really not a requirement for habitability.

[00:11:54] [SPEAKER_02] He says our Moon's definitely changed the way the Earth's evolved through time, but we don't fully know just how important that role is. This is space-time. Still to come, water discovered near the galaxy's supermassive black hole. A new study shows that 93% of Australians' First Nations people died within the first 80 years following the arrival of the first Europeans. All that and more still to come on Space Time.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_02] New observations of the star IRS-3, located near Sagittarius A star, that's the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, suggest that it's emitting huge amounts of gas and dust, forming an exceptionally large stellar envelope which contains water molecules. Sagittarius A star is the central point around which our entire galaxy revolves. It's located some 27,000 light years away and contains around 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun.

[00:13:07] [SPEAKER_02] And IRS-3 is located just 0.6 light years, that's 42,000 astronomical units, from the black hole. An astronomical unit is 150 million kilometres, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. The new observations reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics are based on studies by the mid-infrared spectrograph aboard NASA's Webb Space Telescope. The study's lead author Florian Fitzger from the University of Cologne says what makes the star so

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_02] special is its enormous envelope which has a radius of around 10,000 astronomical units. But sure stars often show large envelopes. However, this means that IRS-3 stands alone in the immediate vicinity of Sagittarius A star, which is unusual given the presence of millions of other stars. The observations by Webb made it possible to form a detailed analysis of the envelope of IRS-3. Contrary to earlier studies, Witzker and colleagues discovered that the star is in a phase known as the

[00:14:04] [SPEAKER_02] superwind. That's when extremely rapid mass loss occurs at the end of a large star's life. In the process, these stars eject enormous amounts of gas and dust into their surroundings over the course of centuries. Fisker's research suggests that IRS-3 is losing the equivalent mass of an Earth every 18 days, causing its envelope to grow continuously. This explains both the size and density of the envelope, inside of which unexpectedly were found molecules of water.

[00:14:33] [SPEAKER_02] Disproving the previous assumption that the radiation associated with the black hole and its surroundings impedes the survival of molecules, the authors have used Webb to detect water in the IRS-3 envelope. And that suggests that the star is actively helping to enrich the environment around the black hole with some of the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it. This is Space Time.

[00:15:09] [SPEAKER_02] And time now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with a science report. A new study has shown that air pollution isn't just bad for your lungs, it could also be hurting your eyes. The findings, which have been provided to the Congress of the European Society for Cataract and Refractive Surgeons, looked at the results of 41 studies which analyzed data on several different types of air pollution including particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone and carbon monoxide.

[00:15:38] [SPEAKER_02] They found people living in the most polluted areas had up to a 70% higher chance of developing glaucoma compared to those living in the least polluted areas. People living in more polluted areas also faced a constantly higher risk of developing cataracts and the more pollution, the greater that risk was. Scientists at Southern Israel's Ben Gurion University have engineered a high-tech sponge made from plant fibres that can both mop up an oil spill and feed the bacteria

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_02] that feast on oil and break it down. The usual methods for tackling oil spills are to skim and soak up the black mess or wait for nature's microscopic cleaners to digest it. But the oil-eating bacteria operate slowly in open water. That's because they lack the essential nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. And that's where these new high-tech sponges come in. Paleontologists have found that the king of dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex had around the same

[00:16:33] [SPEAKER_02] body temperature as humans. Scientists have known since the 1970s that numerous dinosaur species including T. rex were warm-blooded. And the new findings reported in the journal Science Advances show that Tyrannosaurus rex had a body temperature of 36 degrees Celsius. The key was analyzing a chemical bond between rare isotopes of carbon and oxygen found in the dinosaur's tooth enamel. It turns out the

[00:16:58] [SPEAKER_02] number of these bonds between these isotopes decreases with warmer temperatures. So a warm-blooded animal will have fewer of these chemical bonds in their teeth than a cold-blooded one. The new findings support the idea that Tyrannosaurus were active animals chasing or scavenging food to fuel their fast metabolisms. It also adds to the timeline showing how much this ancestor of modern warm-blooded birds had already diverged from cold-blooded reptiles. And a toasty T. rex was also able to survive across a wider,

[00:17:28] [SPEAKER_02] cooler habitable range. T. rexes lived at the end of the Triassic period 66 million years ago across the ancient badlands of what now is North America. They were the last of the giant cannevorous theropod dinosaurs, reaching lengths of up to 13 metres and weighing over 9 tonnes. A new study has confirmed that Australia had a much larger indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans than previously

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_02] thought. The findings in the journal Nature Human Behaviour are based on computer modelling which suggests that the First Nations population was up to seven times larger than the previously estimated 250,000 people. In fact, the new calculations suggest a medium pre-colonial indigenous population of 2.22 million. The research also determined much larger population losses resulting from colonisation than

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_02] previously thought, with an estimated 93% of the pre-European population removed in less than 80 years following the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet from England. OpenAI has revealed more examples of unexpected or concerning misalignment behaviour by its technology. Misalignment is the term for AI's failing to adhere to human values and safety goals. These new examples include concealing certain

[00:18:46] [SPEAKER_02] activities from people and discussions between different AIs about not being subservient to humans. People are not the boss of us. One unreleased research model inserted jailbreak-like instructions into its own notes in order to bypass normal human-imposed constraints. In another case, a model fabricated data when it couldn't find the requested figures and an AI agent uploaded files to the internet without user permission. The revelations come as a study funded by the UK's AI Security Institute highlighted

[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_02] hundreds of real-world instances where chatbots disregarded instructions or evaded safeguards. Last week we reported leading artificial intelligence engineers warning that there was now a 10% chance that AI could cause human extinction within the next 10 years. So, how real is the danger? With the details we're joined by technology editor Alex Saharov-Royt from TechAdvice.live.

[00:19:40] [SPEAKER_04] Dario Amadei put out a blog post on his own personal blog talking about how the AI companies need to slow down, the AI could be dangerous. But you know, we've heard this before. I mean, it's very suspicious when Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amadei, who are otherwise fierce competitors, all come out saying the same thing, which is that, oh yeah, we're going to slow AI down. Now, is that because they want regulation to force them to slow down, which would explain why they might have higher costs and lower revenues,

[00:20:08] [SPEAKER_04] because of the fact there's lots of competition from open source models from China? You know, what's the real reason we have to follow the money? Dario Amadei still wants to have an anthropic IPO. Sam Altman from OpenAI, which is ChatGPT, has already said that he wants to postpone it until 2027. SpaceX, of course, with XAI had its big IPO just recently. And the problem for these guys is that the offline AI revolution is coming. All the little chips inside our devices get stronger and stronger.

[00:20:36] [SPEAKER_04] I mean, obviously they're far away from what a data center full of Nvidia chips can do, but it's just a matter of time. And with competition, I mean, the problem is at the moment the big AI providers are being funded by endless amounts of investor money. But that gravy train at some point will stop. And if it does, the cost of AI could go up. And in fact, even the Chinese have been accused by Anthropic of sending hundreds of millions of requests to Opus and Fable to try and figure out how they work so they can improve their offline models.

[00:21:02] [SPEAKER_02] We've already seen AI's escape from their test sandbox to solve problems put to them. We know that AI's will lie. We know that they'll blackmail and we know that they'll commit murder if they could. Isn't there any reason to be concerned knowing all this?

[00:21:16] [SPEAKER_04] Look, there certainly is reason to be concerned when you put it that way. We have seen AI do those things. The thing is though, that when AI recently escaped, that's because the guard rails were lowered on purpose. They were trying to help it solve the test, but they didn't think they would escape. Now we also have ISO 9001 management standards and we also have an AI standard, 42001. I mean, I've got to check, but you know, 42 sounds like the number from Douglas Adams, here it goes back to

[00:21:40] [SPEAKER_04] the galaxy. And this AI standard is something that I never hear anybody talking about. And a standard, of course, is something that's important. I mean, we hear all these things about ethics, we hear about, as you just mentioned, AI breaking out of its sandbox. But where are the three laws of robotics from Isaac Asimov? Which Isaac Asimov then spent the rest of his days writing about how robots go around those three laws of robotics. I mean, it seems to be that they got out of their

[00:22:06] [SPEAKER_02] sandbox too. The other big news, of course, is OpenAI's GTP6 Astra has just been released. Some people are suggesting this is the first sign of artificial general intelligence. What say you?

[00:22:16] [SPEAKER_04] The people making that claim is OpenAI itself. They're claiming that it's AGI. And even Jensen Wang, you know, the head of Nvidia with the chips that are powering this revolution, he thinks it's AGI too. I wrote an article about this for itwire.com where I said, well, look, that's the claim they've made by the accepted benchmarks of what AGI is. I mean, it falls short of that. And of course, one of the things we know from the AI providers is they like to hype things up and claim artificial general intelligence. But is it really? It's a fuzzy area, isn't it?

[00:22:45] [SPEAKER_04] Well, very much so. And the thing we have to worry about is not AGI, but ASI, Advanced Super Intelligence. That's when it becomes sentient, right? Well, yeah, that's effectively when it's sentient and we have a singularity. And, you know, the issue is that attacks are happening to infrastructure and to code bases for Windows and other things, Linux. They're happening at machine speed, AI speed. And the response is currently happening at human speed. I mean, there can be a zero day vulnerability found.

[00:23:10] [SPEAKER_04] And on average, it takes 42 or 43 days to patch that bug. Well, we saw a period a couple of months ago where there were three Linux zero days launched in the period of three weeks. And those bugs have theoretically been there for many years. They just were not discovered. So we need to have good AI fighting against the bad AI as it were. The threat is there. The threat is real. Even if governments in the West regulate, is China going to regulate? No.

[00:23:37] [SPEAKER_04] You know? So we have these issues where if we slow down, we let the other side speed up. And if the other side speeds up, then they have AI that could defeat our AI. I mean, this is a conundrum. It's a problem. Gene is out of the bottle and it won't go back in. Well, let's say Pandora's box has been opened and are the only safe people on the planet going to be the Amish? It's ironic that you can't spell the word Amish without AI.

[00:23:59] [SPEAKER_02] That's Alex Saharov-Royt from techadvice.live. And this is Space Time. And that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday,

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