An Ex-NASA Astronaut Won’t Rule Out War in Space. Here’s What’s Already Up There.

Winston Scott spent more than 24 days in orbit and three spacewalks building the techniques used to assemble the International Space Station. Asked on Fox’s “Jesse Watters Primetime” whether we will see war in space, the retired Navy captain did not give the comforting answer. “I sure hope not, but I tell you, we live in a world where there is a strong disagreement,” he said, adding: “We live in a world where we have to be prepared to defend ourselves militarily. We hope we don’t see conflict and combat in space, but I would not rule it out.”

The interview, reported by UNILAD Tech, ran in the wake of the Trump administration’s seventh batch of UFO files, so it opened with aliens (“I think E.T. is out there someplace”). The space war part is the bit with real hardware behind it. Scott pointed to Air Force Secretary Troy Meink confirming that the US has weapons in orbit. That did happen, and it is worth unpacking what it means, who else is armed up there, and what a fight in orbit would do to the GPS, broadband and weather data you use every day.

Who Winston Scott is

Scott, born August 6, 1950, in Miami, flew F-14 Tomcats for the Navy before NASA selected him in 1992. He was a mission specialist on STS-72 aboard Endeavour in January 1996 and STS-87 aboard Columbia from November to December 1997, logging 24 days, 14 hours and 34 minutes in space, including three spacewalks totaling 19 hours and 26 minutes. After retiring in 1999 he ran the Florida Space Authority and later held senior roles at the Florida Institute of Technology. His view on geopolitics is an informed opinion, not inside knowledge.

His framing matches the official line: Russia is an ISS partner “but they are not our ally,” and the race with China is “much more military-oriented.”

What “weapons in orbit” actually means

Meink made the disclosure at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference. “This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” he said, according to ABC News. The Associated Press called it the first time the US has confirmed it has deployed weapons in space.

What he did not say matters just as much. Neither the Air Force nor the Space Force has named the systems, said how they work, or said how long they have been up there. “Space control” is military shorthand for both protecting your own satellites and denying an enemy theirs, and a Space Force spokesperson told ABC the capabilities “can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands.” That could mean jammers, cyber tools, sensor-dazzling lasers or satellites that sidle up to others.

One small correction to the UNILAD piece: the “military spokesperson” quote it attributes to the Daily Mail (“The US has warned about Russian and Chinese weapons testing and operationalization since 2007…”) is word for word the Space Force statement given to ABC back in September. It is not a new reaction to Scott’s interview.

Is this legal? Mostly, yes. Article IV of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit. It says nothing about conventional weapons, jammers or co-orbital “inspector” satellites, which is exactly the gap every major power is now working in.

The scorecard: who has tested what

The Secure World Foundation’s 2026 Global Counterspace Capabilities report, published in April, covers 13 countries: the US, Russia, China, India, Australia, France, Germany (new this year), Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the UK. It sorts weapons into five buckets: co-orbital, direct-ascent missiles, electronic warfare, directed energy and cyber. Its headline finding: lots of research, but “only non-destructive counterspace capabilities are being used in active military conflicts.” CSIS analysts, previewing their own 2026 Space Threat Assessment at a joint event in May, compared the trend to a frog in a slowly heating pot.

Destructive tests are rarer, and they are what turns orbit into a junkyard. Four countries have blown up satellites with missiles:

Altitude is the whole story. Low-orbit debris drags itself back into the atmosphere within months or years. China hit Fengyun-1C at about 865 km, where air drag is almost nonexistent, so two thirds of that cloud is still up there almost two decades later. In 2013 a fragment from it struck BLITS, a small Russian laser-ranging satellite, and ended its mission. Russia’s 2021 test forced the ISS crew to shelter in their docked spacecraft.

The US declared a moratorium on destructive direct-ascent missile tests in April 2022, and a UN General Assembly resolution backing the idea passed 155 to 9 that December. China, Russia and India have not signed on.

Russia’s nuclear question

The scariest item on the list has never been used. In 2024 the Biden administration said Russia was developing a space-based nuclear weapon that could sit in orbit and release a burst that would take out satellites around it. There is precedent for the damage: the US Starfish Prime test in 1962 created an artificial radiation belt that crippled roughly a third of the satellites then in orbit. A nuclear burst does not care whose satellites it fries, which is why a megaconstellation like Starlink is a natural target.

US officials have tied Cosmos 2553, launched in February 2022 into an unusual orbit about 2,000 km up, to development of that technology. Moscow says it is a science mission, and tracking firm LeoLabs reported in April 2025 that the satellite appeared to be tumbling. In April 2024 Russia vetoed a US and Japanese Security Council resolution reaffirming the treaty ban on nukes in orbit (13 in favor, China abstaining). Russia also keeps parking “inspector” satellites near American spy satellites: in May 2025, Cosmos 2588 settled into an orbit near the reconnaissance satellite USA 338, Breaking Defense reported.

China’s “dogfighting” satellites

In March 2025, Gen. Michael Guetlein, then the Space Force’s vice chief, described commercial tracking of five objects maneuvering in and around each other, in sync and under control, during 2024. He called it “dogfighting in space.” The Space Force later identified them as three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two Shijian-6 05 spacecraft. SWF’s Victoria Samson called the label unhelpful, since the US performs similar maneuvers. China has also shown off a satellite, SJ-21, that towed a dead Beidou satellite to a graveyard orbit in 2022, and SWF’s 2026 report examines an apparent on-orbit refueling experiment from late 2025 plus reports of a new direct-ascent interceptor. Tools that service satellites can also grab them.

Follow the money

The Space Force’s fiscal 2027 request is $71 billion: about $59 billion in the regular budget and $12 billion through a reconciliation bill, against roughly $40 billion this year, per Air and Space Forces Magazine. The Congressional Research Service counts fiscal 2026 enacted funding at $31.9 billion because it leaves out reconciliation money, so baselines vary. Congress is running on a stopgap through December 11, so none of this is final.

Much of the growth is tied to Golden Dome, the missile shield that would put interceptors in orbit. The budget requests $17.5 billion for Golden Dome overall, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated its space-based pieces alone could cost as much as $542 billion over 20 years. Meink also said the space-based interceptor program has reached “flight-ready hardware,” which is not the same thing as interceptors in orbit.

What an orbital war would do to your phone

GPS. The constellation (32 operational satellites in an April 2026 Space Force briefing) orbits about 20,200 km up, far beyond the reach of the missiles in the table above. The practical threat is jamming and spoofing, which SWF describes as a daily hazard in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A NIST-funded RTI study put the cost of losing GPS at roughly $1 billion per day for the US private sector, and the authors called that a rough estimate. Cell networks, power grids and payment systems also sync to GPS clocks.

Starlink and satellite broadband. KeepTrack counts 11,131 Starlink satellites in orbit as of October 2026, out of 20,290 satellites total. Thousands of targets are too many to shoot down one missile at a time, which is part of why Starlink became a front-line utility in Ukraine. The weak points are elsewhere: ground stations and terminals (the 2022 Viasat KA-SAT hack hit modems, not satellites), jamming, and a nuclear burst. That also covers the satellite texting on your phone that carriers now sell as a backup.

Weather. Forecasts depend on polar-orbiting satellites in exactly the 700 to 900 km band where the Fengyun-1C cloud still lives. Fengyun-1C was itself a weather satellite.

Kessler syndrome. This is the long-tail risk: enough collisions that each one creates debris that causes the next. One 2007 test still accounts for 2,319 tracked fragments. A real war, with dozens of intercepts, could make some orbits too dangerous to use for decades, for everyone, including the side that “won.”

None of that calls for a bunker. It is the same basic resilience covered in our guide to checking your phone’s emergency alerts.

Sources and further reading

• UNILAD Tech: Ex-NASA astronaut offers grim warning over likeliness of war in space
• ABC News: Air Force secretary acknowledges the US has weapons in space
• Associated Press: US acknowledges for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space
• Secure World Foundation: 2026 Global Counterspace Capabilities Report
• CSIS: What Are the Biggest Space Threats in 2026? (transcript)
• CSIS: Space Threat Assessment 2025
• KeepTrack: 10 Anti-Satellite Tests and What They Left Behind
• KeepTrack: How Many Satellites Are in Space?
• Air and Space Forces Magazine: Space Force Poised for 80 Percent Funding Boost in 2027 Budget
• Breaking Defense: 5 Chinese satellites practiced “dogfighting” in space, Space Force says
• Breaking Defense: Russia’s new Cosmos satellite orbiting near US sat, piques ASAT fears
• Reuters (via Yahoo): Secret Russian satellite linked to nuclear weapon program seems to malfunction
• Space.com: Russia vetoes UN resolution against nuclear weapons in space
• SpacePolicyOnline: U.N. Approves Resolution Not to Conduct Destructive ASAT Tests
• NIST: Economic Benefits of the Global Positioning System to the U.S. Private Sector
• Wikipedia: Winston E. Scott

About this article: GeekBlog covers U.S. technology news, AI, phones, smartwatches and gaming. Every story is written and checked under our Editorial Policy. Spotted a mistake or have a story tip? Contact our editors.