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The Legal Fight Over Government and Social-Media Censorship … – The Wall Street Journal

Posted: July 13, 2023 at 4:53 am

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Paul Gigot: A federal judge rules that the Biden administration illegally pressured social media platforms to censor certain views it didn't like, especially on Covid-19, and the judge bars administration officials from meeting with the social media platforms. How significant is this case for the future of free speech and the government use of private actors to do what the First Amendment bars government from doing? Welcome, I'm Paul Gigot with the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, and I'm here with my colleagues Allysia Finley and Kyle Peterson talking about this case, which is Missouri v. Biden, right now in federal district court. Allysia, tell us about the background of this case. Who sued the government and what are they claiming?

Allysia Finley: So Louisiana and Missouri, the states, they sued, actually various government officials. There are over a couple dozen and various government agencies, and these include CDC, Census Bureau, FBI, the HHS, and some of the officials that were named were Anthony Fauci, as well as Rob Flaherty, who we can get to in a little bit, who worked at these agencies and with the states. And also, some scientists or leading plaintiffs were authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which was censored by many of these platforms.

Paul Gigot: Which took an alternative view of how to handle the pandemic.

Allysia Finley: Right. One of the other plaintiffs was the owner of Gateway Pundit whose post, and had been censored by some of these platforms. And they alleged that the platforms, again, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter being the primary ones, were censoring or removing, in some cases, de-platforming individuals at the behest of the government, and that the government and these government agencies and officials were coercing or encouraging the platforms to boot them or suppress their speech.

Paul Gigot: It's fascinating because of course the private companies themselves are not subject to the First Amendment per se. First Amendment constrains government actors. The private companies also have liability protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. So, why are the private actors acting on behalf of government here? Why did Judge Terry Doughty find that there was this pressure on them to do the censoring?

Allysia Finley: So he looked at, actually, this was a very facts and evidence specific case, and he examined the evidence, and a lot of these communications between the government agencies or government officials and the platforms, so the Twitter and Facebook employees, and he found that they were "significantly encouraging or coercing the private platforms to do their bidding." This actually gets to, in 1982, precedent Blum, which related to actually nursing homes and whether the government could be liable for essentially coercing nursing homes to violate law.

Paul Gigot: I see. So this is basically, he went through a lot of discovery. It's the first time these emails and other communications have actually been coughed up in a case like this, and he looked at that evidence. And what did he rule? What did he decide?

Allysia Finley: Well, he ruled that they had violated the free speech rights of the plaintiffs, and actually said that they'd probably violated this speech rights of the millions of Americans across the country. And by the way, they decided to restrict certain content that the government disliked, disfavored, and that this speech was predominantly conservative views.

Paul Gigot: And on Covid, it was dissenting views from the orthodoxy of the government on lockdowns, on vaccines in particular, and other things, right?

Allysia Finley: Masks, right.

Paul Gigot: Masks.

Allysia Finley: And those were the three big ones. I think the strongest evidence in the case actually really concerned the vaccines, and that's where you really saw the Biden White House officials put a lot of pressure on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube to take down content that had flied in the face of their official guidelines.

Paul Gigot: Kyle, what's the coercion that is supposedly exercised here by the government? Obviously, the government has its own right to talk to private actors. It can say, "We don't like this policy." That's not coercion per se. What is the coercive element here?

Kyle Peterson: It's communications between members of the government and staff for these social networks. So, here's a couple of examples.

Paul Gigot: But what makes it coercive? Because if they just say, "Call up Kyle Peterson," and say, "Kyle, I don't like that editorial you wrote." You're going to say, "Well, thank you very much for your comment, but I don't care."

Kyle Peterson: Yeah, I mean, so here's a couple of examples. "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately." Here's another one. "Internally, we have been considering our options on what to do about it." And there was some talk at that point of revising the Section 230 immunity that social media platforms enjoy in the law.

Paul Gigot: This is the government threat against the companies. We're tugging our chin and saying, "Hmm, we're thinking about revising 230, which protects you from liability."

Kyle Peterson: Right, and so the judge's view is that it's a little bit like, "Nice social network you have there, shame if something would happen to it." Here's what the judge says is the standard, "The state can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power, or has provided such significant encouragement that the choice must be deemed to be that of the state." So basically saying that Facebook, Twitter, these social companies had no choice but to comply with these requests. I would push back a little bit though, because maybe that is true in particular with regard to some of these communications between the social networks and the White House. But if you go through and look at the exhibits, the discovery that was found in this case, a lot of this looks like places where people at the social sites that were concerned about misinformation, and people in the government who were concerned about that, were working together. So there's a White House email, for example, that flags an Instagram user, Anthony Fauci Official, and says, "Any way we can get this pulled down? It's not actually one of ours." The answer from Facebook is, "Yep, on it." So there's a case where Facebook has an incentive, I think, not to have people masquerading as public officials on their platform. The White House obviously doesn't want that either, and so they're kind of working together. And the same is true for some of the Covid stuff, at least, you have emails between the CDC and these social sites where the social sites are saying, "We're seeing all sorts of claims that Covid vaccines might cause ALS or magnetism, or that they can alter blood color. Can you verify whether this is true or not?" And the CDC says, "There's nothing to this," or in the examples of myocarditis, "Yes, there is something to this," and trying to respond. And I have a hard time seeing how there's coercion in some of these emails, at least.

Paul Gigot: Okay, fair enough. I mean, conversations like that are not coercive, but if you start to say, as a government official, "That Section 230 thing, we may want to revise that. Please excise this content." And I gather, Allysia, there's also some antitrust threats here that were part of it, correct?

Allysia Finley: Right. Then the privacy regulation, which the giants have also been trying to ward off, and the antitrust point, Facebook has already been sued. The FTC is already is trying to break up Facebook, and actually it's continued to go after Facebook with a number of lawsuits. And actually for that matter, the Justice Department has also sued Google, a numerous antitrust claims.

Paul Gigot: Which owns YouTube.

Allysia Finley: Right, so this threat was legitimate. And I think going back to the point on Section 230, what's interesting is the Biden administration tries to claim in its defense is, "Well, there was bipartisan support from Congress, and so that threat, it's not legitimate, or it doesn't really mean anything because Republicans support modifying or revising Section 230 too."

Paul Gigot: Did the government actually say that in that case?

Allysia Finley: Yes, they actually made that in their defense.

Paul Gigot: Of course, that if-

Allysia Finley: That makes it even more likely.

Paul Gigot: ... Yeah, it makes it more likely that they'd be able to follow through on the threat. So Kyle, what is your response to that? These are government actors, the White House being a very powerful government actor with control over Justice Department, with heavy influence over the federal agencies. Why would it not be coercive in that case?

Kyle Peterson: Well, it could be, and that's the question. I mean, it will be fascinating to watch this as it works its way up the appeals courts and maybe to the Supreme Court. I'm certainly open to the idea that particularly these White House statements that I quoted, that sounds a little coercive to me. One question in the case would be how far that goes down the chain of government? I mean, if somebody in the White House advisory team is saying coercive sounding things to Twitter, does that affect these good faith interactions between the CDC? Does that coercion go all the way down the government chain of command as it were? But that's part of why I think this case is so interesting, worth watching, is we have a new form of media, social media, and we don't have a great case law, nothing. It really, analogous to these situations to rely on. And so, we're going to answer some of these questions, and I would point to another piece of the judge's ruling. So he says, he barred certain communications, interactions between government officials and these social sites, but he says, "The following actions are not prohibited by this preliminary injunction." One of them is exercising permissible public and government speech promoting government policies, or views on matters of public concerns. So is it the secrecy that was the problem here? If these White House officials said publicly, "We think X is misinformation and we're disappointed that Facebook is not taking greater action." Is that coercive in the same way that private conversations to the same effect are? And then two, the judge also says that, not covered by his injunction, "Is informing social media companies of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures?" And I'm a little bit flummoxed by that because if these interactions are coercive with regard to Covid information, I have a hard time seeing how they're not coercive with regard to what people are saying on voting procedures.

Paul Gigot: All right. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more about this fascinating case. A federal judge ruling that private censorship under pressure from the government violates the First Amendment, when we come back. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch Podcast." That is, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch Podcast."

Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Paul Gigot: Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot with The Wall Street Journal, with Allysia Finley and Kyle Peterson, talking about the ruling by Judge Terry Doughty that found the government had illegally pressured private social media companies to censor speech and violated the First Amendment, particularly on Covid. Allysia, there's no doubt here in the factual case, the discovery that the judge undertook, that these companies did censor speech. They did censor content considerably, correct?

Allysia Finley: Right. In many cases, it was, they suppressed some of the content that they deemed "borderline". By that, it means that they prevented it essentially from going viral. People couldn't share it, so it had a very limited audience.

Paul Gigot: Okay, and this was the Great Barrington Declaration, we know was particularly contentious with Tony Fauci and government public health officials at the time. This is the declaration signed by many, many scientists, but Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff were two of the promoters of this. And their argument was that you should take care of the most vulnerable people first, first and foremost under Covid. Make sure that older people, people who had underlying conditions were protected, but let the rest of the economy stay open. That was not where Tony Fauci was. And they ran a campaign internally, which has been exposed later with emails against the Great Barrington proposal.

Allysia Finley: Right. So in part of the ruling, they actually weren't able to find any instances in which the Tony Fauci and Collins actually pressured the social media companies.

Paul Gigot: Okay.

Allysia Finley: And so, it was a lot of internal communications between the two saying that we need to basically push back against this in the media, like doing articles, Washington Post, providing quotes in those cases.

Paul Gigot: Which is not illegal.

Allysia Finley: This is not illegal. So I think that's actually one weak point in the judge's ruling that just because they publicly denounced and tried to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration in the wider media, and then the social media companies kind of took the hint that, "Well, maybe we should also try to suppress this." I don't think that that passes as or meets the criteria as being coercive or significantly even in encouraging, because there really weren't any direct communications at least that they were able to uncover during legal discovery.

Paul Gigot: Okay. So it seems here, Kyle, that what we're talking about when it comes down to a legal matter is what qualifies as, how should we say, discussion between the government and these companies of the kind that we would have as journalists? Certainly, I would have as an editor and have had with government officials who call and gripe about something, or say, "We sure would like you to write an editorial about this or that." They don't say, "Paul, we're going to pull your license." Well, there's no license to practice journalism, but we're not going to try to take away your job or something like that. They can't do that, or we're going to sue you for something or other. But the social media platforms are vulnerable as we said. But does it come down to, do you think, a fact-based question of just how coercive this pressure was?

Kyle Peterson: How coercive it was, and also what the legal standard, the legal test for that coercion is, and whether it's different in the social media space than it is in other spaces? I mean, the difficulty of the analogies I think you hit, as a journalist, you can get calls from government officials that you maybe would describe as a frank exchange of views. And if you're a reporter doing something on the national security beat, I imagine officials, White House officials may call you and say that, "This is very important national security information. If you publish this, you're going to expose sources."

Paul Gigot: Right, and also say that you may end up being vulnerable yourself to some kind of investigation.

Kyle Peterson: Well, or you may end up killing people because there are sources that are described in this that would be revealed. And to me, I mean that sounds maybe persuasive or maybe not, but the question is whether the decision to publish still rests with the journalists and their editors. And I think that's the question here with social media as well. Whether the decision to moderate that content or not moderate that content was still reasonably in the hands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, what have you, or whether there was so much pressure on them that they basically had no choice but to comply.

Paul Gigot: What do you think about that? Is that the line that you would draw here, whether this is actually a proper ruling or not?

Allysia Finley: Well, I think that the coercion is, and whether it's implicit or explicit, I think that that's the key to the case. Now, I just want to use one other illustration is, we've been seeing what's happened to Twitter since Elon Musk took it over and how Lina Khan has basically been harassing the company.

Paul Gigot: She's the head of the Federal Trade.

Allysia Finley: Federal Trade, and basically, because of his hands-off content moderation policies and has been subject to all kinds of document requests, and FTC is also threatening to rewrite a privacy settlement with the company, and that just shows how vindictive the government can be, and the government really does have a lot of power over these companies. It can't really pull licenses per se, but it could seek to put a company out of business, break it up, so to speak. Maybe the Biden administration would be doing these antitrust cases anyways, but some of it could also be out of sheer vindictiveness.

Paul Gigot: Does the judge cite any precedence for the linkage between government and private censorship?

Allysia Finley: Not actually censorship. He cites a lot of different case precedents to, as I mentioned before, the 1982, the Blum precedent which involved the nursing home, and actually the basis in terms of whether or what qualifies as coercion and significant encouragement, which is the standard to hold the government liable or responsible for violation, whether it be a First Amendment or other civil rights or other individual rights violation. But really, in this realm of First Amendment rights, especially with regards to the media or social media, it really is an untested case.

Paul Gigot: There are not a lot of precedents here that have gone up to the Supreme Court. There is a case from some decades ago where the Supreme Court did rule on a, it was in West Virginia I believe, where the government stood guilty of compelling speech because it amounted to a company town. It was just a small town where everybody more or less worked for the same company, and therefore was deemed to be acting on behest of the government. But there's not a lot of case law on this, so this could set some new ground, Kyle. And I'm just reading between the lines of the Peterson coercion here, or the discussion, and I think you're skeptical.

Kyle Peterson: Well, at least I think that there is possibly a mixed ruling here where maybe some of the White House private statements to these social networks crossed the line, and maybe the CDC apparatchiks coordination with Twitter on them asking, is there any truth to this claim, this health claim about a Covid vaccine, doesn't cross the line. But I think this is certainly one to watch just because it is, I think, setting some new ground, and does raise questions for other areas of life. I mean, we were talking about a comparison to journalists earlier. What if you had a newspaper that ran an op-ed, and the President says, "There is information in here that is libelist about me and my administration, and that's why I'm going to appoint judges that will overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, pass a constitutional amendment to change the libel standard under US law." Is that a First Amendment breach? Is that a retaliation?

Paul Gigot: No, no, not at all.

Kyle Peterson: I think there's a lot of cans of worms that are being opened here, and it's hard for me sitting here right now to see around all the corners about how they're going to be settled. But it is certainly going to be an interesting case. And maybe one, or maybe we have to wait for another one to get up to the Supreme Court. There's another one that could be coming on Ron DeSantis and Disney, his removal of government benefits from Disney after Disney spoke out against the law concerning teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools. That is being litigated as a retaliation case, and maybe that will have some bearing on this as well.

Paul Gigot: Well, it strikes me as a very important area to be investigated and litigated because of the power of social media platforms to control speech. I mean, during Covid, we essentially had one part of the debate about Covid, which we carried on in our pages, but that debate could not extend to social media because of the censorship of a lot of those views that the platforms undertook. You saw another illustration with the 2020 campaign with the censoring of the Hunter Biden story that the New York Post have published about his laptop, which turned out to be entirely true. But because of the 51 former spies who said that at the time, that that was possibly Russian misinformation, the platforms used that as an excuse to censor. So, there's a broad concern there for what this says about democratic debate. And it's bad enough if the platforms themselves, from all kicking in the same direction with the same point of view, censor alternative points of view, but it's much worse when the government is able to use them as agents of their official policy to censor dissenting or alternative points of view.

Kyle Peterson: I think that's right. On the point about democratic debate, I would say two things, which is the person who is upset that Facebook keeps taking down their posts about how vaccines cause magnetism or alter their blood color is in the same position as the person whose op-eds on that subject keep getting refused by op-ed editors at newspapers around the country. And I think that it's easy to overestimate the influence of social media on democratic debate. Most Americans are not on Twitter. There is still an awful lot of speech that takes place off Twitter, and way more magnitudes, more speech than there was in the Democratic debate even 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And so, there's a lot of speech out there, a lot of avenues for speech, and there are many companies that want to be the next Twitter. There is competition out there. One problem is the network effects. I mean, Twitter is powerful because everybody else is on Twitter. But also part of it is, I think, those moderation policies. There are unmoderated social media sites, and they tend not to be very pleasant places to spend a few minutes.

Paul Gigot: Allysia, you're going to get the last word here. What do you think about this issue and where it goes from here?

Allysia Finley: Well, I think as Kyle pointed out, there are a number of free speech cases headed up to the Supreme Court. Texas and Florida have tried to tackle this issue in passing laws that would restrict social media companies from censoring speech and speech of public officials and media companies. And the Supreme Court is now considering whether to grant cert to both of those cases, and has asked for the Solicitor General's opinion. But I think those are probably the two more important cases to watch going up to the Supreme Court, and may decide also the extent of free speech rights for the platforms themselves.

Paul Gigot: Right, because those cases are about the governments of those states saying the tech platforms cannot censor, right?

Allysia Finley: Right, and the platforms in those cases are claiming that this is an abridgement of their First Amendment rights.

Paul Gigot: Right, to be able to decide what they want to say or not publishes content. All right. Kyle Peterson and Allysia Finley, thank you for this fascinating discussion. Thank you all for listening. We're here every day with Potomac Watch, and we will back tomorrow with another edition. So, hope you'll join us then.

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The Legal Fight Over Government and Social-Media Censorship ... - The Wall Street Journal

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The Pentagon Will No Longer Offer Support to Moviemakers Who … – Military.com

Posted: at 4:53 am

"What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists?" U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a floor speech while discussing the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill.

Cruz was referring to what some eagle-eyed viewer saw in the trailer for the long-awaited "Top Gun" sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick." It turns out the filmmakers had removed the flags of Taiwan and Japan from Maverick's flight jacket. The reason, reported by Politico, was because the studio tried to "appease" Tencent, a China-based backer of the film.

Politico said it obtained a recent Pentagon document that says the U.S. military will no longer offer technical assistance to filmmakers unless they offer a pledge that the final product won't be altered for approval from the Chinese government.

Read: How Hollywood Films Get the US Military as a Co-Star

According to the document, the Department of Defense "will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People's Republic of China... to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People's Republic of China."

The policy has been a long time coming. In May 2023, Cruz, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced the "The Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies Act" or SCRIPT Act, an amendment to the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill, which would limit or end Defense Department technical assistance to Hollywood productions if those productions censor their films for viewing in China.

"For too long, Hollywood has been complicit in China's censorship and propaganda in the name of bigger profits," Cruz said in a statement. "The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wakeup call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China."

This new Pentagon guidance contains most of the provisions of Cruz's intended legislation, without the legislation. It requires the production company working with the DoD to inform its liaison officer of any changes demanded by a Chinese official, and whether or not the company intends to comply with that demand.

The SCRIPT Act would also require an annual report of films that were submitted to Chinese officials and submitted to the Department of Commerce. Films produced in whole or in part in China will also not be allowed to censor their contents for the Chinese government.

Tencent eventually ended its investment in "Top Gun: Maverick" and the flags reappeared in the final version of the film, but this is just one moment in a long line of censorship requests from Beijing, many of which Hollywood is often only too happy to accommodate. China surpassed North America as the world's biggest market for Hollywood movies in 2020, and moviemakers often depend on its market to break even.

Changes are made despite the fact that Chinese censorship isn't limited to content that makes China look bad. It's known that any content involving Uyghurs, Taiwan or Hong Kong demonstrations won't pass, but the Chinese have also been known to censor same-sex kissing ("Bohemian Rhapsody") and even the Statue of Liberty (noticeably absent from "Spider-Man: No Way Home").

Studios have been editing films for China as far back as the late 1990s with "Titanic," where actress Kate Winslet's nude body was edited out of the final version. "Iron Man 3" featured Chinese product placement. Films such as "Fight Club" and "Lord of War" had their endings cut off and replaced with text that told audiences the criminals were apprehended.

"This new guidance -- implementing the legislation I authored in the SCRIPT Act -- will force studios to choose one or the other, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll make the right choice and reject China's blackmailing," Cruz told Politico.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, or on LinkedIn.

Whether you're looking for news and entertainment, thinking of joining the military or keeping up with military life and benefits, Military.com has you covered. Subscribe to the Military.com newsletter to have military news, updates and resources delivered straight to your inbox.

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The Pentagon Will No Longer Offer Support to Moviemakers Who ... - Military.com

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Britains Holocaust island – Index on Censorship

Posted: at 4:53 am

In a West London art gallery, a pock-marked relief sculpture provides a devastating visual representation of a wartime Nazi atrocity. The piece is both a work of art and evidence from a crime scene: a cast of a wall riddled with bullet holes. The cast could have been taken from any number of sites across Nazi-occupied Europe. But this wall is on Alderney one of the Channel Islands and part of the British Isles which surrendered to the German army in 1940.

The artist Piers Secunda, who created the work, has been told by forensics experts that it was used by a German firing squad. Secunda is part of a growing group of campaigners, journalists, researchers and politicians who believe the full story of the occupation of Alderney has never been told. In particular, he believes the fate of Jewish prisoners on the island has been conveniently minimised to protect the idea of British exceptionalism. If he is right, we will have to reassess our understanding of the history of the geographical boundaries of Hitlers Final Solution. Hence the exhibitions title: The Holocaust on British Soil.

Just eight Jews are officially recorded as dying on Alderney. Secunda, who describes himself as a researcher as well as an artist, is sceptical. Another of his works includes reproductions of lists of deportees compiled by the French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Secunda is now writing to the families of 400 French Jews who are known to havebeen transported to the island from the notorious transit camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris.

If many hundreds of Jews were sent to Alderney and we know the death rate of prisoners was high-between 30% and 40% how is it possible that only eight people died on the island? There is a disconnect, and my interest is to join the dots, he told Index.

While Alderney is technically a Crown Dependency and not a part of the United Kingdom, the British government was responsible for the surrender of the Channel Islands. The occupation of these islands has always been an inconvenient truth. By the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchills War Cabinet concluded the islands could not be defended, and at the beginning of July, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney were all occupied.

However, unlike on the other islands, all but a handful of people on Alderney were evacuated. This paved the way for the island to be turned into a vast prison for slave workers constructing Hitlers sea defences. In January 1942, therefore, four camps Helgoland, Norderney, Sylt and Borkum were set up for workers from so-called Operation Todt. Conventional wisdom is that the majority of those transported to the island were Russian prisoners of war. But the records show a significant proportion of those in the camps were Spanish Republicans, north African Arabs and French Jews.

The conditions on Alderney were appalling and, in common with other Nazi work camps, prisoners were beaten and starved. Many succumbed to disease. Those who could no longer work were sent to camps in mainland Europe where they were murdered. The overall numbers of those who died on the island is also the subject of academic controversy: the minimum estimate is between 700 and 1,000 people, but experts believe the actual figure could be much higher.

Immediately after the liberation of Alderney, two senior British soldiers, Major Cotton and Major Haddock, were sent to investigate war crimes. As a result, the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) office, the body responsible for bringing Nazis to justice, concluded the conditions were akin to those in other concentration camps in German-occupied territory: The position here is somewhat similar to Belsen, stronger perhaps because the offences were committed on British territory. A young captain, Theodore Pantcheff, was brought in to carry out a full investigation. In September 1945 he wrote: Wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on British soil in the last three years.

And yet Britain did not bring a single German officer to justice for what happened on Alderney. Instead, the authorities chose to focus on the Russian victims of the regime in the islands camps and shift the responsibility for any investigation to the Soviet authorities. In October 1945, Pantcheffs report was sent to Moscow, where it lay in the archives until 1993. The British copy was destroyed.

When the report finally came to light, it revealed that 15 suspected war criminals had been in British custody at the end of the war. In his memoirs, Pantcheff claimed that three of the most notorious of these, Maximilian List, Kurt Klebeck and Carl Hoffman, had not survived the war. This was untrue. Hauptsturmfhrer List was in charge of Sylt, the only SS camp on British territory. After the war, he was traced to a British prisoner-of-war camp and was said to have been handed over to the Russians. In fact, he was living in Germany well into the 1970s. Obersturmfhrer Klebeck, Lists deputy, lived out his days in Hamburg, despite being convicted of other war crimes in 1947 and being the subject of German investigations in the 1960s and the 1990s.

Most shocking is the story of Major Hoffman, the Kommandant of Alderney and its four camps, who Pantcheff said had been handed over to the Russians and executed in Kyiv in 1945. The British government was forced to admit the truth in 1983: that Hoffman was taken from Alderney and held in the London Cage for prisoners of war until 1948, when he was released and allowed to return to Germany. He died peacefully in his bed in Hamelin, West Germany, in March 1974.

The story of Alderney is one of silence, state censorship and missed opportunities. Hoffman and the other war criminals should have faced justice immediately after the end of hostilities. The British government has never explained why it allowed them to go free nor why it pursued a policy of Russification of the atrocities committed on the island. But there is no doubt this was a conscious policy. The details are contained in Madeleine Buntings 1995 book, The Model Occupation. In it she said that Brigadier Shapcott from JAG wrote in 1945 that all the inmates on Alderney were Russian, and Britains Foreign Office concluded that for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps. JAG also told the Foreign Office: No were committed against the French Jews. On balance they were treated better than the others working for the Germans.

There have been a number of attempts to correct the historical record by drawing attention to the camps on Alderney and the presence of Jewish prisoners. Most notable is the work of Jewish South African archaeologist Solomon H Steckoll, whose book The Alderney Death Camp was published in 1982 and serialised in The Observer newspaper. His direct, impassioned approach is captured in the cover blurb: In 1943 the SS built a concentration camp on the British island of Alderney. Prisoners were worked as slaves, beaten, starved, hanged, garrotted, hurled from cliff-tops, even buried alive in setting concrete. Why have these horrific acts been kept from the public for so long?

The Alderney Death Camp is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism driven by the authors own burning sense of injustice. Many on Alderney dismissed it as a tabloid hatchet job. But it is nothing of the kind, not least because Steckoll made it his personal mission to find Hoffman and reveal the full scale of the British governments cover-up. This will be his legacy.

Steckolls revelations prompted a grudging recognition from the British government that it had not told the truth about Hoffman. It did not, though, lead to full disclosure. Those files on the Channel Islands that had not been destroyed remained closed for at least another decade, when Labour MP David Winnick, who is Jewish, began campaigning for their release.

From May 1992, Winnick also pushed for an investigation into the war crimes on Alderney committed by Klebeck, who was by then known to be at large in Hamburg. By the end of the year, he had succeeded on both fronts (although no files released made any reference to Alderney). Winnicks campaign was followed two years later by the publication of Buntings book. Nearly 30 years on it still bears scrutiny as a major piece of journalism; Buntings tone as she grapples with the British governments decision-making is a mixture of shock and justified anger.

Her conclusion is stark: Trials on British soil would have been an acutely embarrassing reminder to the British public of several painful facts about the war which the government wanted quickly forgotten: that British territory had been occupied for five years; that British subjects had collaborated and worked for the Germans on Alderney; and that Nazi atrocities, including the establishment of an SS concentration camp, had occurred on British soil.

One block on transparency has been the attitudes on Alderney itself. Academics and journalists have faced hostility on the island. Caroline Sturdy Colls, professor of conflict archaeology at Staffordshire University, was the first to apply modern forensic techniques to sites on Alderney. Her book, Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney, was published last year. Nearly 80 years after the end of the war, the subject of what really happened on Alderney remains highly sensitive among some residents who dont want their island paradise to become part of what they see as the Holocaust industry.

There are certainly some islanders who want to help memorialise the victims and tell their stories, so not everyone wants to forget, Sturdy Colls told Index. Those that do often provide reasons like not wanting the island to be tarnished by this dark history or not wanting tourism based on Nazi sites.

The archaeologist said there were a host of other reasons why the subject of the camps on Alderney has proved controversial. There are many people who still dont recognise the crimes that were perpetrated as being part of the Nazi programme of persecution and/or the Holocaust. After the war, there was a conscious effort by the government to play down the atrocities that were carried out, and so a sanitised narrative emerged that a good proportion of the British public believed or chose to believe. Some of the islanders who went back to Alderney found it too painful to discuss what had happened there, whilst some residentsafter the war didnt (and still dont) want the island to be known for the occupation-era sites that exist there.

There have been several key moments when a full and accurate narrative should have been told. Immediately after the war, the Pantcheff report could have led to a war crimes trial, but the British government chose to draw a veil over the atrocities.

The extraordinary work of Steckoll in 1982 could have prompted an inquiry, but instead it was dismissed as sensationalist. The combined efforts of Winnick in parliament and Bunting in the press could have opened the door in the mid-1990s, but again the government chose obfuscation rather than openness.

We have another such opportunity now. The mantle of Steckoll has been taken up by another Jewish investigator, Marcus Roberts, who is determined to pursue the truth about the Holocaust on British soil. He believes it is possible that between 15,000 and 30,000 people died on the island, with at least 1,000 being Jewish.

Roberts is the founder of the Jewish heritage charity JTrails. He began researching the Nazi camps of northern France in 2007. Two years later he turned his attention to the Channel Islands. He has been pushing for official recognition of Alderney as a Holocaust site, the establishment of an appropriate memorial and protection of Jewish graves. Roberts has established it was not just French Jews who were sent to Alderney; there were Jews from many from other parts of Europe and north Africa.

His research demonstrates that a considerable number of Jews are likely to have died on the island from dysentery and disease. His view is that the push for a Soviet inquiry was a smokescreen. Roberts told The Observer: The way I read it is that the investigation regarding the Russians was undertaken first as a diversion from war crimes against other nationalities, but also there was definitely discussion in the papers we can read that they wanted to guarantee access to Allied war graves on Russian territory. It was also about plausible deniability.

Although she has challenged the numbers cited by Roberts, Sturdy Colls also believes the scale of the Jewish atrocities has been downplayed. It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of, she said. The conditions in which Jews were housed were an extension of those that they were kept in elsewhere in Europe. The camps on Alderney were part of a network of sites that housed Jews and harsh punishments, terrible working and living conditions, and torture characterised their lives on Alderney.

She added that it was important to recognise the atrocities committed against other groups on Alderney eastern Europeans and Jehovahs Witnesses, for example. Overall, the suffering of most of the people who were sent to Alderney and were under the control of Organisation Todt and the SS has been underplayed.

The momentum towards full disclosure may now be irresistible. In recent years, investigative journalists around the world have turned their attention to Alderney, and the story has been covered by The Sunday Timesand ITV in the UK, Channel 9 in Australia, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Times of India. One of the most comprehensive investigations was carried out last year by Isobel Cockerell for the international online publication Coda Story.

Her article on Alderney has been nominated for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. In it she asks the key questions: Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted? She says the islanders have a range of answers: collective shame at surrendering the islands and subsequent collaboration; the post-war focus on rebuilding the country; a view that the scale of the atrocities didnt merit war crimes trials; and also that no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.

Events in the next few years may force the governments hand and prompt ministers to correct the historical record. In 2024, the UK will take its turn as chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. The body is responsible for Holocaust education,remembrance and research around the world. Lord Pickles is the UKs special envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and the head of the UKs IHRA delegation. On visits to Alderney, Pickles has told islanders they need to come to terms with the troubled history of the camps and find a way of marking what happened with a respectful memorial.

Later this year, Pickles will announce an expert review of the numbers who died on Alderney and invite submissions from academics, researchers and members of the public. The IHRA is seeking to adopt a charter to safeguard all sites of the Holocaust in Europe. Gilly Carr, associate professor in archaeology at Cambridge University and chair of the IHRA Safeguarding Sites project, told Index: Such sites play a crucial role in educating current and future generations about the Holocaust and help us reflect on its consequences. In this charter we take a broad approach to what we consider to be a site of the Holocaust. Jews were held in camps in Alderney and we consider these to be Holocaust sites.

Carr, like Sturdy Colls, believes the full story of Nazi atrocities has been downplayed in the past. Certainly, the subject of victims of Nazism in the Channel Islands as a whole, a category within which I would include Jews, political prisoners and forced labourers, has come late to the table, she said. Because there were no war crimes trials resulting from the occupation of the Channel Islands, it became a non-subject for many people.

Carr has helped develop the concept of taboo heritage, where the legacy of war is so sensitive that people become resistant to the idea of full remembrance.

Taboo heritage can become heritage in the end if it receives political support, but this usually takes a lot of time and investment by stakeholders, she said.

Pickles is also co-chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, the body responsible for planning a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which will be built in sight of the Houses of Parliament. British exceptionalism will be at the heart of the new memorial.

It will celebrate the Kindertransport, the scheme to rescue 10,000 children from Nazi Germany in the nine months before the outbreak of war. It will also celebrate British heroes of the Holocaust, such as Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped rescue 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of war.

There is now a commitment to putting the occupation of the Channel Islands at the heart of the memorial. But what happened here does not sit easily with this narrative of exceptionalism. The horrors of Alderney are a blot on Britains reputation, which is perhaps why the full story has been suppressed for so long. The slogan chosen for the memorial is Confronting Evil, Assuming Responsibility. Will we now confront the evil of the camps on Alderney and assume responsibility for covering up what happened there?

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Britains Holocaust island - Index on Censorship

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Honkai Star Rail: The Complete Story of Herta Space Station … – TheGamer

Posted: July 4, 2023 at 12:15 pm

After watching the early trailers and beta gameplay, one of the main reasons for many players to get into Honkai: Star Rail was its lore. The game's set in Honkai Impact 3rd's alternate universe, which explains the existence of similar characters like Himeko, Bronya, Seele, Welt, and many more.

RELATED: Honkai: Star Rail - How To Reroll

As you start playing the game, you'll first go through the story of the Herta Space Station. The Antimatter Legion will be your main enemy in this area, and you'll also get to meet the Astral Express crew for the first time. Eventually, you'll join the express and leave the planet to get to the next one.

Once you make an account and enter the game, you'll be greeted by a scene of the Antimatter Legion invading the Herta Space Station. There'll be a lady playing an invisible violin while the guards on the station try to fend off the enemies and get everyone to safety. After the cutscene ends, you'll learn that this lady is called Kafka.

Someone on the screen will tell Kafka that Antimatter Legion invaded the station, but "Elio" didn't mention it, so it's not important. Kafka will also mention their goal of placing the target before you start your first battle against the Antimatter Legion. You'll play this battle as Kafka herself, but don't get your hopes up, as she's not the main character.

After the fight, you'll have a little talk about Herta, a member of the genius society. She's essentially the leader of Herta Space Station.

When you're about to get into the next room, the monitor person from before will mention a Doomsday Beast also being present at the station. You'll get introduced to Silver Wolf after finishing the battle in this room, and you'll learn that she's the hacker who's been talking to you and also the person who attracted the Antimatter Legion to slow down the Astral Express crew.

Silver Wolf will mention that she was looking at the collection of "Herta's Toys" and a special gun that can score characters. This is where the Stellaron will be mentioned for the first time, and your next destination will be a room where you can find the location of the said Stellaron. You'll fight another wave of Antimatter Legion until you reach the room.

Here, you have to interact with a few items until Silver Wolf hacks all the monitors and opens a secret passage directly into the Stellaron room. Kafka will interact with the glowing sphere, and you'll get to choose the main character of this game between Stelle and Caelus. This choice doesn't change anything in the rest of the game.

There'll be a cutscene of Kafka placing the Stellaron in the heart of the Trailblazer you choose, and then they'll have a short dialogue when the main character wakes up. Kafka and Silver Wolf will then depart, and you'll be woken up by March 7th and Dan Heng. After some introductions, you'll learn that they're the members of the Astral Express crew mentioned earlier.

When you wake up for the first time, Kafka will mention that there will come a time when you have to make an important choice.

She suggests that you make the right choice, and all the confusion will come to an end.

After fighting a couple of Antimatter Legion enemies, you'll meet up with Dan Heng and Arlan. He'll accompany you to the elevator, and you'll find your first Light Cone in the next room. These are Garden of Recollection technology and can enhance your character's abilities by giving them special powers.

As you're about to reach the elevator, you'll go against the first mini-boss in the game called Voidranger: Trampler. Once you successfully defeat the enemies, a cutscene will play out where March, Dan Heng, and Trailblazer will get overwhelmed by the sheer number of Antimatter Legion enemies.

Although, before they can lay a hand on you or your friends, Himeko's drone will show up and defeat them all in one sweep. This will lead to you getting introduced to the character in the Master Control Zone. Arlan departs from the scene after a short dialogue and Himeko introduces herself as the navigator of the Astral Express, the third Express member that you meet.

You'll also get to tell her if March has been any trouble to you. While your choice here doesn't matter much, it does lead to some funny dialogues. You'll then be asked to talk to Asta, who's at the main station giving out orders to defend against the Legion's attack. She's the Lead Researcher at Herta Space Station.

This will lead to a small quest where you have to talk to different members of the Space Station to lift their spirits. While talking to Hinkel, you can simply select the last option to continue the quest. Once you're done talking to everyone, a cutscene of the Doomsday Beast breaching the Station's shield will play out.

At the end of this cutscene, Asta will ask Himeko to take the Astra Express and get out of the Space Station. After deliberation, Himeko will decide to take up Asta's offer. During the dialogue outside, Dan Heng will mention that Doomsday Beast can rip off the defense shield like its paper, and the Station can't defend against it.

He'll also mention that the Legion has the blessing of an Aeon called Nanook (Destruction). Himeko will still suggest that the Express has to leave with the Trailblazer, which will prompt Dan Heng to ask if we're that important. Himeko mentions that the Trailblazer might be what helps turn the tides in their favor.

As you get to the railway station and try to leave, your path will be blocked by the Doomsday Beast. It turns out that you'll have to defeat it after all. The beast will have two phases and three areas to attack. You'll have to deplete its head and both its arms' health to zero, and then constantly attack its body to finish each phase.

This is going to be a hard battle, so it's recommended to pay attention to all the turn-based mechanics introduced in the tutorial.

Once the beast is defeated, a cutscene will play out showing you facing Nanook himself. Welt will save you from getting destroyed in this process, and he'll be introduced as the fourth member of the Astral Express.

When you wake up, you'll talk to Himeko and also be introduced to Herta. She'll mention that she wants to perform some tests on you.

Once you finish the first beta test of the Simulated Universe with Herta, you'll be asked to talk to Himeko whenever you're ready to leave Herta Space Station and board the Express. After talking to her, a beautiful cutscene will play with heartwarming music, which marks the beginning of your story as the Trailblazer.

Before talking to Himeko, you can also talk to Herta and tell her that you don't want to leave with the Astral Express.

This will start a different quest where you'll be allowed to stay at the Space Station, but eventually, Herta will lose interest in you, and you'll just be a regular researcher.

Executing this side quest will take you back to the login screen, and you can log back in to have the quest to talk to Himeko again. This will give more meaning to your story. Herta Space Station is essentially a tutorial stage in Honkai: Star Rail and it'll already hook you to the story and make you want to keep playing.

You'll also meet Pom-Pom, the conductor of the Astral Express. She'll mention that you might be special, but everyone on the Express has their secrets. You'll then learn what the next stop of your journey is.

NEXT: Honkai: Star Rail - All Chest Locations On Herta Space Station

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Honkai Star Rail: The Complete Story of Herta Space Station ... - TheGamer

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Sun breaks out with highest number of sunspots since in more than … – Space.com

Posted: at 12:15 pm

The sun produced over 160 sunspots in June, the highest monthly number in more than two decades.

The data confirm that the current solar cycle, the 25th since records began, is picking up intensity at a much quicker pace than NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasted, sparking concerns of severe space weather events in the months and years to come.

While the space agencies predicted a maximum monthly number of sunspots during the 25th solar cycle's maximum to reach a modest 125, the star is now on a trajectory to peak at just under 200 monthly sunspots, and some scientists think this peak may arrive in just one year.

"Highest monthly average sunspot number since September 2002!" solar physicist Keith Strong shared on Twitter on Sunday. "The June 2023 [sunspot number] was 163.4, the highest value for over 20 years."

Related: NASA mission to 'ignorosphere' could improve space weather forecasts

On Sunday (July 2), one of these sunspots, the darker, cooler areas on the star's surface that feature dense, strong magnetic fields, produced a powerful solar flare, an energetic flash of light, that caused a temporary radio blackout in the western U.S. and over the Pacific Ocean, according to Spaceweather.com. Such events might become more common in the near future as the solar cycle approaches its maximum.

And contrary to the original NASA and NOAA forecast, this maximum might get rather fiery. More sunspots means not only more solar flares but also more coronal mass ejections, powerful eruptions of charged particles that make up solar wind. And that can mean bad space weather on Earth. Intense bursts of solar wind can penetrate Earth's magnetic field and supercharge particle's in Earth's atmosphere, which triggers mesmerizing aurora displays but also causes serious problems to power grids and satellites in Earth's orbit.

Tom Berger, a solar physicist and director of the Space Weather Technology Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Space.com in an earlier interview that after a major solar storm that hit Earth in October 2003, satellite operators lost track of hundreds of spacecraft for several days. This happened due to the increase in gas density in the highest layers of the atmosphere that correspond with the low Earth orbit region where many satellites, as well as the International Space Station, reside.

As the otherwise thin gas in this region interacts with the solar wind, the atmosphere swells up, causing satellites to suddenly face much more drag, or resistance, than they do in calm space weather.

"In the largest storms, the errors in the orbital trajectories become so large that, essentially, the catalog of orbital objects is invalidated," Berger told Space.com. "The objects can be tens of kilometers away from the positions last located by radar. They are essentially lost, and the only solution is to find them again with radar."

Experts worry that due to the growth in the number of satellites and space debris fragments that the low Earth orbit experienced since the last serious solar storm, such a situation might result in orbital chaos that could last for weeks. During this period, the risk of dangerous collisions with space debris fragments would be exceptionally high, creating further risk to satellite operators.

Various operators have already experienced early space weather trouble, including SpaceX, which lost a batch of 40 new Starlink satellites after launching them into what they thought was just a mild solar storm. The mishap that took place in February 2022 saw the brand new spacecraft burn-up in Earth's atmosphere when they couldn't raise their orbits after launch due to the unexpected drag. The European Space Agency (ESA) also reported problems last year after its three Swarm satellites, which study the planet's magnetic field, started losing altitude at a rate never seen before. Operators had to use the spacecrafts' thrusters to prevent them from falling to Earth in the denser gas.

During extreme events, charged solar particles can even damage spacecraft electronics, disrupt GPS signals and knock out power grids on Earth. During the most intense solar storm in history, the Carrington Event of 1859, telegraph clerks reported sparks flying off their machines, setting documents ablaze. The disruption to telegraph services in Europe and North America lasted for several days.

NASA solar physics research scientist Robert Leamon told Space.com in an earlier interview that the worst solar storms tend to arrive during the declining phase of odd solar cycles. Some challenging years might therefore lie ahead for spacecraft operators.

"Since Cycle 25 is odd, we might expect the most effective events to happen after the maximum, in 2025 and 2026," Leamon said. "This is because how the poles of the sun flip every 11 years. You want the pole of the sun in the same orientation compared to the poles of Earth so that then causes the most damage and the best coupling from the solar wind through Earth's magnetic field."

In the meantime, space weather forecasters continue to monitor the sunspot that sparked yesterday's flare as well as several other sunspots that are brewing on the sun's face. The forecasters warn that more solar fireworks are possible in the week ahead. So far, no coronal mass ejection is heading our way but auroras may get a boost from high speed solar wind streaming from a hole in the sun's magnetic field, the U.K. space weather forecaster Met Office said in a statement.

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Sun breaks out with highest number of sunspots since in more than ... - Space.com

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Is there an ‘up’ and a ‘down’ in space? – Livescience.com

Posted: at 12:15 pm

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have long used the seeming weightlessness of space to have a bit of fun chasing their dinner through the air, playing tug-of-war and mimicking superheroes. But is there a traditional "up" and "down" in space? Based on the astronauts' experiences, it's easy to think that the usual designations we use to define our positions, such as up and down or North and South, no longer apply once we leave Earth.

That's true in some ways, but it's still possible to use human perceptions of space and time to orient ourselves among the stars.

Just as on Earth, astronauts aboard the ISS experience gravity, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe. According to Sanjana Curtis, a nuclear astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, the prevailing thinking among physicists is that "down" is simply the direction in which gravity is pulling you, and "up" is the opposite direction. The astronauts' weightlessness stems from the fact that the ISS and the people inside it are free-falling toward the center of the Earth, drawn "down" by the planet's gravitational force. The station remains aloft because the velocity of the station and the resulting centrifugal force it generates push it "up," or away from Earth, at a speed roughly equal to gravity's pull. This balance is called a stable orbit.

"That's one of the most exciting things about physics, that we have a framework to describe and make sense of things that are unintuitive or that we are unable to perceive," Curtis told Live Science. "Up and down may be vague terms, but in physics, you can always come up with a definition that works."

Related: What happens in intergalactic space?

Albert Einstein described gravity as a warping of the fabric of space-time, and to illustrate this theory, scientists often use the simplified analogy of a bedsheet held taut. If you place a bowling ball onto the sheet, its mass causes the sheet to dimple downward at its center. If you then add a marble, it will roll toward the bottom of that dimple, drawn in by gravity.

Every object that has mass curves the space-time continuum. As such, it's unlikely that there's any place in the universe that isn't subject to gravity, Jessica Esquivel, a particle physicist at Fermilab in Illinois, told Live Science. If you plop another marble onto the map even on the outskirts it will be pulled from many directions. "Anywhere in space, you're going to feel that warping of the sheet, and that's gravity that's causing that," she said.

Generally speaking, the more massive an object, the deeper the warp and the stronger the pull, but your proximity also matters. For this reason, the planet you're standing on whether Earth or Mars will always exert the strongest gravitational force on you. At the same time, the planets in our solar system are being drawn toward the center of the sun. Even farther out, the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy is tugging the entire solar system closer. Outside the galaxy, the greatest pull is toward the nearest cluster of galaxies.

"You can zoom out and out and out and see the different depths of that space-time fabric," Esquivel said.

While gravity is a fundamental force, there remains much we don't understand about it. Scientists don't include gravity in the Standard Model of particle physics, for example, because the leading theory of gravity Einsteins general theory of relativity has thus far proven incompatible with the Standard Model . While designations such as "up" or "down" help us make sense of the universe, Esquivel said they can also sometimes hinder our understanding of fundamental physics.

"One of the hardest things about my job is trying to think outside of those binaries, to imagine a space where there's no up or down or forward or backward or past or present," she said. "There's this beautiful fluidity that we have to engage with, and it's really difficult but also one of the funnest parts of the job."

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The top 10 Ariane 5 rocket launches of all time – Space.com

Posted: at 12:15 pm

The Ariane rocket family has a storied history that dates back to the 1970s. Commissioned by the European and French space agencies (ESA and CNES, respectively), the family's fifth-generation launch vehicle, the Ariane 5, was developed and manufactured by Arianespace and began flying in 1996. Ariane 5 has stood as Europe's workhorse rocket for decades now, longer than any of its Ariane predecessors, and has more than 100 missions under its belt.

But that impressive run is about to end. There's just one Ariane 5 mission left a flight called VA261 that's scheduled to launch from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana on Tuesday (July 4) after a delay. VA261 will loft an experimental communications satellite called Heinrich Hertz for the German space agency and Syracuse 4b, a French communications satellite. (Ariane 5's replacement, the Ariane 6, is not yet ready to fly, by the way. It was originally expected to debut in 2020, but a series of setbacks have pushed that target to late 2023 at the earliest.)

While a couple of communication satellites may not make front-page news, the Ariane 5 has had some extremely notable launches during its run. So, as we prepare to bid the final Ariane 5 adieu, here is a look at the rocket's top 10 missions.

Related: Facts about the Ariane 5, Europe's workhorse rocket

The Galileo constellation is the backbone of Europe's satellite-navigation capabilities. Its utility to European citizens and governments is intertwined with numerous aspects of everyday life and is crucial to the continent's defense and infrastructure.

Twelve of the 24 currently operable Galileo satellites were launched on Ariane 5 rockets, which are able to loft four of the hefty spacecraft to orbit at a time a significant increase over the constellation's previous cadence of two-per-launch aboard Russian-built Soyuz rockets. Ariane 5's three Galileo missions launched in November 2016, December 2017 and July 2018.

ESA's first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the Jules Verne, launched atop an Ariane 5 on March 8, 2008. The ATV was designed for cargo missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and was capable of carrying over 7 tons of supplies and experiments for the station and its crew.

At the time, the collective 20-ton mass of the ATV Jules Verne was more than double the maximum weight ever launched by an Ariane 5 rocket. To accommodate this heavy load, the launch vehicle and its infrastructure underwent a set of upgrades, including the addition of structural supports to the Ariane 5's Vehicle Equipment Bay.

Five ATV spacecraft visited the ISS between 2008 and 2015, when the cargo-ship program came to an end. All five launched aboard the Ariane 5.

ESA's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) launched on an Ariane 5 on Dec. 10, 1999 and is still going strong. Instead of one X-ray telescope, XXM-Newton is actually three. The satellite contains a trio of advanced X-ray imaging devices, each made with 58 tiny, cylindrical mirrors all housed within one another and used to increase the telescope's field of view. These work alongside a spectrometer and other cameras that allow mission team members to study distant galaxy clusters, pulsars, black holes and other enigmatic space phenomena.

An Ariane 5 launched the BepiColombo mission for ESA and the Japanese space agency (JAXA) on Oct. 20, 2018. BepiColombo is headed where few spacecraft have gone before the planet Mercury. The double-orbiter probe consists of the European Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Japanese Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. The two are on a journey to reach orbit around Mercury, which has only been accomplished by one other spacecraft, NASA's MESSENGER probe.

To get there, BepiColombo is taking the scenic route. As space missions go, getting into orbit around Mercury is harder than reaching Pluto. The increasing gravity from the sun as you fly deeper into the inner solar system makes capture by a small, fast-orbiting planet like Mercury extremely difficult.

To overcome this obstacle, BepiColombo is using the gravity of multiple planets to slow the spacecraft's velocity. In the five years since its launch, BepiColombo has performed two Venus flyby maneuvers and a flyby of Earth, which occurred in April 2020. And it will take a total of six passes of Mercury before the spacecraft can be captured by the planet's weak gravitational pull. BepiColombo completed its third flyby of Mercury on June 12 and is expected to finally reach orbit around the planet in 2025.

The Herschel Space Observatory and Planck probe were a powerhouse duo that launched on an Ariane 5 on May 14, 2009. Parked at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, Herschel and Planck remained in operation from 2009 until June 2013 and October 2013, respectively. Both spacecraft more than lived up to their mission expectations.

Both were built and operated by ESA. At the time, Herschel was the largest infrared telescope to ever launch, and was only recently dethroned by another well-known space telescope that also launched on an Ariane 5 (which you can read about a bit further down this list). Herschel was outfitted with the largest mirror ever sent to space at the time, and its mission propelled research into the early universe, star formation, and the atmospheres of planets and moons in our own solar system.

Planck was designed to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB), radiation associated with the Big Bang and early universe. Planck's highly sensitive instruments allowed the probe to take unprecedented CMB measurements, which scientists used to help determine the age of the universe and produce the first CMB map of the entire sky.

Related: Planck probe sees Big Bang relics (gallery)

ESA's Rosetta mission was an enormous undertaking that resulted in some major firsts for space exploration. Launched on an Ariane 5 on March 2, 2004, Rosetta and its lander Philae spent 10 years catching up to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (also known as 67P). On Aug. 6, 2014, Rosetta became the first spacecraft ever to orbit a comet, beaming back extraordinary views of the icy body in unparalleled detail.

On Nov. 12 of that year, the Philae lander detached from Rosetta to attempt the first-ever landing on a comet's surface. Not all parts of Philae's landing went as planned: Anchoring harpoons designed to latch onto the comet during touchdown failed to fire, causing the spacecraft to bounce twice before settling on the surface. When Philae did come down for good, a cliff kept the lander in almost permanent shadow, obscuring the probe's solar panels from the sun.

Rosetta lost contact with Philae three days later, preventing the lander from meeting the majority of its mission objectives. But Rosetta remained in orbit around 67P for two more years, conducting studies of the comet's nucleus and changes caused by its varying proximity to the sun. In July 2015, 67P was positioned just right for some sunlight to reach Philae, and the lander momentarily woke up. Philae made contact with the Rosetta orbiter a few times during that short span before shutting off for a final time.

On Sept. 30, 2016, with its pioneering mission at an end, Rosetta aimed itself toward 67P and performed a kamikaze dive into the comet's frigid surface.

Related: Europe's Rosetta comet mission in photos

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is another ESA mission that is going to make some serious waves. JUICE was Ariane 5's penultimate mission, launching on April 14 of this year, and is now on a 7.5-year journey to the Jovian system. To get there, the spacecraft will perform three gravity-assist flybys of Earth and one of Venus, before finally arriving at Jupiter in December 2031. When it gets there, JUICE will orbit the planet for three years, making close flybys of three of Jupiter's icy ocean moons and studying them for signs of habitable conditions.

JUICE will perform two passes of Europa, one of the solar system's best bets for alien life, several passes of Callisto, Jupiter's second-largest moon and one of the solar system's most ancient planetary bodies, and finally Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system and JUICE's primary target. The probe will pass Ganymede a dozen times before nestling into orbit around the moon in 2034. When it does that, JUICE will become the first spacecraft to orbit a planetary moon other than that of Earth.

Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the solar system that produces its own magnetic field. Using nearly a dozen scientific instruments, JUICE will study Ganymede's complex inner core, analyze the moon's surface and collect data on the potential for its icy environment to sustain life.

Are you surprised? Granted, this list is entirely subjective, but who isn't putting this famous scope in the top spot? NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest and most powerful off-Earth observatory ever launched. This miraculous feat of science and engineering li on an Ariane 5 rocket on Dec. 25, 2021.

A massive, multi-layered sunshield, measuring nearly 70 feet by 50 feet (22 by 15 meters), protects the telescope's 18-segment primary mirror, which is approximately 21 feet (6.5 m) across. Like its infrared telescope predecessor Herschel (mentioned above), JWST is parked at L2, in the darkness of space a million miles from Earth.

Part of JWST's mission involves peering back into deep time, to see the universe's first light. The telescope has detected hundreds of early galaxies, helped characterize exoplanets, revealed marvelous hidden features of star clusters and nebulae thousands of light-years away and provided some of the most detailed views to date of planets in our own solar system, like this image of Uranus, released earlier this year. JWST is only in the beginning of its research, and it's expected to keep studying the cosmos for over a decade.

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The top 10 Ariane 5 rocket launches of all time - Space.com

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SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the ‘dark … – Space.com

Posted: at 12:15 pm

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. A SpaceX rocket launched a new space telescope into orbit Saturday (July 1) on a mission to map the "dark universe" like never before.

The European Space Agency observatory, called Euclid, soared to space today aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 11:11 a.m. EDT (1511 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 40 here at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Spectators here at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex cheered and applauded as the Falcon 9 booster carried Euclid aloft, with the first stage handily touching down just eight minutes later on a drone ship stationed nearby in the Atlantic Ocean.

"We have a mission," ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher said during a live webcast just after liftoff. "I'm so excited for this mission now, knowing its on its way to Lagrange point 2 ... amazing, I'm very happy and very thrilled."

The Euclid space observatory, which is designed to seek out invisible dark matter and dark energy, separated from its rocket about 41 minutes after liftoff and is now making the journey to the sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, which is roughly 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from our planet on the opposite side of the sun. Lagrange points are relatively stable orbits where satellites use a minimum of fuel, and Euclid's destination is a popular location: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope also orbits at L2, for example.

Related: We've never seen dark matter and dark energy. Does it really exist?

Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up most of the universe, but we can't see these phenomena in wavelengths of light. Rather, we can track the dark universe through its effects on other objects. (Gravitational lensing is one example, when a massive object bends the light of a distant object behind through the force of gravity, bringing otherwise faraway stars or galaxies into sharp focus.)

Cosmologists scientists studying the history of space seek to understand how the dark universe behaves to chart the effects of time on our cosmos. The mergers of galaxies, the expansion of the universe and the movements of individual stars are all subject to the forces of dark energy and dark matter.

Euclid will aim its telescope eye to regions outside of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, to map over a third of the "extragalactic" sky. In its six-year mission, the deep space explorer will map billions of targets like galaxies and stars. Euclid's two instruments, focusing respectively on visible and infrared (heat-seeking) light wavelengths, will record the information for scientists.

The long survey mission will uncover the movements of these distant objects, along with their chemical makeup. From space, Euclid's sharp eyes will allow for images at least four times more clear than what telescopes achieve from the ground, given the spacecraft will be far away from Earth's interfering atmosphere and stray light.

Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, said the Euclid mission is one 15 years in the making, but still she was holding her breath waiting for signal acquisition after a prefect launch and spacecraft separation.

"In the next six years of this mission, we will unravel the mysteries of the dark universe," Mundell said. "So, a huge honor to be here. I think there'll be some partying tonight."

Related: The Euclid spacecraft will transform how we view the 'dark universe'

The 1.4 billion Euro ($1.5 billion USD) Euclid has been in the works for nearly two decades. It was forged from two mission concepts proposed in 2007: Dune (Dark Universe Explorer) and Space (Spectroscopic All Sky Cosmic Explorer), which used different but complementing ways of looking at dark energy. Given how well the two missions worked with each other, they were combined into one powerful observatory: Euclid.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) science program committee selected Euclid for space in 2011 and formally adopted the program in 2012. The larger Euclid consortium today includes more than 2,000 scientists from Europe, the U.S. (including NASA), Canada and Japan contributing both instruments and analysis. Thales Alenia Space was the satellite's prime contractor, while Airbus Defence and Space contributed the payload module and 4-foot (1.2-meter) telescope.

Euclid's work follows on from several ground-based and space-based surveys of the universe. Among them is the Chilean Victor M. Blanco telescope's Dark Energy Survey that mapped 100 million galaxies; a 2022 study of that team's work will serve as a pathfinder both for Euclid and for NASA's Roman Space Telescope.

ESA's still-active Gaia satellite (also at Lagrange Point 2) is another recent example, having mapped the movements of nearly 2 billion bright stars since 2015. Gaia, however, focuses on the Milky Way and that will make it a complementary mission to Euclid's deep space focus.

Incidentally, Euclid was not supposed to launch aboard SpaceX at all. As late as February 2022, the mission was manifested upon an Arianespace Soyuz (provided by Russia) for a March 2023 launch in French Guiana. Russia's unsanctioned invasion of Ukraine forced a stop to most such space collaborations aside from the International Space Station, pushing Euclid's team to look for another ride to space.

Arianespace has been ESA's launch partner for decades and as a French vendor, it is the preferred route for European space access. Yet there was no room left on the retiring Ariane 5 rocket line, and the new Ariane 6 was still in a late stage of development, reported SpaceNews, which was at the meeting.

Even U.S. options were few, as United Launch Alliance's trusty Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy rockets also had full manifests ahead of their retirement. ULA's new Vulcan Centaur will not fly until this year at least, leaving SpaceX as the only viable short-term option, according to ESA comments last year.

To get to its new site, Euclid made its way from Italy to its Floridian launch site under sail. It took roughly two weeks to voyage across the Atlantic by boat, yet just minutes to cross that same ocean again in the air by rocket.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Euclid made its second flight to space with this launch. The mission marked SpaceX's 44th mission of 2023 and 243rd mission to date. It was the also the 204th successful landing of an orbital class rocket by SpaceX.

Euclid will take about 30 days to commute to its deep-space site. Investigators have not yet released the date for the first science image, but say it will be in a few months.

Elizabeth Howell's Florida coverage was co-sponsored by Canadian Geographic magazine and Canada's University of Waterloo, where Euclid's primary science coordinator (Will Percival) is based. Space.com has independent control of news coverage.

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NASAs ChatGPT-like AI will let spaceships talk to astronauts – Freethink

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NASA is developing a ChatGPT-style interface for future spacecraft, giving astronauts the ability to talk to the systems using natural language and have the systems talk right back.

Space talk: In June 2018, a massive dust storm on Mars engulfed NASAs Opportunity rover, cutting off communication with Earth. Eight months later, NASA announced an end to the rovers 15-year Mars mission.

The last message [NASA] received was basically, My battery is low and its getting dark, tweeted science reporter Jacob Margolis after talking to NASA about the rover.

The internet went crazy over Opportunitys poignant last words, but the rover didnt really say them its last message to Earth was written in coded data that NASA engineers had to interpret, just like every transmission before it.

The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles.

The idea: If rovers and other spacecraft could communicate with NASA using the same natural language people use to talk to each other, it could ease interpretation and thanks to advances in AI, were getting closer to that reality.

Its really not like science fiction any more, said Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at NASA, at a virtual meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on June 20.

Whats new? During her keynote speech at the IEEEs Cognitive Communications for Aerospace Applications Workshop, Suzuki explained how NASA is developing an interface similar to OpenAIs popular ChatGPT for future spacecraft and rovers.

This would let NASA scientists and astronauts communicate with the machines using natural language instead of having to sift through technical manuals to find information on how to tell a rover to perform a certain maneuver, for example, they could just tell it.

The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system, and beyond, said Suzuki.

NASA is developing an interface similar to OpenAIs popular ChatGPT for future spacecraft and rovers.

Looking ahead: NASA engineers wont have to wait too long to begin chatting it up with their spacecraft according to Suzuki, an early version of the AI will be integrated into Lunar Gateway, a moon-orbiting space station set to launch as soon as November 2024.

Once online, its not hard to imagine NASA using the space stations ability to talk to increase public awareness and engagement in the mission, too they could just give the Gateway AI its own Twitter account and wait for it to drop gems like the one attributed to Opportunity.

Wed love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at [emailprotected].

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Space Force is redefining outer space as a theater of war – The Washington Post

Posted: at 12:15 pm

July 2, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The uniforms resemble costumes from the television series Battlestar Galactica, and the logo is right out of Star Trek. Even the name given its members, guardians, seems born of science fiction. But three years after it was established as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, the U.S. Space Force is very much a reality.

It has a motto, Sempra Supra or Always Above, fitting for an agency whose future is outside Earths atmosphere. It has an official song, a short, melodic anthem about guardians boldly reaching into space thats not as catchy as The Army Goes Rolling Along. It has a budget ($26 billion last year, similar to NASA), bases across the country and a mission to transform the militarys relationship to the cosmos at a time when space has moved from being a peaceful commons to a crucial front in military conflict.

We are very much clearly in the next chapter of the Space Force, Gen. David Thompson, the vice chief of space operations, said during a recent event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The mission of the Space Force now is to become an enterprise that really makes sure that were ready to deliver warfighting capabilities.

What that means in practice is still unclear: The Space Force remains one of the least understood arms of the federal government. Its culture and identity are still being molded, as its leaders push to set the department apart from the Air Force, Navy and Army by arguing that as a new, smaller service it is free to do things differently. While the Air Force has more than 300,000 service members, there are only 13,000 guardians.

Internally, Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both? And despite all the talk of starting fresh and moving nimbly, the Space Force still exists within the rigid walls of the Pentagon, the worlds largest bureaucracy, which is often faulted for resisting change.

When Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, introduced tenets to guide the force, he labeled them A theory of success, rather than a doctrine because he wants them to continue to evolve.

Im proposing this theory so that people will debate with me, he said during an event earlier this year at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. So well get better at figuring out what are the nuances that matter, what are the details that we to continue to refine.

A glimpse of what the Space Force has become, and aspires to, can be seen on the Florida Space Coast, where the Space Age was born in the United States and where a new space era, driven largely by growth in the private space industry, is taking hold.

Propelled largely by Elon Musks SpaceX, the number of launches here has not only increased, but the topography of the place has changed. Landing pads for SpaceXs reusable rockets and historic launch sites like pad 39A that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon are now in private hands.

New companies, such as Jeff Bezos Blue Origin, are taking over launchpads that had sat vacant for decades, trying to get their rockets into orbit as well. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Even the official name has changed: It is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The growth is remarkable. In 2021, 31 rockets blasted off from the facilities run by NASA and the Space Force. Last year, the number jumped to 57, and this year its expected to exceed 90.

With some thinking that number will eventually exceed 200, 300 or even more, a top Space Force general decided he needed help managing the traffic. So last spring, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the base, arranged a meeting for a couple dozen of his staff at a place where many loathe to go but that is used to sending large numbers of vehicles into the sky at a regular cadence: Orlando International Airport.

During the visit to the Orlando airport, our folks got a lot of good ideas, he said in an interview in his office at Patrick Space Force Base. Because these are people they dont normally talk to. So they do things in a different way. They think a different way.

What Purdy and the Space Force as a whole is trying to do is far more than just create airline-like operations. They are focused on redefining how the military uses space, and attempting to transform it into a domain where the U.S. can exert the kind of tactical dominance it now displays on land, air and sea.

That is easier said than done. Much of the militarys infrastructure in space was developed at a time when space was considered a peaceful place. Satellites, for example, were built to be big and robust and last for years, even decades, without interference. But then China and Russia showed such fat targets were sitting ducks. China blasted a dead satellite with a missile strike in 2007, and Russia did it in 2021 shows of force that shook the U.S. military leadership and polluted Earth orbit with dangerous debris for decades to come.

So the Space Force is pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver.

Thats just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains space superiority, as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission?

In the interview, Purdy gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future.

Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well?

In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island. And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance, he said. Its a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area.

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground?

Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moments notice?

Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. Can we lease a room? Purdy said. Can we lease a module?

The idea is to use space as if it were any other theater of war, with supply lines, logistical oversight and tactical awareness of whats happening day in and day out. But all of that is more difficult in a weightless vacuum that extends well beyond the largest oceans.

In no other military domain would you take a tank, or an aircraft or a jeep or a ship and gas it up and then say Okay you will never refuel it again, Purdy had said earlier this year in an interview with the Aerospace Corporation. The military also has the ability to repair tanks and jets. But the vehicles the Space Force depends on satellites are different. Refueling and servicing them are difficult and so every movement has to be considered carefully. Am I going to need this fuel 10 years from now? he said in the Aerospace Corporation interview.

Some of these concepts may become real. Some may not. But Purdy at least feels free to pursue new ideas because were not bound by years of tradition within the Space Force or the previous Air Force command, he said. It didnt exist. And so we can define our own concepts of how operations will work.

Two years ago we werent thinking of any of this stuff, none of it, he added. The on-orbit space storage of logistics, we werent thinking of six months ago. And so weve been able to think rapidly, get with industry and rapidly move the ball forward on all those pieces.

The fact that the idea of the Space Force is still somewhat in flux is to be expected, said Douglas Loverro, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy.

After it was founded in 1947, it took the Air Force 25 years to figure out their mission, he said. We shouldnt expect that the Space Force is going to be able to figure it out the day after we stand them up. Its going to take a little while, and thats okay.

When it was established by President Donald Trump at the end of 2019, the Space Force was widely mocked derided as a political ploy for a politician desperately trying to project strength and the butt of alien jokes for late-night comedians.

But as it has taken form, the culture of the Space Force is building, and I think thats good, retired Air Force general John Hyten, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview. We just have to change the process along with the culture because you can have a new culture and the old process, and you still run into a brick wall.

In Congress, Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) and former congressman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) advocated for the establishment of a Space Corps as part of the Air Force, the way the Marine Corps exists under the Navy. The effort was driven by a desire to make space a priority for the Pentagon at a time when other nations, particularly China, were catching up.

We have lost a dramatic lead in space that we should have never let get away from us. So thats what gave us the sense of urgency to get after this, Rogers said in 2019.

Since then, the threat has only grown.

In its annual Space Threat Assessment report, the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently reported that China continues to make progress toward its goal of becoming the world leader in space. Over the past year, China has continued to grow its space and counterspace assets, maintaining its status as the second-most-capable space nation after the United States.

In April, The Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. China would seek to jam communications and intelligence satellites as well as destroy ballistic missile early warning satellites, as part of a military strike on Taiwan, according to documents allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. China is now able to hold key U.S. and Allied space assets at risk, according to the documents, which were obtained by The Post.

In March, Saltzman gave a speech titled Guardians in the Fight in which he unveiled a plan he called competitive endurance that is designed to compete over the long-term with China and other actors. The goal is initially to deter any conflict from reaching space, but if necessary to achieve space superiority.

As part of the plan, the Space Force would work to ensure that the United States avoids operational surprise, by keeping track of other countries satellites and movements in space while also being able to identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.

But he acknowledged the difficulties of operating in an area hundreds of miles off the surface of the Earth. On the ground, battle lines can be drawn, delineating zones of conflict. Our domain is a little different, he said. In space, you cannot leave the war zone. There is also no way, he added, to physically separate civil, commercial, military satellites from one another because the laws that govern orbits are immutable. And low Earth orbit also is polluted with debris, traveling at 5 miles per second, so fast that even a small piece, a bolt or even a fleck of paint, can cause enormous damage.

While the Navy patrols vast oceans, the Space Forces area of responsibility is defined as 100 kilometers above sea level extending outward, indefinitely, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, the deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command, said during a recent talk with the Secure World Foundation. So, a huge AOR. Do the math.

Another problem, Hyten said, is that so much of what the Space Force does remains classified. And because its overclassified, its very difficult to talk about specifics, Hyten said. And when you cant talk about specifics that makes it one of the most misunderstood elements of our government. We fundamentally need to normalize the classification, so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people.

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