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Donna Kennedy-Glans: Elon Musk's space race with China

‘No single person or government should have this scale of power .. over a level of the atmosphere,’ says Calgary space lawyer Gregory Radisic

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When China announced plans to launch 200,000 satellites into space, late last year, Elon Musk responded in kind, upping the ante, with one million more satellites.

Donna Kennedy-Glans: Elon Musk's space race with China Back to video

Musk is merging SpaceX and xAi, his artificial intelligence startup, to create a US$1.25-trillion company. Solar-powered data centres orbiting Earth is his bold idea; preferable, he claims, to building out AI infrastructure on the ground.

This reads like a speculative sci-fi novel. Yet Calgary-based space lawyer Gregory Radisic assures me it’s grounded in reality.

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Gregory is legal counsel to the Alberta Securities Commission’s innovation team. Presently, he’s decamped to the Gold Coast in Australia, thanks to a fully funded scholarship offered by Bond University’s Centre for Space, Cyberspace & Data Law.

Steven Freeland, Gregory’s PhD supervisor, chairs the Working Group on the Legal Aspects of Space Resources Activity at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. “He drafts the new laws for the moon and the new laws for mining and space,” Gregory explains nonchalantly.

SpaceX has applied to a U.S. regulatory commission for an orbital data-centre constellation of one million satellites, Gregory confirms. It’s a gobsmacking move; Musk wants an orbital monopoly.

“Is this a test to show how useless the UN is?” Gregory posits. Neither SpaceX nor Musk “wants to be held accountable to anyone but the United States.”

Or, Gregory offers, “Is this all just hypothetical? But Musk wants it to look real, just to see how everyone flounders and flails?”

Another possibility: “SpaceX wants to IPO in a few months; is this just a marketing ploy? Will this improve the potential of the stock?”

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“You have to take (Musk) at face value,” Gregory concludes. “He made an application to the FCC (the U.S. Federal Communications Commission). That’s an expensive process. He’s proposing something audacious that’s never happened before. Certainly pushes innovation to the nth degree.”

But if the project goes ahead, Gregory points out, his voice growing quiet, “the night sky — what we see — will never be the same again.”

My conversation with this 30-year-old space lawyer has me scratching my head: How does one decide to practise “space” law? When I was at law school, albeit 40-plus years ago, outer space wasn’t on the curriculum.

“I was at the UN’s Office for Terrorism Prevention, in Vienna” Gregory responds, “working on the prevention of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.”

After a chance interaction with the UN Space office, Gregory redirected his career to focus on space law, what he perceived as a more upbeat, optimistic frontier. “It’s one of the few frontiers left where you can make a big impact,” he says with a mile-wide smile.

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“You can help draft laws for the moon,” he adds, enthusiastically. And, he believes, it’s collaborative space: “Countries do want to work together; they do want to achieve big things together.”

I’m loath to dampen this young lawyer’s high hopes for space. Still, with Musk and the Chinese clamouring to plant hundreds of thousands of satellites in space, I can’t help but question the viability of collaboration.

“I don’t really see a case for a million satellites,” Gregory acknowledges. So, I ask, “it’s a land-grab, so to speak?” The Chinese and Musk just trying to take up space; put a flag there, be the first one, lay claims to space like early explorers did at the poles? “Yeah,” he responds with a slow nod, “if you’re there, no one else can operate in that space.”

“That’s what China’s idea is as well,” he reports, “…we own all the airspace above China. No one can pass over the country and look at it with a satellite if we have 200,000 satellites above us.”

These possibilities — hundreds of thousands of satellites hovering overhead, blocking out what we know of the night sky and intensifying surveillance — may only be speculative. Nevertheless, they are disquieting.

In an attempt to ground our conversation in the here-and-now, I invited Gregory to explain how a space data company he champions — Wyvern — was launched in Edmonton, of all places, by four University of Alberta grads. Since 2023, Wyvern’s launched four satellites into space, taking pictures of Earth every day, and raising millions in private capital.

Gregory first met the Wyvern team at a startup incubation conference hosted by Edmonton Unlimited, he explains. He was attending the gathering on behalf of the Alberta Securities Commission’s innovation team, and was invigorated by their story.

The company’s founders connected as part of the rocket competition and small satellite team at U of A, Gregory reports. It’s a good news innovation story: “The university is helping them get on their feet as a company,” he reports, “Edmonton Unlimited was offering a pathway to financing.”

“Wyvern uses 30-plus different types of spectral imagining. So you can imagine what they’re able to see,” he enthuses. Using satellites, Wyvern can track forest fires and invasive species, monitor methane releases from oil wells and mines, support precision agriculture. There’s also military capability, he explains, making sure things are secure, tracking weapons movements.

“It’s a commercialization success story that gets young people, especially university students, really engaged,” Gregory continues. “(They) can start something in Alberta; not just start something, but start something really interesting — cool even — and it will succeed.”

It’s an inspiring story that demonstrates how the commercialization of space can be innovative, yet not overpowering.

And yet, it’s also fraught, as our per conversations about Musk’s and China’s ambitions for sovereignty in space. He says governance of space takes a consensus-building approach at the UN, because impacts are universal.

Gregory’s even pitching Ottawa on the notion Canada has a constitutional duty to protect the night sky.

“No single person or government should have this scale of power or control over a level of the atmosphere,” Gregory laments. “No single person should impact the night sky for billions of people.”

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