Description
There is a surprisingly long history of human ideas about war in space, from the earliest science fiction tales to the elaborate space wargames devised today. This paper analyses four generations of ‘space war stories’, drawn from both popular culture and serious strategic planning, in order to demonstrate how these scenarios consistently reflect contemporary anxieties and interests rather than objective predictions of future space conflict. It reviews pre-spaceflight fantasies and the Cold War and American hyperpower eras, before focusing on six key factors driving contemporary visions of space warfare: renewed great power competition; existential threats and space colonization; hypercapitalism; rapidly evolving weapons technologies; critical reappraisals of colonial history; and proliferating conspiracy theories about space. A crucial finding from this analysis is that virtually every space war scenario ever devised has failed to materialise, yet these imaginaries profoundly influence policy, doctrine, technological development, and financial investments. Arguably, they create mythic futures in which space warfare is plausible, likely and winnable, contradicting a number of strategic, normative and technical factors that in reality render space warfare not so plausible, likely or winnable. As the militarisation and weaponisation of orbital space proceeds, understanding how our ideas about space conflict are shaped by mythic rather than inevitable futures is essential for approaching space security with appropriate criticality, and helping to prevent our terrestrial conflicts from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies off-Earth.
