After the US announced the delimitation of space as a warfighting domain, several NATO powers inaugurated a separate space command, with the heads of state of the aforementioned pointing to the increasing space capabilities of Russia, China, and India, who have all denied any intent to militarise space or “base any type of weapons in space”.
Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin has warned that the US might attempt to install nuclear weapons in space under the pretext of terraforming Mars.
One of the Mars-colonisation concepts, terraforming is the hypothetical process of changing the conditions on a planet to make it habitable for life that exists on Earth, including humans.
The Russian space chief weighed in on the dangers of the militarisation of space. He underscored that he was not referring to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) designed for nuclear weapons delivery (which Russia, the United States, China, France, India, the United Kingdom, and North Korea have), which are in actual space for just minutes. It was the actual permanent deployment of space-based weapons that Russia is categorically against.
The dominant treaty governing space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) that bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space, prohibits military activities on celestial bodies, and details legally binding rules governing the peaceful exploration and use of space.
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Rogozin emphasised that he considers the possible permanent…
