The picture is one of chaos: highway traffic snarled, bank ATMs and the world's stock exchanges slowed and disabled, smartphones rendered dumb, air traffic grounded, communications slowed or stopped, military capability turned back in time a half century. This is a scenario recently forecast in several places as representing one of the consequences of a war in space.

There would also be no more GPS, or its Russian equivalent (GLONASS), or that of China (BeiDou2) or Europe (Galileo). No more SATCOM or weather satellites. Nations emerging with the help of satellite capabilities returning to darkness.

The war leaves the battlespace untenable for years, perhaps centuries, because of debris from destroyed satellites. Any trip to explore another planet would have to negotiate a debris minefield in space. It's a scenario some say is inevitable as space becomes more congested and contested. But maybe not. "Everything is about not having a war extend to space," said RAdm. Brian Brown, deputy commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space, part of the U.S. Strategic Command.

In a November 17 panel at the Defense One Summit, Brown, DoD Deputy Undersecretary (Space) Winston Beauchamp and Scott Szymanski, mission manager for space with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, offered alternatives to space conflict.

For now, the goal is to have sufficient resilience to assure that satellite capability survives jamming and other offensive moves in orbit. Beauchamp outlined ideas being considered to build satellite resilience, singling out commercial satellite communications as a primary component of an eventual government plan.

"[Commercial companies are] building digital payloads. They're building steerable beams ... around interference sources. They're going away from large beams to multiple spot beams that are steerable - all of which is helpful for their business case, but it's also a great enabler for government use in the case of jamming," Beauchamp said. "So it's a real convergence of industrial technology trends and government needs."

The capabilities he outlined are all on the Intelsat EpicNG family of high throughput satellites. Beauchamp said that the government should make commercial satellite capability "a baseline, not an augmentation" to defense.

To Beauchamp's suggestion, Brown added advancing space situational awareness that is a product of the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, which has moved from experimental to operational in less than a year, and the Commercial Integration Cell.

Ultimately, the goal of resilience is to make satellites less vulnerable in orbit and, therefore, a less tempting target. "If (potential adversaries) do their math right, they'll look at it and say, 'Perhaps I can't achieve the goals that I want, to set out to deny space capability to the U.S. and its allies. And if that's the case ... maybe it's not a good idea to start," Beauchamp said.

The future involves international negotiation, analogous to the test ban treaties put in place in the 1950s and 60s following nuclear capability proliferation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

International regulation talks should include the space industry on which the world is so dependent. Current space conduct is defined by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

"(It's) the international equivalent of the parents telling the kids in the back of the station wagon, 'Don't touch each other, and don't break your toys'," Beauchamp said. "It's limited in what it can achieve. That's fine when the only people in space were governments, and when the number of assets in space was relatively small.

"What we need to do now is to acknowledge the fact that there are tremendous commercial opportunities in space, that more and more operators are launching systems into space ... We need to define rules of the road, of norms and behaviors, so we don't have very popular orbits get congested with debris."

Beauchamp is referring to space situational awareness, and his views are very much in line with a recent article here on SatCom Frontier.

The United States is not the only nation with a stake in avoiding war in space. The rest of the world has a similar incentive to reduce the chances of conflict in space. Leveraging commercial innovation is the best way for the U.S. to maintain a level of space capacity that supports stability, and one that adversaries would hesitate to test.