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Notes · Space
The treaty covers the moon
American satellites were targeted and destroyed in combat for the first time this spring. The retiring head of the Space Force told the WSJ what that world looks like — and the one place the 1967 treaty guards absolutely is the one place he says a weapon would be useless.
18 August 2026 · 10 min read · The Wall Street Journal
Written with AI tools, reviewed by me on its substance — how these are made →
The line goes past in the second minute and neither of them slows down for it. American space capabilities were targeted and destroyed for the first time during Epic Fury — the interviewer says it as settled fact, and the general does not correct her. Epic Fury is the US operation against Iran that opened on 28 February 2026. So this spring, somewhere above our heads, American satellites were attacked and some of them stopped working for good. It surfaced at a conference in May, was never detailed, and has not been news since.
The man declining to elaborate is General Chance Saltzman, the second Chief of Space Operations, who retired on 13 August after thirty-five years in uniform. WSJ's Shelby Holliday recorded thirty-four minutes with him days before he left. I watched it because exit interviews are where the framing loosens, and because the Space Force publishes very little about what it actually did in two wars this year. What I got is more useful than a disclosure: a working description of a domain where the capability is finished and the rules are somewhere else entirely.
"We fully expect to be contested. And that's just a friendly way of saying we expect to fight to preserve the capabilities that we are providing to the Joint Force."
What space war turned out to look like
Not lasers. Satellites that register the heat of a rocket engine and the acceleration behind it, and read from those two facts what kind of missile it is, how far it flies and where it will land — early enough for an air-defence battery to be pointed at it and for everyone underneath to take shelter. GPS. Secure satellite communications. Dishes on the backs of trucks that focus jamming energy up at somebody else's satellite and stop when told to. Commercial imagery. In January, Guardians supported the operation in Venezuela that ended with Maduro in American custody: more than 150 aircraft flew, and electromagnetic warfare mapped and then defeated Russian-made air defences. In Iran, Space Command and Cyber Command moved first — before anything kinetic, they blinded sensors and cut military communications.
In April the Space Force published two documents about where this goes: Future Operating Environment 2040 and, beside it, the larger force it would take to meet that environment. 2040 is the year the Chinese leadership has publicly named for parity with the United States in space. Asked to describe it, Saltzman answers like a weather forecast.
"A transparent world where everybody can see everything. A heavily contested electromagnetic spectrum."
The most precise thing in the sky
The part of the interview I did not expect to be the most interesting is about clocks. Ask what GPS is for and the answer is navigation; Saltzman says the deeper function is the timing standard — one reference that lets every computer, every radio link and every transaction on the planet agree on what time it is. Position is derived from time. And the constellation is not a passive utility. Operators can tune it.
"The operators for GPS take advantage of knowing exactly when the bombs are going to be put in place and they figure out how do we sweeten the constellation to make it as accurate as possible in this time, at this place."
He is talking about Midnight Hammer — the night of 21 June 2025, when seven B-2s put fourteen 30,000-pound penetrators into Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan, the first operational use of that weapon. So the same constellation that timestamps a bank transfer was tightened, for a window, over a specific patch of Iranian rock, and then allowed to relax back to ordinary accuracy. One infrastructure, two uses, no seam between them. That is the shape of everything else in this interview.
The part the treaty covers
Arms control in space is one document. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction from orbit, and reserves the moon and other celestial bodies exclusively for peaceful purposes — no military bases, no fortifications, no weapons tests, no manoeuvres. That is the whole regime. Conventional weapons in earth orbit are not addressed.
Holliday asks why the moon matters. Saltzman explains the altitude — geosynchronous orbit is about 23,000 miles up, the moon is roughly ten times that — and then says the thing that made me stop the video and write the title of this piece.
"God forbid somebody wants to put a weapon in one of those orbits, I have to account for it."
"Well, I mean, putting a weapon there, it doesn't do anything."
Twenty-five seconds apart. The location covered by the treaty's absolute prohibition is the location the operator considers militarily empty. Meanwhile in the orbits that decide wars, China is flying what he calls operational weapons: co-orbital satellites that rendezvous with other satellites and manoeuvre around them, which a Space Force vice chief described last year as dogfighting, plus direct-ascent interceptors, ground lasers and jammers. Nothing in the treaty speaks to any of it. And the protected zone is filling up on its own schedule — NASA announced Moon Base in May, three missions to start, a permanent south-pole site by 2032. Where national interests grow, Saltzman says, the Space Force will go to protect them.
The safeguard that isn't a rule
There is a chapter on AI, and it is the most candid stretch of the conversation. The job he describes is inhuman by construction: take a launch from a location nobody predicted, match a satellite's orbit to an effector to a moving target, and do it inside a timeline that still means something. No staff can process that volume. So the machines do the work and the human arrives at the end.
"I think it's the kind of things that machines do better than humans. Now, you'll still need a human in the loop to make that final determination, I think, but that's far easier when all of the upfront work has been done for you at speed."
"Everything that we can do with AI, an adversary is going to be able to do as well."
His answer to that symmetry is speed: decision loops have to be faster than the other side's. Which is the one pressure that makes a human reviewer expensive. Notice what the safeguard actually is — “you'll still need a human in the loop, I think.” Twice hedged, in the sentence itself, by a serving officer. No law requires it. Europe's AI Act, the most comprehensive AI statute in force, excludes military, defence and national security uses entirely under Article 2(3); lawyers point out that a declared military purpose removes a system from its reach with nothing to prove. The UN Secretary-General asked states to conclude a binding treaty on autonomous weapons by the end of 2026 — this year. A General Assembly resolution drew 166 votes but resolutions do not bind, the US opposes a categorical ban and prefers voluntary codes, and the relevant convention works by consensus, so one state is enough to stop a protocol. It is August. There is no treaty. The human in the loop is a preference, and the man holding it retired five days before this interview came out.
Where the pictures went
The sharpest question comes late and gets the softest answer. Holliday, who could not report from Iranian ground or from US bases in the region, says she and her colleagues relied on commercial satellite imagery to see what was being hit — and that the US then cracked down on it. Why, she asks, is commercial imagery so problematic for the United States?
"Well, I'm not sure I would phrase it that way. I would say anytime we see dissemination of information, they could put our forces in jeopardy, put them in danger. We're going to take action."
What happened is documented. Planet Labs first delayed Middle East imagery, then on 5 April 2026 indefinitely suspended distribution covering Iran, nearby allied bases, the Gulf states and existing conflict zones, at the direct request of the US national security team. Reporters and researchers lost the only independent record of a war they could not enter. The lever is licensing — shutter control runs through NOAA and has never been tested at the Supreme Court. His answer is not false: force protection is real, and journalists near a strike are a real problem for a commander. But declining the premise moves a government instruction into the passive voice, and the same month the US sanctioned three Chinese satellite firms for supplying Iran with imagery. Identical capability. Read as intelligence when it is theirs and as risk when it is ours.
Why this belongs in the Almanac
I keep an almanac of AI and the rules, built around one measurement: the distance between what a capability can already do and the moment anyone decides anything about it. Its most interesting finding this year ran backwards — Europe wrote a requirement to mark machine-generated text into law before any production system could do it, and the systems caught up on 2 August. That is the rare direction. This is the common one, at its full extent: a domain where the capability has been operational for decades, where assets have now been destroyed in combat, and where the binding rules cover weapons of mass destruction and the surface of the moon.
And the shape of that gap is portable, which is why I filed it. 1967 got the moon because in 1967 nobody could reach it and nobody had a use for it — a prohibition costs nothing when it forbids something no one wants yet. Orbit was already useful, so orbit stayed open. Read that forward and the AI rules that pass will be the ones covering uses nobody's revenue or security depends on, and the exemption will be written into the same sentence that makes the rest binding. Article 2(3) is not a drafting accident. It is the price of getting the rest of the AI Act through. The gap does not widen because legislators are slow. It widens because the parts of a capability that matter most are the parts everyone agrees to leave out.
- Epic Fury opened 28 Feb 2026; US space capabilities were targeted and destroyed for the first time, disclosed in May and never detailed.
- The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans WMD from orbit and reserves the moon for peaceful purposes exclusively — conventional weapons in earth orbit are not covered.
- Future Operating Environment 2040, published April 2026, names China the pacing threat and expects AI-enabled space-ground operations on both sides.
- Golden Dome: $3.2bn in space-based interceptor prototype agreements to 12 companies in April 2026, initial capability targeted for 2028.
- EU AI Act Article 2(3) excludes military, defence and national security uses entirely; no binding rule anywhere requires a human in the loop.
- Planet Labs suspended Iran imagery indefinitely on 5 Apr 2026 at US government request; the same month, three Chinese satellite firms were sanctioned for supplying Iran.