Daily Archives: July 9, 2026

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of War (Special Mention) (16) Space Warfare

Posted on by

 

 

(16) SPACE WARFARE

 

Less Star Wars, more Sputnik – that is, space warfare is more about ballistic missiles and satellites, for now at least.

And yes, Star Wars is essentially WW2 dogfights, bomber runs, and naval battles in space, where they wouldn’t work or make no sense as depicted.

But seriously, while we tend to think of space warfare as SF “space opera” battles between spaceships, we’ve been fighting space warfare in various degrees since WW2, just in more mundane forms (to the extent that you count ballistic missiles and satellites as mundane).

While the usual flightpath of German V-2 rockets to their targets in WW2 was not through space, they could on vertical launch traverse the edge of space when that was defined as 100 kilometers – hence the vertical launch of V-2 rocket MW18014 on 20 June 1944 retroactively became the first artificial object to travel into space by that definition.

After that, ballistic missiles have routinely had flight paths which transit the upper atmosphere or space. As such, nuclear warfare is space warfare, at least as represented by ballistic missiles, so not surprisingly defensive measures for nuclear warfare have also been planned to operate in space – most famously the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI by the US, dubbed Star Wars.

However, ballistic missiles used in combat with conventional warheads have also operated in space, mostly in conflicts in the Middle East, along with the defensive measures against them. “In November 2023, Israel claimed an interception of a Houthi ballistic missile as the the first combat in space”.

It’s in the deployment of (or against) satellites, originating in the Cold War, that space warfare really comes into its own.

“The Cold War prompted the start of the militarization of space. Military satellites have been launched since the later 1950s for communications, navigation, reconnaissance, and munitions guidance. The Gulf War is sometimes called the “first space war” because of the use of these capabilities by the US.”

Intriguingly (to me at least), space warfare is occasionally broken down into components of ground-to-space warfare (such as targeting satellites from Earth), space-to-space warfare (such as satellites targeting other satellites), and space-to-ground warfare (such as satellites attacking targets on Earth).

Even more intriguingly, there is ground-to-space warfare that involves weapons capable of being deployed by a single soldier for satellites or other targets in space – with the amusing acronym of MANPASTA. I’m feeling the urge to take out the International Space Station with one of those babies – it blocks my view of Venus.

There have even been nukes in space, although international treaties prohibit the permanent basing of weapons of mass destruction in space or the military use of celestial bodies – but do not prohibit the military use of orbital space or military space spaces. I suppose there goes my dreams of moon buggy battles (or where opposing forces lob asteroids at each other). However, back to the nukes, “the US and Soviet Union carried out nine nuclear explosions in space from 1958 to 1962, which damaged satellites”.

Even without nuclear weapons in space, the logic of mutually assured destruction in space – as the accumulation or creation of space debris can endanger your own satellites or spacecraft, particularly in the scenario of Kessler Syndrome in which we effectively paint ourselves into a planetary corner with our own space junk. It’s a pity that the term, coined at almost the same time as the first Star Wars film, was not adapted by the latter – it would have put a whole new spin on it as the Kessler Run instead of the Kessel Run.

Top Tens – Comics: Top 10 Comics (Special Mention) (9) Peter Milligan – Shade the Changing Man

Posted on by

Cover of the collected edition (of the first six issues) with art by Chris Baccalo (fair use)

 

 

(9) PETER MILLIGAN –

SHADE THE CHANGING MAN (1990-1996)

 

“Sometimes I think that if I wasn’t crazy…I’d go crazy”

Peter Milligan is another British comics writer that started as writing for 2000 AD, most notably with Bad Company – a future war story in which a bizarre company of soldiers fight humanity’s bizarre war against the alien Krool.

However, contrary to my characteristic preference for 2000 AD, my favorite is his work for DC Comic’s Vertigo imprint label for more mature graphic novels outside the publishing restrictions of mainstream comics. Milligan came to Vertigo towards the end of the first wave of the so-called British invasion or ‘Britwave’ of British writers into American comics – and like his fellow British writers for Vertigo, he revamped an obscure DC Comics character, Shade the Changing Man.

The focus of the series is Shade, an interdimensional traveler to Earth from the parallel world of Meta, with the reality-warping ‘power of madness’ (which seems to be part of Metan technology) – he resembles another of my favorites, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but with power born of madness instead of dreams. But then, what are dreams if not a little madness in our lives?

In other words, it starts off weird and gets weirder – a psychedelic fantasy and odyssey. The initial narrative has the most defined plot structure, as Shade was sent to Earth to defeat a dangerous manifestation of madness and the American psyche or collective unconscious, the American Scream. After that, it is the personifications from Shade’s own psyche that are dangerous, as well as other beings born from the Area of Madness – which after all extends to the land of dreams and the dead, angels and the Devil. Shade himself dies, but is reborn through the power of madness – jumping bodies and on one occasion gender as Shade the Changing Woman (anticipating the more recent reboot of a female Shade).