High Stakes in the Heavens

by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 02, 2026

The New Table Limits: For decades, the strategic game of spaceflight was played within the predictable gravity well of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). However, nowadays, the boundaries of the table have been lifted. The competition has changed to a cislunar one, the very large and complicated volume of space between Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and the Moon, and the Lagrange points that are well beyond that region and are gravitationally stable.

It is no longer a flag-planting exercise; it is a battle to the very top. With the United States and China wagering so heavily on the technological and economic dominance of this region, the situation is like a high-stakes blackjack game. The players are computing the odds, counting cards, and trying to beat the house in a setting that has chaotic physics and unlimited potential winnings; strategic dominance and unlimited resources. In contrast to a friendly match, though, what may emerge in this blackjack game is a dangerous militarizing escalation that may deprive the human race of the stars in the billions of years to come.

The Dealer: Physics and the Chaos of Gravity
The house will always win in any casino. In the cislunar space, the dealer is physics itself, the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP).

In contrast to satellites orbiting the Earth in relatively simple ellipses, spacecraft in the cislunar space undergo the attraction of two huge bodies: the Earth and the Moon. Such an interaction produces a chaotic space of non-linear orbits and gravitational sweet spots called Lagrange points.

Such Lagrange points are the face cards of the deck:

L1 (The Gateway): It is located between the Earth and the Moon, and it provides an ideal observation of the near side of the Moon. It is the perfect tollbooth to check on traffic.L2 (The Far Side Perch): Being behind the Moon, L2 provides the possibility to continuously communicate with the lunar far side, which is always out of sight of the Earth.L4 and L5 (The Trojans): Stable equilibrium points that serve as a natural parking lot for long-term storage for idle military resources.

This is a matter that needs to be mastered by surging along invisible gravitational highways known as invariant manifolds. A player who comprehends these manifolds could maneuver spacecraft using minimal fuel, cheating the laws of physics by playing the game of counting cards. They are able to move assets into place with no thermal flare of engines, and their moves are hard to notice until it is too late.

The House: The U.S. and the Artemis Rules
The United States has assumed the role of the House in this blackjack game in geopolitics. House rules, floor work, and transparency are some of the measures by which the House maintains order.

The U.S. is trying to set the rules of house of cislunar conduct with the help of the Artemis Accords. More than 60 countries signed these principles by the end of 2025, which are based on the principles of transparency, interoperability, and publication of scientific data. The most disputed of these rules is the idea of “Safety Zones” – the spaces around lunar operations where dangerous interference is forbidden. Although the U.S. considers it a precaution, the enemy considers it a sly tactic to claim some of the prime real estate without actually infringing the Outer Space Treaty.

In order to implement such regulations, the U.S. Space Force is the so-called Pit Boss. Understanding that the cislunar space provides enemies with an opportunity to use the space as an asteroid-sized gap in American defense, the Space Force is working on the construction of the Oracle spacecraft (previously CHPS). Oracle will be placed on the L1 point and will serve as a picket ship with the outer gaze, scanning the surface in search of the faint objects not visible to the Earth-based sensors. It is the eye in the sky that aims at making sure that nobody is cheating the system.

Added to this, the U.S. is dragging high rollers to the table, commercial partners, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. Against this backdrop, the U.S. is trying to establish an economic center of gravity to dominate the West by integrating the private sector logistics as a part of the national architecture.

The Card Counter: China’s Strategic Calculus
When the House is the U.S., then the astute Card Counter is the People’s Republic of China (PRC). They have come to the casino not to play by the House rules, but to win the odds with better calculations and positioning.

The strategy of China is characterized by the doctrine of Strategic Key Points. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) realizes that having the power over certain nodes, such as the L2 point, gives it the ability to control the whole system. The U.S. is planning its infrastructure, whereas China is constructing it.

The Magpie Bridge
The ace of China in the sleeve is their Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) relay satellites. Queqiao-2 is in a specialized orbit, which is used to handle constant communications of activities on the lunar South Pole and the far side. More importantly, this system also has payloads of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This makes the relay network a huge deep-space surveillance system, which will be able to monitor U.S. assets in the blind spots behind the Moon without detection by Earth-based optical sensors.Illuminating the Table
To tilt the deck further, China is building the so-called “China Fuyan” (Compound Eye) radar array. This active radar is capable of pinging objects 150 million kilometers away, unlike passive telescopes that wait for starlight. By making the dark on the cislunar side visible, China deprives the U.S. of the possibility of making moves under the carpet, so that wherever the House bets, the Counter can see it.

At the same time, China is developing an alternative coalition: the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). The ILRS attracts partners such as Russia, Venezuela, and Pakistan, thus forming a bifurcated order. It is a distinct table that has its own chips, docking standards, and data protocols, and it puts the Artemis Accords down a notch.

The Wild Card: Russia’s Asymmetric Bet
Every blackjack game cannot be complete without a Wild Card, which is a player who plays any game and is unpredictable since there is not much left to lose. Russia and its weakened space program, represented by the crash of Luna-25, is perfectly suited to this role.

Russia cannot keep up with either the U.S. or China in the pace of launch or robotics, and is instead returning to its age-old competitive advantage, which is nuclear technology. Moscow has written down its intentions to build a nuclear power station on the Moon by 2036. A nuclear reactor provides megawatts of power without regard to the solar cycle, possibly allowing high-energy directed weapons, lasers that would force sensors into Geostationary orbit.

Moreover, Russia is a spoiler. Russia would be able to disrupt precise lunar landing with the capabilities developed during the conflict in Ukraine, like GPS jamming, or would be able to deploy so-called inspector satellites to interfere with communications relays. A spoiler does not have to be a winner to destroy the game for the other players in a fragile environment.

The Pot: Why Play the Game?
Why are countries jeopardizing going bust over a barren rock? Because the pot on the table is potentially infinite.
Water Ice: The “oil” of the solar system. Water ice discovered in permanently shaded craters at the lunar South Pole can be purified into hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel. Owning such ice deposits is like having the only gas station in the desert. It relaxes the tyranny of the rocket equation, enabling the owner to fly missions to Mars and farther at a small fraction of the price of launching missions out of Earth.Helium-3: The “fusion gamble.” Helium-3 is a rare isotope found in the lunar soil and is worth about $20 million a kilo. It is the elixir of clean nuclear fusion. Even one successful mining exercise would transform the energy markets of the world.Strategic Geography: In the same way the navies battle over the control of canals and straits, the space forces are fighting over the Lagrange points. These points are the keys to the control of trade routes of the future cislunar economy, which will be estimated to have a higher value than $100 billion by 2040.
The Risks of Going Bust
The threat of this geopolitical blackjack game is that, as opposed to a casino, there is no pit boss to intervene in a fight. The legal void is immense. The Outer Space Treaty forbids national appropriation, but Safety Zones and mining sites suggest all too clearly the appearance of territory.

The main threat is not so much a full-fledged war, but a grey-zone conflict, which is supported by the blind side of the Moon.

The “Lost in Space” Scenario
Consider the case of a U.S. satellite at the L1 point that abruptly switched off. Was it a micrometeoroid? A software glitch? Or was it a Chinese soft kill with an electronic jamming on a nearby relay? The victim does not know whether to be certain because Space Domain Awareness (SDA) is not yet fully developed. This ambiguity is dangerous. In case the U.S. believes that it has been attacked and punishes a Chinese satellite, a localized misconception might escalate into a kinetic war that annihilates the fragile orbital space.The Pursuit-Evasion Trap
Mathematical simulations indicate that the unpredictable gravity of the cislunar system allows pursuit-evasion games. The invariant manifolds can be used by an enemy to attack a valuable object on the sun-facing side, and blind its sensors in effect. They might then grapple it, and drag it off as the Shijian-21 satellite of China had demonstrated in GEO. Such an incident might result in a series of attacks unless there are effective deconfliction channels (which cannot be done because of diplomatic stalemates such as the Wolf Amendment).

High Stakes in the Heavens

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