TETHERS: SATELLITES’ SAVIOR?

How could satel­lites be saved from nuclear attack? Simple, the Pentagon says: with giant, elec­tri­cally charged space-​​ropes.
First, a lit­tle con­text. These days, it’s hard to imag­ine the U.S. mil­i­tary doing much of any­thing with­out using satel­lites. Guiding bombs, relay­ing orders, spy­ing on adbad guys’ hide­outs — all of that is done from orbit.
But with one nice-​​sized nuclear blast in space, it’d all be over. The satel­lites would be no bet­ter than scrap. Kiss a cou­ple tril­lion bucks in hard­ware — and just about every Pentagon strat­egy of the past few years — good­bye.
So what to do? Satellites can be hard­ened against radi­a­tion — the new ones, any­way. But armor­ing the machines already in orbit would cost way, way too much. So Darpa, the Pentagon’s mad-​​science divi­sion, is start­ing to look at ways to clean up radi­a­tion in space, Defense News reports. (We men­tioned this project in pass­ing a few months back.)
One idea is to use ’”electrodynamic-​​static space teth­ers’ that would remove highly charged radi­a­tion par­ti­cles.” And no, as Dave Barry would say, I am not mak­ing this up.
“The teth­ers would be car­ried by satel­lites in low Earth orbit and cut across mag­netic field lines, induc­ing elec­tro­mag­netic cur­rent that would dilute the nuclear radi­a­tion and push it away from satel­lites, a gov­ern­ment offi­cial said.
DARPA is seek­ing $2.8 mil­lion for the space tether effort, a new pro­gram in its 2005 bud­get request.
Under that effort, DARPA plans to develop hard­ware for place­ment on a “small, high-​​powered” satel­lite plat­form, and con­duct tether exper­i­ments in low Earth orbit that would include “high-​​energy elec­tron reme­di­a­tion.“
One com­pany — Lynnwood, Washington’s Tethers Unlimited, has already pro­posed such a plan. Both NASA and Darpa are already fund­ing the firm’s research.

June 25th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.