PENTAGON STILL SPOOKED BY SPACE ATTACK

Even before he became George Bush’s Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld was spooked about a “space Pearl Harbor” a sur­prise attack on America’s satel­lites. Now that he’s headed for a likely sec­ond term at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his deputies are get­ting even more jit­tery about a hos­tile strike in orbit.
To begin with, nobody at the Pentagon nobody any­where, in fact really has a firm grasp on what’s actu­ally out there, cir­cling the Earth. There are dozens of satel­lites, thou­sands of pieces of man-​​made debris, as well as an array of space rocks. But no one’s quite sure of where, exactly, it all is.
Aviation Week quotes a “night­mare” that the country’s top mil­i­tary space offi­cer some­times shares with his col­leagues: “A phone call from the White House ask­ing, ‘What hap­pened to our satel­lite? And what are you doing about it?’ With few excep­tions, today’s response will be the same as a for­mer Cincspace [Command-​​in-​​Chief of Space Operations] gave the Vice President sev­eral years ago: ‘We don’t know, and there’s not much we can do.“‘
Everyone agrees that the first step to satel­lite defense is to get some sort of sense of what’s hap­pen­ing in orbit. But the job of set­ting up this “Space Situational Awareness” has been bogged down in the bureau­cratic muck. “There are now “99 orga­ni­za­tions par­tic­i­pat­ing in 79 dif­fer­ent meet­ings, con­fer­ences or forums, while using 91 sep­a­rate SSA tools and sys­tems — [all] stovepiped and on their own course,” Rear Adm. Thomas Zelibor, global oper­a­tions direc­tor for U.S. Strategic Command, told Aviation Week.
In Rumsfeld’s “space Pearl Harbor” report, the once-​​and-​​future Defense Secretary wor­ried about adver­saries attack­ing U.S. satel­lite ground sta­tions, jam­ming GPS sig­nals, or even set­ting off a nuclear bomb in space. Rumsfeld also warned about ene­mies devel­op­ing ground-​​based lasers, or anti-​​satellite space­craft that might, one day, be able to take out American orbiters.
But these “alarmist judgment[s] [are] not based on the avail­able evi­dence,” Jeffrey Lewis argues in Arms Control Today. “Indeed, a fair read­ing of unclas­si­fied intel­li­gence esti­mates and the Pentagons own offi­cial state­ments sug­gest coun­tries are not invest­ing the time, money, and energy needed for such efforts.“
Ground-​​based lasers that can strike into space that’s more sci­ence fic­tion than sci­ence, Lewis says. Russia, the only coun­try to test anti-​​satellites, last did so in 1982. And American satel­lites have, so far, shown them­selves imper­vi­ous to jam­ming.
The Defense Department is less than reas­sured, how­ever. Late last month, the Air Force offi­cials declared their first anti-​​satellite weapon — a radio frequency-​​based jam­mer — ready to go.
THERE’S MORE: TM Lutas cau­tions against “over­look­ing a cred­i­ble threat.”

While no nation-​​state seems to be con­cen­trat­ing on anti-​​satellite weaponry, that does not mean that there is no threat. Hijacking an upcom­ing launch and load­ing low-​​tech threats like ball bear­ings for orbital deploy­ment is some­thing that needs to be coun­tered…
There is no rea­son to panic or have a crash pro­gram but there are cred­i­ble, grow­ing threats in my opin­ion and they will mul­ti­ply as pri­vate orbital rock­etry becomes pop­u­lar and lift costs drop… I don’t think it’s unre­al­is­tic to start think­ing about stuff that is in the 20 year time horizon.

November 4th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.