ROCKY FOE: SATELLITE WEAPONS?

Sen. Jay Rockefeller put Capitol Hill — or, at least, it’s defense wonk divi­sion — in a bit of a tizzy Wednesday, when he crit­i­cized a clas­si­fied spy pro­gram as “totally unjus­ti­fied and very, very waste­ful and dan­ger­ous to the national secu­rity.“
So the AP decided to read some tea leaves, and fig­ure out which pro­gram Rockefeller was talk­ing about. Their con­clu­sion: “Almost cer­tainly a spy satel­lite sys­tem, per­haps with tech­nol­ogy to destroy poten­tial attackers.”

Rockefeller’s descrip­tion of the spy project as a “major fund­ing acqui­si­tion pro­gram” sug­gests a price tag in the range of bil­lions of dol­lars, intel­li­gence experts said. But even expen­sive imagery or eaves­drop­ping satel­lites — so long as they’re unarmed — are rarely crit­i­cized as a dan­ger to U.S. secu­rity, they noted.

As reg­u­lar Defense Tech read­ers know, the Pentagon has a whole stack of projects, in vary­ing stages of devel­op­ment, to strike evil-​​doers in space. In October, the Air Force declared oper­a­tional it’s radio frequency-​​based satel­lite jam­mer, the Counter Communications System. Back in January of 2003, the Defense Department launched its Experimental Satellite Series (XSS), which is devel­op­ing pint-​​size orbiters, largely for offen­sive pur­poses. Recently-​​revealed XSS designs include a “blocker” microsat, which uses a “cir­cu­lar, gim­baled, opaque fan” to stop up enemy com­mu­ni­ca­tions in space. There’s also an orbit­ing “grab­ber,” equipped with a mechan­i­cal arm, meant for “dock­ing with and reori­en­ta­tion of enemy space­craft.” With this “grap­ple fea­ture,” the mini-​​ship will “attach itself to [an] enemy satel­lite, [and] benignly cause dis­ori­en­ta­tion.“
Satellites from hos­tile coun­tries aren’t the only ones which could be blocked or grabbed by the American machines. In a recent report, the Air Force declared that orbiters from neu­tral nations, pri­vate com­pa­nies — even weather satel­lites — were all on the tar­get list, too.

December 9th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.