SPACE SWATTER KEEPS HITTING

For some rea­son, there have been ques­tions in Defense Department cir­cles about whether or not it’s a good idea to fund a “giant, kevlar fly swat­ter that is sup­posed to whack satel­lites out of the orbit.“
Luckily, the Arms Control Wonk tells us, the pro-​​swatter crowd seems to have gained the upper hand. The Kinetic Energy Anti-​​Satellite (KE-​​ASAT) pro­gram is still get­ting Pentagon cash.
The KE-​​ASAT has spooked some in U.S. Strategic Command, because of the debris it might gen­er­ate from a mid-​​orbit smack­down. “As of mid-​​2001 three pro­to­types had been built, and all three remained in stor­age at a Boeing facil­ity in Anaheim, CA,” GlobalSecurity​.org notes. Defense Department higher-​​ups haven’t funded the pro­gram in a few years.
But the Army and the Missile Defense Agency have con­tin­ued to slip KE-​​ASAT a few mil­lion annu­ally. And now, the Army’s Space and Missile Command is think­ing about drop­ping $15 mil to start flight test­ing parts of the sys­tem. If all works accord­ing to plan, a swat­ter pro­to­type could take off some time in 2007.

March 15th, 2005 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.