Real-​​World Space War

With all the heavy breath­ing and sky-​​is-​​falling chat­ter about weapons in orbit lately nice lead edi­to­r­ial, New York Times! — it’s refresh­ing to see a sober, real­is­tic view of what “space war” would really look like. Most of the action, it turns out, takes place on the ground.
“Ground-​​based RF [radio fre­quency] jam­mers and laser “daz­zlers” might pose a more imme­di­ate threat to satel­lites than deploy­ments of sys­tems for­mally defined as space weapons,” says EE Times.

“Dazzling” is defined as tem­po­rary inter­fer­ence with a satellite’s opti­cal sen­sors, as opposed to per­ma­nent dam­age of a satellite’s com­po­nents. At a con­fer­ence here last week on space mil­i­tary pol­icy, David Wright and Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said that exist­ing U.S. ground lasers such as the Mid-​​Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser at White Sands, N.M., and the Starfire Optical Range, near Albuquerque already could accom­plish some daz­zling, if not dam­ag­ing, mis­sions. Wright and Grego co-​​authored [An American Academy of Arts and Sciences] study, “The Physics of Space Security,” with UCS col­league Lisbeth Gronlund.
The prob­lem with laser daz­zling and blind­ing, Grego said, is that they are not nec­es­sar­ily tem­po­rary. Given the dis­tance from ground to orbit, by the time the power out­put is high enough to over­whelm a large sec­tion of opti­cal sen­sors, the cen­tral peak of the laser power would be suf­fi­cient to dam­age por­tions of the sen­sor per­ma­nently, mak­ing the assault more likely to be con­sid­ered an act of aggres­sion
Peter Hays, a for­mer National Defense University teacher and author of “United States Military Space: Into the Twenty-​​First Century,” said that the mil­i­tary would always pre­fer jam­ming, spoof­ing (scram­bling posi­tion­ing code) or oth­er­wise elec­tron­i­cally dis­abling satel­lites to destroy­ing them, since the resul­tant debris fields would pose a threat to all orbit­ing satel­lites, not just tar­geted ones. “There is a pref­er­ence in the mil­i­tary to rely on reversible effects first,” he said
In their study, Wright, Grego and Gronlund acknowl­edge the push to use space for both anti-​​satellite and anti-​​missile mis­sions. But Wright said at the con­fer­ence that space makes a poor stag­ing envi­ron­ment for deploy­ing weapons to attack ground, sea or air tar­gets. It is also less than opti­mal, he said, as a stag­ing envi­ron­ment for anti-​​ballistic-​​missile plat­forms and weapons plat­forms that would deny the use of space to oth­ers.
While he con­ceded that some in the mil­i­tary believe the United States should deploy space-​​based weapons as soon as pos­si­ble to avoid a “space Pearl Harbor,” Wright argued that no last­ing mil­i­tary advan­tage would be gained by being first to weaponize space.

THERE’S MORE: “A small seg­ment of the Air Force space lead­er­ship has always been in favor of unre­al­is­tic space weaponry, but is rarely able to con­vince any­body at higher lev­els that it is nec­es­sary,” notes Dwayne Day in a strong Space Review essay.

General Tommy Power wrote that in 1962 in a secret telex explain­ing why the Air Force needed a manned space­craft pro­pelled into orbit by nuclear bombs exploded under­neath itfight­ing its way into space the whole time. Power was in charge of Strategic Air Command, and the Orion space bat­tle­ship was obvi­ously not approved, either by his bosses on the Air Staff or the Secretary of Defense. However, that kind of over­heated war­rior rhetoric has always existed in the US Air Force when it comes to space pro­grams
Unfortunately, a lot of peo­ple out­side of this com­mu­nity fall for the rhetoric with reg­u­lar­ity. The press reports these speeches and the occa­sional wild study as if they rep­re­sent real Pentagon plans. Conservatives believe that if an Air Force gen­eral states the need for an anti-​​satellite weapon or an expen­sive piece of hard­ware it must be vital. Moreover, so-​​called peace and jus­tice groups claim that the sky is falling and that we are about to enter the era of space mil­i­ta­riza­tion. The gulf between rhetoric and real­ity is filled with a lot of clue­less people. 

AND MORE: The biggest dan­ger to American satel­lites might come from junk — 100,000 — 200,000 “small, untracked pieces of man-​​made debris” in orbit today. (Thanks RC for the tip.)

May 25th, 2005 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.