Space War: Spooky?

Everybody agrees that it’s get­ting eas­ier for lower-​​tech coun­tries and ter­ror­ist groups to hop into space — and maybe even mess with American satel­lites. The ques­tion is: will they?
“More coun­tries than ever now have launch-​​to-​​orbit capa­bil­i­ties, which increases the pos­si­bil­ity of rogue nations plac­ing anti­satel­lite pay­loads in space to attack U.S. orbiters,” Signal mag­a­zine darkly warns, sum­ming up a recent Air Force report. “And, some emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies offer the poten­tial of empow­er­ing ter­ror­ists with inex­pen­sive anti­satel­lite [ASAT] mea­sures that could remove vital U.S. orbital assets from the bat­tle­space.“
Potential, maybe. But the Wonk Daddy thinks that poten­tial is pretty damn small. The Air Force is suf­fer­ing from a col­lec­tive case of “lazy tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism,” he says — Marx in orbit, basi­cally. The Air Force is avoid­ing the “thorny empir­i­cal ques­tions,” Dr. J notes, “like why have space­far­ing states largely refrained from devel­op­ing ASATs?”

The last non-​​US ASAT test was more than twenty years ago by an adver­sary — the Soviet Union — that no longer exists.
[The Air Force] does give one exam­ple… of a non-​​spacefaring state (Iran) engag­ing in some pretty ama­teur jam­ming (that we stopped). Otherwise — and I haven’t seen the report itself, yet — “the law of devel­op­ment of human his­tory,” to quote Engels, does the heavy lift­ing.
So, why no for­eign ASATS? Instead of assum­ing that states will build ASATs for the same rea­son dogs lick them­selves, per­haps the ben­e­fits derived from the peace­ful use of space are an incen­tive for coop­er­a­tion — an incen­tive we might wish to reinforce.

June 6th, 2005 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.