Lawmakers warned this week that escalating tensions with Russia may leave the U.S. without ready transport to the ISS after NASA retires the space shuttle fleet in 2010.
The space agency does not expect the shuttle's replacement, the Orion—an Apollo-like craft being developed as part of the Constellation program—to be ready to fly until 2015. NASA's plan was for the interim was to use Russian Soyuz craft to send up crew and cargo to the $100 billion station.
How awkward would it be if the Russian relief showed up in 2010 and left the American on board? Kind of hard to ask Russia for a hitch to space while you're actively running logistics to their Georgian enemies.
It's an interesting scenario to wargame out: If Ivan refuses to send up American astronauts and sticks to a Russia-only crew, does that mean that they'd be guilty of the first documented case of space hijacking?
That said, Russia will probably honor the agreement. They'll want to avoid the natural influx of funding Congress would send to NASA to fast track Orion or keep the shuttles running for 5 more years.
Lucrative business, spacelift.
--John Noonan
3rd Failure in Row, SpaceX Pushes On
Elon Musk is one of the gutsiest entrepreneurs in the world. After making a pile from his share of PayPal — which he co-founded — Elon decided he wanted to do something no new company has done, build a new launch vehicle from scratch and then sell it.
A dogged and gifted salesman, he sold the Air Force on the idea. They were being pushed hard by Congress to come up with a cheaper and simpler rocket to lift small- and medium-sized satellites into orbit, and Elon had a workable solution — risky, but workable.
But the third try — which analysis of past launch programs indicate was crucial since programs that don’t have a successful launch in the first three rarely succeed — was pretty much an unmitigated failure, no matter how adeptly Elon tries to spin it. The launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific went well but the second stage did not separate correctly.
Even Jim Armor, former head of the National Security Space Office and a devout supporter of Operationally Responsive Space, now says he would not approve launch of any national security payload atop a Falcon launch system unless Elon gets two successful and successive launches under his belt.
Armor, now an independent consultant, confessed to being disheartened by the latest SpaceX failure.
“What a heartbreaker,” he said when I reached him on the phone. He said Elon must accept that his company’s systems engineering skills are just not up to the task of putting together several rocket stages and getting them to work. “As far as bringing it together in a stack Elon has been humbled by rocket science,” Armor said. “If I were him I would stop trying to do it by myself and would seek some outside expertise."
The U.S. Army plans to build and launch into orbit a constellation of satellites for the first time in roughly 50 years. And it plans to build the cluster of eight miniature communications satellites within as little as nine months, defense officials told Military.com.
The roughly $5 million effort is part of the Army's commitment to what is known as Operationally Responsive Space. The joint program, based at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., was created in May 2007 after years of vigorous prodding by Congress to get the U.S. military to change how it conceives of, builds and flies satellites.
For the Army, this is "a pathfinder project to fulfill an urgent need for beyond line of sight communications capability," said James Lee, chief of strategy and policy for Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala.
Lee's office set up a task force in March to decide how the Army should tackle the deployment of space assets. And the money for the service's satellite effort is coming from Army coffers, Lee added.
The requirement for the bantam-weight sats -- which measure about 30 inches square and weigh around five pounds -- was generated by a combatant commander whom Lee declined to identify. But you can get some idea who it is by the mission he described for the so-called "cubesats."
The satellites should provide communications for Army units below the brigade level operating in parts of the world where the military has no current secure satellite communications, such as Africa, Lee explained.
The only services available in those regions come from commercial vendors, he said, and they're often not American-owned.
In addition to providing needed communications links, the effort would also help build the Army's overall space capabilities, Lee said.
"We feel it's important to have experience at an engineering level to build space capabilities, even if it's a simple as a cubesat," he said. Army engineers will work alongside designers from a Huntsville-based company called MilTec, which will build the first six satellites. Space and Missile Defense Command will build the last two.
"We believe we have the expertise but many of our scientists don't have hands-on experience," Lee said.
All eight satellites will be launched together, either on a Minotaur or Falcon rocket. Minotaur, a four-stage solid fuel rocket that uses decommissioned Minuteman missile rocket motors, is built by Orbital Sciences Corp. The Falcon 1 is built by PayPal millionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX Company.
The Minotaur has flown seven times and the Falcon has launched twice but has not successfully lofted a payload into orbit.
The satellites will fly either in a swarm or will be flown in a loose formation. And Lee said the Army wants members of its space cadre to do the flying.
A senior Defense Department official who tracks space programs was supportive of the Army's plans, calling the move "great news." And in a sign of just how much the Air Force has dominated space systems and operations, the official noted that, "a little competition never hurt anyone."
And Lee was careful to avoid offense: "We don't really want to replace the Navy or the Air Force." But with today's strategic realities, and the limited resources currently available in orbit, the Army wants to make sure it plays its part.
The threat from an adversary's use of space is more than just zapping a satellite out of sky. It could be as mundane as grabbing an up-to-date reconnaissance image from a free Web site.
That's a scenario a top Air Force official is trying to counter as more countries push their own commercial payloads into the highest frontier. With the easy access to free online imagery services such as Google Earth and Yahoo Maps, and other paid sites, military officials are worried an enemy might gain vital intelligence on U.S. and allied military positions anonymously and with little investment.
"It could be as simple as how is it that an adversary gets an image off of Google Earth that could somehow threaten American lives or interests," said Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, who manages space and missile systems development for the Air Force. "That is an example of a space threat that we may face in the future,"
Hamel told Military reporters at a March 11 breakfast meeting in Washington he is pressuring domestic licensing authorities to force satellite imagery providers to reduce the resolution of their images in areas where American troops are engaged, or to delay their image feed so that an adversary can't get up-to-the-minute information on U.S. and allied military moves.
Most free online imaging tools block the resolution of their satellite photos in sensitive regions, though sometimes detailed information does slip through. On March 7, the head of the Northern Command banned Google Earth photo teams from U.S. military installations after one group shot panoramic images of Fort Sam Houston in Texas for the company's "Street View" component.
Google officials quickly pulled the images from its Google Earth site and apologized for the incident, saying it wasn't their policy to photo military bases.
That's the kind of slip up that worries space managers like Hamel.
"We want our aerospace industry to be at the cutting edge of commercial providers" for imagery, Hamel explained. "We also want to make sure that the kind of information that can get out into the public domain and used is not going to threaten our legitimate security interests."
"We'd like to have U.S. companies that are at the forefront of this such that we could ... ensure that there is not data of greater currency than what we believe would be militarily acceptable.
But international commercial operators who aren't beholden to any U.S. laws might balk at protecting America's security interests in the face of cold hard cash. So Hamel hopes to either beat them into space and edge them out of the neighborhood, or cajole them into sticking to the American licensing standards.
"It's part of our national interest to ensure that we set the conditions not only for U.S. companies but also set some of the norms in terms of how systems on an international or allied basis are used," he added.
Though U.S. officials and military brass can try to strong-arm other countries into going America's way, the rapid increase in demand for information that was once the only accessible by governments and the tools to deliver that data means the risk will only increase.
"We're seeing a significant growth in both civil and commercial remote sensing capabilities ... in this country and with friends and in various other nations are actively developing and fielding capabilities," Hamel said. "It wasn't too many years ago that what would have been our cutting edge reconnaissance capability, now are commercially purchasable products.
-- Christian
DoD Eyes Space-Based Energy Source
Here's an interesting story ripped from the headlines at Military.com. I'm intrigued by this idea and I'm wondering if some of our more informed readers out there can add some light to this subject.
BALI, Indonesia - While great nations fretted over coal, oil and global warming, one of the smallest at the U.N. climate conference was looking toward the heavens for its energy.
The annual meeting's corridors can be a sounding board for unlikely "solutions" to climate change - from filling the skies with soot to block the sun, to cultivating oceans of seaweed to absorb the atmosphere's heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Unlike other ideas, however, one this year had an influential backer, the Pentagon, which is investigating whether space-based solar power - beaming energy down from satellites - will provide "affordable, clean, safe, reliable, sustainable and expandable energy for mankind."
Tommy Remengesau Jr. is interested, too. "We'd like to look at it," said the president of the tiny western Pacific nation of Palau.
The Defense Department this October quietly issued a 75-page study conducted for its National Security Space Office concluding that space power - collection of energy by vast arrays of solar panels aboard mammoth satellites - offers a potential energy source for global U.S. military operations.
It could be done with today's technology, experts say. But the prohibitive cost of lifting thousands of tons of equipment into space makes it uneconomical.
That's where Palau, a scattering of islands and 20,000 islanders, comes in.
In September, American entrepreneur Kevin Reed proposed at the 58th International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, that Palau's uninhabited Helen Island would be an ideal spot for a small demonstration project, a 260-foot-diameter "rectifying antenna," or rectenna, to take in 1 megawatt of power transmitted earthward by a satellite orbiting 300 miles above Earth.
That's enough electricity to power 1,000 homes, but on that empty island the project would "be intended to show its safety for everywhere else," Reed said in a telephone interview from California.
Reed said he expects his U.S.-Swiss-German consortium to begin manufacturing the necessary ultralight solar panels within two years, and to attract financial support from manufacturers wanting to show how their technology - launch vehicles, satellites, transmission technology - could make such a system work. He estimates project costs at $800 million and completion as early as 2012.
At the U.N. climate conference here this month, a Reed partner discussed the idea with the Palauans, who Reed said could benefit from beamed-down energy if the project is expanded to populated areas.
"We are keen on alternative energy," Palau's Remengesau said. "And if this is something that can benefit Palau, I'm sure we'd like to look at it."
Space power has been explored since the 1960s by NASA and the Japanese and European space agencies, based on the fundamental fact that solar energy is eight times more powerful in outer space than it is after passing through Earth's atmosphere.
The energy captured by space-based photovoltaic arrays would be converted into microwaves for transmission to Earth, where it would be transformed into direct-current electricity.
Low-orbiting satellites, as proposed for Palau, would pass over once every 90 minutes or so, transmitting power to a rectenna for perhaps five minutes, requiring long-term battery storage or immediate use - for example, in recharging electric automobiles via built-in rectennas.
Most studies have focused instead on geostationary satellites, those whose orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth keeps them over a single location, to which they would transmit a continuous flow of power.
The scale of that vision is enormous: One NASA study visualized solar-panel arrays 3 by 6 miles in size, transmitting power to similarly sized rectennas on Earth.
Each such mega-orbiter might produce 5 gigawatts of power, more than twice the output of a Hoover Dam.
But how safe would those beams be?
Patrick Collins of Japan's Azabu University, who participated in Japanese government studies of space power, said a lower-power beam, because of its breadth, might be no more powerful than the energy emanating from a microwave oven's door. The beams from giant satellites would likely require precautionary no-go zones for aircraft and people on the ground, he said.
Rising oil costs and fears of global warming will lead more people to look seriously at space power, boosters believe.
"The climate change implications are pretty clear. You can get basically unlimited carbon-free power from this," said Mark Hopkins, senior vice president of the National Space Society in Washington.
"You just have to find a way to make it cost-effective."
Advocates say the U.S. and other governments must invest in developing lower-cost space-launch vehicles. "It is imperative that this work for `drilling up' vs. drilling down for energy security begins immediately," concludes October's Pentagon report.
Some seem to hear the call. The European Space Agency has scheduled a conference on space-based solar power for next Feb. 29. Space Island Group, another entrepreneurial U.S. endeavor, reports "very positive" discussions with a European utility and the Indian government about buying future power from satellite systems.
To Robert N. Schock, an expert on future energy with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, space power doesn't look like science fiction.
The panel's 2007 reports didn't address space power's potential, Schock explained, because his team's time horizon didn't extend beyond 2030. But, he said, "I wouldn't be surprised at the beginning of the next century to see significant power utilized on Earth from space - and maybe sooner."
-- Christian
Your Lunar Vacation Home
Moderate temperatures, nearly perpetual sunshine, flat landing areas and subterranean resources make the rim of the Shackleton Crater -- situated within the solar system's largest impact crater -- an ideal location for a lunar homestead, down near the moon's south pole. NASA hopes to send the first pioneers there by 2020.
"Hardscrabble" was what future president Ulysses S. Grant named his ramshackle homestead on the pre-Civil War Missouri frontier. That might be an apt title for NASA's planned lunar outpost, for its residents will find the moon a harsh place to settle. Survival will depend on their ability to evade micrometeoroids, extract oxygen from rocks and even, like Grant, grow wheat.
The space agency announced its strategy to return to the moon last December. Instead of emulating the series of six Apollo landings, it chose as its initial goal the establishment of a single lunar outpost. Using the new crew exploration vehicle, Orion, NASA plans to send four astronauts to the moon as early as 2020 ("Mission: Moon," March '07). Eventually, four-man crews will rotate home every six months. Their goal will be to live off the land, extend scientific exploration and practice for an eventual leap to Mars.
The moon, says NASA, is the place to get our space-suited hands dirty. "The lunar base is part of an overall plan that has legs, that makes sense," says Wendell Mendell, chief of the Office of Lunar and Planetary Exploration at Johnson Space Center. "We're moving the human species out into the solar system."
Learn how NASA plans to build a Moon colony at Military.com.
High-altitude balloons, filmy bags of helium floating at altitudes that no known airplane can sustain, have attracted increasing attention as the US Air Force has looked at "near space" -- above air traffic, with long lines of sight -- as an operating regime. One snag: balloons go whither the wind blows, payload and all.
A USAF-sponsored project to deal with that problem, Talon Topper, has been under way for several years, and a critical demonstration has just been disclosed. Contractor Near Space Corporation -- based in Oregon -- has successfully tested a Payload Return Vehicle (PRV), a radical lifting-body glider that can safely descend from very high altitudes to a controlled landing, returning an instrument package to a desired location.
Alert readers will instantly recognize the PRV for what it is -- a close relative of the Facetmobile, the all-flat-surface personal aircraft designed and test-flown by Barnaby Wainfan, who is employed in civilian life as as an ace aerodynamicist at Northrop Grumman.
Important aspects of the design include the ability to stay under control in a Mach 0.98 dive (don't try that with a conventional glider design), very light weight (useful for something carried by a balloon) and a shape that readily accommodates large payloads and antennas. It also has a very low stalling speed for easy and safe recovery. Faceting is not there for stealth but to make the aircraft easy to build.
See the entire entry from Aviation Week's Ares blog at Military.com.
The long and the short of it is that Steve Kosiak, their principle budget analyst and author of the report, believes at this point space-based missile defense and space-based anti-satellite systems are too expensive for their relative effectiveness.
A constellation of space-based weapons designed to defend the United States against an attack with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) would be extremely costly to acquire and support. Moreover, at least based on the technology likely to be available over the next twenty years, such a system would probably not prove to be a cost-effective investment, especially when measured against the cost to a potential adversary of defeating such a system.
Second, while space-based weapons intended to strike terrestrial-based targets could, in some cases, cost substantially less to acquire and support than space-based ballistic missile defense systems, such weapons would likely prove more costly—and, in some instances, far more costly—than comparably effective terrestrial-based alternatives.
Third, while space-based ASAT weapons would also generally be less costly to acquire and support than space-based ballistic missile defense systems, there does not appear to be a compelling need, on either cost or effectiveness grounds, to acquire a dedicated space-based ASAT capability—in part, because the US military already possesses or is acquiring a range of terrestrial-based weapons with significant inherent ASAT capabilities.
Fourth, space-based defensive (“bodyguard”) satellites would, to a great extent, be indistinguishable from space-based ASAT weapons. Thus, such systems would likely have similar costs. In addition, their deployment would presumably have similar implications for sparking or accelerating an arms race in space. These weapons would also be incapable of protecting against some of the ASAT threats most likely to emerge in coming years. A more effective and cost-effective approach might be to rely on a range of passive countermeasures. Strengthening US space surveillance and tracking capabilities could also offer an important means of improving the security of US satellites.
Fifth, although space-based weapons designed to strike terrestrial-based targets, conduct ASAT attacks, or intercept enemy ASAT weapons appear to be neither necessary, nor, generally, as cost effective as terrestrial-based alternatives, in a few instances—unlike space-based ballistic missile defense systems—they appear to be relatively affordable and may even represent cost-effective options. In these cases, non-budgetary considerations, such the perceived strategic importance of the capability and the potential arms race implications of moving ahead with such a system, will have to play the dominant role in shaping programmatic and policy choices.
What he does advocate is some mix of decoy satellites, high-altitude drones that mimic satellite capabilities and the rejiggering of ground-based ICBM interceptors to an ASAT role.
Ultimately ... the most cost-effective means of protecting US satellite capabilities may be to rely on a range of passive countermeasures, such as decoys, and terrestrial-based alternatives, such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ... Strengthening US space surveillance and tracking capabilities offers an important means of improving the security of US satellites.
I tend to believe that space weapons will be increasingly important given the U.S. reliance on satellites for everything from navigation to communications. But I like the idea that the U.S. can exploit vulnerabilities in anti-satellite weaponry and weaknesses without breaking the bank, countering one country’s propaganda win with a quiet “so what?”
-- Christian
Martian Spacesuit Proposed (hmmmm...)
MIT astronautics professor Dava Newman tries on her custom-fitted BioSuit, designed for exploration and work on Mars. The pattern of thick, semi-elastic polymer threads forms a support structure to counter the low pressure of other planets.
Until recently, astronauts rarely worried about what to wear -- a standard gas-pressurized spacesuit was the only choice. But navigating Mars in a bulky 300-pound setup would be like doing gymnastics in a suit of armor. "They're not going there to sit in the habitat," says Newman. "They'll have to work five to seven days a week."
Newman has designed an alternative with enough flexibility to get the job done. Partially inspired by giraffe anatomy -- the tall beasts use tight leg skin to help regulate blood pressure -- the BioSuit relies on mechanical counterpressure instead of gas pressure. Every suit must be tailored to squeeze its owner.
Alright, in case you all missed it, here's a reminder of how important today is...I mean, this is where the real "tech" in "Defense Tech" all began.
From USA Today:
As a high school junior in the fall of 1957, Gerry Wheeler knew what he was destined to do the following summer: work in the family milk-delivery business in Peterboro, N.H. It's what he and his older brother had always done.
But on Oct. 4, 1957, 50 years ago today, he and the rest of America got a bleep-bleep-bleeping wake-up call. Its name: Sputnik.
Launched by scientists in the Soviet Union, Sputnik I was the first artificial object to orbit Earth. It quietly changed Wheeler's life — and those of millions more.
As Sputnik jump-started the space race, the little aluminum sphere also jolted the nation's education system. The aftershocks are still felt today.
That autumn, many Americans feared that Sputnik presaged a possible ballistic nuclear attack by the Soviets. But Wheeler's parents took a more pragmatic approach: They urged him to take a science course that summer.
"Once Sputnik went up, the conversation changed around the dinner table," he says.
Wheeler spent the summer studying advanced physics; he went on to earn a Ph.D. in nuclear physics at Boston University, teach at Temple University and Montana State, and head the National Science Teachers Association.
It's tempting to believe that before Sputnik, the USA's math and science education system was moribund, but historians disagree. U.S. scientists and engineers had helped win World War II, after all, and plans for better coursework already were in place in 1957. But they got a much-needed push.
At the time, many Americans feared that federal funding could lead to federal control. But in 1957, educators quickly seized on the launch and pushed for more government money.
"They saw Sputnik as an opportunity to bang the drum," says New York University education historian Diane Ravitch. It also settled the question of "whether the federal government should be involved in education at all."
In 1958, Congress approved $1 billion for the National Defense Education Act, or NDEA, the first of an alphabet soup of more than a dozen programs meant to help U.S. students compete with the Soviets. Schools also began focusing on gifted students, handpicking them for upper-level courses.
Then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson held the first hearings on spending for school construction. That summer, schools began receiving matching funds, not only for math and science but also for foreign languages.
Those 1960s-era "language labs" with headphones and microphones also were a direct result of Sputnik, says Peggy Kidwell, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
"That was something that was really big after Sputnik," she says.
Baby-boomer families began buying educational toys — telescopes and plastic models of the human body. A Gilbert chemistry set that already had been on the market "sold really well" the Christmas after Sputnik, Kidwell says.
Though schools' focus on gifted students was short-lived, Ravitch says — replaced in the 1960s by a move toward equal education for all — what survived was Congress' commitment to help pay for education.
In 1964, President Johnson signed the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which today lives on as No Child Left Behind.
Many educators now say the nation needs another Sputnik-like scare to motivate the nation to improve schools. They say the two most likely candidates — global warming and global economic competition — are close, but they're no Sputnik.
"It wasn't a trend," Ravitch says. "It was a space shot, and I don't know what the equivalent of a space shot today would be."
-- Christian
Chinese Missiles Could Target U.S. Sats
At 5:28 PM EST on Jan. 11, 2007, a satellite arced over southern China. It was small -- just 6 ft. long -- a tiny object in the heavens, steadily bleeping its location to ground stations below, just as it had every day for the past seven years. And then it was gone, transformed into a cloud of debris hurtling at nearly 16,000 mph along the main thoroughfare used by orbiting spacecraft.
It was not the start of the world's first war in space, but it could have been. It was just a test: The satellite was a defunct Chinese weather spacecraft. And the country that destroyed it was China. According to reports, a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility near Xichang, in Sichuan province, lofted a multistage solid-fuel missile topped with a kinetic kill vehicle. Traveling nearly 18,000 mph, the kill vehicle intercepted the sat and -- boom -- obliterated it. "It was almost just a dead-reckoning flight with little control over the intercept path," says Phillip S. Clark, an independent British authority who has written widely on the Chinese and Russian space programs.
For China, a nation that has already sent humans into space and developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the technology involved in the test was hardly remarkable. But as a demonstration of a rising military posture, it was a surprisingly aggressive act, especially since China has long pushed for an international treaty banning space weapons.
Read the full story from Popular Mechanics posted HERE on Military.com...
Once again NASA is dealing with shuttle damage caused by a chunk of foam. And, as a result, once again we're pondering the state of America's space program.
The cool website How Things Work reminds us what was done in the wake of the Columbia disaster a few years ago:
One hundred and seven cameras (Infrared, High Speed Digital Video, HDTV, 35 mm, 16 mm) have been placed on and around the launch pad to film the shuttle during liftoff.
Ten sites within 40 miles of the launch pad have been equipped with cameras to film the shuttle during ascent.
On days of heavier cloud cover when ground cameras will be obscured, two WB-57 aircraft will film the shuttle from high altitude as it ascends.
Three radar tracking facilities (one with C-band and two with Doppler radar) will monitor the shuttle to detect debris.
New digital video cameras have been installed on the ET to monitor the underside of the orbiter and relay the data to the ground through antennae installed in the ET.
Cameras have been installed on the SRB noses to monitor the ET.
The shuttle crew has new handheld digital cameras to photograph the ET after separation. The images will be downloaded to laptops on the orbiter and then transmitted to the ground.
A digital spacewalk camera will be used for astronauts to inspect the orbiter while in orbit.
Finally, engineers and technicians have installed 66 tiny accelerometers and 22 temperature sensors in the leading edge of both wings on the orbiter. The devices will detect the impact of any debris hitting the orbiter's wings.
So, as proved during each of the missions subsequent to Columbia, engineers are going to see what falls off during ascent. What then? According to "How Stuff Works," options include applying pre-ceramic polymers to small cracks or using small mechanical plugs made of carbon-silicone carbides to repair damage up to 6 inches in diameter.
In this case, according to AP, views reveal that "the first foam fragment came off at 24 seconds after liftoff and appeared to hit the tip of the body flap. The second was 58 seconds after liftoff with a resulting spray or discoloration on the right wing. The third came almost three minutes after liftoff, too late to cause any damage to the right wing."
As an aviator its hard for me to imagine flying a craft I knew had a high likelihood of shedding parts after every launch, but I guess that's why astronauts are still considered a breed apart (diaper jokes notwithstanding). I have faith in folks like my friend and former squadronmate "Grace" Kelly (the pilot on the current mission) but at the same time I wonder if it isn't time to move past this 26-year-old platform.
More details surrounding the current situation at Military.com.
-- Ward
Satellite Pit Stop
Defense Tech has previously made light of space debris falling back to earth (see "Native Americans Solve Chinese Space Junk Problem" post from back in March), but of course this potential phenomenon is not funny. (We know that now.)
DARPA - an organization that has never found the issue even remotely humorous - is doing something to keep the sky from falling. Some months ago they, in partnership with Boeing and other subcontractors, launched "Orbital Express," a project designed to demonstrate the feasibility of refueling and upgrading satellites in space (rather than waiting to upgrade them once they return to earth as shards of burning metal).
According to DARPA's website "the goal of the Orbital Express Space Operations Architecture program is to validate the technical feasibility of robotic, autonomous onorbit refueling and reconfiguration of satellites to support a broad range of future U.S. national security and commercial space programs. Refueling satellites will enable frequent maneuver to improve coverage, change arrival times to counter denial and deception and improve survivability, as well as extend satellite lifetime. Electronics upgrades on-orbit can provide regular performance improvements and dramatically reduce the time to deploy new technology on-orbit."
The first robotic transfer of propellant and a battery to a client satellite happened on July 2.
NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites have provided the first three-dimensional images of the sun. For the first time, scientists are able to see structures in the sun's atmosphere in three dimensions.
According to NASA's site, "STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP). This two-year mission, launched October 2006, will provide a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - will trace the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth. They will reveal the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids, and help us understand why they happen. STEREO will become a key addition to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejections with its unique side-viewing perspective."
This news was greeted by skepticism from solar experts and "Teletubbies" fans nationwide. "I don't doubt these pictures are real," said Melvin Bromide of Needles, California. "But they're not of the sun. Any sane person knows the sun is a flat thing with a baby in the middle of it. To say otherwise will keep the baby from giggling and that's bad, as we all know."
As we previously reported he would, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking got a taste of weightlessness yesterday courtesy of a Zero Gravity Corporation modified 727. According to MSNBC.com, "the jet carrying Hawking, a handful of his physicians and nurses, and dozens of others first flew up to 24,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean off Florida. Nurses lifted Hawking and carried him to the front of the jet, where they placed him on his back atop a special foam pillow." The 727 did eight parabolic profiles.
I had a chance for a ride in NASA's "Vomit Comit," a modified 707, a few years back. It was an interesting experience. On this particular flight, the airplane flew 40 parabolas (50 degrees nose up to 30 degrees nose down) that afforded just less than 30 seconds of zero G each. As my host, a Navy SEAL and mission specialist, predicted, the engineers and assorted NASA staffers throughout the padded fuselage started out very enthusiasically, spinning each other and laughing. But by the tenth parabola, they were all airsick. By the fortieth they would have given their firstborns to get off that damn jet. But once we got back on the ground all agreed the experience was worth the nausea - sort of like a winging ceremony used to be back in the day.
Got some time to kill on orbit, astronauts? Why not have that elective surgery you've been thinking about?
The Associated Press reports today that doctors and scientists from the University of Washington are working with NASA to develop a surgical robot that could work in the crowded confines of a space vehicle.
According to the article, "The portable robot, which can be controlled over the Internet by a human surgeon many miles away, is being developed with money from the U.S. Defense Department to be used to treat wounded soldiers on a battlefield, to perform complicated surgery on patients in remote areas of the developing world and to help sick astronauts in space.
"The difference between the robot surgeon demonstrated at the University of Washington on Wednesday and others that are being used today in American hospitals involves portability and communications, said Professor Blake Hannaford, co-director of the UW BioRobotics Lab.
"All the portable parts of this device weigh about 50 pounds and can be transported and reconstructed by non-engineers at remote sites. Robot surgeons currently being used in hospitals weigh several thousand pounds, are not portable and can't be easily broken down and reconstructed."
Update: DT gougemaster and Inside Defense guru Dan Dupont rightly flags the error of a "surgery in space" post sans "Silent Running" reference. Thanks, Dan.
It's always refreshing to see that our former Cold War opponents would be at home at Sundance. "First On the Moon" is an avant garde Russian movie about, as the film's Wikipedia entry states: "a group of journalists {who} are investigating a highly secret document when they uncover a sensational story: that even before the Second World War, in 1938, the first rocket was made in the USSR and Soviet scientists were planning to send an orbiter to the moon and back. The evidence is convincing; it is clear that in this case, Russian cosmonauts were first."
In Alexander Prokhorov's review he writes, "The film begins in Chile where the Soviet spacecraft apparently landed after its return from the moon and traces the fate of the first Soviet 'cosmopilot,' Ivan Kharlamov (Boris Vlasov). This Zelig-like character travels from Chile across the Pacific, and then across China to Mongolia until he is finally captured by the NKVD and sent to a psychiatric ward. Eventually, he miraculously escapes from his cell and assumes a series of identities that allow him to hide from the secret police and to survive in the hostile and erratic environment of Soviet Russia."
Here's a scene from the film:
Okay . . . that wasn't really the film. But you guys are up enough on your Russian pop culture that you weren't fooled, right?
(DID) -- Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) Milstar III satellites will support twice as many tactical networks, while providing 10-12 times the capacity and 6 times higher data rate transfer than that of the current Milstar II satellites. They will form the secure backbone of the Pentagon's intermediate term Military Satellite Communications (MILSATCOM) architecture, until the larger capacity Transformational Communications Satellite System or its equivalent enters service. Its companion Family of Advanced Beyond-line-of-sight Terminals (FAB-T) program, meanwhile, will give the US military modern capabilities and more flexibility on the receiving end.
Like a number of current US satellite development programs, the AEHF program has been cited for cost overruns and schedule slips, in part as a result of failures by the US National Security Agency to furnish key cryptography requirements and specifications in the most timely manner.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who authored the best-selling book, "A Brief History of Time," soon will experience a brief history with weightlessness.
Hawking, who uses a wheelchair and is almost completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, plans to go on a weightless flight on April 26, officials at the flight operator said Thursday.
The flight, operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based space tourism and entertainment company, will take off and return to a landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center.
"As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience first hand weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment," Hawking said in a statement.
The modified Boeing 727 generally soars to 32,000 feet at a sharp angle and then plunges 8,000 feet so passengers can experience 25-second snippets of zero gravity during the descent. As the plane climbs, passengers experience 25 seconds of being pushed down hard, as they feel 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth.
Zero Gravity CEO Peter Diamandis said assistants will be onboard to help Hawking.
"The key thing here is that weightless and personal spaceflight is something available to everyone, even someone like Prof. Hawking," Diamandis told The Associated Press. "This something that almost everyone can now experience."
Zero Gravity will pick up the bill, which normally is $3,750. The company also plans to have two seats on the flight auctioned off by two charities.
The company began offering the flights in 2004.
Last year, Hawking publicly spoke of his desire to go into space and made an appeal to Sir Richard Branson, whose company, Virgin Galactic, is building a suborbital spaceship that could be flying passengers as early as 2009.
Branson has decided he will personally finance Hawking's ticket into space - a flight that would normally cost $200,000.
"He's one of the greatest physicists of all time," Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn told AP earlier this year.
God Slides Shuttle Launch to the Right
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- A scheduled March 15 launch has been delayed after the external fuel tank attached to the shuttle Atlantis and possibly the orbiter itself were damaged by a hailstorm at the launch pad Monday afternoon.
Workers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are still assessing the extent of the damage, but NASA managers decided Atlantis must be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for thorough inspections and repairs.
The rollback means Atlantis will not launch in March as planned. Program officials hope repairs can be completed for a launch in late April or May.
It's nice to know it didn't take a soggy-diapered, pepper-spraying astronut like which hell hath no fury for NASA to wonder, "Gee, what if one of the best-of-the-best loses it on orbit?"
This from the Associated Press today:
NASA PLAN FOR UNSTABLE ASTRONAUTS: DUCT TAPE, TRANQUILIZERS
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- What would happen if an astronaut became mentally unstable in space and, say, destroyed the ship's oxygen system or tried to open the hatch and kill everyone aboard?
That was the question after the apparent breakdown of Lisa Nowak, arrested this month on charges she tried to kidnap and kill a woman she regarded as her rival for another astronaut's affections.
It turns out NASA has detailed, written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut's crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.
Long before the China launched its anti-satellite weapon, the U.S. military had an array of plans in place to research and develop technologies for combat in space. One of the best ways to track those plans is to check out the so-called budget "justification" documents the Defense Department puts out each year with its budget request to Congress.
Most of the money for space capabilities is in the Air Force budget, and space weapons funding now resides almost entirely in the "research, development, test and evaluation" portion of that budget. For those who want to follow along at home, the space-fight material is found in "Air Force RDT&E Volume II," pages 567-577 and 879-896.
Those two sets of pages contain the budget numbers, descriptions and even schedules for the Air Force's "Space Control Technology" and "Counterspace Systems" programs, respectively.
The Air Force requested $27 million for "Space Control Technology" R&D in fiscal year 2007, and $47 million for developing and acquiring the first "Counterspace Systems" that will deployed, such as the "Counter Satellite Communications System" and the "Rapid Identificaiton Detection and Reporting System," or RAIDRS.
The Air Force documents define "Space Control Technology" as systems aimed at "Space Situational Awareness (SSA), Defensive Counterspace (DCS), and Offensive Counterspace (OCS)."
SSA includes "monitoring, detecting, identifying, tracking, assessing, verifying, categorizing, and characterizing, objects and events in space," the documents state. "DCS includes defensive activities to protect U.S. and friendly space-systems assets, resources, and operations from enemy attempts to negate or interfere . . . [or] use U.S. space systems and services for purposes hostile to U.S. national security interests. OCS activities disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy space systems, or the information they provide, which may be used for purposes hostile to U.S. national security interests. Consistent with DOD policy, the negation efforts of this program currently focus on negation technologies which have temporary, localized, and reversible effects."
While the Space Control Technology program funds early-stage research and technology development, the Counterspace Systems program "supports the conduct of critical planning, technology insertion, and system acquisition in support of Air Force space control systems and associated command and control development to meet current and future military space control needs."
In other words, technologies that are nearing the point of deployment as weapon systems are funded in the Counterspace Systems program. That's the section of the budget where you'll find the Air Force's plans for the three space weapons that are closest to becoming reality. Here's what the Air Force says about the purposes of these specific systems, and when they'll be operational:
Counter Satellite Communications System: ". . . mobile/transportable counter satellite communications capabilities and associated command and control. . . . Includes architecture engineering, system hardware design and development, software design and integration, testing and procurement of capabilities to provide disruption of satellite communications signals in response to USSTRATCOM requirements."
The budget documents indicate "first-generation" counter satellite communications capabilities are already in place, while the "second-generation" capability will be built by 2011.
Rapid Identification Detection and Reporting System (RAIDRS): " . . . provide[s] attack warning, threat identification and characterization, and rapid mission impact assessments of U.S. space systems. This effort will investigate and implement the technical architecture, operational concept, support concept, training, verification (test), and deployment of a Rapid Attack Identification Detection and Reporting System (RAIDRS). Incremental capability deliveries are planned."
"Spiral 1" of RAIDRS will reach "initial operational capability" toward the end of this year, while "full operational capability" will occur at the beginning of 2010, according to the budget documents. Air Force contractors are scheduled to begin building "Spiral 2" in 2011.
Offensive Counterspace Command and Control (OCS C2): "This effort supports the development of command and control and mission planning capabilities in support of the fielding and employment of Offensive Counterspace (OCS) Systems. It provides for the integration and development of collaborative tools to link deployable OCS systems with Joint Warfighting C2 systems and to enable integrated planning and execution of the OCS mission. Developed capabilities will be integrated into the Space C2 Weapon System / Combatant Commanders' Integrated Command and Control System (CCIC2S)."
Delivery of the first OCS C2 capability will occur in 2008, according to the Air Force budget documents.
So Iran's Fars News Agency is parotingAviation Week's report, that Tehran is about to launch a satellite -- with "the liquid-propellant, 800-1,000-mi. range Shahab 3 missile, or the 1,800-mi. range, solid propellant Ghadar-110," to take the thing into space.
But take these stories with a big heap of salt, Defense Tech's Iran-watching friends remind us. Because reports coming out of Iran are notoriously fickle. In the fall of '05, the press was full of warnings that Iran was about to launch its 65-76 kilogram Mesbah satellite. The thing never made it off the ground. Instead, using a Russian launcher, Tehran sent its Sinah-1 recon satellite into orbit.
So what about this latest claim? "Count me as being very dubious but not totally disbelieving," says one sage observer. "I wouldn't want to say it's totally impossible, but at best you're talking about a very tiny satellite. The Shahab-3 is a single stage rocket, perhaps a little more than half as heavy as the Redstone" missile that was modified to put the first American itty-bitty satellite into orbit, in the '50s.
And that single-stage business is important to keep in mind, notes out pal the Robot Economist. "There is a reason why most [medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles] are multi-stagers - they need to drop as much mass during the boost phase in order to maximize their delta-v budgets [the velocity changes needed to get into orbit]. Iran and
North Korea have generally tried to extend the range of their rockets by increasing the size of their single stagers, because it doesn't require as much R&D and resources.
But if the Globalsecurity.org specs are right, the Iranian missile's delta-v is only about half of the 9-10 kilometers/second needed to get into low-earth orbit. "Unless the Iranians have done something amazing to mod up the power of the Shahab-3, which I haven't seen any reliable evidence of, that theoretical satellite is going nowhere," Mr. RE says.
And "we thought 'Kremlinology' was hard. Ha!" says one space-spotter. "At least there was Kremlinology," another replies. "I continue to despair that even though we have been grappling with the Mad Mullahs for over a quarter of a century there seems to have been no concerted systematic effort to try to reverse-engineer their operational code."
China Cops to Sat Kill; Mysteries Remain
So Beijing has finally owned up to blasting one of their satellites out of orbit -- althogh a foreign ministry spokesperson says that "the test is not targeted at any country and will not threaten any country."
But space-tracker Sven Grahn, over on the FPSPACE list, is wondering why the Chinese bothered to hit the sat in the first place. After all, he notes, Beijing didn't have to destroy its orbiter, in order to prove its satellite-killer worked.
The Chinese could have put up a a target satellite with a miss-distance indicator and then launched the ground-based interceptor to fly really close without destroying the target. But who would have noticed? US intelligence perhaps - but what could the US have said? "A Chinese missile came very close to a Chinese satellite!" So what would the general public say? They could say: "just another unsubstantiated accusation from the Pentagon!" The Chinese would not want to announce such a test. To prove that it was effective they would have had to release test data. They also want to keep up appearances that they only want to use space for peaceful purposes.
So, the Chinese decide to really hit a satellite and create a huge cloud of debris. The U.S. detects the intercept and releases the [debris information], provid[ing] the general public with hard evidence that the test really occurred. This raised the credibility of the U.S. And the Chinese are happy because the message they wanted to send to the world has gotten out - loud and clear.
This sort of subterfuge is one of several reasons why Joe Buff thinks that the anti-satellite (ASAT) test wasn't just some rogue operation -- it was authorized from the top. President Hu Jintao "is head of state, commander in chief, and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party all rolled into one," Buff reminds us. "The People's Liberation Army makes sure that the CCP stays in total control of the nation. The General Political Department of the PLA [People's Liberation Army] has commissars everywhere who make sure the armed forces stay absolutely loyal to the Party. So no way was Mr. Hu clueless on any front in this ASAT brouhaha."
This isn't China's only space controversy, long-time satellite-watcher Peter Brown notes in a fascinating piece for the Washington Times. "The loss of another Chinese satellite in early November is causing headaches as well, something that China would prefer to keep quiet."
This involved a spanking new Chinese communications satellite, the largest ever built to date by China. Known as Sinosat-2, it was launched on October 29 and weighed more than 5 tons. In a matter of days, however, any celebrating ended rather abruptly. Sinosat-2 suffered a complete failure and soon was hurtling back into the earth's atmosphere...
Despite initial reports that Sinosat-2 was experiencing problems, Chinese space officials elected to remain silent for two weeks or more -- until late November -- until accounts of this Chinese satellite in distress began appearing in the Asian press...
Why was China reluctant to admit that Sinosat-2 was in serious trouble? First, this satellite represented China's first flight of its new Dongfanghong or DFH-4 spacecraft bus. Second, Sinosat-2 was the first of a new generation of jamming-resistant satellites created by China after satellite broadcasts were jammed in 2002. These incidents were characterized by the Chinese government as deliberate acts of sabotage carried out by the outlawed Falun Gong involving a satellite known as Sinosat-1.
I spoke with John Pike, the long-time military space observer and director of GlobalSecurity.org, shortly after the news broke that the Chinese had destroyed a satellite, more than 500 miles above the Earth. He wondered how much "adult supervision" there had been of the sat-killer test. Perhaps this was a small group of China star warriors looking to teach the U.S. a lesson, he mused -- not a big, strategic move from the chiefs in Beijing.
Now, there have been lots of theories about why China decided now to conduct their anti-satellite test. Maybe it was a way to scare the Bush administration back to the negotiating table. Maybe it was done to compete with India's recent ballistic missile test. Maybe it was a designed to show the U.S. how costly an intervention on Taiwain's side would be. (The CIA is "especially concerned," because "the Chinese have become so adept at camouflage," according to Aviation Week.)
Today's analysis in the New York Times, however, seems to lend credence to Pike's guess. "Bush administration officials said that they had been unable to get even the most basic diplomatic response from China," the paper says. Those American officials "were uncertain whether China’s top leaders, including President Hu Jintao, were fully aware of the test or the reaction it would engender."
The American officials presume that Mr. Hu was generally aware of the missile testing program, but speculate that he may not have known the timing of the test. China’s continuing silence would appear to suggest, at a minimum, that Mr. Hu did not anticipate a strong international reaction, either because he had not fully prepared for the possibility that the test would succeed, or because he did not foresee that American intelligence on it would be shared with allies, or leaked.
In an interview late Friday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, raised the possibility that China’s leaders might not have fully known what their military was doing.
“The question on something like this is, at what level in the Chinese government are people witting, and have they approved?” Mr. Hadley asked.
Last week, I described China's satellite strike as "next-gen," and America's ability to fend off such an attack however somewhere around zero. After all, there's never been a direct ground-to-space satellite smack; and the Air Force itself says such defenses are improbable, at best.
But veteran space analyst Jim Oberg says the anti-satellite test was a little easier than it looked. And there may be some defenses, after all. Because there's a big difference between a "satellite-killing demonstration and the needs of a real weapon — one that would be a genuine threat to other countries' satellites," he notes.
Now it's important to keep in mind that the Chinese carefully timed the launch of their kinetic kill vehicle so that it would intercept the known position and orbit of the satellite it was aiming for—intercepting a target in an arbitrary orbit is a much more difficult proposition...
The missile's kill mechanism is that of a bullet: It crashes head-on into a target moving at 28 000 km/hr, adding its own speed to the total impact velocity...
The Chinese targeted a low-orbiting, obsolete, weather satellite, where the kinetic kill energy was very great. However, the really strategic satellites fly much higher — the [GPS] navigation network is 20 000 km up... [T]he orbital velocities [there] are so much lower that the impact energy would be only about a tenth as high as in last week's test.
Distance introduces a second burden: terminal navigation. When a target satellite is close to the Earth, ground radars can track it and relay final course corrections, both to the rocket during its ascent and to the kill vehicle, once it has been deployed on its hoped-for collision course. Radar operates at an inverse fourth power law, which means that for the Chinese system to aim many times farther than low Earth orbit—as it would have to do to track objects geosynchronously—the demands on a ground-based radar would be simply impossible...
Nor are space targets helpless victims to such kinetic kill attacks, especially at higher altitudes... [A] target satellite can take steps to interfere with the attacker obtaining a workable targeting solution, and the farther from Earth the attack occurs, the more the odds favor the target.
Objects can hide in space, to a greater or lesser degree, by lowering their radar reflectivity or optical brightness along the attacker's expected line of approach. This makes terminal navigation and guidance more difficult. That effect can be augmented with decoys, which can either be deployed when an attack is detected or can be sent, as a matter of routine, to fly in formation with the high-value target. A decoy doesn't have to be a throwaway subsatellite, it could be an inflatable spar a few tens of meters long with a pseudo-target at the end to attract the on-rushing kinetic kill vehicle away from the real spacecraft. Such a decoy could be deployed in a matter of minutes, and even re-stowed afterwards for future re-use.
Even the simple suspicion that a target may have such a capability would discourage a potential attacker. And the realization that a target might also be able to detect and characterize even a failed attack would be an additional deterrent. There would be no way for the attacking country to get away with attempted mayhem.
Having a weapon that can disable or destroy satellites is considered a component of China’s unofficial doctrine of asymmetrical warfare. China’s army strategists have written that the military intends to use relatively inexpensive but highly disruptive technologies to impede the better-equipped and better-trained American forces in the event of an armed conflict — over Taiwan, for example...
Some analysts suggested that one possible motivation was to prod the Bush administration to negotiate a treaty to ban space weapons. Russia and China have advocated such a treaty, but President Bush rejected those calls when he authorized a policy that seeks to preserve “freedom of action” in space. Chinese officials have warned that an arms race could ensue if Washington did not change course.
Now, Beijing officials aren't even admitting they destroyed the orbiter, yet. But the China Matters blog uncovers a post by a self-proclaimed Chinese soldier, who seems to reinforce the scare-'em-into-cutting-a-deal motive:
This overweening country [the USA] began to regard space as its own back yard. The national space policy it announced in 2006 nonchalantly regarded space as its private property. At the same time, when China at the United Nations proposed a special international organization to resolve the actual problems of a space arms race that were being faced, the United States, acting as a country far in the lead in space, vehemently opposed, saying that there was no arms race in space...
We hope... [this] will smack the American carnivores back to reason. History shows us that if you don't hit Americans, they aren't willing to sit down at the negotiation table.
UPDATE 01/21/07: Last week's test has given a "shiver of hope" to the "nation’s star warriors, frustrated that their plans to arm the heavens went nowhere for two decades despite more than $100 billion in blue-sky research," Bill Broad says in a tart opinion piece.
There's been immediate fallout -- both physical and political -- from China's satellite killer test.
Debris from the orbital collision has already been spotted, the M-T Milcom blog notes. "As of this writing NORAD has officially cataloged 32 objects... that now pollute a vital area of space (sun-synchronous polar orbit)." The picture to the right is of a few of 'em.
"There are over 125 satellites that operate in this portion of space," the M-T blog observes. Those include reconnaissance satellites, like the Lacrosse and Advanced Keyhole orbiters, as well as weather-monitors, like the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program series. In other words, this test directly affects the American military's ability look for terrorist hideouts, and survey a potential battlefield. These are not small matters. "Our space assets are the first asset on the scene," GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike tells the AP. "They are absolutely central to why we are a superpower - a signature component to America's style of warfare."
Frequent Defense Tech commenter Robot Economist, now with his own blog, warns that "this situation has the potential of becoming the next Katyusha rocket or IED problem for the United States." Even the International Space Station could be at risk. That said, RE reminds us that "it is unlikely that [China's] success... translates into any sort of immediately fieldable capability."
If the spotty record of our ground-based missile interceptors demonstrate anything, it is the difficulty of intercepting even predictable space targets... [And] the Chinese had a pretty good handicap on this test.
The US military isn't completely dependent on spy satellites (in case of war, the Taiwan Straits would be overflown by enough spy and communications aircraft to make the satellites redundant), but destroying them is a way of chipping away at US capability, and thus indicating that China can inflict real costs in case of a US intervention in a militarized China-Taiwan dispute. The public way in which the Chinese have carried out this test, as well as earlier "blinding" tests, and the recent submarine-stalks-carrier debacle indicates to me that they're as serious as possible about showing the US their capabilities, which is key to a deterrent strategy. Also, Chinese anti-satellite capabilities don't have to be targeted against US military satellites; the Chinese may threaten commercial satellites as well, which would help to metastasize the costs of any US intervention.
No wonder, then, that governments around the world are protesting the move. With one exception, apparently: Russia. Arms Control Wonk notes...
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov commented to reporters that he has heard reports of the Chinese test, but thinks that the rumors are quite abstract and are exaggerated.
In an interview, vice-preseident of the Russian Academy of geopolitcal affairs, General Leonid Ivashov, said that he thinks the Chinese used Russian developments for making their antisatellite missiles.
Previous anti-satellite weapons tests, conducted during the Cold War, involved either co-orbiting killer satellites (the Soviet approach) or an air-launched anti-satellite missile (the U.S. approach, also considered by the Soviets but never attempted). Some tests involved shooting ground-based anti-missile missiles toward satellites, but those missiles never hit their mark.
That's because it's hard to nail an orbiter, traveling hundreds of miles up at thousands of miles per hour, from the ground. The fact that the Chinese were able to do it could have troubling repercussions beyond space, as one commenter to the FPSPACE list notes:
Assuming the [Chinese target satellite] was on the order of 3 meters in size, and assuming the kill was made in direct ascent mode as opposed to co-orbiting mode, this test demonstrates the capability to achieve a velocity error on the order of 3 meters / ~1000 seconds, i.e., way less than 1 cm per second. This has obvious implications for their CEPs [Circular Error Probables, the accuracy] of Chinese ballistic missiles.
Now, Beijing seems to have cheated just a bit in this test, Oberg observes.
The last orbital data released by NORAD seem to show one end of the [Chinese target] satellite's orbit being raised by about 20 miles (32 kilometers). Such tweaking is characteristic of a satellite lining up its orbital path for a rendezvous with a ground-launched visitor. The international space station does this in preparation for Russian spacecraft visits.
In fact, the reason the U.S. Air Force chose the air-launched anti-satellite system is that it does not have to have its target line up with a ground-based missile pad. Naturally, a real target in the real world would never make such a helpful maneuver.
Without the target’s maneuver to make itself easier to kill, a ground-based shot would likely have to be made from the side — or “out of plane,” in space navigation parlance. With such a geometry, the final approach for physical contact occurs under much higher rates of angular change, making terminal guidance much more difficult. It can be done, but with less reliability.
But even with some fudging, this remains a very serious technical accomplishment. Oberg's piece has lots more -- including some possible (repeat, possible) countermeasures to a satellite strike. Be sure to read the whole thing.
Of course, for a long time, directly attacking the orbiter with another piece of metal seemed like the least likely, least effective way to knock a satellite out. Since 2004, the U.S. Air Force has had in its arsenal a series of radio frequency jammers, to interfere with satellite operations. Three or four times a year, small groups of junior officers gather at an Air Force Research Laboratory facility in New Mexico to figure out how to take American satellites off-line using nothing more than sweet talk and off-the-shelf gear.
Then there are the lasers. Not only did China recently light up an American orbiter with a ground-based laser. But, as Dan Dupont reminds us, the U.S. military spent much of the 90's testing out a satellite-shooting beam weapon of its own: the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, or "MIRACL."
"In October 1997, the Air Force commissioned a test of an ASAT [anti-satellite] system based on the MIRACL laser," the Union of Concerned Scientists notes. "This system was directed toward a satellite orbiting 420 km above the Earth. The MIRACL laser apparently had technical difficulties, but the results of the test were startling."
A lower-power (30-watt) laser intended for alignment of the system and tracking of the satellite was the primary laser source used during the test, and it appeared that this lower-power laser was sufficiently powerful itself to blind the satellite temporarily, although it could not destroy the sensor. That a commercially available laser and a 1.5 m mirror could be an effective ASAT highlighted a US vulnerability that had not been fully appreciated. Although the Pentagon described the test as defensive (i.e., to learn about the vulnerability of US satellites to laser attack), many—in particular the Russians—expressed concern about the offensive capabilities of this system and whether it constituted a breach of the ABM [anti-ballistic missile] Treaty, and formally requested negotiations on an ASAT weapon ban.
China has shown it can destroy a satellite in orbit. What could the U.S. do to stop Beijing, if it decided to attack an American orbiter next? Short answer: nothing.
It takes about 20 minutes to fire a ballistic missile into space, and have its "kill vehicle" strike a satellite at hypersonic speed -- over 15,000 miles per hour -- in low-earth orbit. That's far too quick for anything in the American arsenal to respond, in time. There's "no possibility of shielding" a relatively-fragile satellite against such a strike. "And it is impractical [for a satellite] to carry enough fuel to maneuver away even if you had specific and timely warning of an attack," Center for Defense Information analyst Theresea Hitchens notes.
The American military today counts on its satellites to relay orders, guide troops across battlefields, and spy on enemy hideouts. The U.S. Air Force's primer for war in space -- "Doctrine Document 2-2.1: Counterspace Operations" -- lists a number of measures that can be taken to protect American assets in orbit, including "deploying satellites into various orbital altitudes and planes" and "employing frequency-hopping techniques to complicate jamming." But those tactics are used to preserve the U.S. satellite constellation as a whole. None of them could save a single American orbiter against a direct attack. "Physical hardening of structures mitigates the impact of kinetic effects, but is generally more applicable to ground-based facilities than to space-based systems due to launch-weight considerations," the Air Force document notes. "Maneuver[ing] is limited by on-board fuel constraints, orbital mechanics, and advanced warning of an impending attack. Furthermore, repositioning satellites generally degrades or interrupts their mission."
With today's conventional defenses proving so impotent, expect a new push within the U.S. military for more exotic countermeasures. The Airborne Laser is a modified 747 that's being designed to blast missiles out of the sky, as soon as they leave they launch pad; the jet's first flight test in expected in 2009, after years and years of delays. The Kinetic Energy Interceptor is a long-range, non-explosive missile, meant for the same task. But the weapon "exists mostly on paper, and couldn't be operational before 2014," Defense Tech's David Axe noted recently.
The U.S. could also try to destroy an anti-satellite missile, before it took off. Over the last several years, momentum has been building in the Pentagon for the ability to conduct "Prompt Global Strikes," hitting anywhere on Earth, in an hour or less. But near-term PGS plans -- using modified Trident ballistic missiles -- have been put on hold, for fears that such an attack could start World War III, in the process. Destroying a satellite is as clear an act of war as there can be, however. Perhaps those Trident attacks will now be seen as worth the risk.
In the meantime, GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike figures the Chinese will continue to test their satellite-killing weapons. It takes a dozen or more trials before a strategic weapon like this is deemed reliable enough to be considered operational. "So expect one or two more tests like this every year, for a long time," he says.
The Chinese test, now confirmed by the National Security Council, would be the first successful anti-satellite weapons trial since 1985, when the United States used an F-15 and a kill vehicle to destroy the Solwind research satellite. And that trial was dangerous -- not just for its target, but for nearly everything orbiting in space, Hitchens notes. Even small pieces of space debris can be lethal to spacecraft. The '85 test "resulted in more than 250 pieces of debris, the last of which deorbited in 2002."
The Chinese trial could "lead to nearly 800 debris fragments of size 10 cm or larger, nearly 40,000 debris fragments with size between 1 and 10 cm, and roughly 2 million fragments of size 1 mm or larger," the Union of Concerned Scientists' David Wright notes on the Arms Control Wonk blog. "Roughly half of the debris fragments with size 1 cm or larger would stay in orbit for more than a decade."
"This raises an interesting public policy question because we are so much more dependent on commercial and military satellites that the ASAT [anti-satellite] options available to us are much more complicated than those available to the Chinese," adds Jeffrey Lewis. "This is a race that favors them, unfortunately."
"China performed a successful anti-satellite weapons test" last week, according to Aviation Week. In the trial, a ballistic missile, armed with a non-explosive warhead, "destroy[ed] an aging Chinese weather satellite target" over 500 miles above the Earth, U.S. intelligence agencies believe.
The news comes just a few months after reports of China testing high-powered lasers to temporarily blind American orbiters. "If the test is verified it will signify a major new Chinese military capability," AvWeek says. And it could be the spark that ignites an arms race in space, analysts believe. Theresa Hitchens, with the Center for Defense Information called it an "irresponsible and self-defeating act" that will give "space hawks… more ammunition to take the United States down a similarly dangerous path."
Details emerging from space sources indicate that the Chinese Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) polar orbit weather satellite... was attacked by an ASAT [anti-satellite] system launched from or near the Xichang Space Center.
The attack is believe to have occurred as the weather satellite flew at 530 mi. altitude 4 deg. west of Xichang, located in Sichuan province...
Although intelligence agencies must complete confirmation of the test, the attack is believed to have occurred at about 5:28 p.m. EST Jan. 11. U. S. intelligence agencies had been expecting some sort of test that day, sources said....
USAF radar reports on the Chinese FY-1C spacecraft have been posted once or twice daily for years, but those reports jumped to about 4 times per day just before the alleged test.
The USAF radar reports then ceased Jan. 11, but then appeared for a day showing "signs of orbital distress". The reports were then halted again. The Air Force radars may well be busy cataloging many pieces of debris, sources said.
Harvard University's Jeffrey Lewis, a self-admitted skeptic about China's space ambitions, has been hearing from many sources in recent months that "China’s ASAT work seem[s] to have been ramping up." He writes over at his blog, Arms Control Wonk:
If China has conducted an ASAT test, this is extremely bad. I had been hoping that the Bush Administration would push for a ban on anti-satellite testing, either in the form of a code of conduct. The Bush folks, however, have been fond of saying that wasn’t necessary, because 'there is no arms race in space.'
Well, we have one now, instigated by an incredibly short-sighted Chinese government.
(Big ups: EM)
UPDATE 11:42 AM: Why would Beijing pull a stunt like this? The China Matters blog has a theory. Meanwhile, one keen space-watcher notes that, if this anti-sat weapon was really "kinetic" -- i.e., hit-to-kill, non-explosive -- instead of a plain ol' exploding weapon, that's extremely bad news. That means the booster rocket has to be very accurate "in order to deliver the kill vehicle to the desired initial trajectory.... Then the kill vehicle needs to tweak its trajectory into a precise collision course using on-board propulsion and either on-board target tracking or... command guidance from the ground." That's no mean task.
Still, I have a feeling this story, from the Telegraph, is a little over-blown.
Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.
Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.
The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.
Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.
"This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks," said an intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group. "Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?... We believe they use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas such as tents."
As the paper notes, "it is unclear how old the maps are." But unless they're very recent, it's hard to believe they'd show today's tents all that accurately.
Axe is in Lebanon. So he's not around to give his Pop Sci cover story, "Semper Fly," a proper shout-out. Allow me.
The Marines have typically been the American military's emergency fighter, its "911 force," the guys you want to get to a trouble zone, ASAP. But these days, getting overflight rights and managing logistics right can slow things to a crawl. So a bunch of waaaay out-of-the-box-thinkin' Marines have come up with an almost insanely ambitious new plan: send squads through space, instead. The concept is called "Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion," or SUSTAIN.
Each Sustain lander is intended to hold a squad of 13 Marines. Mounted on wedge-shaped carrier aircraft, the lander would detach, climb, and accelerate with scramjet engines to 100,000 feet and then fire rocket engines to get above 50 miles, following an arc over hostile countries. Composite shields would absorb or deflect the searing heat of reentry as the vehicles angle for the landing zone.
Lafontant arrived at this Space Marines vision after years of analyzing military space needs. A 44-year-old Queens, New York, native who joined the Corps in 1984 as an infantry officer and progressed through Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he studied space systems operations and joined the small fraternity of Marine Space Operations Officers. In 2001 he took a job in the Pentagon working for the National Reconnaissance Office. He was serving as liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 2001 when the Marine Corps launched its deepest air assault ever.
Five hundred Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit prepared to fly 441 miles through the mountains of northern Pakistan in CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopters to capture an airstrip near Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was to be the beginning of the first large offensive against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. If all went well, the Marines expected to walk away with Osama bin Laden.
But political considerations sabotaged the mission. For weeks, the Marines had bobbed on the Indian Ocean aboard two assault ships while State Department officials negotiated with Pakistan for the right to fly through the country’s airspace. Pakistan granted access only after winning economic and military concessions that, some say, have reinforced a repressive regime. When U.S. troops finally touched down on November 25, bin Laden’s trail was cold. “We ended up selling our soul to the devil to get through,” Lafontant says. He grew determined to find a way around that sort of diplomatic entanglement. “What if we don’t have to have anybody’s permission?” he asked himself. “What if we just go above and drop in?”
Now, David just loves this idea. But he knows it's pretty damn far-fetched. He does a good job at laying out the obstacles to making SUSTAIN happen. Not just the extremely high technical hurdles; the Marines' total and utter lack of funds for the project, too. He warps up his story on a balanced note:
Whether or not Sustain ever makes it past the concept stage, it’s clear that military planners are looking to increase the mobility of American forces. A Marine space transport — one that would reduce politically charged bureaucratic delays and the potential for mission snafus — might sound impossible, but to Lafontant and others entrusted with imagining the future of war, it is simply the next logical step.
"A number of countries are exploring and acquiring capabilities to counter, attack, and defeat U.S. space systems," Undersecretary of State Robert G. Joseph... the senior arms control official at the State Department... said.
...He said terrorists and enemy states might view the U.S. space program as "a highly lucrative target," while sophisticated technologies could improve their ability to interfere with U.S. space systems and services.
Joseph did not identify terror groups or nations that might have such motives.
Nor, apparently, did Joseph mention that the Air Force already has a team of satellite-attackers in place, who's job is to replicate terror strikes -- using nothing but gadgets they can pick up at Radio Shack. My Popular Mechanics article explains:
Three or four times a year, small groups of junior officers gather at an Air Force Research Laboratory facility in New Mexico and try to figure out how to take down an American satellite using nothing more than sweet talk and off-the-shelf gear.
The U.S. military relies on satellites to relay orders, guide precision bombs and direct flying drones. But those multibillion-dollar systems can be surprisingly vulnerable to the simplest of attacks. So, it’s up to the members of the Space Countermeasures Hands On Program — Space CHOP, for short — to find those weaknesses before enemies have a chance to crack them.
Space CHOP was formed in 1999, and one of its earliest experiments used a UHF generator and a small amplifier purchased from an electronics store. The team pieced together an antenna out of copper wire, PVC piping and other easily obtained materials. (The Air Force won’t elaborate on Space CHOP hardware or targets.) By aiming the antenna at the sky and turning on just a few milliwatts of power, the team showed it could block signals from a military communications satellite.
“We demonstrated that a few unsophisticated guys with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment could interfere with a seriously sophisticated satellite system,” says John Holbrook, Space CHOP’s program manager. “If we had turned on full power, we would’ve knocked [the system] out.”
More often than not, the Space CHOP team doesn’t need any equipment to uncover a vulnerability. They scour the Internet for potentially damaging information. They case out Air Force bases. Or, posing as graduate students, they pump defense contractors and military officers for information until they’ve figured out a way to take down a satellite or its link on the ground.
The military also has personnel known as “red teams” — full-time mock adversaries who specialize in cyberattacks — Holbrook notes. But his team of outsiders often finds vulnerabilities that the red teams miss. “We’re experts in not being experts,” Holbrook says with a laugh.
Will We Finally Get Our Moon Base?
A couple of months ago, I made a snide remark about those who advocate “pulling out of the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits [military] installations on the moon among other things.”
“Not that we have a plan for a [military] moon-base, but we might—you know?”
NASA’s Lunar Architecture Team, chartered in May 2006, concluded that the most advantageous approach is to develop a solar-powered lunar base and to locate it near one of the poles of the moon. With such an outpost, NASA can learn to use the moon’s natural resources to live off the land, make preparations for a journey to Mars, conduct a wide range of scientific investigations and encourage international participation.
“The architecture work has resulted in an understanding of what is required to implement and enable critical exploration objectives,” said Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator, Exploration Systems Directorate. “This is all important as we continue the process we have begun and better define the architecture and our various exploration roles in what is a very exciting future for the United States and the world.”
As currently envisioned, an incremental buildup would begin with four-person crews making several seven-day visits to the moon until their power supplies, rovers and living quarters are operational. The first mission would begin by 2020. These would be followed by 180-day missions to prepare for journeys to Mars.
The proposed lunar architecture calls for robotic precursor missions designed to support the human mission. These precursors include landing site reconnaissance, natural resource assays and technology risk reduction for the human lander.
Anyway, the announcement contains nothing to suggests that the notional moon-base would be a military installation or in any way incompatible with the Outer Space Treaty.
But it did remind me of Cold War studies for lunar military installations. For a history of crazy military moonbase ideas, Jeff Richelson’s “Shooting for the Moon” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a great place to start.
"The Deadlies," our contest to find the most insanely-dangerous gear of all time, is well under way. A bunch of folks have already posted their nominees. They're all brilliant. Take MOOSE ("Man Out of Space Easiest"), General Electric's one-man, orbital escape pod from the 1960's.
To use it, an astronaut first would don a spacesuit and remove the 200-pound packaged escape system from a large suitcase-sized container aboard the spacecraft.
Then the person would unfold a 6-foot-long bag made of clear Mylar plastic and step into one end of it.
Attached and bonded to the rear of the bag was an ablative heat shield about one-quarter inch (6.3 millimeters) thick. Inside the bag were two canisters of white polyurethane foam, a portable rocket motor with twin exhaust nozzles that protruded through the Mylar cover, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.
Once inside the bag, the astronaut would don a harness, zip the bag closed and float out the hatch of the spacecraft.
Out in space the astronaut would activate the foam canisters, which would inflate the bag into the shape of a blunt cone within a few minutes.
Then the astronaut would orient the bag with the rocket motor so that the blunt end faced towards Earth. That way, atmospheric heat upon reentry would char only the heat shield.
Perhaps the engineers gained confidence from U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger who made a couple of towering leaps from open-balloon gondolas during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In one high-altitude test in August 1960, Kittinger jumped from a height of nearly 103,000 feet (31,395 meters) and free fell for more than four and a half minutes before his parachute opened. Kittinger even surpassed the speed of sound – the only human to do so without using an aircraft or space vehicle -- yet survived his 20-mile (32-kilometer) fall in remarkably good shape.
The reasoning followed that if one man survived such a drop, then others could as well from even higher altitudes.
A decade after the final retirement of Lockheed Martin's Mach-3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the Air Force is preparing to test a plane that flies more than three times as fast. Two Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicles, built by Lockheed Martin with input from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), will take to the air in 2008. The $100-million program aims to field a Mach-10 unmanned aircraft that can spy on foreign powers, drop bombs or even lob satellites into orbit.
The Blackbird, which was first retired in 1990 then briefly resurrected between 1995 and 1997, reached its Mach-3 top speed by way of its hybrid Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines, which featured a conventional turbojet engine installed inside a ramjet optimized for supersonic flight. At low speeds, the turbojet did most of the work; at high speed the turbojet throttled back and the ramjet took over.
Engineers are improving on this so-called "combined cycle" to propel the Falcon, using a more powerful "scramjet" in place of the ramjet. "We need propulsion that transitions seamlessly from Mach 0 to Mach 9 or 10," says Lockheed Martin's Bob Baumgartner.
"For low speed, we're looking at turbine engines that can perform at speeds from Mach 0 to Mach 4, then a scramjet ... that takes over anywhere between Mach 2 and Mach 4 and goes up to higher Mach numbers -- depending on the fuel, up to Mach 10," says Steven Walker, a Darpa researcher. "For sure, we know how turbines work, but we don't have turbines that work at Mach 4."
"The scramjets are still at a low-technology readiness level," he adds. "Combining both flow-paths and looking at how you transition from one to the other and the transition back ... that's all new, break-through technology."
"Thermal protection ... is the next major enabling technology," Baumgartner says, referring to ways of coping with the high temperatures that Mach-10 flight generates. "We're looking at durable metallic thermal protection panels to withstand heat and keep it away from structure. We're also looking at ceramic panels."
Foil insulation is an option too, he continues. And for the engines, developers are looking at new ceramic or metal-alloy coatings that can withstand temperatures reaching thousands of degrees.
Lockheed Martin's Craig Johnston, who works on a hypersonic engine project, sees many applications for Falcon and similar vehicles. "I can easily envision this technology eventually making its way into advanced aircraft ... something like long-range strike aircraft, supersonic bombers or future fighters."
Darpa also foresees using Falcon to cheaply launch small satellites. "Falcon will develop a low cost, responsive Small Launch Vehicle that can be launched for $5 million or less," an agency statement reads. "The SLV will be capable of launching small satellites into sun-synchronous orbits and will provide the nation a new, small-payload access to space capability."
I'm sure a bazillion bloggers are going to squeal in paranoia about thisWashington Post story, on the Bush Administration's new space policy. But, of course, they could have been squealing a full week earlier, if they had just read Defense Tech first.
Thanks to Haninah Levine and Theresa Hitchens, this site was on top of the more martial space plan on October 11th. Other elements of the story -- the Air Force's "Counterspace Operations Doctrine," the Chinese laser supposedly that's targeting U.S. satellites -- have all been addressed here, too. A long time ago.
And so, with that, I'm ushering in a new category: "Eat DT's Dust" -- stories that the mainstream press takes up, long after this site has dealt with 'em. I'm posthumously inducting Jeffrey Lewis' post, "NORK Nuclear Test: It's A Dud," into the club, too. The Wonk beat all the big papers to the now-universal conclusion.
There are plenty of times, of course, when Defense Tech just points to, or comments on, stories that have been broken by outlets like the Times, the Post, or ABC News. But when it's the reverse -- well, I figure we ought to strut our stuff just a little bit more.
Nuke Spaceship Docs Revealed
In the late 1950's, the U.S. government began research into an interplanterary spacecraft that relied on nuclear detonations for propulsion. The effort, dubbed "Project Orion," died quietly ater a few years. But many of the documents surrounding the atomic spaceship have remained hidden or classified for more than four decades.
Boing Boing has a bunch of 'em up, now -- as well as an interview with tech historian George Dyson, who's dad worked on Orion. Check it out.
UPDATE 11:15 AM: "Orion is interesting from a military technology point of view, partly because it was literally a 'space battleship' with a large stock of nuclear warheads it could deliver anywhere on the planet," says David Hambling. "In particular, there is a program mentioned in [Dyson's] book called 'Casaba Howitzer' which is a nuke with highly directional blast, suitable for attacking buried installations etc. Casaba Howitzer is still, as far as I know, highly classified with no details anywhere."
Bush: Space is for Soldiers
After four years and some 35 drafts, the Bush White House has finally released its long-awaited rewrite of the U.S. National Space Policy. Obviously, the administration was keen to get the word out – they quietly posted a 10-page unclassified summary on the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s website at 5 pm on Oct. 6 – the Friday before the Columbus Day long weekend.
Hmm. Maybe not.
When asked about the document, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow replied: "What, this old thing? Just something we inherited from our Uncle Bill." Well, not literally, of course. But in a further indication that the administration intends to downplay the significance of the document, insiders have been characterizing the new NSP as "nothing new," just a variation on the themes set by the Clinton administration in the last NSP.
A cursory reading might support that conclusion – much of the language from the previous policy is lifted intact. But giving such an important document just a cursory reading would be a mistake. Slap down the new NSP, signed by President Bush on Aug. 31, and the old one, signed by President Clinton in 1996, side by side, and reach deep down for those old grad-school "textual analysis" skills, and it’s quickly apparent that we are dealing with two very different beasts. Though that won’t come as a surprise to those who have been playing the space game over the past decade or so.
While the Clinton version focuses on civil and commercial space, the Bush NSP gives primacy to national security and military space. Example: of Clinton’s five goals for U.S. space programs, two mention national security; of Bush’s six goals, four are related to national security and defense.
While the Clinton policy aimed to highlight international cooperation and collective security in space, the Bush NSP takes a go–it-alone stance, using strong language that asserts U.S. unilateral rights in space while possibly also being intended to "negate" the rights of other space-faring nations. In ominous tones, the document threatens in one section to "dissuade or deter others from either impeding [U.S.] rights or developing capabilities intended to do so" – raising the specter of preemptive action against other nations’ dual-use space technology.
Indeed, even as the Bush policy emphasizes the importance of space security, it goes out of its way to make clear that this security may not, under any circumstances, come from (shudder) international law: "The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduce research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests" [emphasis added].
While the new NSP doesn't go as far as some space hawks wanted it to in openly endorsing the strategy of fighting "in, from and through" space, neither has it served to put a blanket – even a thin one – on those ambitions. And in taking a decidedly "us against them" tone, it is likely to further cement the view from abroad that the United States has taken on the role of a "Lone Space Cowboy." And as much as people love John Wayne movies overseas, that will not be a good thing.
"China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in... a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft," Defense News is reporting. And, at least in theory, those lasers might be able temporarily take offline America's most powerful orbiting spies, like the giant electro-optical Keyhole spacecraft or radar-based satellites like the Lacrosse.
Now, the article is a little short on details. "It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful," the story says.
And there's a touch of hyperbole in the piece. According to the article, a recent Pentagon report "acknowledge[d] China has the ability to blind U.S. satellites, thanks to a powerful ground-based laser." That's not exactly right. What the report actually says isn't quite so definitive:
Evidence exists that China is improving its situational awareness in space, which will give it the ability to track and identify most satellites. Such capability will allow for the deconfliction of Chinese satellites, and would also be required for offensive actions. At least one of the satellite attack systems appears to be a groundbased laser designed to damage or blind imaging satellites.
Nevertheless, citing unnamed "top officials," the trade journal asserts that "China not only has the [anti-satellite] capability, but has exercised it. It is not clear when China first used lasers to attack American satellites. Sources would only say that there have been several tests over the past several years."
Within the U.S. military, there's a contingent that's been worried for years about China arming up like this. The other day, I was talking to an Air Force colonel, about the Pentagon's plans for "prompt global strike" -- the ability to launch, in a matter of hours, a bolt-from-the-blue attack against an enemy thousands and thousands of miles away. Some in the armed forces talk about the strikes as a way to take out an Iranian nuclear facility, a terrorist chieftain, or a North Korean missile on the launchpad. But this colonel had a different target in mind for the instant attack: a Chinese "anti-satellite, ground-based laser wreak[ing] havoc with our constellation."
If China really is pursuing such a weapon, it wouldn't be the only country looking at lasers to interfere with enemy eyes above the sky. In a 1997 test, the U.S. fired a chemical laser at a satellite orbiting 420 kilometers above the Earth. The "laser apparently had technical difficulties," according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "but the results of the test were startling."
A lower-power (30-watt) laser intended for alignment of the system and tracking of the satellite was the primary laser source used during the test, and it appeared that this lower-power laser was sufficiently powerful itself to blind the satellite temporarily, although it could not destroy the sensor.
These days, the Air Force's Starfire Optical Range is shooting lasers in the sky, trying to figure out how best to correct for atmospheric interference. Astronomers looking into the heavens will be the most immediate beneficiaries. But Starfire could help out anti-satellite weaponeers, too. These days, ground-based lasers aren't powerful enough -- or good enough at traveling through the air -- to permanently take out a satellite; the best the beams might be able to do is blind the thing, temporarily. That could change, if Starfire (or its Chinese equivalent) does its job right.
UPDATE 10:12 AM: Color Theresea Hitchens, the Center for Defense Information's resident spacewar guru, "not convinced – nor impressed."
The folks quoted in this story are neither space nor China experts -- and those folks are easy to find. And there is the odd timing: just as Griffin goes to China, over the earlier objections of Rummy and the P-gon. Statements like "China's burgeoning antisatellite capabilities..." -- who SAYS? Even the P-gon hasn't gone that far in its reports on Chinese Military Power.
All that said, I would NOT be surprised if the Chinese were testing a Ground-Based Laser. So are we, at Starfire Optical Range. If they lased U.S. satellites though, how do we know they were trying to blind them rather than TRACK them -- since we say Starfire is using lasers only to track sats? China doesn't have all that great tracking ability, and it needs it, not just to track our stuff but their own. There isn't any real way to tell, I don't think, what the INTENT behind such lasing would be.
NOT that it is a good thing -- lasing other people's sats without their consent, or at least specific statements of your intent to do only tracking, in peacetime ought to be off the playing field, hence the need for a code of conduct of some sort in space operations.
Finally, with regard to laser blinding -- it is not as easy as it sounds to "blind" an optical satellite with a laser. I'm no physicist, but as I understand it, imaging satellites usually work in several wavelengths, meaning first of all you'd have to have lasers in all the colors that match those wavelengths to blind the sat, not just one single wavelength laser beam. Secondly, because of the way imaging sats work, taking pictures of strips of the Earth using strips of pixels, you'd have to figure out how to blind all the pixels -- which apparently is so hard as to be well nigh impossible. And I note that as far as I know, we haven't gotten that far with Starfire, so what makes us so sure the Chinese are ahead of us there?
If you ask me, the story raises more questions than answers.
Sats Hit Snags
Just about everything the U.S. military does these days depends on satellites: spying on insurgents, relaying orders, keeping drones and soldiers pointed in the right direction. The idea, in the future, is to go even more sat-centric. Too bad the Air Force is having such a tough time getting contractors to build the next generation of orbiters it says are so critical.
Last week, the Air Force decided to cut fees owed Boeing, citing a $260-million cost overrun and delays of three years in the company's work on new Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites (pictured). Meanwhile, an Air Force review of the program recommended rescheduling first launch of the new satellites from January 2007 to May 2008.
Nearly the entire slate of Air Force satellite programs, valued at around $40 billion through 2010, faces cost, schedule and technical challenges. All this, despite years of warnings of "systemic problems" with the military space program. Space Radar, a $5-billion program to field orbiting radars for ground targeting, has suffered Congressional budget cuts in recent years amid concerns that its cost and schedule are poorly defined. Transformational Satellite, or TSAT, is intended to support secure wideband communications with a five-satellite constellation beginning in 2013, all in an effort to ward off an impending military bandwidth crunch. But the Congressional Budget Office contends that even TSAT -- part of a portfolio of communications satellites that accounts for the majority of space spending -- will fail to satisfy the military's enormous (and growing) appetite for secure bandwidth.
UPDATE, 13:25 EST: This just in from Defense News regarding the 2007 defense budget:
Expressing concern over cost growth in the troubled Transformational Communications Satellite program, senators cut $230 million from the $867 million requested for program. They cut $100 million from the $266 million sought for the Space Radar, citing “uncertainties with the program.”
Israel Wants to Jam Sats
Back in 2004, the U.S. Air Force suggested that they might be willing to mess with commercial satellites, if they were aiding an American foe. The idea drew howls from outside observers. And, for a while, it seemed destined for an extremely quiet corner of flyboy doctrine.
But now, the Israelis are picking up where their American counterparts left off, Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome reports. Fed up with Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV broadcasts -- which stayed on the air, despite repeated aerial and electronic attacks -- the Sabras are now talking publicly about "disrupt[ing] transmissions of enemy programming carried by commercial satellites."
“No doubt, we understand the power of the media, public opinion and mass psychology,” said [Maj. Gen. Ido] Nehushtan, who is responsible for IDF modernization planning. “Al-Manar is a liability, and we’re going to have to improve our ability to counter this threat...”
...the only way to ensure persistent, reliable, wide-area broadcast denial is through an anti-communication satellite system. Israel must develop the means to surgically target signals serving Hizbollah without damaging the spacecraft or disrupting operations of other customers serviced by the broadcast frequencies, he said...
[But] according to [an Israeli] executive, jamming a communications satellite is “like interfering with civil aviation. You can do it, but it’s against international law and you’ll be subject to all kinds of lawsuits.”
It is technologically impossible, he said, to selectively jam only those satellite signals that carry enemy broadcasts.
“Everything goes out as a single beam, and it is impossible to jam only those channels viewed as a threat,” the executive said. “If you make the decision to interfere with one [satellite signal], then you must be prepared to face the consequences of the collateral damage incurred to the many other legitimate users of the signal.”
Robert Ames, chief executive of the Satellite Users Interference Reduction Group... said it is relatively easy to jam a specific satellite transponder.
“Transponders are separated by frequency,” he said. “All you have to do is know the frequency which it operates on and then put up a signal that is stronger than the programming carrier of the satellite...
Satellite interference capabilities have been around since the mid-1970s, he added. “But if the Israelis are talking about technological challenges, I assume they are aiming for a capability that goes way beyond what our companies have experienced to date.”
Calling All Space Experts
David Axe here. I'm working on a big piece for Popular Science on hypersonics and reuseable spacecraft ... and I need your help. If you're in industry or government and terms like "Hot Eagle", "Falcon", "HTV" or "CAV" mean anything to you, drop me a line. I need some insider perspective ... and I can guarantee anonymity.
Could Compass put the US (and Europe) in a jam?
In yesterday’s article I referenced the peculiar number of Compass satellites registered with the ITU. Naturally, such registrations also include the frequencies to be used. Things get very interesting when you compare Compass’ registrations to the GPS and Galileo allocations…
It is already well known that GPS and Galileo share some of the same frequencies. The rationale behind the frequency-sharing is simple – the systems have the potential to be interoperable. To a civilian end-user, Galileo is merely an extension of the GPS constellation, providing better coverage and higher resolution. Yet each system retains some non-overlapping frequencies, such as GPS’s military M-Code and Galileo’s Public Regulated Service. That way, the US military doesn’t have to worry about Galileo interfering with its GPS signal.
Many of you may remember that before this arrangement was agreed on, the DoD was afraid that they would not be able to jam Galileo without jamming its own GPS M-Code. This would have left the U.S. military planners in a difficult position – to prevent the enemy’s use of satellite navigation (using civilian Galileo receivers) they would also have to deny it to themselves. Despite DARPA’s efforts in recent years to build true precision-guided weapons independent of GPS, the military still remains heavily dependent on GPS.
Six years of trans-Atlantic diplomacy finally resulted in the Binary Offset Carrier 1.1 standard, which was agreed upon in June 2004 by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and EU Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio. Neither GPS nor Galileo is vulnerable to jamming targeting the other – and the U.S. military retains the right, and the technical capability, to use ground jammers to knock out Galileo signals in war zones.
Both GPS and Galileo are now experiencing deja vu, though, thanks to Compass. Without going into all the numbers, virtually all GPS and Galileo frequencies are overlain by Compass. Not only that, but Compass retains additional frequencies that are not touched by either of the U.S. or European systems (a caveat: satellites rarely use all the frequencies included in their ITU registrations, so this needs to be taken with a grain of salt). GPS’s civilian and military channels, Galileo’s open, commercial, and Public Regulated channels are all within those ranges. Only the frequencies used onboard GPS satellites for missile warnings were avoided – at least China was wise enough not to mess with that.
Compass could jam GPS or Galileo even if Compass is only a regional system for Asia with a limited number of satellites. In a military flare-up regarding Taiwan, China could certainly benefit from a complete denial of positioning services to the U.S. and its allies. All it would take would be for the Chinese to program Compass to drown out the other systems with a stronger signal to start causing problems (there is debate as to whether or not such drowning can be overcome).
More deceptively, Compass could masquerade as GPS and Galileo and transmit deceptive signals. Obviously, the specter of a Chinese finger on a big, red jamming button is giving the shivers to the U.S. military.
However, frequency allocations do not indicate nefarious intent. These same allocations could allow Compass to work in harmony with GPS and Galileo. Overlapping frequencies are essential for making the American and European systems interoperabile – the same would hold for Compass. There is precedent; both Japan and India have well-developed plans to augment the GPS network to suit their needs (in Japan’s case, high-latitude urban reception; in India’s an expanding aviation market). A global, multinational satellite navigation network comprising over 75 satellites would certainly provide remarkable coverage and high precision to all users during the vast majority of the time when there is not a military incursion.
And, if worst comes to worst, everybody would have their own independent networks to fall back on – assuming you don’t get jammed first.
As has been widely reported, China plans to construct its own global satellite navigation network. Or so it would appear. No one’s quite sure. The system, dubbed Compass, is mired in confusion, with possible intentions ranging from a modest upgrade of their regional Beidou system to a full blown competitor to GPS and Galileo.
China invested in the European Galileo system through the Galileo Joint Undertaking. Remarkably, this investment will not allow the Chinese any role in Galileo when it transitions to the Supervisory Authority at the end of the year, likely due to the sensitive nature of Galileo’s encrypted signals. It’s no surprise, then, that China would feel betrayed by its partnership in the Joint Undertaking. Compass may be a result of China’s desire to strike out on its own– or a bluff aimed at wrangling a more substantive role in Galileo.
The business case for Galileo’s commercial signals is questionable, since most people are content with using GPS and the free Galileo signals. Another commercial competitor, such as Compass, would surely hurt Galileo. As such, China can easily use Compass as leverage for better standing within the Supervisory Authority.
China has ordered 18-20 rubidium atomic clocks, a key component of satellite navigation systems. However, this is nowhere near enough to create a global constellation, which requires at least 21 satellites, especially since there are usually multiple clocks per satellite, with GPS satellites having at least three and Galileo having four.
At best, China would be able to build eight or nine satellites with just two clocks each, which would allow for a regional navigation system for East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Such a system would not be a commercial threat to Galileo, but has potential to become a global competitor fairly quickly if China buys more clocks; this initial order may only represent a first installment.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) database has 36 satellite slots registered to Compass. Fourteen are in geosynchronous orbits, and the remaining 22 are in the medium orbits traditionally used for navigation systems. While there is a tendency to register more slots with the ITU than will realistically be filled, such a large number of registrations for a regional system would be excessive and place China in a poor position with the ITU for future registrations.
What is Europe to do? The economic returns on Galileo must be protected if the project is to succeed. China could be given rights under the Supervisory Authority, minimizing its need for Compass. However, this would probably allow Chinese companies to build Galileo ground receivers, a potentially lucrative market that Europe would like to keep for itself. It would also give China access to the encrypted, and sensitive, public-safety signals. The stakes are high, but can Europe afford to call China’s bluff?
An interesting aside: there is no guarantee that the clocks would be used for Compass. Another possible application is naval signal reconnaissance satellites similar to the Navy’s Ocean Surveillance Satellites program. In that case, the clocks are used for radio inferometery, in turn determining the origin of the intercepted signals. Such a capability for the Chinese would undoubtedly have significant military implications. That possibility, however, is a subject for another day.
Falcon – a word that evokes power, speed, lethality. Then why did the Air Force’s latest FALCON fall out the back of a C-17 at 32,000 feet?
The answer: drop tests. The drop from the C-17, which proceeded according to plan, was part of DARPA’s efforts to develop a Small Launch Vehicle (SLV) as part of its FALCON program. This particular FALCON is the Force Application and Launch from the CONtinental United States program -- and shouldn’t be confused with the rocket, the satellite, the fighter jet, the supercomputer, or any of the other pieces of hardware which undoubtedly bear the same name in the defense tech community.
The SLV is a small rocket (still over 60 feet in length) that, if successful, will be able to quickly place a lightweight military satellite into orbit. I guess dropping a 72,000 pound rocket out the back of a plane is easier than waiting for a launch pad at Vandenberg.
The SLV would allow for the rapid replacement of failed assets, provide supplemental reconnaissance for a hot zone, etc. Rapid launch could also be applied to space weapons, providing the Air Force with the ability to quickly deploy either passive or active weapons systems without providing the public and international community the opportunity to protest.
The SLV also has another objective - to boost a scramjet-powered hypersonic bomber to its target halfway around the world. This is part of FALCON’s other aim, to provide Prompt Global Strike capability to any location in the world in under two hours. Prompt Global Strike is basically the always-ready, rapid response system behind our ballistic missiles. Except in this case, you can’t use missiles, and you can’t use nukes.
The hope is to drop conventional bombs on far-flung targets quickly without the showstopper issues associated with using a Trident II. The problem with the Trident is, you don’t want to place the world’s nuclear second-strike forces on alert as you send a conventionally-tipped Trident II toward Osama bin Laden.
FALCON has lofty goals by attempting a truly global reach and a 12,000 pound payload. You could send more than just bombs – deploying Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVS) are certainly possible. It can, in fact, carry so much that some people want to use it to rapidly deploy a Marine squad. However, it is unlikely that even hardened Space Marines (OOO-RAH!) could sustain the necessary G forces in their potential drop ship.
FALCON is centered on the Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV), a reusable unmanned bomber. Traveling at over Mach 5, the HCV will use a scramjet engine, a significant departure from the rockets traditionally used in long-range weapons systems. Since a scramjet’s trajectory is markedly distinct from an ICBM it will also be readily identifiable.
What is not clear is, given the HCV’s proposed range and payload, is whether the international community would consider it any less of a threat than a Trident. It doesn’t even have to be nuclear-tipped to scare the heck out of you – 12,000 pounds of munitions in the right place can be devastating. In fact, FALCON could be a bigger threat than the nuclear arsenal since there is a much greater chance of its use in non-apocalyptic scenarios.
If any current U.S. space program deserves the name "Transformational," it’s the Department of Defense’s ambitious Transformational Satellite Communications System (TSAT) program. The aim of the program is to provide real-time, high bandwidth connections between military assets – ships, planes, drones, units, even individual ground vehicles – anywhere in the world, providing a critical component of network-centric warfare.
Unfortunately, "transformational" is a synonym for another word: risky. Estimates currently project that the program, when and if completed, will cost as much as $18 billion – highlighting the program for close scrutiny from Congress.
But for this week, team TSAT can celebrate a success. In a test conducted in conjunction with MIT, Boeing & Ball Aerospace demonstrated the inter-satellite laser link (Boeing) and pointing system (Ball Aerospace). This laser link will ultimately provide the 40 gigabits per second backbone that connects the planned 5 satellites together, which are slated to be launched in 2013.
The MiTEx Mystery: Mobile microsats make nerds nervous
Right now, a pair of mysterious, highly mobile microsatellites dubbed MiTEx are roaming about in geostationary orbit (GEO). Their mission and their capabilities are unknown; even their orbital position is classified. Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences each built one of the 225kg microsatellites for DARPA, and the Naval Research Lab built the propulsive upper stage.
Information on the microsatellites themselves is virtually nonexistent. Calls by this office to DARPA were quickly met with “no comment”, and Space News writer Jeremy Singer’s inquiries also went unanswered. DARPA has already run the controversial DART and XSS-11 missions, both of which tested technology with anti-satellite applications. Since these missions were conducted largely within the public eye, one has to wonder what MiTEx is up to that must remain so secret.
The MiTEx launch, on June 18, was heralded by a press release touting its upper stage as a “technology demonstrator,” but this is where the story gets interesting. The upper stage is equipped with lightweight, high-capacity propellant tanks and with thrusters that use a platinum/rhodium alloy, which should be able to fire tens of thousands of times. It has solar panels and lithium-ion batteries to provide electrical power, as well as a star tracker. Compared to traditional upper stages – which consist of an unadorned solid-fuel rocket motor - this elaborate contraption of an upper stage is quite novel and is certainly designed to do a lot more than transfer the microsatellites from their transfer orbit to GEO.
But while such a tricked-out upper stage is unusual – only one other known upper stage, the Integrated Apogee Boost Subsystem (IABS), has even carried solar panels – every one of the individual technologies listed above is in itself tested and well-established. So what exactly are the technologies which this technology demonstrator is demonstrating?
The MiTEx satellites – about which no information is available - are freely traversing GEO with a robust upper stage that, based on launch vehicle performance, probably has plenty of fuel to spare for significant maneuvers. What exactly will they be doing in what has become the most economically viable and strategically important locale in space?
That is the million-dollar question. The high level of secrecy surrounding the satellites themselves, as well as the unusual upper stage, suggests that MiTEx might be more than a technology demonstrator. The fact that MiTEx effectively has stealth capability (only the U.S. Space Surveillance Network has a chance of detecting it) doesn’t help calm the nerves.
Close proximity operations around other satellites – as demonstrated by DART and XSS-11 – are certainly possible and would allow for a wide range of activities. For example, proximity operations would enable detailed reconnaissance of a satellite, identifying weaknesses, taking photographs, and collecting all the satellite’s incoming and outgoing radio traffic. More hostile acts, such as denying ground communications, depleting propellant reserves, and even causing permanent damage to the satellite, cannot be ruled out.
MiTEx could merely be demonstrating technologies that haven’t been tried before in the harsher GEO environment. Or it could indeed be operational, performing any number of possible clandestine missions. We simply do not know.
More information on MiTEx can be found at the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information. Ryan Caron is a research assistant for the space security project at the World Security Institute’s Center for Defense Information. He studies aerospace engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
(More) Marines in Spaaaaaace!
Col. Jack Wassink is a former Marine Corps jet jockey with a weird new mission. This blunt, 45-year-old chief of the Marine Corps's tiny Space Integration Branch in Quantico, Virginia, shepherds the Marines' radical vision of space warfare.
Unlike the Air Force, Navy and Army, all three of which sponsor expensive satellite programs, the cash-strapped Marines are pushing just one space concept. It's called Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion, or SUSTAIN, and it's a reusable spaceplane meant to get a squad of Marines to any hotspot on Earth in two hours -- then get them out. The idea is to reinforce embattled embassies, take out terrorist leaders or defuse hostage situations before it's too late. "The Marine Corps needs [this] capability," Brig. Gen. Richard C. Zilmer told Congress in 2004.
"The Corps has always been an expeditionary force, a force of readiness, a 911 force," Wassink says. "All SUSTAIN is, is a requirement to move Marines very rapidly from one place to another. Space lends itself to that role."
Read more at Military.com. And check out Marines who aren't in space at my Flickr ... and in black and white in my graphic novel WAR FIX.
Peter B. de Selding hit the front page of Space News (subscription only) the other day with a scoop about a Chinese plan to build a 24-satellite navigation network, called Compass, in roughly the same orbit as the American and European sat-nav systems, GPS and Galileo. But there’s more: the Chinese are apparently “threatening” to use an encrypted signal for military ops that would actually overlay – and maybe interfere with – "M-Code," the Pentagon's GPS broadcast. That's the signal that keeps everything from precision bombs to flying drones on track.
You might remember that the Pentagon had a right royal hissy fit when the Europeans proposed to overlay Galileo’s encrypted signal on the M-code, because under those circumstances the U.S. military wouldn’t be able to jam Galileo during any hostilities without blocking its own ability to access the GPS signal. So, you would figure collective hair would be on fire over at the five-sided building at the news of the Chinese plan, right?
Well, maybe and maybe not. Turns out this jamming biz is not as simple as it sounds. According to CDI’s resident techno-geeks, Haninah, Eric and Ryan, it seems that we could, at least theoretically, jam the Chinese satellites even if the GPS signals are overlain (over-layed? laid over?). It would be difficult, and we’d need a lot of jammers to ensure that enough satellites in the network were shut down to degrade the system’s functionality. But jamming the signals of individual satellites is a tough challenge, so we’d likely end up opting instead for “frying” – in that the easiest way to shut them off would be to them slam them with a pulse that would put the electronics permanently out of commission.
That's probably not an option we'd want to take with Galileo constellation -- which, after all, is costing the Euros a serious wad. Considering that the U.S. isn’t likely to be at war with Europe anytime soon (perhaps despite the efforts of the French), it’s probably safe to assume that we’d only be talking about stopping up Galileo if some bad guy was using it against us – and it is pretty unimaginable that under those circumstances that the U.S. would want to be faced with having to blow (electronically that is) Eurohardware out of the sky.
Instead, we'd probably want to use local jammers, to block out a given area's satellite receivers on the ground. GPS signals (and Galileo signals) are weak. So it's pretty dang simple to drown them out using an in-theater jammer putting out a stronger signal over a certain geographic footprint. But that only works if our M-code and their signals aren't crossed-up.
But the question of being able to jam the Chinese isn’t the only problem raised by the potential Compass signal overlay. The CDI techno-geeks, as well as one of my P-gon buds who actually knows a thing or two about satops, explained that the Compass constellation itself could be used by the Chinese as sort of a giant jammer in space to muck up GPS. The Compass sats could transmit garbage that disabled GPS, or transmit deceptive signals that would not disable it, but cause it to broadcast incorrect data. They could do this intermittently and sneakily – to undermine confidence in GPS/Galileo reliability (Beijing to Washington, “We’re so sorry, bugs in our system.”) Or they could equip the Compass satellites with high-powered transmitters linked to a big, red DISABLE GPS button at PLA HQ for use in any conflict with the U.S.
Before I get slammed for pretending to be Bill Gertz, it is worth noting, as Gregory Kulacki from the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out, that there isn’t any money in the current Chinese five-year budget plan for such a satnav system, and we’d be talking about big, big money. Nor could Gregory find any info in the Chinese-language technical literature in the public domain about the specs for such a potential system. So, maybe the Chinese just want to scare the Euros into letting them in on their signal? Stay tuned, we’ll know more next Monday when Space News will be publishing a follow-up story.
You can't protect what you can't see. And, right now, America's military has a really, really hard time seeing into space. Which means U.S. satellites could be at risk.
So it makes sense that the Air Force is spending a whole lot of money on "space situational awareness" -- getting a better picture of what's in orbit -- before the service starts investing big in the moreoutlandishtools of space war. Air Force magazine breaks down the programs:
The Space Fence is an array of dispersed radars that track satellites as they pass over the United States. The Air Force is planning a $275 million upgrade over the next five years that will convert the system to S-band radar, allowing greater search capability and faster revisit times. It also will sharpen the resolution of the radar, so that it can see objects from a current minimum of 12 inches in size down to two inches in size. The radars themselves will be distributed over a wider geographical area, giving a better view of the horizon. They will be able to see beyond low earth orbit (LEO) to medium Earth orbit (MEO). [Col. Ronald] Grundman said the old hardware likely will be retired around 2011, because “it’s reaching some sustainability limits.”
Space-Based Surveillance System: Planned to be a constellation of five satellites, the SBSS would operate in in LEO to look at satellites and other objects in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO), at about 26,000 miles from the Earth’s surface. SBSS builds on a missile defense experiment launched in 1996 that looked for ballistic missiles using a visible and an infrared sensor. The IR sensor quit after 18 months, but the visible sensor has continued to function, now for almost 10 years, as proof of concept for a space-based sensor. However, Grundman said, “We think it’s probably going to run out of life at any time.” A Block 10 version of the SBSS is to be ready to fly in 2009. It will be a “risk reducer” for the objective system—the remaining four satellites—which should be launched between 2013 and 2014. The SBSS will be a visible-spectrum telescope. It will “help us find things” at GEO and MEO “that we don’t already know about,” Grundman noted, as well as “keep track of things up there that we do know about, and to get more frequent revisit on them.” The SBSS will be able to survey an area of interest “a few times a day as opposed to every few days.”
RAIDRS: The Rapid Attack Identification Detection and Reporting System is not a satellite, but a “hybrid architecture” of sensors, comm links, and data processing systems intended to analyze the data from satellites and determine if they are being affected by some external force, Grundman explained. “It’s a data situational awareness system” that analyzes the data received at satellite downlinks. RAIDRS detects electromagnetic interference on satellites; “in other words, it’s looking to see if our commsats are being jammed by others.” Spiral 1 also will be able to pinpoint the source of the jamming. By 2010, full operational capability will be 32 ground-based, deployable RAIDRS with broad capability to analyze radio frequency energy across many bands.Grundman noted that interference or jamming may not always be a hostile act. “It’s not that uncommon that we end up interfering with our own communications, sometimes,” he noted. However, it’s important to find a jamming signal and stop it, no matter the source. Spiral 2 will have more data fusion and more automated connections with space command and control systems.
On the offensive counterspace [knocking out enemy satellite] front is the Counter Communications System. Known as CounterComm for short, this project funds a series of ground-deployable jamming units, each with two antennas, set up in the vicinity of an area where the Air Force wants to interfere with an adversary’s satellites. Operational since 2004, the Air Force now has three Block 10 systems and, in the Fiscal 2007 budget, asked for three more. There are plans to upgrade the units to a Block 20 configuration. Further details are classified...
Grundman said he has nothing in his portfolio involving a kinetic [physically destructive] ASAT [anti-satellite] capability. Asked about ASATs that disable a target satellite by spraying their optics or solar panels with paint, Grundman said, “There have been some studies looking at potential concepts in that regard. They’re sometimes called ‘coaters.’ And I think that’s about as much as I can say about that.”
A Trident missile is not the only way of putting a warhead anywhere in the world on target at short notice. A couple of weeks back I mentioned the Slingatron, which appeared in a US Army report on possible low-cost routes to space. The idea of a giant spiral Hula Hoop, somewhat bigger than a football stadium and oscillating at about nine revolutions a second, may seem a bit radical to some people. But – if you didn’tknowalready – no idea is too radical for DARPA. Budget documents reveal that they are not just doing studies. They have their very own Slingatron program , budgeted at at $3 million for 2006 rising to $4 million in 2007. Here's how it's described:
The Slingatron program will use modern engineering and physics concepts to accelerate masses to extremely high velocities. This mechanical mass acceleration concept, based on using centripetal body forces, is fundamentally different from electro-magnetic accelerators and hence avoids the limitations of those machines. Initial studies have demonstrated the fundamental feasibility of the Slingatron concept. This program will explore the concept’s bounding limits and seek to develop uses for the technology within those limits. Included in this program will be studies of the key technologies that will allow the accelerator to achieve very high projectile energies.
The program plans are nothing if not ambitious, aiming to:
- Fabricate experimental launchers.
- Demonstrate mass launchers that range in capabilities over three to four orders of magnitude.
- Demonstrate mass velocities on the order of several km/s and perhaps higher than 10km/s.
However, a perusal of DARPA’s latest plans showed no sign of the Slingatron. I checked with the Agency itself, and spokeswoman Jan Walker advised me:
"We did some preliminary investigation and results were not promising, so we decided not to proceed further."
This could mean one of two things. Either the idea is too crazy even for DARPA, and it really cannot be made to work. Or else it does work, and the whole thing has gone underground, with a giant black program somewhere to construct one of these things. If a huge rotating structure appears in your neck of the woods, accompanied by occasional whooshing sounds and shooting stars…I’d advise you to stay quiet about it.
THERE'S MORE The U.S. Air Force has its own ideas about ground-based space launchers according to this piece in New Scientist magazine. The work is being carried out by LaunchPoint Technologies who are working on an innovative magnetic space launch system. It’s based on a sled which works like a maglev train running on a circular track. When it reaches a high enough speed - which might take a large number of revolutions - it is diverted off the track and off into space. LaunchPoint suggest that they will be able to put payloads into orbit for as little as $750/lb for their first system, perhaps later dropping to $100/lb, against current costs of $4,000/lb or more. Such a device could also be used to launch projectiles. The initial capital cost would be expensive – but then Trident submarines are not cheap either, and they're not so useful for putting up satellites.
The Air Force's cadre of space war planners has always liked to dream big. Take the current issue of Air & Space Power Journal, for instance. In it, fifteen USAF officers muse about how best to apply (and extend) the American military's superiority above the skies. Maj. Mark Steves foresees a fleet of airships, operating at the atmosphere's edge, keeping watch and relaying communications around the globe. Les Doggerel, a civilian at Air Force Space Command, looks forward to an array of cheap, "plug and play" satellites that can be launched at a moment's notice.
But perhaps the most ambitious plan comes from ICBM combat crew commander Capt. Joseph T. Page II, who calls for launching cyberattacks on enemy satellites -- and then capturing the orbiters, or tossing them into the atmosphere, if the need arises.
Military planners have long considered space to be the "ultimate high ground." And to defend that high ground, Air Force doctrine calls for two main strategies – defensive counterspace (protecting our satellites) and offensive counterspace (knocking out the other guys').
Capt. Page isn't too impressed with playing defense. "It will not increase the balance in our favor but only 'hold the line' against enemy attacks,'" he writes.
But offensive counterspace has proved tricky, with the specter of shards of broken satellites strewn in space, or crashing down to Earth. Page's suggestion: hijack an enemy orbiter's attitude control system -- which runs everything from propulsion to communications – and replace it with a "parasitic attitude control system," or PACS.
The idea of covertly supplanting a satellite’s ACS is technologically feasible and may become a desired, mature capability when conflict arises in space…. [It] involves controlling an enemy satellite by supplanting its original ACS and negating the satellite’s mission with the PACS. [It] can control a satellite in numerous ways…
• Depleting the satellite’s primary fuel until the satellite is drifting (denial/disruption). Once a satellite runs out of maneuvering fuel to counter drifting, it is considered dead.
• Stressing and straining the satellite bus until body-part separation occurs from changes in angular-momentum spin rates (destruction). Assuming the satellite is three-axis stabilized, enough rotational velocity would put tremendous stress on the solar panels/deployed antennae. Application of enough stress and strain will separate the appendages, depending upon the rate of spin applied to the satellite bus.
• Realigning... antennae for friendly-force intelligence collection by moving the directional antenna’s “footprint” away from hostile ground-station coverage areas and towards space-based signals-intelligence satellites or simply aiming the antennae into deep space, away from Earth (deception/denial)...
• Pushing the satellite into transfer orbit for atmospheric reentry or physical capture (destruction/denial/degradation/disruption). Deliberate movement of the satellite out of its expected orbital plane would allow the PACS controller full, positive control over the satellite’s designated path. Physical capture by friendly spacecraft and crews becomes possible by bringing the satellite down to an acceptable orbital altitude. If the plan calls for its physical destruction, lowering the satellite’s altitude and speed can allow atmospheric friction to heat up and structurally weaken or burn up the satellite bus and payload. (emphasis mine)
Now, to be clear, this is just one Captain's concept – not some official Air Force program. And other writers in the current Journal take much more sober views of the limits of U.S. space power. Retired Lt. Col. “Mel” Tomme calls B.S. on the idea of launching little, "tactical" satellites into low-earth orbit. Space and Missile Systems Center commander Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel says that the military's space capabilities have badly eroded, and that it's time to get "back to basics."
But Page sees efforts underway now that could eventually lead to his "parasitic" space-weapon: prototype orbital tugboats, that would move satellites from one orbit to the next; small space ships designed for "proximity operations" near another satellite. Both are, in effect, physically correcting a satellite's flight. Maybe software could do a better job… Hey, a Captain can dream, can't he?
All space projects get into orbit pretty much the same way – by burning lots of rocket fuel, a spaceship powers itself past the sky. But what if there was a different approach? What if we could throw something so hard, it would wind up in space? At NASA's behest, Ed Schmidt and Mark Bundy of the Army Research Lab are looking at ways of firing projectiles into orbit.
The notion has a very long pedigree. Back in 1687 when Isaac Newton first came up with the theory of gravity he also introduced the concept of an orbital cannon which could fire a cannonball so fast that it would never come down. The first serious attempt to shoot into space was the High Altitude Research Program (HARP)
carried out in the US in the 60’s (not to be confused with HAARP High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program so beloved of the tinfoil hat brigade). HARP used a modified 16-inch naval gun to loft projectiles to the incredible altitude of 112 miles before being cancelled in 1967.
The ARL study looks at more sophisticated approaches than your basic cannon, including a blast wave accelerator, and electro-magnetic rail gun, and an EM coil gun. But the wildest idea may be the Slingatron: a giant, hypervelocity, rapid-fire slingshot. The machine would spin a projectile faster and faster through a spiral-shaped tube, building up increasing amounts of centripetal force along the way – just like a discus-thrower, spinning himself around before a toss, or like a latter-day King David, winding up his weapon before he whacks Goliath.
Schmidt and Bundy are cautiously positive about Slingatron and the other launch concepts:
- Achieving an 8 km/s muzzle velocity did not violate any laws of physics
- All had serious engineering and materials issues
- Significant research is required
- Facilitization costs would be high
- All are high risk
So it’s a big project which will take some development, but the benefits would be phenomenal. If we can spend $7 billion+ on an airborne laser which is frankly unimpressive, why not put a billion into each of these concepts - then use the rest to build whichever looks best?
An orbital launcher would bring the cost of putting a payload into orbit from around $10,000 a pound to a few hundred dollars. (The G-forces are so huge, astronauts still have to go up the hard way). The main problem as far as I can see would be fights breaking out in the queue to use it. [OK, not exactly. But Hambling's on a roll here. Let him go with it. -- ed.]
NASA wants it to send up components of the ISS or future lunar of Mars missions. Send up the pieces and it could all be assembled in Earth orbit before moving on go where no man has gone before. Or they could use it as a first-stage, putting rockets into orbit which could then boost small probes to the rest of the solar system.
Or it could be used to put up new nano-satellites by the score, at short notice and without the need for scarce and expensive rockets.
But for the Pentagon it could be a candidate for the ideal Global Strike tool: capable delivering a one-ton bunker-busting tungsten supercavitating penetrator at orbital speed. [Not that we're encouraging this sort of thing.] That’s real Shock & Awe, which could arrive anywhere in the world with no warning before bombers could get off the runway. (Anyone remember Saddam Hussein’s Project Babylon Supergun , or the Nazi’s V3 plans?)
Alternatively, an aeroballistic pod could be launched which would break open at high altitude to release a dozen Dominators or similar craft to find and attack precision targets, catching fleeing terrorists in less time than it takes to get a Predator into the area.
Then again, the anti-satellite people might want to have a go too. [Not that we're looking to encourage them, either.] It would make a neat anti-aircraft gun, firing small guided projectiles, and might offer some interesting options for kinetic ballistic missile defense.
Maybe SOCOM might want a look for about instant re-supply anywhere, for when it absolutely, positively has to be there within the hour, regardless of weather conditions?
If you take a look at my book Weapons Grade, you’ll find a chapter with an unusual history of the Space Race. It shows how the space program for both East and West originated with the German military V-2 program, and progressed on the back of post-war ballistic missile programs. The launchers on both sides were modified versions of rockets originally designed to carry warheads. The idea of space travel had been around for years, but it took military interest to make it happen.
We may now again be in a situation where the next major breakthrough in space technology is just waiting for the military to take the lead again.
Some Air Force weapons simulators act like our biggest enemies just don't exist. Why? Because the programs get their data from friendly ground weather-monitoring stations. And when there aren't any stations in a particular country, you get "an inconvenient Iran-shaped blank on the map."
That may be about to change, thanks to some collaboration between a civilian space program and the Department of Defense.
On Friday, a NASA satellite named CloudSat took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Unlike traditional radar weather satellites, which can only take two-dimensional snapshots of clouds (think Weather Channel radar maps), CloudSat can take three-dimensional profiles of the atmosphere, measuring how clouds, aerosol particles and precipitation are distributed vertically.
But the goods that CloudSat will deliver also sound like exactly what the Air Force needs in order to take the next step with HELEEOS -- its realistic, operational simulation of high-energy laser weapons. Maybe that’s why CloudSat’s Advisory Group, charged with "expand[ing] the usefulness and future application of CloudSat data," includes representatives from both the Naval Research Lab and the Airborne Laser Program Office – the DOD’s leading laser weapons program.
While CloudSat seems to be a good model for civilian-military collaboration on space assets, resource-sharing in space doesn’t always work out so smoothly. A recent case demonstrates where this type of sharing can create annoying conflicts of interest.
For over a decade now, the DOD has been working to merge its meteorological assets with the civilian National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the folks who give you the National Weather Service); at the same time, NOAA is working more and more closely with EUMETSAT, the European civilian weather-satellite agency.
The DOD seems to have won the first round of fighting that resulted from this conflict of interests. The upcoming European MetOp-1 satellite will include a few instruments provided by the two US agencies, and the Department of Defense therefore wants to be able to block third-party access to weather data from the system in an emergency. After negotiations went down to the eleventh hour, the Europeans finally agreed to a compromise that will allow the DOD to decide when to push the data-denial button, but allow EUMETSAT to do the actual button-pushing.
Back in 2004, the Department of Defense prevailed in another confrontation with the European Union, this one over Galileo, the EU’s answer to the DOD’s Global positioning System. In the Galileo flap, the US’s demands were even higher than in the back-and-forth over MetOp: not only did we insist on the right to jam Galileo’s signal in case of an emergency, we demanded that the EU design Galileo in such a way that we could jam it without affecting GPS.
All of these disputes were resolved successfully, and with the US military getting its way. This happened in part because the US military also represented NATO –- which made it a lot easier for us to argue that what’s best for us is best for the Europeans, too.
But as both militaries and civilian economies become more dependent on space, and as the US government continues to merge its military and civilian orbital resources, look for more of these turf wars to crop up. The two sides that won’t always come round to seeing eye to eye as easily as they did in these cases. Let’s just hope this won’t lead to any shootouts on the final frontier.
Most of Defense Tech's new crop of bloggers are loaded with security or technical experience: former platoon leaders, missile defense engineers, homeland defense analysts, insidermagazine editors. Steven Snell, on the hand hand, is just your average, garden-variety maniac. But I'm loving this Brit's snarky wit. And I'm hoping this is the first of many posts for the site.
Not since the Beastie Boys Intergalactic video have I been this excited about robots fighting.
Defense Tech has detailed the Pentagon's numerous efforts to deal with a possible rumble in space before. As you may have guessed, they've been trying to cram everything from exotic micro-satellites to combat-ready marines into orbit. But even the blue-sky research brains at DARPA are behind the times when it comes to the coolest thing since naked Counter-Strike.
A mini-satellite carrying several small humanoid robots will (hopefully) be launched into space in October 2010. Once safely in orbit, the satellite will release its robotic passengers, who will proceed to fight each other in the vacuum of space.
That's what organizers of ROBO-ONE, the annual Japanese robot fighting tournament hope to see in just a few years. The official ROBO-ONE site (translated) describes the competition as a "grapple athletic meet by the two-legged robot". In short, its not your usual arena match with competitive dad wrenching the controls from his teary-eyed child mid-battle.
Is any of this actually possible? And will it be before my robot learns his own moves ? Frankly, maybe. Let's face it, robots fighting in space is pretty Rumsfeld . And if you combine the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's recent achievements and the popularity of home made robot kits in Tokyo, we could be watching a very good scrap.
-- Steven Snell
NASA, China in Space Link?
The Chinese National Space Administration recently invited NASA’s head to visit China. The hope is that would be the first step in future cooperation between the two agencies, a first date in case “we need to get married some day.”
This kind of exchange – and the cooperative work that would hopefully come of it – can only be good. Confidence Building Measures between China and the US, particularly in space, are absolutely essential. Both America and China have each expressed concerns about the other looking to weaponize space:
“The pace and scope of China’s military build-up already puts regional military balances at risk. China is likely to continue making large investments in high-end, asymmetric military capabilities, emphasizing electronic and cyber-warfare; counter-space operations…”Quadrennial Defense Review, Feb 2006
“China is developing or improving counter-reconnaissance and counter-space capabilities using a range of solutions from low-tech denial and deception… to high-tech lasers and space-tracking devices.”
DOD Assessment of China’s military power, 2005
“At present, the danger of weaponization of outer space is increasing with each passing day. Taking weapons into outer space will lead to an arms race there and make it a new arena for military confrontation.”
“The nuclear deterrence strategy based on the first use of nuclear weapons has yet to be abandoned. The trend towards lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and developing new nuclear weapons is worrisome. There has been greater danger of weaponization of and an arms race in outer space.”
China’s White Paper on Arms Control, Sep 2005
Each nation is likely to weaponize space in the coming decades if it’s convinced the other is trying to do so – that’s Arms Races 101. There’s no guarantee (and, admittedly, not a great chance) that cooperation in peaceful space exploration will prevent a space arms race. But it can’t hurt.
I've got a story in today's New York Times on NASA's Centennial Challenges -- the contests designed to lure innovators and innovation into the space agency. Here's how it starts:
Steve Jones doesn't have a workshop, exactly, for his miniature space elevator; he is designing it in his dorm room and in four labs scattered across the University of British Columbia. He doesn't have a staff, either; a collection of friends and fellow space enthusiasts volunteer to help. And his budget, in the low five figures, comes mostly from the school activities fund, although Red Bull is donating some energy drinks.
But he might soon have a chance to join the ranks of the aerospace establishment -- getting money from NASA and, in his own way, helping explore the solar system. To get ready, he is spending 60 hours a week on his elevator, which is meant to haul people and gear into orbit without a rocket. He has even put off graduation until the project is done.
Until recently, the chances that a college senior like Mr. Jones would contribute to the NASA space program were remote. Contracts belonged mostly to the Boeings of the world. Tinkerers and students were kept at the far edge of the periphery. But with budgets tightening and the obstacles to human space exploration looking more daunting, NASA is enlisting the expertise of outsiders.
For example, the agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators.
But more important than the cash prizes, contestants and administrators say, is the opportunity to sidestep the traditional ways NASA has done business and bring some fresh faces to its ranks.
"With a regular contract, a small group of students like us wouldn't have a chance," Mr. Jones said. "This way, anyone with a good idea can contribute."
Click over here to read this rest. And if you're interested in space, be sure to check in regularly at Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log. When I want space news, it's the first place I click.
UPDATE 04/08/06: News.com has a sweet photo montage of the challengers.
* "Redesigning Living Organism to Survive on Mars." Let's breed hybrid plants that can survive the Red Planet's radiation, lack of oxygen, and extreme temperatures, so our astronauts have something to eat up there.
Billion Bucks for Space Weaponry?
Most of the programs aren't space weapons themselves; they're more like building blocks, which could be used in orbit for many things, including weaponry. But still, it's pretty stunning to read that money for these potential "dual-use" space projects tops a billion dollars in the Pentagon's latest budget request. That's a $700 million increase from last year, according to a new study from the Center for Defense Information and the Henry L. Stimson Center.
Money for satellite jammers and other "counterspace systems" jumps from $29.1 to $47.3 million. Money for the "Multiple Kill Vehicle," which the study describes as the "preferred interceptor for a space based missile defense," shoots up $137 million dollars, to $220 million.
And that's just in the unclassified world. The "black" projects which could lead to space weapons add up to nearly $1.7 billion, up more than $400 million from the year before.
For 16 years, Aviation Week & Space Technology says, it has been investigating a hush-hush Pentagon program to put a "small military spaceplane in orbit. Considerable evidence supports the existence of such a highly classified system, and top Pentagon officials have hinted that it's 'out there,' but iron-clad confirmation that meets AW&ST standards has remained elusive. Now facing the possibility that this innovative 'Blackstar' system may have been shelved, we elected to share what we've learned about it with our readers, rather than let an intriguing technological breakthrough vanish into 'black world' history, known to only a few insiders."
After the shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986, and a subsequent string of expendable-booster failures, Pentagon leaders were stunned to learn they no longer had "assured access to space." Suddenly, the U.S. needed a means to orbit satellites necessary to keep tabs on its Cold War adversaries.
The answer: a high-flying, hypersonic jet that would launch a small orbiter into space.
A large "mothership," closely resembling the U.S. Air Force's historic XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter's engines fire and boost the vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital.
The manned orbiter's primary military advantage would be surprise overflight. There would be no forewarning of its presence, prior to the first orbit, allowing ground targets to be imaged before they could be hidden. In contrast, satellite orbits are predictable enough that activities having intelligence value can be scheduled to avoid overflights...
Once a Blackstar orbiter reenters the atmosphere, it can land horizontally at almost any location having a sufficiently long runway. So far, observed spaceplane landings have been reported at Hurlburt AFB, Fla.; Kadena AB, Okinawa; and Holloman AFB, N.M.
The spaceplane is capable of carrying an advanced imaging suite that features 1-meter-aperture adaptive optics with an integral sodium-ion-sensing laser. By compensating in real-time for atmospheric turbulence-caused aberrations sensed by the laser, the system is capable of acquiring very detailed images of ground targets or in-space objects, according to industry officials familiar with the package.
One anonymous tipster asks, "Is it possible to design, build and operate such a complex and expensive system and still keep it secret for so long?"
Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources told MSNBC.com that they believed the concept was unworkable, based on principles of rocket design. One source said the mothership would be flying much too slow and too low for a space plane to reach orbital speed after release. When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sought proposals for an unmanned RASCAL satellite launcher five years ago, the specifications called for the carrier aircraft to go much higher, and the submitted designs still needed two stages to reach orbital speed.
Boeing: We Screwed Up, Give us $500 Mil
"When a child who is on trial for murdering his parents pleads for leniency on grounds that he is an orphan, we call that chutzpah," says Space News' Washington Aerospace Briefing. "When a U.S. defense contractor botches a program demands a huge termination fee when the contract is cancelled, we call that... standard operating procedure."
So no, we weren't completely shocked to hear that Boeing is seeking about $500 million from the National Reconnaissance Office in termination fees associated with the Future Imagery Architecture spy satellite program. The NRO cancelled the optical portion of Boeing's multi-billion dollar FIA contract last year after becoming fed up with the company's technical struggles and that lead to innumerable delays and soaring costs.
FIA was supposed to be “a constellation of satellites that would gather clearer and more-frequent images -- even at night and when there is a cloud cover -- of enemy military activity than current satellites can,” the Los Angeles Times notes. Originally scheduled to launch in 2005, at one point, FIA looked like it might become the “most expensive program in the history of the intelligence community,” according to Globalsecurity.org.
When Boeing won the FIA contract, back in 1999, it was something of a coup. As the Times observes, “Much of Boeing's space expertise was in making rockets to launch satellites and developing commercial telecommunication satellites. It had little experience manufacturing satellites with optical lenses that can take close-up pictures from space of objects on the ground.” That was Lockheed Martin’s area of expertise. “Boeing bid very aggressively even though it didn't understand the technology as well as Lockheed," the ubiquitous Loren Thompson told the LAT.
So it’s no surprise that Boeing started burning through cash and dropping deadlinesa, once FIA got underway. “As early as 2002, the government had to reprogramming of about $625 million [and possibly as much as $900 million] from other intelligence programs… to get the program back on schedule,” Globalsecurity.org says. “By the end of 2004 the House Intelligence Committee remained concerned about the viability and effectiveness of a future overhead architecture, given the apparent lack of a comprehensive architectural plan for the overhead system of systems, specifically in the area of imagery.”
By 2005 – after $10 billion on FIA, including about $4 or $5 billion in cost overruns – the government finally had enough, taking the project away from Boeing, and giving it to Lockheed.
Boeing's request for a half a B to make up for the lost work is big. But it's not totally unprecedented, Washington Aerospace Briefing says. The company is still arguing with the Pentagon over $2.3 billion for the A-12 stealth carrier aircraft program, cancelled in 1991.
(Big ups: AT, JS)
UPDATE 2:28 PM: AT points out that there were some interesting names associated with Boeing's controversial FIA win. In Boeing's '99 press release, we read:
Ed Nowinski, Boeing FIA Program Manager, stated, 'This was a very hard-fought competition and the win is the result of the total commitment of our team.'
MELBOURNE, Florida, August 5, 1996—Harris Corporation has named Ed Nowinski as vice president of Strategic Planning and Business Development for the company's Electronic Systems Sector.
Mr. Nowinski most recently was the director of imagery intelligence for the U.S. government's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and director of development and engineering for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Nowinski joined the CIA in 1967 and rose rapidly to positions of increasing responsibility during his career with the CIA and NRO, including director of the Data Communications Group, deputy director of development and engineering, and director of systems engineering. During his government career, he was instrumental in establishing several of the country's premier intelligence collection systems.
Real-Life Hyperspace Drive?
Are you ready to make the jump to hyperspace? A controversial paper, outling a "motor [that] would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds" is making waves in military and scientific circles, New Scientist reports. "It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics."
The Scotsman notes that...
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft."
Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that... "NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [US] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works."
Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, "runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine" which might be able to test some of the basic science behind Hauser's theories, New Scientist observes.
For now, though, [Sandia space scientist Roger] Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind, is a successful experiment."
(Big ups: DS)
Air Force Wants Space War Game
Blasting pixilated space ships can be mighty fun, as anyone who's ever played Galaga can tell you. The Air Force thinks it can put all that joystick time to good use, too -- by using games to help airmen prepare for real-life outer space combat.
The service is looking for game maker to build a sim for what it calls “counterspace operations” -- military-speak for stopping enemy satellites.
Right now, it’s hard to train folks to handle these kinds of missions. Wargaming in orbit is an expensive and risky proposition. And most – but definitely not all -- of the coolest counterspace toys are still on the drawing board. So the Air Force wants a video game “where these tasks can be trained and rehearsed in a realistic set of scenarios and simulations.”
“Access to any classified data would be eliminated” in the simulation, the Air Force says in its request for proposals (scroll down). “[B]ut the training that is provided could be conceptually valid and of sufficient fidelity to support the key [counterpsace] tasks.”
The idea of using games to train kids for a space fight has been around for years – at least since 1985’s sci-fi classic, Ender’s Game.
The U.S. armed forces have been using games to prep its troops for even longer. Back in World War II, a flight simulator in New York’s Coney Island amusement park was turned into a training tool for military pilots. Recent years have only brought the worlds of gaming and the world of war closer, as more of combat has become a matter of pushing the right buttons; and the game have grown more realistic.
Still, you’ve got to hope that this new sim won’t be too true-to-life. What’s a space game, after all, without a tractor beams and a “challenging stage?”
A joint U.S. Air Force/Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] team announced today that the first modernized Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite has been declared fully operational for GPS users around the globe following extensive on-orbit testing of the spacecraft's new military and civilian signals.
Launched on Sept. 25 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. the GPS IIR-14 (M) satellite is the most technologically advanced GPS satellite ever developed. The spacecraft features a modernized antenna panel that provides increased signal power to receivers on the ground, two new military signals for improved accuracy, enhanced encryption and anti-jamming capabilities for the military, and a second civil signal that will provide users with an open access signal on a different frequency.
The second modernized GPS sat will launch early next year. A total of eight of these birds is planned.
Meanwhile, the first launch of Europe's sat-nav program, Galileo, was pushed back from December 26th to the 28th. The satellite, built by Britain, will be launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket.
Meanwhile, India is going to use GLONASS, Russia's answer to GPS and Gallileo.
Autonomous Nanosatellite Guardian for Evaluating Local Space (ANGELS)
Jeremy Singer at Space Newsreports (Yahoo! has the full text) that the Air Force Research Laboratory is “planning a small experimental satellite that would orbit in close proximity to a host spacecraft and keep tabs on their surrounding space environment” in geostationary orbit:
The Angels satellite will be launched into a geostationary orbit for an experiment that is expected to last about a year, according to the request for information. The Air Force hopes to extend the mission for another two years, according to the request for information.
Geostationary orbit is a belt of space some 36,000 kilometers above the equator that hosts most communications satellites. The Air Force chose that orbit because its distance from Earth’s surface makes it less visible and more difficult to monitor than lower orbits, [Tom] Caudill [the space surveillance technical area lead at the laboratory] said.
The Angels spacecraft would launch along with a yet-to-be-determined host satellite that it would shadow in orbit, Caudill said. The launch likely will be arranged by the Defense Department’s Space Test Program, he said.
Jeremy noticed the program when the Air Force Research Laboratory released this solicitatiton for the Autonomous Nanosatellite Guardian for Evaluating Local Space or ANGELS.
I am not sure how ANGELS relates to a similar DARPA program, Spectator, that Lt Col Jim Shoemaker (USAF), Program Manager, Tactical Technology Office, DARPA Space Activities, mentioned at DARPATECH 2005:
... might also want to validate the concept of a host vehicle inspector, a nanosat carried by a host satellite, able to be released to inspect its host to assist in anomaly resolution, such as an incompletely deployed solar array. These are some of the ideas we’re exploring on a new program called Spectator. We’re not exactly sure what Spectator should be, and we welcome your input in defining the program.
Then again, from that description, I am not sure DARPA knows either. They seem to be duplicative, if not coextensive.
The United States does need to improve its space situational awareness, especially in geostationary orbit (GEO). Up there, a piece of space debris as small as a centimeter can cause the loss of a satellite; the tiny nuggets contain so much potential energy, in fact, that it's not even worth shielding against them. But we only track objects a meter and larger in GEO -- a thousand times the deadly size.
The idea of using small satellites to monitor and, perhaps, protect satellites has been kicking around for a while—Matt Bille, from the research group ANSER, co-authored a pair of papers calling for a “microsatellite space guard” in 1999 and 2000:
* Matt Bille and Deborah A. Bille, Enforcing the OST—The Inspection Question
AIAA-2000-5155, AIAA Space 2000 Conference and Exposition, Long Beach, CA, Sept. 19-21, 2000.
* Matt Bille, Robyn Kane, Martin Oetting (ANSER) and Donna Dickey (AFRL), A Microsatellite Space Guard Force, 13th Annual AIAA/USU Small Satellite Conference, 1999.
While ANGELS will eventually operate in geostationary orbits, Bille et al expect the first space guard satellites in low earth orbit (LEO), building programs like XSS, DART and Orbital Express, which all used small satellites to operate near bigger ones.
These projects haven't been without their share of bumps. Big bumps, like the ones tow satellites make when they clang together. DART had itself a little accident while conducting an rendezvous (RSO for the hipsters) last April. And given that, I think some rules of the road for such "proximity operations" would be in order—before the Chinese start doing it, too, and everybody in this town freaks out.
By the end of September a Russian Cosmos 3 missile will be launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome 800 km north of Moscow, carrying two Iranian satellites into orbit. Although the satellites are claimed to be for meteorological and experimental purposes, experts believe that one of them will possess surveillance capabilities allowing it to observe American and Israeli military facilities throughout the Middle East...
The Iranian Satellite to be launched called the Mesbah, which literally means “lantern,” has been in the works for the last eight years and reached maturity after collaboration between Iranian and Italian engineers. The Italian company Carlo Gavazzi Space (CGS), who assisted in the Iranian space effort to develop the Mesbah also contributed extensive knowledge to its partners and as a result, Iranian officials have been quoted as being optimistic regarding their ability to independently launch more advanced satellites in the next several years.
The 65-75kg Mesbah will, according official Iranian sources, be used as a tool for collecting data on ground and water resources and meteorological conditions, and will also be used to control power supply systems and pipelines. However, various intelligence sources report that the satellite will also have limited surveillance capabilities and will be used by Iran to gather intelligence information on neighboring countries including American bases in Iraq, the Gulf and Israel. The satellite is expected to remain in orbit for three years and some experts say it will be able to continue operations for up to five years. Along side the Mesbah, the Russian Cosmos 3 will reportedly launch a smaller Iranian satellite named Sinah-1. This 20kg domestically made satellite was meant to be launched using Iran's own launcher as a technology demonstrator, but for unknown reasons will eventually be launched using the Russian booster.
Nations around the world have raised concern regarding the ongoing efforts by the Iranian government to acquire advanced military capabilities including independent satellite launching capabilities which are directly linked to the development of its ballistic missile program. Tal Inbar, senior research fellow at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies, told IsraCast that the development of the Iranian space program will allow Iran to continue the development of its long-range ballistic missile program surpassing the watchful eye the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the organization in charged of preventing the proliferation of missile technology. Technologies that accompany the development of satellites such as micro electronics can also be used as a cover for the development of small size nuclear weapons which will fit the advanced version of the Shihab missile, says Inbar...
Marines in Spaaaaaace!
"After three years of being laughed out of meetings, the U.S. Marine Corps' futuristic plans to deploy through space may finally be getting some traction," notes Aviation Week's spunky new spin-off, Defense Technology International.
Although the chuckle factor hasn't altogether disappeared, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Darpa are beginning a study of options for a reusable upper-stage space travel vehicle -- the same kind of technology that the Marines might need for a ride halfway across the globe.
The effort is called "Hot Eagle," and it could be the first step forward in the Marine Corps' hopes for space travel. Within minutes of bursting into the atmosphere beyond the speed of sound -- and dispatching that ominous sonic boom -- a small squad of Marines could be on the ground and ready to take care of business within 2 hours. [One presentation muses that the capsule might later be picked up by a Osprey or by a "balloon cable and C-17" transport plane. Or, the Marines might "hike out," and "leave [the] crew capsule behind." -- ed.]
The Marine Corps calls the concept the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion Capability (Sustain). This plan, a growing group of Marine supporters say, is the natural evolution of the service's proclivity for expeditionary warfare that began decades ago with amphibious landings...
The concept is to deliver strategic equipment or a small squad of soldiers to any point on the globe -- even the most hard-to-reach location -- within hours of need. Once on the ground, those soldiers can carry out strategically critical missions like reconnaissance or destroying a specific target.
"Today’s military satellites "take about two minutes to transfer a simple photo," Defense News notes. "That same image could take about 23 seconds on the next-generation Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites, which will start to go up in the next few years."
Such blinding speed could finally bring to life the Pentagon’s visions of networked sensors and shooters — unmanned aerial vehicles, Joint Strike Fighters, warships and troops on the ground — trading instant images and video anywhere in the world.
The Air Force's Transformational Satellite System (TSAT) program got off the ground about two years ago.. Boeing and Lockheed, which each have half-billion-dollar contracts to develop initial TSAT systems, are competing for a final production contract to be awarded in a year or so. Both have reported initial success in basic laser communications and other features.
TSAT will offer jam-proof radio and laser connections to compact surface receivers. Instead of lugging around brick-sized satellite phones, troops will sport BlackBerries that deliver space intelligence on the run.
Sounds great. But the Air Force figures it'll take $12-$18 billion to put the five-satellite constellation in orbit. And, given the military space program's track record of legendarily large screw-ups, it's far from clear whether Congress will pony up for TSAT.
During the 2005 budget process, lawmakers cut $300 million from the $775 million request. In 2006, the Air Force is asking for $836 million. The House Armed Services Committee has recommended only about half that be approved, while the Senate Armed Services would like a cut of about $200 million.
Not many people would try to drive an 24 year old American car coast to coast on Interstate 80 this summer, but that’s a fair description of the launch of the Shuttle Discovery, built in 1981 and flown into space many times. Discovery is a well maintained antique that won’t be retired until 2010. NASA’s Return to Flight Task Group oversaw the implementation of 15 recommendations made after the Columbia breakup and Discovery is a much improved craft that is safer than any of its predecessors.
The shuttle is a flying truck with no military applications. NASA likes this, but when the Shuttle concept was first discussed (ancient history: the Nixon Administration) Air Force played a role in its design as people assumed that there would be military activities that the shuttle could perform. This was before it became clear that unmanned craft did better at everything in space.
There is still an attraction for a space plane or trans-atmospheric craft, albeit unmanned, that could be based in the United States and perform Afghanistan-like air bombardments without the need for expensive overseas deployments, bases, or multiple refueling. The latest program is called FALCON (Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States), part of a larger concept called Global Strike that guides Air Force thinking about its future role. FALCON phase I would be a hypersonic glider – not really a space plane. FALCON phase II would be a reusable, sub-orbital UAV.
FALCON is the latest in a long line of hypersonic aircraft or space plane programs that the U.S. has started. Unlike the earlier efforts, which were usually abandoned somewhere in the middle of testing, this one may actually enter into service, in part because of the skills and technologies developed for long range UAVs like Global Hawk. Seeing FALCON as a space weapon excites arms controllers, but in its first phase, despite its long range and high altitude, it’s not really a space vehicle.
Falcon raises the question of whether the US civil space program should abandon reusable spacecraft and return to an Apollo-like single use vehicle like the planned CEV (cheaper, reliable, old fashioned). Note to space-race watchers: the Europeans recently announced they would support a new Russian plan for a space plane named ‘Kliper’ that could replace the Soyuz capsule. Kliper would have the capabilities of a king-cab pickup truck (6 passengers, 1000 lbs. of cargo).
Moon shine
If you believe they put a man on the moon . . .
. . . or even (especially?) if you don't, this one's for you.
In 2008, NASA says it will send a "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter" into low orbit around the moon. While it's primary mission will be to scout for the next manned lunar mission (ostensibly planned for around 2020), it also will do something to defeat those wacky conspiracy theories about how and why the United Stats allegedly faked its moon missions.
It's going to photograph what astronauts left on the moon, "providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972," NASA says.
There are six landing sites scattered across the moon's surface, but even the Hubble telescope can't photograph them.
Apparently, NASA says, the fact that they haven't been photographed since the Nixon administration adds fuel to the conspiracy theory fires.
Overall, though, the LROC mission is not really about the past.
It will sample the Moon's radiation environment, search for patches of frozen water, make laser maps of lunar terrain and, using LROC, photograph the Moon's entire surface. By the time astronauts return, they'll know the best places to land and much of what awaits them.
Two key targets: the moon's poles. Why? Potential locations for moon bases, of course.
Defense Tech darlings NIAC (that's the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) have handed out their research grants for 2005. And all of 'em are pretty geekalicious. Behold:
* Multi-MICE: A Network of Interactive Nuclear Cryoprobes to Explore Ice Sheets on Mars and Europa (PI: Dr. George Maise, Plus Ultra Technologies, Inc., Stony Brook, N.Y.)
* A Contamination-Free Ultrahigh-Precision Formation Flight Method Based on Intracavity Photon Thrusters and Tethers (PI: Dr. Young K. Bae, Bae Institute, Tustin, Calif.)
* Modular Spacecraft with Integrated Structural Electrodynamic Propulsion (PI: Mr. Nestor Voronka, Tethers Unlimited, Bothell, Wash.)
...And a bunch more. We've covered NIAC before, here, here, here, here, and probably a bunch of other places, too.
Of all the far-fetched space weapons hyped by the Times last month, "Rods from God" are probably the most dubious. That doesn't stop the Weekly Standard from panting about how totally wicked awesome it would be if the Air Force really could drop giant tungsten slabs from orbit, however.
The system could represent a tremendous leap forward in the military's ability to destroy underground, hardened facilities of the type that have allowed Iran and other rogue states to violate the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty with impunity...
Iran has used deeply buried facilities… to shelter its nuclear program... This has limited America's options for intervention. A conventional attack on such facilities might succeed in setting the Iranian program back a few years, but due to the presumed dispersal of equipment over a number of sites across the Islamic Republic, only good intelligence and a great deal of luck would eliminate the threat entirely. And while a nuclear attack could be tactically successful, it is politically unviable. A few well-placed tungsten rods, however, would guarantee the destruction of the targeted facilities.
And so on. It's not until the 9th paragraph (of a 12-graph story) that the Standard reveals, "the likelihood of the rods, or any other system, being deployed in space over the next decade [are] next to nil.'" What's never mentioned at all is the opinion of many physicists that the rods would only be a small fraction as effective as conventional bombs.
There is room, however, for a wee scare tactic before the story is through.
It's likely that space will be weaponized. The only question is whether the U.S. Air Force or [China's] People's Liberation Army will be at the vanguard of the revolution.
[The rods are] at least 10 years away from being operational, and the cost of launching heavy tungsten rods into orbit would be, well, astronomical. Other financial challenges include the satellite's "absentee-ratio," which refers to number of satellites, or in this case bundles of rods, which would be necessary to assure proximity to the target.
Furthermore, it may be necessary to slow substantially the rods' rate of speed to prevent them from vaporizing on impact--though retrorockets might offer a solution to this problem. Simply attaching a tungsten rod to the tip of an ICBM would overcome many of these hurdles.
And here's PopSci:
If so-called "Rods from God"... ever do materialize, it won’t be for at least 15 years. Launching heavy tungsten rods into space will require substantially cheaper rocket technology than we have today. But there are numerous other obstacles to making such a system work.... The rods’ speed would be so high that they would vaporize on impact, before the rods could penetrate the surface. Furthermore, the "absentee ratio" -- the fact that orbiting satellites circle the Earth every 100 minutes and so at any given time might be far from the desired target—would be prohibitive. A better solution, Pike argues, is to pursue the original concept: Place the rods atop intercontinental ballistic missiles, which would slow down enough during the downward part of their trajectory to avoid vaporizing on impact.
Hot off the virtual presses, the Index has in it just about everything you need to know about the state of the world's civilian and military space efforts. The bits about international orbital plans are sure to send the collective mind of the spacewar crowd into hyperdrive.
A total of 44 states have accessed space through an independent launch capability or the launch capabilities of others. In the 1990s, the rate of increase in this capability doubled from just less than one to just less than two per year, mostly for civil space programs. Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. of the UK has enabled seven countries to build their first civil satellite over the last 12 years.
2004 saw this trend toward greater civil space access continuing, with Iran announcing plans to launch a satellite in 2005, and South Korea and Russia signing an agreement on the joint development of a launch vehicle planned for use in 2007...
Overall, a total of 28 civil assets, including satellites and human spaceflights, were launched in 2004, in addition to five launches involving the deployment of seven global utility satellites…
A total of 26 military space assets were launched in 2004, including 21 by the US and Russia, and 12 by other states. China reportedly launched three military reconnaissance satellites in 2004. In December 2004, France launched four 120-kilogram Essaim signals intelligence satellites. The Israeli Air Force changed its name to the Israeli Air and Space Force in 2004, while the launch of its OFEQ-6 reconnaissance satellite failed in its third stage in September. South Korea announced the creation of an Air Force Space Command, and Thailand signed a deal with a French company for production of its first intelligence and defense satellite...
Now, before everyone gets too frazzled, keep in mind that America still has the pimp hand in space.
The US currently accounts for 95 percent of total global military space expenditures and maintains approximately 135 operational military-related satellites — over half of all military satellites in orbit.
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.
Congress Slashes Pentagon Space Projects
It's kind of hilarious, when you think about it. At the same time the New York Times is chasing its tail about weapons in orbit, Congress is slashing the Pentagon's eternally-mismanaged space programs.
"Brushing aside the recent claim by a senior U.S. Air Force officer that all is well with the military space acquisition system, a congressional defense oversight committee made good on threats to rein in the service's top two satellite development programs," reports C4ISR Journal's Jeremy Singer.
In marking up their version of the 2006 Defense Authorization Act, members of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee sent a strong message that they beg to beg to differ with the April 5 assertion by Gen. Lance Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, that the space acquisition system is not broken and that those who think otherwise should "get over it."
The panel slashed the Air Force's funding request for the Space Radar surveillance satellites and the Transformational Satellite Communications System (T-Sat), directing the service to restructure both efforts. The panel recommended providing $436 million of the $836 million request for T-Sat and $100 million of the $226 million request for the Space Radar.
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 it—fighting 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.)
Times' Shaky Spacewar Story
For most of the planet, it will seem like a shocker. But, really, the fact that the Air Force is looking for President Bush's approval to put weapons in space is no revelation. The service has been shouting for orbiting arms for years.
The New York Times is reporting today that the Air Force wants a new national-security directive to "replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts."
Well, of course that's what the Air Force wants. Last year, an Air Force paper on "Counterspace Operations," signed by chief of staff Gen. John Jumper, declared that the "freedom to attack… denying space capability to the adversary" has become a "crucial first step in any military operation." In 2003, the service released a "Transformation Flight Plan," complete with a space weapons wish list -- from anti-satellite lasers to arms that could "strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space."
It's from this collection that the Times' Tim Weiner draws at least some of its examples of weapons in orbit. And I'm afraid Weiner may have confused the Air Force's equivalent of day dreams with full-blown, big-money Pentagon development efforts.
[An] Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.
Yes, "Rods from God" is mentioned in the 2003 "Flight Plan." But the idea was debunked so long ago that's it's hard to believe the service is actually pursuing the Rods in any serious way. As Columbia University physics professor Richard Garwin noted, the Rods could only work if they orbited at low altitudes. And that means they "could only deliver one-ninth the destructive energy per gram as a conventional bomb."
[Another] program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world.
This is a project Defense Tech has reported on several times, most recently in early May. It's not as outlandish as "Rods from God." But the laser-mirror effort is still in its infancy, with the most basic of experiments now getting started. This is a long way from a weapon, folks.
A [third] seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast."
Obviously, the military is very interested in high-powered microwaves -- the Active Denial crowd control system is the best example. But microwave weapons, based in space? That's just wishful thinking.
The Air Force already has a potential weapon in space. In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.
This isn't quite right, either. The 305-pound, nine foot-long XSS-11 is a demonstrator to show how maneuverable and autonomous future mini-satellites might be. Down the road, those capabilities would be great to have on an anti-satellite device, sure. But it's a mistake, I think, to call the XSS-11 itself a "weapon." I'll have more to say about the XSS-11 in next month's Popular Mechanics.
A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."
Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," General Lord said.
Now this project -- which we first looked at back in November 2003 -- is legit, with a hefty $91 million invested into it over the last two years. But, by making so little distinction between this effort and more pie-in-the-sky plans, the Times does its readers a bit of a disservice.
What's more, the paper of record actually ignores some of the Air Force's actual, working space weapons while spilling ink over the service's least-likely schemes. In October, the Air Force deployed a radio-frequency jammer, meant to disrupt opponents' satellite communications. And, according to Air Force documents, commercial spacecraft, neutral countries' launching pads – even weather satellites – are all on the potential target list. To me, that's truly shocking.
THERE'S MORE: Winds of Change has an interesting post up about the media-military divide. And Winds sister site Defense Industry Daily points out a new $19.5 contract for Boeing to start working on "large structure deployment and control from space." Be sure to check out Armchair Generalist'stake on the Times story, too.
GOOGLESAT MANIA CONTINUES
It's been a week since Defense Tech reader DS dug through Google's archives of satellite pictures, and found a lonely airstrip out by Nevada's legendary Area 51. Apparently, you guys can't get enough of the pics. The tide of, um, interesting Googlesat images keeps pouring into Defense Tech HQ.
In honor of Passover, perhaps, reader DC uncovers this Hebraically-themed shape, carved out of the desert near Groom Lake. "It's a bombing target, set up to simulate a SAM [surface-to-air missile] or antiaircraft berm," says DS, examing U.S. Geological Survey diagrams. Strangely, the targets are often labelled with people's names. This one's called "David."
Taking a second look at one of the images from the last Googlesat onslaught, DS notices that the picture looks a whole lot like this overhead view of Nellis Air Force Base -- the headuqarters for the Predator robotic squadrons. DS even finds a close-up, showing planes on the runway.
"Are we ready for a Googlesat contest?" pants JA. "How about a search for an aircraft in flight?"
THERE'S MORE: Game over! Reader NW reminds us that Slashdotters found some mid-air plane pictures a couple of weeks back, including this one, where you can pan left, and watch the plane gain altitude.
AND MORE: This Googlesat picture of a plane in flight "is over my previous residence in Richardson, Texas," says McZ.
MORE GOOGLESAT FUN
Defense Tech reader DS got himself a shout-out in Slate last week, after finding an airstrip out by Nevada's infamous Area 51 in Google's database of satellite pictures. So reader McZ decided to raise the stakes, and sent in to Defense Tech HQ a whole heap of "airfields and strange structures" he discovered in the Googlesat archives.
"All these locations are generally in the same reservation as Groom Lake/Area 51," says JA, who, along with DS, was nice enough to take a gander at the pics for me. "Given that this was the location for a lot of the testing for the F117s and various other black craft, it makes sense to have local targets -- keeps you from having to fly over unsecure ground. But the lack of an identifiable golf course is highly suspicious for a supposed USAF facility."
Anyway, here are a half-dozen of the locations, and what DS and JA had to say about 'em:
latitude 37.363237, longitude -116.827273 DS: Appears to be the same as my airstrip...a target for aerial bombing. JA: Yep, an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, a target or training site of some other sort.
37.705925, -116.659646 JA: It has the feel of a target about it. But there's a lack of infrastructure around. It just occurred to me to wonder whether any of this apparent plethora of target runways might be set up to resemble certain 'airfields of interest' in other parts of the world. As landmarks they're pretty hard to hide. DS: Probably not a place you'd want to visit any time soon, since the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketch says in big letters "RADIOACTIVE AREA."
37.586145, -116.915330 JA: Definitely the recipient of numerous bombings. DS: I think we're seeing here why our Air Force is so good at bombing the crap out of the enemy.
37.421686, -116.822768 DS: I'd have to say that this is definitely a bombing target. You can see the blast marks all around the strip. JA: Target, decoy, or simulation. Large circle appears to have been done over top of earlier scrapings, possibly done for different purpose.
37.485010, -116.228459 DS: It's a strange circular structure -- a possible target range? JA: It's a location directly north of the strip that got all this started would indicate a target or some other form of training site. There appear to be a couple of towers pointing NNW from the center of the thing. There's a couple of reasons to create a large bull's-eye. A seismographic test facility, perhaps?
37.628036, -116.848060 (pictured above) DS: Five circles inside of a triangle. It looks fake. But it shows up on other images and has road to it. It has to be an ultra secret homing symbol to assist E.T. with landing...Ok, just kidding...it's a bombing target. JA: Sand, Cat D9, Bored Airman, Time, some assembly required. It could possibly be another navigational target, but just how many of those do you need in a 10 square mile area? Yanking the former Soviet Union's intel guys' chains? Yanking the Roswell bunch's chain?
AREA 51'S HIDDEN AIRSTRIP?
By now, most of you have probably heard the news that Google has added satellite pictures to their maps. And that those eyes in the sky have taken some pretty amazing pictures -- an erupting volcano, a Baghdad firefight, a Russian sub trapped in ice.
Defense Tech reader DS was rifling through Google's satellite database the other day, and found what he says is "an unknown facility" near the infamous Groom Lake military complex -- the place called "Area 51" by tin-foil hatters worldwide.
DS' discovery, at latitude 37.399263 and longitude -116.223850…
is an isolated airstrip with a road connecting it to what appears to be an underground facility of some sort. I pulled up the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketches on the area, and it shows no identifying information, however it does reveal what appears to be a tunnel system connecting the various buildings in the underground complex... If you or someone in your circle can shed some light on what this is, it would be interesting I'm sure.
THERE'S MORE: Here's a guy who claims to have Googled his way into pictures of Area 51 itself (via Blogs of War).
DARPA'S SUMO IN SPACE
It seemed like kind of joke last October, when the Pentagon wished out loud for a spaceship that would grab enemy satellites, and throw them around -- maybe even out of orbit. But the Defense Department is dead serious, the Arms Control Wonk tells us. $35 million serious.
In its proposed budget for 2006, Pentagon way-out research arm Darpa is asking for 35 large over the next two years for its Spacecraft for the Unmanned Modification of Orbits (SUMO) program.
"SUMO combines detailed stereo photogrammetric imaging with robotic... manipulators to autonomously grapple space objects," the agency says. "SUMO offers the potential for spacecraft salvage, repair, rescue, reposition, and debris removal to extend service life or provide a safe and calculated de-orbit."
Sounds friendly enough -- like a tugboat in space, maybe. Until you stop to think that the SUMO could also grab satellites that don't want to be repositioned or de-orbited. Suddenly, that tugboat starts looking an awful lot like a wrestler's arm, about to toss an opponent out of the ring.
THERE'S MORE: Of course, since this is Darpa we're talking about here, there are a whole smorgasbord of wild-sounding space projects waiting to be funded. Using "x-ray celestial sources to determine the three dimensional position... of orbiting spacecraft," anyone? Or how about space tethers, to "rapidly remediate high energy radiation particles produced by a High Altitude Nuclear Detonation?" A bunch of others are here.
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.
SPACE CHIEF: THINK ATTACK FIRST
Major General Daniel Darnell, head of the Air Force's Space Warfare Center, has some advice for satellite companies. If there's trouble with your orbiter, your first response should be “think possible attack.”
Never mind the fact that "no country, not even the United States, currently has a working anti-satellite system in its arsenal... outside of the remote chance of someone launching a nuke into space," as the Center for Defense Information's Theresa Hitchens points out. (Although the U.S. is putting some jammers in place.) And never mind the fact that "the Air Force does not have the capability at this time to ascertain on the spot whether any disruption of satellite operations is due to a malfunction, such as faulty software or space weather, or the result of some sort of deliberate interference or attack."
Nope, satelitte operators should go ahead and assume their machines have been sabotaged by evildoers. And that's a serious problem, Hitchens reminds us. Because under current U.S. military doctrine, a strike against a satellite "would be considered an act of war subject to military response. In other words, we will shoot back."
But at whom or what? The satellite that happens to be nearest the disabled one? The "rogue state" du jour?
The wholesale adoption by the Air Force of such trigger-happy thinking would obviously be a recipe for disaster, raising the likelihood of the United States launching an accidental war... Suffice it to say, there will be a price to pay the first time a U.S. anti-satellite weapon shoots down an innocent Chinese communications satellite because a crucial widget on a U.S. satellite conked out due to faulty manufacturing processes.
Hitchens sees this all as an attempt to help sell space weapons to a sometimes-reluctant Congress and Pentagon brass. And I can see her point.
But what if the bosses already believe the Chicken Little talk? After all, wasn't it Donald Rumsfeld, the big boss himself, who warned in 2001 of a "space Pearl Harbor." Then Gen. Darnell's warning wouldn't be a sales job at all. It'd be an official expression of U.S. policy to shoot first, and ask questions later.
THERE'S MORE: "In the absence of a clear national strategy and policy on new military missions in outer space, the administration of President George W. Bush is funding programs that will create 'facts in orbit,'" Hitchens and friends write in a separate CDI report, which gives a program-by-program breakdown of what the Pentagon has in store for space in the upcoming budget.
PENTAGON STARTS SPACE WAR TRAINING
Just in case you were wondering whether or not the Pentagon was really serious about knocking other countries' satellites out of orbit, comes this item from C4ISR Journal. The Defense Department, it seems, has "launched a series of exercises designed to sharpen its understanding and management of counter-satellite operations."
The three-year Joint Space Control Operations-Negation (JSCO-N) program will help the Pentagon figure out which satellite-killers to buy, and determine which procedures to follow when knocking the orbiters out.
According to a report from the Pentagon's testing and evaluation office, the Defense Department wants to "target an adversary's space capability by using a variety of permanent and/or reversible means to achieve five possible effects: deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction..."
"The JSCO-N effort includes three 'field tests,'" C4ISR Journal's Jeremy Singer notes. "The first of those, Terminal Fury 05, was scheduled to take place in December, according to the report. It was to be followed by Terminal Fury 06 and Unified Endeavor 06."
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon refused to give details on the exercises. But, as Singer observes, "the Air Force has for at least the past few years been working on systems for neutralizing enemy satellite capabilities. The service announced in October 2004 that one such system, designed to disrupt satellite radio-transmissions, is now being fielded." In 2003, the Air Force released its "Transformation Flight Plan," which spelled out a number of anti-orbiter weapons, including "ground-based lasers, air-launched missiles and space-based radio frequency transmitters capable of disrupting or destroying other satellites."
THERE'S MORE: On the other hand, Defense Daily has this...
Weapons in Space? Not this year, it seems, or a least not part of the Missile Defense Agency’s budget. The Missile Defense Agency is not funding any new space-based programs in the FY ’06 defense-spending request, although the controversial Near Field Infrared Experiment, NFIRE, remains in the budget. “Space-based is not part of this budget,” says a senior Pentagon official. The “debate” on whether to develop a space-based capability has not yet taken place, according to the official. Another thing you won’t see is a follow-on on to Russian American Observational Satellite program, or RAMOS, which was “defunded” in the FY ’05 budget.
AND MORE: "It is true that the space-based test bed was delayed by two years, but that decision is accompanied with an increase in classified funding for futuristic missile defense programs from $ 160 M to $ 350 M," the Arms Control Wonk notes. "That's a lot of secret money."
PENTAGON SENDS BILLIONS INTO SPACE
Aircraft carriers may be retired, and new-fangeled fighter forces may be slashed. But, in this year's budget, the Pentagon's plans for space are getting a $2 billion boost, according to Defense Daily.
At the heart of these efforts in the Space Radar (SR) program -- an effort to build a constellation of 10 to 24 satellites by 2012 that would track everything below, from planes to tanks to individual people. Last year, Congress wiped out all but $75 million from the SR project, citing the program's outsized ambitions and underdeveloped technologies.
But SR has been restructured into something more manageable, Defense Department officials promise. The Pentagon now wants to have a its first, full-sized SR satellite in orbit by 2015. In the short term, the Defense Department would launch one or two satellites about one-quarter the scale of a [final] system," Defense Daily notes. "The satellites would be used to prove the concepts of tracking moving ground targets from space, collaborating with airborne assets and downlinking data to both military and intelligence officials." The Pentagon now wants $226 million for SR this year, with an additional $4.2 billion earmarked through fiscal year 2011.
The Defense Department budget also calls for nearly $11 billion over five years for the troubled Transformational Communications system, which uses lasers, instead of radio waves, to pass along data. Last year, Congress cut funding for that project by nearly $300 million. The Space Based Space Surveillance program, meant to keep watch over potential enemies in orbit, is scheduled to get $115 million next year. And the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, to build the next generation of rockets to take satellites into orbit, will get $864 million next year and $6 billion over the next five years. Initially, the Pentagon had planned to "rely on the commercial launch market to cover those costs, but the market has not flourished as expected," Inside Defense observes.
In recent years, the Pentagon's space program has been teetering on the edge of disaster -- and sometimes falling off that cliff. A 2003 Defense Science Board report cited "systemic problems" with America's military space effort. "Cost has replaced mission success" as the "primary means" for evaluating new military space equipment, the report notes. And "low cost estimates throughout the acquisition process" have "lead to unrealistic budgets and unexecutable programs."
Nevertheless, the Defense Department's spending on space continues to grow, as soldiers grow more reliant on satellites to guide their bombs, relay their messages, and find their enemies. "Space is a critical part of our warfighting priorities and I think the budget reflects that," a Pentagon official told reporters in a background briefing on the budget. "As a whole, I think space did very well."
THERE'S MORE: The goal of the Pentagon's Transformational Communications -- to send messages in space via laser -- sounds cool. But major, major technical hurdles remain, Aviation Week notes.
Devising cryptographic gear for laser communications and handling the extremely high data rates of future systems will be a challenge... One decision developers may be forced into is whether to encrypt at all. The industry official points out that intercepting the narrow-beam laser communications in space would be extremely difficult for an adversary, as would intercepting a downlink...
But encryption technology isn't the only area that may require attention. As microprocessors become faster and more compact, the Pentagon's goal of radiation-hardened equipment merely one generation behind the non-hardened commercial standard is becoming more elusive. As commercial processors become more compact and require more heat dissipation, developers of radiation-hardened equipment are struggling to provide proper shielding and still deliver the required performance in the limited space.
SATELLITE SNOOPING ON THE RISE
It wasn't too long ago that only soldiers and spies could afford GPS trackers. Now, Declan McCullaugh tells us, the "devices now are readily available to jealous spouses, private investigators and local police departments for just a few hundred dollars." What's more, "a federal judge in New York ruled last week that police [do] not need court authorization" before snooping on a suspect via satellite.
THERE'S MORE: In April, the L.A. Sherriff's Department is going to be testing out model airplane-sized drones on surveillance missions. Unmanned mini-fliers like these -- the Navy's Silver Fox and the Marines' Dragon Eye, for example -- have been used with more than a little success in Iraq.
ISRAELI BIG: SPACE WEAPONS, PLEASE
The U.S. military isn't the only country, it seems, interested in putting arms in orbit. "Israel’s top lawmaker for defense and security affairs has called for the development and deployment of space-based weapons," Defense News reports.
In a rare public discussion on Israel’s military use of space, Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israel’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, said the nation must compensate for its lack of strategic depth on land by expanding use of sea- and space-based attacks.
Specifically, Steinitz urged defense and industry officials to consider future developments of anti-satellite missiles, satellite-attacking lasers and ship-based missiles “that can strike the skies.”
“In Israel, our strategic Achilles’ heel is our miniscule geographical size,” Steinitz told a Dec. 22 symposium sponsored by the Israeli Space Society and the Fisher Institute for Strategic Air and Space Studies. “This lack of ground territory — and our obligation to defend the homeland from attack — drives the need to develop a strategic envelope of air, sea and space forces not only for defense, but for attack.”
“The other side faces a military handicap when compared to Israel, but it can use its borders to try — through primitive means like Scud missiles, long-range artillery and guerrilla tactics — to threaten Israeli territory. Israel cannot allow itself to forsake its ground forces, but it also cannot permit itself to be dragged into a land war. Therefore, it is beneficial to push the war into the air, sea and space...”
While Steinitz conceded that his exhortations for a militarized, tightly integrated sea, air and space force was merely “my personal vision, at this point,” he said he would use his influential committee chairmanship to push for greater space-related funding. “What we’re seeing today is just the beginning spark of a new kind of warfare that warrants a new kind of defense doctrine."
THERE'S MORE: Darpa chief Tony Tether is in Israel right now, Defense News notes, looking for new technologies to better fight the block-by-block battles that have become so common in Iraq. It's part of a growing trend of G.I.s relying on sabras to supply some of their gear.
NASA'S WILDEST DREAMS
NASA has always had it share of dreamers. Years before Leonard Nimoy put on pointy ears – or Neil Armstrong made his giant leap – the space agency's big thinkers were sketching out Enterprise-esque ion propulsion engines and colonies on other worlds.
But there are some ideas too mad even for NASA's mad scientists -- especially in these budget-challenged times. Enter NIAC, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. This five-person, independently-funded center, hands out about $3 million per year to scientists proposing the wildest of wild ideas: weather control; robotic fleets defending the earth from asteroid attack; shape-shifting space suits. After the six to twenty-four month studies are done, NIAC then shops the proposals to NASA proper, where the real funding can begin.
Like NIAC's best-known graduate -- the 62,000-mile "Space Elevator" for hauling cargo into orbit – the ideas are decades away from the possible. But sometimes, even the nuttiest dreams come true. As NIAC director Bob Cassanova counsels, "Don't let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination."
I take a quick look at four NIAC projects in this month's Wired magazine -- a follow-up, of sorts, to an article I wrote last May for Wired News. Here are two programs that's didn't make it into the magazine piece (they overlapped with some other Wired stories), but are still pretty cool, nonetheless.
ANTI-MISSION. Getting to other stars – or even to the edge of our own system – will take a whole lot of speed. Los Alamos physicist Steve Howe thinks he has the turbo-charger: anti-matter. Pound for pound, the unstable particles are tens of millions of times more powerful than chemical or nuclear propellants. By trapping molecules of anti-hydrogen in tiny electrostatic traps – and then dribbling those molecules against a uranium-coated sail – Howe believes he can get a spacecraft to the solar system's edge, 23 billion miles away, in just ten years. It took the Cassini probe to Saturn seven years to go just a billion miles. Under a NIAC contract, Howe thumbnailed an anti-matter-powered mission to the Kupier Belt, the band of icy bodies beyond Neptune. For the trip to happen, it'll take a "miracle of some magnitude" – ramping up anti-matter production by 200 million percent. But the Kupier jaunt is just a warm up for the big adventure, a four-decade excursion to Alpha Centauri.
Guiding bombs, relaying orders, finding a safe way through hostile territory -- just about everything a modern military does on the ground depends on a satellite in space. So it's no wonder that the Pentagon spent a nice-sized chunk of 2004 getting ready for an eventual showdown in orbit.
This was also the year that NASA was sent back to its mission of manned exploration -- and astronaut entrepreneurs reached the edge of space. Can trips to Alpha Centauri be far behind?
For years, the American military has spoken in hints and whispers, if at all, about its plans to develop weapons in space. But the U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan changes all that. Released in November, the report makes U.S. dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon priority in the new century. And it runs through dozens of research programs designed to ensure that America can never be challenged in orbit -- from anti-satellite lasers to weapons that "would provide the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space."
SPACE WAR BUDGET UNVEILED
$75.9 million to shut down enemy satellite communications. $84.6 million for projects like relay mirrors that would re-target laser beams in space. $15 million for weapons that ram into satellites and other "space control" efforts. That's just a small sample of what the Pentagon plans to spend on space war research next year, according to a study from the Center for Defense Information.
AIR FORCE: SATELLITE JAMMER READY
The U.S. Air Force is ready to start jamming enemy satellites. So says ISR Journal, which reports that the Counter Communications System (CounterCom), a radio frequency-based system to disrupt communications satellites, has been declared operational by the American military.
USAF WANTS SELF-AWARE SATELLITES
One of the things that makes Rummy & Co. the most nervous is that nobody has a clue what's up there in orbit. Imagine how vast and opaque the seas must have seen to World War I-era commanders, and you'll get the idea. The Air Force may have a fix: turn satellites' internal monitors outward, to keep tabs on space.
MOON BASE: RECURRING DREAM
Moon Base? Old news. In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start. Because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.
SATELLITES SPEED DARFUR AID
Satellites can be used for peaceful purposes, too. A European-led coalition is using the orbiters to boost humanitarian efforts in the conflict-torn Darfur region of Sudan.
SPYSAT MYSTERY SOLVED
A classified spy program that had worked Sen. Jay Rockefeller -- and a nice-sized chunk of Washington -- into a jittering froth has been unveiled.
CONGRESS POKES ALL-SEEING EYE IN SKY
It's a spook fantasy: an all-seeing, always-on, rain-or-shine constellation of satellites, able to keep track of every plane, truck, and person below. Now, Congress is telling the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board.
U.S. SPACE-BASED POSITIONING, NAVIGATION, AND TIMING POLICY, signed by the President on 8 December 2004, "establishes guidance and implementation actions for space-based positioning, navigation, and timing programs, augmentations, and activities for U.S. national and homeland security, civil, scientific, and commercial purposes."
In other words its a GPS policy, and pretty aggressive one at that.
The policy, which also comes in a classified flavor, reportedly resulted in a directive to the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) to develop plans to shut down civil use of U.S. GPS signals in certain emergencies and to deny advesaries access to foreign space-based satellite navigation services, such as the European Union's Galileo system.
Does anybody remember when Washington claimed that Galileo was unnecessary, because we would never shut GPS down?
The Europeans have been buzzing about what the U.S. might do to Galileo in a crisis. Publication of a new Air Force Counterspace Doctrine fueled these fears, after Peter Teets asked a rather provocative question in the foreward:
What will we do ten years from now when American lives are put at risk because an adversary chooses to leverage the global positioning system or perhaps the Galileo constellation to attack American forces with precision?
Comments like this have a way of being taken the "wrong way." An ugly row recently erupted after a British paper reported that European participants at a Royal United Services Institute conference thought they heard U.S. officials threaten "irreversible action" to deny hostile powers access to Galileo in a crisis--although other participants disputed that any threat was issued.
Some of the dispute can, I think, be traced to a difference in thinking about satellite navigation. Whereas Americans tend to think of GPS as a military application that civilians are permitted to use (reflecting the military origins of GPS), much of the rest of the world sees it as a global public utility. I suspect we'll be hearing a lot about this policy by Galileo's supporters.
--Jeffrey Lewis
ROCKY SPYSAT MYSTERY SOLVED
Big ups to the Washington Post's Dana Priest, for cracking the mystery of the classified spy program that had worked Sen. Jay Rockefeller -- and a nice-sized chunk of Washington -- into a jittering froth. The project is called MISTY. And here's what Priest had to say about it:
The United States is building a new generation of spy satellites designed to orbit undetected, in a highly classified program that has provoked opposition in closed congressional sessions where lawmakers have questioned its necessity and rapidly escalating price, according to U.S. officials.
The previously undisclosed effort has almost doubled in projected cost -- from $5 billion to nearly $9.5 billion, officials said. The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages spy satellite programs, has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the program, officials said.
The stealth satellite, which would probably become the largest single-item expenditure in the $40 billion intelligence budget, is to be launched in the next five years and is meant to replace an existing stealth satellite, according to officials. Non-stealth satellites can be tracked and their orbits can be predicted, allowing countries to attempt to hide weapons or troop movements on the ground when they are overhead.
But MISTY isn't exactly "previously undisclosed," like Priest says. The ever-intrepid Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, in fact, blogged about MISTY back in March:
Some individuals holding clearances refer to a “classified piece” of the puzzle that might have dramatic effect on such proposals [to provide satellite tracking data]. I am pretty sure the classified piece is the existence of low observable stealth satellites, which is secret only in the administrative sense of the term.
The MISTY program is extensively covered in Jeffrey Richelson (2001), The Wizards of Langley, Westview, 248-250. Richelson mentions that a quartet of amateur astronomers were able to track the satellite. One of those astronomers, Ted Molczan, recently suggested a candidate for MISTY-2.
The ability of amateurs (albeit highly skilled ones) to track such satellites suggests that opponents of providing more data and analytic support are attempting hold back the tides of transparency-and, in doing so, we are passing up a chance to shape the legal and operational environment for the provision of satellite tracking data in ways that might legitimately preserve US national interests.
WASTE, NOT WEAPON, IS ROCKY WORRY
Chill out, everyone. (Including yours truly.) The "dangerous" spy program Sen. Jay Rockefeller hooted about the other day is not a weapon in space, Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis assures us.
In fact, the Senator has since backed off of his "dangerous" comment, with his spokesperson telling the AP that "He was referring to the fact that it was a misallocation of funds."
So what is this mystery project, then? Lewis is guessing it's the Future Imagery Architecture, a long, long-troubled set of eyes in orbit that the Pentagon's Defense Science Board called in 2003 "significantly underfunded and technically flawed. The task force believes this FIA program is not executable."
THERE'S MORE: The National Reconnaissance Office -- the government agency behind FIA and other spy satellite efforts -- "has dropped plans to procure a new generation of data-relay satellites equipped with laser-optic communications technology," according to C4ISR Journal.
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.
SATELLITES SPEED DARFUR AID
Defense Tech makes a whole lot of noise about how satellites are being -- and will be -- used for war. But the orbiters can be employed for peaceful purposes, as well. Take, for example, this report from the New Scientist:
Satellites are boosting humanitarian efforts in the conflict-torn Darfur region of Sudan. The European Space Agency (ESA) released observations representing the largest-scale use of satellites by Respond - a new consortium of European aidagencies - on Tuesday.
Internal conflict with Arab militia called the Janjaweed - accused of attacking African tribes in Darfur - has forced an estimated 1.5 million people to flee their homes and take refuge in camps scattered throughout a region the size of France.
Coordinating aid efforts between the camps can be extremely difficult, particularly during the rainy season, which began in August. Normally dry riverbeds - called wadis - can overflow and flood roads during the rains, crippling communication in remote areas, says Kader Fellah, who helps support the Respond project.
"Some agencies reported it could take as long as 10 days to travel 120 kilometres by road. What aid workers needed was up-to-date road network information combined with analysis of wadi flooding," he says.
The Respond project provides that crucial information by combining data from nine separate spacecraft, including ESA's Envisat, the largest Earth-observation spacecraft ever built. It pools both radar and optical data to produce maps that range in resolution from a scale of 1:200,000 for route planning to 1:2000 - which can image individual tents at camps and clinics. And it takes just 12 hours to produce the maps, providing the data over the internet.
"Before we provided this mapping, the [German Red Cross] were crossing the same wadi two or three times in their efforts to find a route between population centres, causing severe delays to aid shipments," says Alex Irving, a geographical analyst supporting Respond.
IRAN'S "TROJAN HORSE" IN SPACE
Iran is planning on launching its first satellite early next year. And it's not so the mullahs can catch the Knicks game or HBO Latino.
Tehran is planning on using an upgraded version of its ballistic missile, the Shahab-3, to get the satellite into orbit. And this "first Iranian space mission and planned follow-on satellite flights, even if failures, could act as 'technological Trojan Horses' to help Iran develop both range and warhead improvements to [Iran's] already upgraded [missile] program," according to Aviation Week. "In addition, some materials and micro-electronic technologies necessary for Iranian satellite design could be important for the development of tiny, high-quality components needed to produce small nuclear weapons."
An upgraded version of the Shahab-3--flight tested 3-4 times between July and October--already seems to be proving modifications indicative of a vehicle being groomed to carry a nuclear warhead.
U.S. Air Force Defense Support Program (DSP) missile warning spacecraft and other U.S. and Israeli assets closely monitored the recent, aggressive Iranian flight tests that flew ranges of 1,500-2,000 km. (930-1,240 mi.).
At nearly 60 ft. long, the upgraded Shahab-3 carries about 15% more propellant and has a more bulbous nose (see photo). This indicates a different reentry vehicle design similar to that used on the Russian SS-9 ICBM.
The new design appears to be a warhead capable of carrying an avionics unit on separation from the booster--a design that could enable air-burst nuclear weapons fusing during reentry...
'Developing [further Shahab upgrades] under the guise of a space launch vehicle could permit Iran to avoid the possible political and economic costs of missile testing,' the Congressional Research Service found in a recent report.
USAF WANTS SELF-AWARE SATELLITES
The possibility of a sneak attack in space has the Pentagon spooked. And one of the things that makes Rummy & Co. the most nervous is that nobody has a clue what's actually up there in orbit. Imagine how vast and opaque the seas must have seen to World War I-era commanders, and you'll get the idea.
There are an array of efforts underway to try to fix this. But a just-introduced Air Force program wins the coolest name award. And it could be in the running for a biggest-bang-for-the-buck prize, too, if it ever gets off of the ground.
"The Self-Aware Satellite" (scroll waaay down) starts with the premise that orbiters already have a lot of sensors on board. But these instruments are oriented inward, to keep tabs on the satellite's health. What's worse, many of the sensors "are fixed and uni-purpose, and they cannot be accessed in a way inconsistent with this originally envisioned purpose," the Air Force notes.
The Self-Aware Satellite – also known as Satellite-As-A-Sensor, or SAAS – looks to break that rigid mold, and let free up the orbiters' instrumentation.
In SAAS, all sensor data is posted to a centralized database, which can be freely accessed in real-time by a satellite's own processor(s). Sensors can furthermore be redirected to other purposes. For example, a timing, telemetry and control (TT&C) radio can be retargeted to behave as a radio-frequency (RF) threat-warning sensor when not otherwise engaged. Correlations between sensors can be analyzed by the platform on orbit. When combined with an autonomous ability to exploit the information for short-loop responsive actions, a "self-aware" satellite is created.
But pulling off this trick means doing a big time reworking of satellites' closed and centralized software. And it means reprogramming sensors, so they can spot both internal trouble as well as threats from without.
SOVIET BATTLE STATION SNAPSHOTS
Thank you, Slashdot. Thank you. How else would I have found out about these photographs of the Soviet Union's orbiting battle station?
The Skif and its Polyus prototype were supposed to be the Soviets' answer to Star Wars -- a spacecraft to defend against (and launch its own) anti-satellite weapons. The Polyus was launched in '87. But it couldn't get itself into a working orbit, probably because of "a faulty inertial guidance sensor," according to the Encyclopedia Astronautica. "No member of the Reagan or Bush administrations ever admitted or revealed publicly any knowledge of Polyus. The US Navy has made no statements about any attempts to investigate the wreckage of Polyus, which lies on the floor of the South Pacific."
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 Pentagon’s 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.
AIR FORCE: SATELLITE JAMMER READY
The U.S. Air Force is ready to start jamming enemy satellites. So says ISR Journal, which reports that the Counter Communications System (CounterCom), a radio frequency-based system to disrupt communications satellites, has been declared operational by the American military.
CounterCom is classified, so there's not a whole lot of details floating around about the program. But ISR Journal does say that the $75 million "system is similar to other ground based electronic warfare gear and is based largely on commercially available components, according to [Air Force] Space Command officials."
Alan Boyle, that lucky bastard. MSNBC's crack space columnist got to be a fly on the wall at the annual meeting of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts -- the space agency's sci-fi arm. They're the guys who fund way-out studies into things like magnetic plasma beam propulsion, weather control, and robot swarms to defend the Earth. Think of it as an itty-bitty version of Darpa, but for space. With way more lasers.
One of the ideas reviewed at this week's confab: a spray-on spacesuit for a trip to Mars. MIT engineering professor Dava Newman "has been looking at the possibility of spraying a layer of polymer fabric over an astronaut, in a booth much like those used for getting a spray-on suntan," Alan explains. "The 'second-skin' suit could be augmented by temperature-control underwear, flexible joint attachments and perhaps even an exoskeleton."
Grrrrr.
PENTAGON WANTS MINI-KILLERS IN SPACE
A few weeks back, Defense Tech took a look at the Air Force's emerging plans for fighting in space. Well, "Arms Control Wonk" Jeffrey Lewis has uncovered what looks like a Pentagon wish list for orbital combat. At the top of the list: a slew of itty-bitty satellites. Their mission: "Destruction of Enemy Spacecraft," the Defense Department briefing says.
These killers would be loaded, ten at a time, into a reusable military orbiter. Once a target had been hunted down, these "Microsat Kinetic Kill Payloads" (MKKPs) would intercept an enemy satellite -- the briefing calls it a "hyper-velocity 'tail chase.'" Then they would inspect the damage, after the MKKPs had done their worse.
Launched Jan. 29 [2003], the 28-kilogram XSS-10 successfully demonstrated its ability to move closely around another object to take images. The contract to build its successor, XSS-11, and its more specific sensor payload already has been awarded.
Taking pictures is not much of a threat, but the Air Force sees these satellites as more than just shutterbugs. The "single strongest recommendation" of the Air Force's 1999 Microsatellite Technology and Requirements Study was "the deployment, as rapidly as possible, of XSS-10-based satellites to intercept, image and, if needed, take action against a target satellite," according to an unclassified summary published in 2000.
Other XSS projects, according to the Pentagon briefing, include a "blocker" microsat, which uses a "circular, gimbaled, opaque fan" to stop up enemy communications in space, as well as a satellite "jammer."
But my favorite has to be the "grabber" microsat -- a machine straight out of James Bond, 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."
The American military has begun planning for combat in space, an Air Force report reveals. And commercial spacecraft, neutral countries' launching pads – even weather satellites – are all on the potential target list.
"Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1: Counterspace Operations" is an apparent first-cut at detailing how U.S. forces might take out an enemy's space capabilities -- and protect America's eyes and ears in orbit. Signed by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, the unclassified report sketches out who would be in command during a space fight, what American weapons would be used, and which targets might be attacked.
In that way, the report is similar to hundreds of others in the Pentagon's archives. But buried in the report's acronyms and org charts are two striking sentiments, analysts say. First, the document declares that the U.S. Air Force is duty-bound to slap down other countries' space efforts, should the need arise. Then, Counterpsace Operations declares that a satellite or a ground control station doesn't have to belong to one of America's enemies in order to get hit.
"You could be inflicting large costs on a company or country that has no role in a war. And that introduces great possibilities for backlash and political fallout," warned Theresea Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information. "You could wind up damaging the capabilities of our allies – or even ourselves."
But the Air Force may not have much of a choice, really. Nearly all the world's militaries – including America's -- rely on private companies' satellites for relaying messages, taking pictures, or guiding bombs. During the Iraq invasion, for example, commercial orbiters carried 80 percent of U.S. forces' satellite communications.
Under the contract, Northrop Grumman will work with a government team to complete the preliminary design for the spacecraft. The work includes developing hardware, software and test activities for the design of the non-nuclear portion of the spacecraft. It also includes developing the interfaces for the spacecraft, space reactor, and science instruments. The contractor is responsible for the integration of government-owned and provided technologies into the spacecraft. They are also responsible for assembly, integration, and testing of the space system in accordance with applicable government requirements.
The government team will co-design the spacecraft with the contractor. NASA will supply the launch vehicle. The Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors, Washington, will own and be responsible for the space reactor.
Nice. This was a mission that needed to go forward -- tight budget times or no. Nuclear power may be the best answer for reaching the solar system's outer rim. And the "Galileo spacecraft found evidence that Jupiter's large icy moons appear to have three ingredients considered essential for life: water, energy and the necessary chemical contents," NASA notes.
TROUBLE FOR DARPA SPACE PROGRAM
Darpa, we have a problem.
The Pentagon's way-out research agency has been trying for a while now to make space launches a whole lot cheaper and easier. But one of Darpa's main space programs -- the Responsive Access, Small Cargo and Affordable Launch Vehicle (RASCAL) project -- is "not going very well," agency director Tony Tether has confessed. Darpa will "re-evaluate the program following a design review this autumn," reports Defense News.
The RASCAL concept involves a jet-powered carrier aircraft that would fly beyond the atmosphere at a steep angle before releasing an expendable rocket designed to carry a satellite payload to its desired orbit. The aircraft would be equipped with an injection system that brings oxygen and water into its engines to compensate for the lack of air at extremely high altitudes.
During 2002's DarpaTech conference, RASCAL program manager Preston Carter promised flight tests in 2005. Now, it's pretty clear that's not happening. And, if and when RASCALs do come down the pike, they ain't gonna be cheap.
According to Defense News, RASCAL-designer Space Launch Corporation says "has not yet determined the precise cost."
Darpa has run into cost growth problems with the RASCAL program in the past, because the carrier aircraft turned out to be more expensive than anticipated. Early in the program, the estimated cost of developing the aircraft was $88 million, but the total program cost now is estimated to pass the $100 million mark in 2005 with significant funding still needed to carry through to a flight demonstration.
SATELLITE PICS GOING DARK?
You might be able to see the hurricanes heading for Florida. Maybe. But just about all other commercial satellite imagery could be put off-limits, if a new Senate bill goes through as planned.
The measure, "Nondisclosure of Certain Products of Commercial Satellite Operations," would exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) unclassified, commercial satellite pictures bought up by the government, as well as "any... other product that is derived from such data."
For example, "maps, reports, and any other unclassified government analyses or communications that are in some way 'derived from' a commercial satellite image would all of a sudden become inaccessible."
News reports would get a whole lot thinner, too. As Barbara Cochran, head of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, notes, the press relies on satellite pictures constantly, to track everything from weather to war to population shifts. "Recent uses include coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts; nuclear and other WMD sites in Iran, Pakistan, India, Libya, North Korea, China, and other countries; flooding in Bangladesh and Eastern India; deforestation in Brazil; wildfires and tornadoes in the United States; and refugee crises in the Sudan [and] Rwanda," she writes.
If this regulation passes, much of that imagery – not classified in any way, and collected by a private company, not a government agency -- would vanish from public view.
"In essence," Cochran says in a letter to Congress, "this new FOIA exemption would result in taxpayer dollars being used to preclude the media from adequately informing the public about matters of critical importance that in no way implicate the national security."
THERE'S MORE: "The Justice Department has asked an appellate court to keep its arguments secret for a case in which privacy advocate John Gilmore is challenging federal requirements to show identification before boarding an airplane," the Washington Post reports.
STUNT PILOTS TO CATCH SUN'S WISPS TODAY
After seven years, three million miles, and $260 million, Hollywood stunt pilots will have exactly one chance today to snag a returning NASA space probe.
"Genesis" is the space agency's first attempt since the end of the Apollo Era to bring samples back from the beyond – in this case, a collection of ions shorn from the solar wind. But the thin wafers of gold, diamond, sapphire, and silicon used to capture the samples are so delicate, they'll shatter if they hit planetside.
Enter Dan Rudert, a helicopter pilot who's flown stunts and aerial camera runs for flicks like The Hulk and XXX. He's one of two chopper-captains (one lead, and one backup) poised to grab the plummeting 500-pound collector before it hits the ground, and return it gently to Utah's Dugway Proving Ground.
19 miles above the ground, the capsule will open its first parachute, slowing its speed to 410 miles per hour. A second, hang glider-esque chute will unfurl about a mile-and-a-half up. And then Rudert and company will spring into action.
Flying just a bit above and behind the capsule at 38 miles per hour, Rudert will use an 18.5 foot-long pole to hook the chute's lead lines. Once the link is made, a tiny explosive will fire a pin into the hook, securing the connection. The capsule will then be gently plunked into a sealed container, and the whole package will be brought to a clean room for decontamination.
NASA scientists believe the samples will be their best chance yet to get a detailed picture of what the Sun is made of. And by better understanding the makeup of the Solar System's grandaddy, researchers believe they'll get a much clearer picture of how the neighborhood's youngsters – like the Earth and Mars – were born and grew up.
That is, if everything goes right at Dugway. If Rudert doesn't make the grab – or the chute doesn’t open, or a hundred other things go south – it's mission over. And that would send a whole bunch of space scientists scrambling for the Drano. Collecting Genesis' itty-bitty samples – just two hundred-thousandths of a gram – has been beyond burdensome. The probe flew a million and a half miles towards the Sun, to collect its solar ions. Then it swung a million miles past the Earth, so it could be properly positioned to rendezvous with the Hollywood pilots over Utah. Talk about making the first take count.
THERE'S MORE: Rats. Damn. This sucks: Genesis has "crashed to Earth... after its parachute failed to deploy," the AP is reporting.
"It wasn't immediately known whether [Genesis'] cosmic samples had been destroyed," the wire service says.
It's a spook fantasy: an all-seeing, always-on, rain-or-shine constellation of satellites, able to keep track of every plane, truck, and person below.
"We need to know something about everything all the time," undersecretary of defense for intelligence Stephen Cambone told a conference last year. "We need an illuminator, throwing into relief all the pictures and activities on the Earth's surface. And then we need to be able to switch on the spotlight, or alert other systems, to dive deep."
For years, U.S. intelligence and defense officials have been pouring money into such a system, the Space Based Radar, or SBR. The goal was to have the satellite array up and running by 2012.
Now, Congress is telling the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board. The House Appropriations Committee has cut the Air Force’s 2005 budget request for Space Based Radar from $327 million to $75 million, ISR Journal notes. Instead of being treated as a project that's about to be built, the committee added, SBR should be approached as a research and development effort.
"When weighed against military operations in Iraq and the ongoing war against terrorism, the SBR program 'simply cannot be afforded,'" the magazine quote the committee as saying.
The Air Force has yet to settle on many of the technical details of the proposed radar satellite constellation such as the size of the spacecraft and the orbits they would use. Very preliminary estimates for budget planning call for nine satellites in low Earth orbit.
Air Force officials estimate that a constellation of that size could cost at least $30 billion. That figure is more than the Air Force’s combined budget for nearly all of its other satellite efforts with the exception of the development of the laser-linked Transformational Communications satellites…
Even that figure may not show the true price tag of the satellites, given the Air Force’s difficulty in forecasting the cost of its space programs, the committee stated. One example is the troubled Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) High missile warning program, which is now expected to cost 450 percent more than the Air Force estimated when it was at about the same point of development as the Space Based Radar system is now.
First, a little context. These days, it's hard to imagine the U.S. military doing much of anything without using satellites. Guiding bombs, relaying orders, spying on adbad guys' hideouts -- all of that is done from orbit.
But with one nice-sized nuclear blast in space, it'd all be over. The satellites would be no better than scrap. Kiss a couple trillion bucks in hardware -- and just about every Pentagon strategy of the past few years -- goodbye.
So what to do? Satellites can be hardened against radiation -- the new ones, anyway. But armoring the machines already in orbit would cost way, way too much. So Darpa, the Pentagon's mad-science division, is starting to look at ways to clean up radiation in space, Defense News reports. (We mentioned this project in passing a few months back.)
One idea is to use '"electrodynamic-static space tethers' that would remove highly charged radiation particles." And no, as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.
"The tethers would be carried by satellites in low Earth orbit and cut across magnetic field lines, inducing electromagnetic current that would dilute the nuclear radiation and push it away from satellites, a government official said.
DARPA is seeking $2.8 million for the space tether effort, a new program in its 2005 budget request.
Under that effort, DARPA plans to develop hardware for placement on a "small, high-powered" satellite platform, and conduct tether experiments in low Earth orbit that would include "high-energy electron remediation."
It's a fair bet that satellite navigation won't be at the top of the agenda when President Bush meets with European leaders in Ireland next week for the annual summit between the United States and the European Union. But, in the long run, a little-known agreement to allow New World and Old World satellites to play nice with each other could prove to be the summit item that has the greatest impact on average people worldwide.
For years, drivers have found their way home, and bombs have found their way to targets, because of the global positioning system, or GPS. The array of 27 American satellites gives receivers on the ground an accurate sense of where they are on the globe. Since the late '90s, Europeans have been working on their answer to GPS, called Galileo.
At first, the system was supposed to be a GPS competitor. But now, after years of wrangling, the United States and Europe have agreed to cooperate. That could mean more widely available tracking systems -- ones that work in just about every urban canyon, office park and hiking trail across the globe.
"Odds are, you'll get stronger reception, and more reliable services," said Ralph Braibanti, who directs the State Department's space and advanced technology office, and who negotiated the agreement for the U.S. side.
But it will take more diplomatic finagling to make the program work. Galileo's 30-satellite network is scheduled to come online in about 2008. Several people close to the project said they would be shocked if the deadline holds. Most of the financing for Galileo -- about 2.5 billion euros, or $3 billion -- is supposed to come from a public-private partnership. But European bureaucrats haven't yet settled on a private partner. And it's murky how that business will actually make money from the venture.
The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day's tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right.
After six years of development, engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center say they now have a version of the Personal Satellite Assistant, or PSA, that's fully mobile, with a sensor suite that's nearly space-ready.
But it's unclear whether the red spherical bot will ever make it into orbit. Like so much else at the space agency these days, the fate of the PSA remains uncertain. The drone's makers hope to have an answer from the higher-ups by the end of the summer.
THERE'S MORE: In case the PSA wasn't sci-fi enough for you, consider how the prototype drone is built. Or rather, printed. A 3D printer's laser zaps a vat of plastic, constructing the PSA a tiny layer at a time. When it's done, the globe rises out of the liquid, fully formed. "Pretty cool," Keith Nicewarner, the project's lead system engineer, giggles.
AND MORE: Then there's the matter of testing the PSA. That's done in a full-scale mockup of the International Space Station's American wing. Over this, a force-feedback gantry crane tangles a cable, which holds a gimbal. The PSA floats inside. The set-up simulates the effects of microgravity, and allows the 'bot to buzz around, unencumbered by friction or drag.
AND MORE: Via Xeni and SMZ, here's a picture of the PSA being tested, circa 2000...
DARPA: WATER = SATELLITE JUICE
"Orbiting spy satellites have an annoying habit of running out of fuel and burning up in the atmosphere," Defense Tech pal John Gartner writes in today's Wired News. "So Darpa is looking for a way to make them last longer and move better. The key might be water."
Darpa's Water Rocket program "would develop a satellite that exploits a 'closed loop' regenerative fuel cell: Solar power electrolyzes water into hydrogen, then the hydrogen is converted into electricity and water."
These days, most satellites are largely solar-powered. But they use liquid fuel to power the thrusters that adjust their position.
Moving to a water-based system could therefore make the satellites more maneuverable. And that could "improve the satellite's coverage, change its arrival times to counter denial and deception and improve survivability, as well as extend a satellite's lifetime," according to Darpa spokesperson Jan Walker.
NO IDEA TOO WILD FOR NASA'S SCI-FI ARM
For 25 years, Ross Hoffman has had a vision: to use tiny changes in the environment to alter the paths of hurricanes, slow down snow storms and turn dark days bright.
For most of those years, Hoffman kept his ideas largely to himself. His adviser at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told him weather control was too outlandish for his Ph.D. thesis. The chances of a buttoned-down foundation or government agency funding such research were so slim, Hoffman didn't even bother to ask.
Hoffman is now wrapping up his half-million-dollar study for NIAC. But the agency is continuing to bankroll concepts for a future decades away.
Some space analysts wonder how long it can last, however. With NASA in turmoil, and a presidential directive to return to the moon, will a science fiction-oriented agency like NIAC survive?
"One wonders," LL writes, "if the federal government does not fund this kind of research, and public corporations are eliminating most of the basic research expenditures, what would happen to the scientific leadership of this country?"
AND MORE: "The leadership in basic science has already been ceded in certain areas," says Defense Tech dad Tom Shachtman. "High-energy particle research has gone to Switzerland because we wouldn't fund the supercollider; cutting-edge stem-cell research is now being done primarily in other countries because it has been impeded here for political/moral reasons. Congress, and in some instances the Executive Branch, have become unwilling to recommend for funding a lot of research that is too far out, or that appears to not be cost-efficient in terms of yielding near-immediate practical results. That is the very definition of short-sightedness."
AND MORE: NIAC is a lot more relevant than you think, Hoffman says. Take the all the studies "that relate to the sustained exploration of Mars," for instance.
One NIAC-funded researcher looked at where to live on Mars, and decided caves were the best place. Another studied a plant genetic assessment and control system for space environments, since astronauts cannot live by Tang alone. A third looked at what to wear on Mars, and settled on "an astronaut bio-suit system... coupling human and robotic abilities into a hybrid of the two, to the point where the explorer is hardly aware of the boundary between innate human performance and robotic activities," Hoffman explains.
Then of course, there's the question of how to get to the Red Planet.
That would be tackled, one NIAC thinker suggests, with "small, highly autonomous, solar-electric-propelled space ships, dubbed Astrotels for astronaut hotels. Hyperbolic rendezvous between them and the planetary transport hubs [would use] even smaller, fast-transfer, aeroassist vehicles called Taxis."
Obviously.
SPACE WAR BUDGET UNVEILED
$75.9 million to shut down enemy satellite communications. $84.6 million for projects like relay mirrors that would re-target laser beams in space. $15 million for weapons that ram into satellites and other "space control" efforts.
That's just a small sample of what the Pentagon plans to spend on space war research next year, according to a study from the Center for Defense Information.
"It is clear," the report reads, "that the United States is funding R&D that could, and in some cases intends to, provide capabilities in the next decade or so, to fight war in, from and through space."
BOEING, AIR FORCE MAKE UP
Last year, the Air Force blocked Boeing from a billion dollars worth of new satellite-launching contracts, for stealing industrial secrets from competitor Lockheed Martin.
Now, the Wall Street Journal says that "Boeing and Air Force officials are putting the final touches on an agreement that clears the way for the company's rocket units to resume government bidding."
For its part, the Chicago company has agreed to pay the Air Force's investigative costs, implemented various ethics programs and pledged to provide regular updates to the Pentagon on compliance efforts, these officials said. The payment amount isn't expected to exceed several million dollars, though no final terms have been reached and last-minute disagreements could hold up a resolution.
A settlement wouldn't resolve pending Justice Department criminal and civil investigations, which are likely to take many more months to play out and could cost Boeing $250 million or more in fines and penalties, according to people familiar with the details. Yet the move could end up reducing the leverage of Justice Department prosecutors and Pentagon investigators pursuing criminal matters.
Why would the Air Force do this? The problem is that Boeing is one of an extremely small circle of companies that can actually help the Air Force with its space operations. With satellites playing an increasingly important military role -- relaying communications, finding adversaries, and guiding smart bombs --- the Air Force doesn't want to rely on a single contractor to put its eyes in the sky.
So, in a sense, Air Force generals needs Boeing just as much as the company needs them. Call the lawyers.
DARPA GETS SPACEY
Robots building communications arrays hundreds of miles above the Earth. Electromagnetic pulses cleansing space of nuclear explosions' lethal effects. Raw materials turning themselves into orbiting sensors.
That's just a small sample of what Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, has in store for space.
The United States' military leans more and more on satellites to guide its bombs, spy on its foes and route its top-secret messages. But, for the first time in decades, America doesn't have space to itself. And that has the Pentagon spooked.
"The world scene is changing. We have to quickly shift gears in space," Darpa official Gary Graham told an invited audience of 2,200 at the DarpaTech conference. "Many nations have growing capabilities in imaging and communications and navigation. The Chinese have a manned space program."
The way to counter this perceived threat, according to the research agency, is to make building and launching American satellites much, much cheaper and easier. Right now, the United States sends only a few dozen satellites into orbit each year. Darpa program manager Tim Grayson wants "operating in the spaceways (to) become as routine as traveling the airways."
An international space probe set to launch Thursday morning won't just take the closest look yet at the core of a comet. It may shed light on the origin of life on Earth.
A series of recent studies have suggested that comets may have brought water and amino acids -- the building blocks of life -- to Earth billions of years ago. But that's all theoretical. Scientists don't yet have direct proof that comets really carry these materials. Only a couple of probes have ever seen comets up close, after all.
Rosetta, the European Space Agency craft scheduled to lift off Thursday from a launching pad in French Guyana, could dramatically augment the available evidence. If it works as planned, Rosetta will be the first probe to land on a comet's surface. The samples it takes from the soil and atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko should determine whether these interplanetary streakers contain the chemical precursors to bacteria, plants and people.
For years, the American military has spoken in hints and whispers, if at all, about its plans to develop weapons in space. But the U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan changes all that. Released in November, the report makes U.S. dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon priority in the new century. And it runs through dozens of research programs designed to ensure that America can never be challenged in orbit -- from anti-satellite lasers to weapons that "would provide the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space."
Space has become an increasingly important part of U.S. military efforts. Satellites are used more and more to talk to troops, keep tabs on foes and guide smart bombs. There's also long been recognition that satellites may need some sort of protection against attack.
But the Air Force report goes far beyond these defensive capabilities, calling for weapons that can cripple other countries' orbiters.
That prospect worries some analysts, who fear the U.S. may spark a worldwide arms race in orbit.
"I don't think other countries will be taking this lying down," said Theresa Hitchens, the vice president of the Center for Defense Information. The space weapons programs listed in the Air Force report went largely unnoticed until Hitchens circulated them in an e-mail Thursday. "This will certainly prompt China into actually moving forward" on space weapon plans of its own, she added. "The Russians are likely to respond with something as well."
THERE'S MORE: Quicker, cheaper ways to get into orbit -- that's also a key component of the Air Force report. Right now, space launches have to be planned months in advance. But the Air Force wants to orbiters to be able to take off "on demand" -- just like planes do today.
Another goal is a hypersonic missile, launched from the United States, that can strike almost anywhere in the world. That's something Defense Tech discussed in detail here.
AND MORE: Gen. Lance Lord, who heads Air Force Space Command, told Inside the Air Force that he's focusing on "reversible effects" in space -- weapons that can "temporarily degrade enemy capability, but do not permanently damage their space systems," according to the journal. "However, he did not rule out pursuing more damaging counterspace capabilities for use when it is in the interest of national security."
AND MORE: Space.com has a killer round-up of what's in the Air Force plan.
RED MARS
The Soviet Union might have been poised to implode in 1989. But that didn't stop the whiz-kids at the CIA from predicting that the Evil Empire would "likely" soon be painting the Red Planet, um, Red.
The big aerospace companies are starting to manuever for Bush's Moon-and-Mars lucre. Here's a Boeing sketch for the "interplanetary Crew Exploration Vehicle" -- "assembled at the Lunar Space Station" and "capable of traveling to Mars or beyond."
In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start. Because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.
Since word of Bush's space plan leaked last week, political rivals and some space-policy experts have assaulted it for being too expensive and grandiose.
But the 2004 plan sounds downright meek compared with a 1959 scheme to use nearly 150 rockets to outfit a military outpost on the moon. A 180-person lunar commune probably isn't in the works, as was proposed in 1972. And it's hard to imagine a replay of 1975's idea to build a 100-ton, magnetic-levitation train for tossing bags of freshly mined lunar soil into space, where it would be processed into industrial supplies.
My Wired News article has looks at some of history's kookiest moon plans.
THERE'S MORE: Ben Bova, Greg Bear and other science-fiction luminaries are fired up about the new space plan.
In a letter, Leaders of the House Science Committee told NASA chief Sean O'Keefe that work on the Plane should be put on ice until "we - the Congress, the White House, and NASA - have reached any agreement... on appropriate NASA goals for human space flight" and on how the craft fits in with those plans.
ALL-SEEING SATELLITES BEGIN TO FOCUS
The Space Based Radar -- the Pentagon's proposed series of all-seeing satellites -- is moving forward. Raytheon just picked up a $37.4 million contract to build a pre-prototype array of sensors for the network of eyes in the sky, scheduled for 2012.
The job, to be finished by next September, calls for the development of a unit combining cloud-piercing ground synthetic aperture radar, moving target indication, and digital terrain elevation data.
Last month, SAIC inked a deal worth up to $139.4 million for system integration work on the project.
FEDS WANT ALL-SEEING EYE IN THE SKY
An all-seeing, omnipresent set of eyes in the sky: that's the collective goal of the spooks, suits, generals, and geeks gathered this week in New Orleans to discuss the future of satellites in war, homeland security, and spycraft.
But talking about this Big Brother vision in a hotel ballroom is proving to be a whole lot easier than executing it in orbit. Several of the satellite systems which figure to be steps towards this globe-watching goal are wrapped in controversy, cost overruns, or long delays.
America's space programs -- both military and civilian -- are in the dumps. How can they be fixed?Winds of Change says there are two missing pieces.
"One is cheaper launch technologies. The other is a space industry that doesn't have to depend solely on NASA and other central-planning agencies."
REPORT: MILITARY SPACE PROGRAM IN DISARRAY
The American military space program is in a state of near-total disarray, says a report from the Defense Science Board, released yesterday. The troubles run so deep, they're beginning to rival the mess at NASA, its counterpart in civilian space.
Among the "systemic problems" the group found: "widespread lack of budget reserves required to implement high risk programs on schedule; and an overall underappreciation of the importance of appropriately staffed and trained system engineering staffs to manage the technologically demanding and unique aspects of space programs."
"Cost has replaced mission success" as the "primary means" for evaluating new military space equipment, the report notes. And "low cost estimates throughout the acquisition process" have "lead to unrealistic budgets and unexecutable programs."
The U.S. military has become increasingly reliant on space to wage war. Global Positioning System-based "smart bombs," "eye-in-the-sky" surveillance, and satellite phones are just a few examples of how American troops lean on space technology to talk, track friend and foe, and fight.
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, (NRO director Peter) Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide 'persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters.' If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have 'no veto power.'
While empire-cheerleaders, like the fine folks at Winds of Change, are applauding the move, such a denial seems sure to piss off America's dwindling handful of pals -- again. And when fighting a global, decentralized enemy like Al Qaeda, don't you need all the friends you can get?
THERE'S MORE: As if on cue, the European Space Agency has announced plans to move ahead with the 30-satellite Galileo system, which is widely seen as a rival to the U.S. military's Global Positioning System (GPS) array. The plans call for Galileo to be operational by 2008.
As Slashdot notes, the U.S. opened up access to GPS three years ago "partly to make GPS more useful for all mankind, but also to dissuade other countries from developing their own navigational satellite system, and thus be dependant on the U.S. for both peaceful and military purposes.
"Since the demise of the Russian GLONASS system, GPS is the only game in town. Evidently recent events make Europe feel less comfortable about such things, and so they're building their own." (emphasis mine)
SATELLITES: KEY TO VICTORY?
Since the fall of Baghdad, just about every media outlet has anointed a technology as the decisive factor that "won the war." The Los Angeles Times takes its turn today, nominating military satellites as the gee-whiz key to victory.
"Though overshadowed by headline-grabbing pilotless drones and 21,000-pound MOAB bunker-buster bombs, the quick, quiet, almost mundane flow of electronic information -- whether from polar orbiting weather satellites 23,000 miles above Earth or school bus-sized KH or 'keyhole class' spy satellites keen enough to read large newspaper headlines from space -- proved one of the U.S. military's most powerful weapons (in Gulf War II)," the paper says.
"If you ask what was the difference between Iraq's army and America's army, the big difference was satellites," John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told the Times.
Allen Thomson, a retired intelligence analyst now living in Texas, said the most important satellite assets in this war were "the unglamorous ones" that supported communications, navigation and meteorology. These include the military's star performer: the Air Force Space Command's behemoth "Milstar" satellites, 10,000-pound switchboards in space that provide secure voice and data communication around the world. The number of satellites of all types used in the war is estimated to be nearly 100.
While allied forces were flush with data coming in day and night, Iraqi officers appeared to be operating with very little good information, experts said. At times, the Iraqi leadership was sending orders to units that no longer existed.
How awkward would it be if the Russian relief showed up in 2010 and left the American on board? Kind of hard to ask Russia for a hitch to space while you're actively running logistics to their Georgian enemies.
Most of the money for space capabilities is in the Air Force budget, and space weapons funding now resides almost entirely in the 
But take these stories with a big heap of salt, Defense Tech's Iran-watching friends remind us. Because reports coming out of Iran are notoriously fickle. In the fall of '05, the press was full of warnings that Iran was 
But space-tracker 
Now, there have been lots of 
But veteran space analyst 
"There are 
The news comes just a few months after reports of China testing high-powered lasers to 
The Marines have typically been the American military's emergency fighter, its "
“Not that we have a plan for a [military] moon-base, but we might—you know?”
The Blackbird, which was first retired in 1990 then briefly resurrected between 1995 and 1997, reached its Mach-3 top speed by way of its hybrid Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines, which featured a conventional turbojet engine installed inside a ramjet optimized for supersonic flight. At low speeds, the turbojet did most of the work; at high speed the turbojet throttled back and the ramjet took over.
Thanks to Haninah Levine and Theresa Hitchens, this site was on top of the more martial space plan on October 11th. Other elements of the story -- the Air Force's "
In the late 1950's, the U.S. government began research into an interplanterary spacecraft that relied on nuclear detonations for propulsion. The effort, dubbed "Project Orion," died quietly ater a few years. But many of the documents surrounding the atomic spaceship have remained hidden or classified for more than four decades.
Hmm. Maybe not.
Now, the article is a little short on details. "It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful," the story says.
Nearly the entire slate of 
But now, the Israelis are picking up where their American counterparts left off, 
Falcon – a word that evokes power, speed, lethality. Then why did the Air Force’s latest FALCON fall out the back of a C-17 at 32,000 feet?
Information on the microsatellites themselves is virtually nonexistent. Calls by this office to DARPA were quickly met with “no comment”, and Space News writer Jeremy Singer’s inquiries also went unanswered. DARPA has already run the controversial 
Col. Jack Wassink is a former Marine Corps jet jockey with a weird new mission. This blunt, 45-year-old chief of the Marine Corps's tiny Space Integration Branch in Quantico, Virginia, shepherds the Marines' radical vision of space warfare.
"The Corps has always been an expeditionary force, a force of readiness, a 911 force," Wassink says. "All SUSTAIN is, is a requirement to move Marines very rapidly from one place to another. Space lends itself to that role."
You might remember that the Pentagon had a 
But perhaps the most ambitious plan comes from ICBM combat crew commander Capt. Joseph T. Page II, who calls for 
Or it could be used to put up new 
This atmospheric data has 
Not since the Beastie Boys Intergalactic 
This kind of exchange – and the cooperative work that would hopefully come of it – can only be good. Confidence Building Measures between China and the US, particularly in space, are absolutely essential. Both America and China have each expressed concerns about the other looking to weaponize space:
Steve Jones doesn't have a workshop, exactly, for his 
NASA's sci-fi arm never fails to disappoint. After years of funding research into 
Most of the programs aren't space weapons themselves; they're more like building blocks, which could be used in orbit for many things, including weaponry. But still, it's pretty stunning to read that money for these potential "dual-use" space projects 
For 16 years, Aviation Week & Space Technology says, it has been investigating a hush-hush Pentagon program to put a "
The Scotsman notes that...
The service is looking for game maker to build a sim for what it calls “
The third wave of U.S. orbiters, scheduled for launch in the mid-2010s, "
Hot off the virtual presses, the Index has in it just about everything you need to know about the state of the world's civilian and military space efforts. The bits about international orbital plans are sure to send the collective mind of the spacewar crowd into hyperdrive.
"More countries than ever now have launch-to-orbit capabilities, which increases the possibility of 
"Ground-based RF [radio frequency] jammers and laser "
The New York Times is reporting today that the Air Force wants a 
In honor of Passover, perhaps, 
"All these locations are generally in the same reservation as Groom Lake/Area 51," says JA, who, along with DS, was nice enough to take a gander at the pics for me. "Given that this was the location for a lot of the testing for the F117s and various other black craft, it makes sense to have local targets -- keeps you from having to fly over unsecure ground. But the lack of an identifiable golf course is highly suspicious for a supposed USAF facility."
Defense Tech reader DS was rifling through Google's satellite database the other day, and found what he says is "
It seemed like kind of joke last October, when the Pentagon wished out loud for a 
Luckily, the Arms Control Wonk tells us, the pro-swatter crowd seems to have gained the upper hand. The 
In a rare public discussion on Israel’s military use of space, 
The United States is building a new generation of spy satellites designed to orbit undetected, in a highly classified program that has provoked opposition in closed congressional sessions where lawmakers have questioned its necessity and rapidly escalating price, according to U.S. officials.
Chill out, everyone. (Including yours truly.) The "
Defense Tech makes a whole lot of noise about how satellites are being -- and will be -- 
Iran is planning on launching its 
The possibility of a sneak attack in space has the Pentagon 
Thank you, 
A few weeks back, Defense Tech took a look at the Air Force's 
NASA's 
Darpa, we have a problem.
You might be able to see the hurricanes heading for Florida. Maybe. But just about all other commercial satellite imagery could be put off-limits, if a new Senate bill goes through as planned.
After seven years, three million miles, and $260 million, Hollywood stunt pilots will have exactly one chance today to 
THERE'S MORE: Rats. Damn. This sucks: Genesis has "
It's a spook fantasy: an all-seeing, always-on, rain-or-shine constellation of satellites, able to keep track of every plane, truck, and person below.
So what to do? Satellites can be hardened against radiation -- the new ones, anyway. But armoring the machines already in orbit would cost way, way too much. So Darpa, the Pentagon's mad-science division, is starting to look at ways to 
For 25 years, Ross Hoffman has had a vision: to use tiny changes in the environment to alter the paths of hurricanes, slow down snow storms and turn dark days bright.
Robots building communications arrays hundreds of miles above the Earth. Electromagnetic pulses cleansing space of nuclear explosions' lethal effects. Raw materials turning themselves into orbiting sensors.
The big aerospace companies are starting to manuever for Bush's Moon-and-Mars lucre. Here's a Boeing sketch for the "interplanetary 
Moon Base? 
But the 2004 plan sounds downright meek compared with a 