By Victoria Samson
For most people, “Star Wars” evokes the memory of George Lucas action movies. However, the United States has been working on a program that could turn our fictional idea of “star wars” into a reality. Through its missile defense system, where the Pentagon hopes to shoot down incoming missiles by running interceptors directly into them, the United States is moving its battles to the ultimate high ground: space. If that is allowed to pass, it will endanger all, while providing defense to none.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is asking for $10 million to start initial design concepts for a space “test bed.” While this is chump change by Pentagon standards, MDA’s budget documents indicate that it is planning to spend $290 million on this program through fiscal year 2013, which establishes that this is a serious effort to move something from the drawing board to the skies.
The proposed Space Test Bed would be used to do research on putting interceptors in the heavens, with the idea that orbiting spacecraft would be guided into and destroy enemy ballistic missiles.
If it takes this step, the United States would start a new, more dangerous era.
There are major problems with this idea. The first is that it would establish the precedent of weaponizing space. So far, satellites are used to monitor other countries’ activities, share communications and guide weapons, but there have not been actual weapons placed on orbit.
Yet.
If there were, the United States would have the most to lose. Both the U.S. military and the economy rely very heavily upon satellite systems working reliably and constantly. Imagine the public’s consternation if ATMs didn’t work, or if GPS navigation was cancelled for ships on the high seas, or if credit card transactions couldn’t be processed. More dangerous is the effect it would have on the U.S. military. We have become so dependent upon our “eyes in the sky” that during war-gaming, when satellite capabilities have been knocked out, the commanders launched (simulated) nuclear attacks. Their arguments were that if they couldn’t see what their enemies were doing, they had to assume the worst.
Even during the most distrustful times of the Cold War, when the two superpowers were eyeing each other suspiciously and adding thousands of nuclear weapons to their arsenals, agreements were signed protecting their satellite networks, also known as “National Technical Means.”
Another negative consequence of putting weapons in space is the debris that would follow. Only 6 percent of the objects circling our planet are working satellites; the rest are junk.
As tests are held while space-based interceptors are developed, the addition of more space debris would be unavoidable. This trash up in space is dangerous: Even minute pieces that are 1 cm. in diameter or less could, at the dizzying speeds at some of the orbits, have catastrophic results should they hit other spacecraft, satellites, or astronauts. China held a test in January where a rocket launched from its territories deliberately hit one of its old weather satellites at an altitude of roughly 530 miles. It was destroyed and left over 1,000 pieces of space debris … that we know about. There could be hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments that could prove lethal, should they run into anything of value. It is estimated that half that debris will remain on orbit for over 20 years. China has since stated that it would like to see some sort of treaty preventing the weaponization of space, so its path has not yet been carved in stone.
This test demonstrates that weaponizing space could have ramifications long after the weapons have lost their use, assuming that they can show some sort of military utility in the first place. A 2003 report from the non-partisan American Physical Society stated that to defend against a solitary North Korean liquid-fueled Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, there would need to be 1,600 interceptors on orbit, a number that would be impossible to actually field and maintain.
There are more effective ways to defend ourselves, and certainly methods that don’t result in a trigger-happy world hemmed in by thousands of pieces of space debris. Let’s hope that Congress realizes this and nips the Space Test Bed in the bud.
Victoria Samson is a research analyst for the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C., that focuses on military and security issues. For more information, visit www.cdi.org.
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