I’m pleased to note that Glenn Reynolds and I have a new short opinion piece up at Forbes.com,”Bombing the Moon.” It takes the hook of the LCROSS mission last week to shift gears from explosions on the Moon to … orbital war on satellites.
We applaud an Obama administration initiative to try and get ahead of the issue, but also point out the rogue state-shooting-at-space problem with diplomatic initiatives. Here’s a short bit:
The LCROSS mission is an important and expensive scientific experiment. Nonetheless, comments on Web sites such as Scientific American and Nature indicate that quite a few people thought the whole venture to be some sort of outer-space vandalism. Some even wondered whether NASA might have acted illegally or violated an international law or treaty by setting out to “bomb the Moon” … The answer is no.
[T]oday the leading threat is to global communications and control of instruments crucial to economic and social systems, by means of weapons aimed against satellites. Nor does the threat necessarily require any specially designed weapon; satellites are horribly delicate and unprotected against kinetic force, and essentially anything with an engine and some maneuverability, including other satellites present for otherwise ordinary and nonthreatening uses, can create a threat to them. Think IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in space.
James N. Gibson says:
I love how so many people without any knowledge on our space program have been talking about the LCross mission.
1) The LCross was the second half of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. Both Satellites were launched in the same Atlas V launch, the Centaur in question being needed to actual send the 500 million dollar LRO satellite to the moon. Once that was done the LCross was to then use the Centaur as a digging tool: otherwise the Centaur would have simply become more junk in space.
2) Regarding “bombing the moon”, we did far worse in the 1970s during the Apollo program. It seems all the talking heads on space have forgotten that following Apollo 12 we began smashing the third stage of the Saturn V into the lunar surface. This was done so sensors left by the previous mission could make seismic readings of the moon. In Total we crashed 5 third stages (called an S4-B) into the moon; each one weighing over 30,000 lbs or six times the weight of the Centaur. The LRO mission, in addition to its photographing of the Apollo landing sites, has taken an image of the crash site for the Apollo 14 third stage.
3) The various treaty’s stated are truly only applicable on the signatory nations. Back in the 60s and early 70s when there were only two space powers that made things easy. But with so many nations, and now commercial groups, launching “satellites” the situation is getting more complicated. Add to this the problems caused by malfunctioning satellites such as the dead russian that crashed into our Iridium recently, or the NRO Sat that failed in launch and had to be shot down to insure it fell into a deep area of the Ocean. So don’t put too much faith in those old treaties, times are changing fast.
October 13, 2009, 1:37 pmJimmy W says:
Real capabilities, as opposed to treaties and laws, remain the deciding factors of international relations. It is as true here as it is in more terrestrial contexts.
October 13, 2009, 4:45 pmSplunge says:
You should have had someone who majored in physical science instead of English or pre-law help you out with that article. Then you wouldn’t have written nonsense like this:
Nor does the threat necessarily require any specially designed weapon; satellites are horribly delicate and unprotected against kinetic force, and essentially anything with an engine and some maneuverability, including other satellites present for otherwise ordinary and nonthreatening uses, can create a threat to them. Think IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in space.
A satellite is not floating there, like a cork on a stream, and any clod can just work his way up to it gradually, or wait for it to bob over a bomb, like your unreasonable IED analogy.
A satellite is zipping along at high velocity — faster than any ordinary bullet — through an enormous volume of space. Hitting one 3-foot-diameter bullet with another, launched from the ground, or changing orbits without too much required onboard propellant, requires not just “an engine and some maneuverability,” but also the kind of exquisite tracking and guidance abilities that have had the Democrats laughing about ballistic missile defense as “Star Wars” for the last 30 years.
Indeed, ASAT and BMD are similar tasks, technologically speaking. The only serious difference (and it is serious) is that the satellite’s orbit can be observed for a long time before you try to kill it, which means you have much more leisure for designing your interception. But aside from the speed with which you must complete the task, the two jobs are similar, and similarly hard.
Additionally, I disagree with your thesis. An ASAT treat would not be in the interests of the United States, any more than the ABM treaty was, and for similar reasons. While the United States is far more dependent on satellites, it is also, for obvious and similar reasons, far more adept at satellite operations, including ASAT operations. In the absence of an ASAT treaty, the United States would be free to develop an appropriate ASAT and satellite defense program (it’s hard to build a robust defense program if you aren’t allowed to build the offensive weapons against which it must defend). And we can imagine that it would do both, meaning it would be in the excellent position of both being able to defend its assets in orbit and destroy the assets of opponents, if necessary.
Your thesis is merely another form of passive Maginot-line thinking. It never works. The only good defense includes active components, including, in this case, a robust ASAT program, and I cannot think of a single historical example of a mutual disarmament treaty that worked to the advantage of the more powerful and sophisticated party.
I can well understand, of course, why the rest of the world fervently wishes for an ASAT treaty. The USSR loved the ABM treaty for the same reason: they knew very well they could not compete, and knew that the cheapest way to win the competition was to convince the United States to neuter itself. I can also understand why the Obama Administration likes the idea: their ambitions are all domestic, and they view foreign policy as either a distraction from the Real Job (remaking the United States internally) or, as here, as a cheap way to score points with aging Nuclear Freeze alumni boomers by trading away military security (the necessity for which they don’t believe anyway) for Nobel Peace Prize! headlines.
October 13, 2009, 6:55 pm