To operate a Predator-style drone requires ownership in space, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):
All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.
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For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world.
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By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.
“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese—unannounced and unexpectedly—shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wicked-problem scenarios in space.
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Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a five-thousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman—certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.
In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian—a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the truth to Congress—fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.” Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak), and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons would not work well from space.
“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.
Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51–like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.