Something disturbing happened five hundred miles above China on January 11th.
An old Chinese weather satellite was in orbit, and then, quite abruptly, it wasn't. Or, rather, if it was, it was no longer in one piece, and if it had been in any way operational before, it certainly wasn't afterward. United States Air Force tracking radars will now have a more challenging job, to track all of the debris that's large enough to track.
American intelligence agencies believe that it was destroyed by a weapon fired from Xichang, a major launch facility in Sichuan, China. While details remain classified, it seems to have been taken out with a "kinetic-kill" (a weapon that works simply by crashing into the target at high velocity) payload delivered on a medium-range ballistic missile. In this case, "crashing into the target" is a slight mischaracterization. In actuality, the target likely crashed into the interceptor, which was probably simply flung up into space into its path, at which point the satellite hit it at orbital velocity. This didn't require an orbital launch vehicle, because there was no need to match velocities (and in fact the greater the difference in velocities the better), so it didn't have to attain orbital speeds. But it doesn't matter which vehicle hit which, any more than your body-shop bill is any less when you hit a deer that jumps in front of your car on the road rather than it chasing you down from behind.
This type of weapon has been tested against satellites before. The US developed and tested a system back in the eighties that was air launched from an F-15, to provide maximum stealth and flexibility of trajectory and to avoid the need to wait for a satellite's ground track to cross the fixed launch site. But this was unprecedented, in that it was the first that we know of to be launched directly from the ground.
There are several issues of concern about this event.
The most immediate one is that the debris resulting from it now constitutes a hazard to all low-earth-orbit satellites below five hundred miles, including the International Space Station. It could in fact be a problem even higher, because some of the particles were flung into higher-apogee orbits in the collision. They will continue to be a problem until the orbits of the individual pieces decay and cause them to burn up in the upper atmosphere. At that altitude, this will take weeks, or months, depending on the size of the pieces (the smaller ones will come down faster, because they'll have more drag for their mass). Such tests performed in the past by the US occurred at much lower altitude, and much shorter debris dwell times (though some pieces still took years to reenter).
It's unclear (at least to me -- I am not a space lawyer) that this act violated any existing treaties per se, but it seems unlikely. It was their own satellite that they destroyed, after all. There is a Liability Convention under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, but this remains a gray area, due to an inability to date to reach consensus on a definition of "debris." But at the least, it's certainly extremely bad manners (not unusual for the Chinese in such matters), and if one of those pieces hits another nation's satellite, clearly the Chinese could be held liable, at least in theory, per the provisions of the treaty. Of course, it would have to proven that it was one of those pieces, which it could be if it turned out to be one of the thirty-odd new pieces now large enough to be tracked, and whose trajectories can be traced back to that of the original satellite.
Much more worrisome, of course, are the longer-term policy, diplomacy, and military and security considerations.
Simply put, if the Chinese have such a weapon, we currently have no defense against it. Moreover, we are highly dependent on our space assets, something that the Chinese have no doubt been observing in our recent military activities. Particularly in this millennium, in Afghanistan and Iraq, our eyes and ears in the sky, and our ability to tell terrestrial systems where they are via GPS, have leveraged our military capabilities tremendously, while minimizing collateral casualties and damage. Take them out, and we're back to the Vietnam era in terms of capability. In fact we'd be worse off, because at least then, we had systems that weren't dependent on space capabilities, whereas the loss of our satellites today would render much of our terrestrial, aerial and naval armament much less effective at best, and useless or even counterproductive junk at worst.
It also puts to rest the comforting but naive theories of some that such a capability is beyond the Chinese -- that killing satellites is an intrinsically difficult thing, and that we need not worry about their ability to do so. While it's certainly easier to kill a satellite (which moves on a predictable course) than a ballistic missile in acceleration, or the multiple warheads it blooms after it ends its engine burn, it was still mistakenly thought to be very difficult. We might now, in light of their feat, reconsider how hard the missile defense problem is as well, for us or for them.
Of course, as is generally the case with any perceived adverse development, on the planet or off, the first person to be blamed is George W. Bush. A few months ago, the administration quietly released a "new" national space policy, which, among other things, declared that it would be the policy of this nation to preserve our freedom of operation and ability to control the high ground of earth orbit. Which is to say, that we will treat space no differently than we traditionally have treated the high seas. In actuality, it was little different than policy has been for decades, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, but as Jeff Foust noted at his Space Politics blog, the usual suspects had their usual complaints about it:
...the [conservative think tank] Marshall Institute...released a critique of the policy this week...While pleased that the administration recognizes the importance of space in national policy, the author(s) (not identified by name in the document) are disappointed with both how the document was released and the strength (or lack thereof) of its language. (This is illustrated with subheadings like "An Inauspicious Launch" and "Weasel Words".) In several cases the document contrasts the language of the 2006 policy with the much stronger (and, in the institute's eyes, better) language in Ronald Reagan's 1982 policy...
...Those who are opposed to the policy because they think it's too strong, rather than too weak, haven't been silent, either. There's an essay in that noted space journal, the Newtown (Conn.) Bee. The commentary, written by Leonor Tomero of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, claims that "the United States is reversing its longstanding leadership role in working to keep offensive weapons out of space." It's pretty standard stuff: if the US develops space weapons, then other countries will do so, and the US has more to lose because it relies more on space assets than other countries. (That argument, of course, assumes that other countries are sincere about opposing space weapons.)
With the test of this new weapons system, some administration critics claim that we "provoked" the Chinese into doing this (an obvious confusion of cause and effect, since the system had to have been under development for much longer than since last fall). This is particularly ironic, because the administration line since its policy came out has been that "there is no arms race in space." Well, if there wasn't before, there certainly seems to be one now. Or perhaps, only one side is racing.
But the question remains: what is the purpose of this test, at this time?
The good friar Occam (of razor fame) would have suggested that (to mix authoritative quotes), the cigar is just a cigar, and maybe the Chinese just want to have a capability to kill our satellites, and know that it works. It would certainly be handy (albeit risky) if they decided to (say) take back Taiwan by force. But it may not be quite that simple.
In the most comprehensive article written to date on the incident, noted space analyst James Oberg suggests that this is part of a diplomatic move by the Chinese to leverage the international (i.e., anti-American) community to pressure the US in support of an anti-ASAT treaty. As he notes, classically, our major-power adversaries love such arms-control treaties because, unlike them, we have internal institutions, such as federal checks and balances and a free press, to make us accountable to abide by them, whereas they simply ignore them. This particularly treaty would probably be unverifiable, though pesky little issues like that rarely concern those who irrationally value paper and promises over hardware when it comes to keeping the peace.
And that's the bottom line. Where should we put our trust -- in treaties, or in actual hardware systems to defend our vital space assets?
Some of course will argue that the horse isn't completely out of the barn and that it's not too late to get it under control. They will say that this system only puts our LEO satellites at risk, because many of our most valuable systems are thousands of miles higher (GPS in a twelve-hour orbit, and many weather, surveillance and secure communications satellites even higher in GEO), so we aren't as vulnerable as it implies. They will also no doubt argue that the system doesn't allow them to take out a large number of satellites in a short period of time, which would be necessary to maintain the element of surprise, since it operates out of fixed launch sites that will have to wait hours or days for each targeted satellite to appear overhead within range of the rocket.
But of course, the principle has been proven, and all that's necessary to solve these problems is to put the system up on a rocket with more impulse needed to get to higher altitude, and to adapt it to an air-launched system, as we did in the eighties. There's no reason to think the Chinese (and others) incapable of solving this problem. Admittedly, the warning times would be much greater, and the relative velocities much lower, but they'd still be high enough to destroy the targets if they can't avoid the interceptor, and as far as we know, none of the critical systems currently deployed have much, if any ability to do so.
The most prudent assumption is that the Chinese (and Russians, and eventually, as they develop further their own space capabilities, Indians and Pakistanis and South Koreans and...) are going to have this capability, and that we must learn how to counter it. Even if they don't specifically develop anti-satellite systems, the laws of physics dictate that any system designed for the much more difficult job of taking out an exoatmospheric missile or entry vehicle will find a satellite kill, at least in LEO, a piece of cake.
Thus, we can't wish away a space arms race. We have to think about how to win it. Unfortunately, this is made more difficult by the approach we've taken to space systems since the dawn of the space age, five decades ago this coming October 4th.
Because of the legacy that arose, in our rush to conquer space, by building our first launch vehicles from expendable ballistic missiles, launch costs remain high. This in turn, results in expensive satellites, because they have to be simultaneously very lightweight and extremely reliable. Many of the most critical satellites are multi-billion-dollar "battlestar galacticas" that take years to build and launch (and unfortunately, many of these are low-earth-orbit satellites.) They are the carrier battle groups of the space-related military services. If they're taken out, it would take years and billions of dollars to replace their capability, and even if the money were an affordable luxury in wartime, the replacement time is not.
Short of hoping that an anti-ASAT treaty would actually be effective (and, as the old military dictum says, hope is neither a strategy nor a tactic), there are really only two actual countermeasures, neither of which would necessarily violate an anti-ASAT treaty even if we signed on to it. One is defending the satellites against attack (though one imagines that the usual suspects would claim that such defenses were "provocative"). The other is being able to reconstitute the lost capability affordably and quickly.
In the future, we should expect to see some combination of the two. New satellites will have to have more maneuvering capability to avoid such attacks, if not actual active defenses against them (e.g., chaff or decoys), and we'll have to use some of the same systems being developed to protect us from missile attacks on ground and sea targets to defend our space assets as well. But such defenses won't be perfect, and we'll have to come up with ways of rapidly launching new satellites in the event of their loss, which will mean radical changes to both our launch and satellite design philosophies.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to change from the current model of large, expensive satellites on large expensive and unresponsive expendable launch systems, but it's deeply entrenched within the National Reconnaissance Office and much of the traditional Air Force. And there is always a lot of resistance to potential institutional change whenever it rears its head.
The most recent incarnation of this is a program proposed a few years ago, called Operationally Responsive Spacelift (ORS). The idea was to develop newer, smaller launch systems that were affordable to operate and, unlike current Air Force launchers (including the Enhanced Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELVs) into which the service and its contractors sunk billions in the nineties) could launch almost on demand and command, within a day or two, rather than sitting on fixed and expensive launch pads in preparation for a launch, often for months. One of the potential ideas was that a stockpile of replacement satellites would be warehoused and ready to be rapidly integrated into one of the responsive vehicles in the event of a capability loss during wartime or crisis. Ironically, just having such a capability could help act as a stronger deterrent to anti-satellite operations than treaties, since the potential costs could be high in terms of retaliation, and the benefits greatly lowered by reducing the value of the replaceable targets.
Unfortunately, anything as radically new as this philosophy has a chicken-and-egg problem. Such launch systems need new, responsive, low-cost payloads to justify their development, and no one will approve the construction of payloads in the absence of an assured capability to deliver them. The other problem is that, even if the launch systems were available, there are some missions for which, due to basic physics, it's difficult to build small and cheap satellites (a notable one is reconnaissance missions that currently require large optics to get adequate resolution on the ground, though there may be ways of getting around this with arrays of smaller satellites). For these reasons, and others, resistance to any change to business-as-usual remains intense. For instance, a key part of ORS, the FALCON program, has encountered substantial entrenched resistance within the defense establishment, with attempts by opponents to terminate funding.
Very recently, however, there have been signs that the pro-ORS forces have been regaining ground. Was this change of heart in any way a result of the event of January 11th? It's not clear, but it's not inconceivable that it was at least a factor. If so, and it results in ORS program success and new ways of doing military space business, the Chinese may have blown up a lot more than an antique weather satellite. They may have also have unwittingly helped destroy an old military space age, half a century old and long in the tooth, and usher in a new one.
