Evidence: Most Popular
AFSPC also needs to work with US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) for inclusion of threats to commercial space in the latter’s 8000-series contingency plans.23 Currently, it is not clear how much of those plans are applicable to commercial space operators or to the capabilities AFSPC and USSTRATCOM can use to protect them from targeted interference. There could be significant challenges under US Code Title 10 and Title 50. These define how AFSPC can use capabilities to protect terrestrial networks used by commercial space operators inside the United States. There could be liability concerns if the Pentagon used space and cyber capabilities to protect a commercial space operator and caused collateral damage in the process. The only way to address those challenges is to begin planning for them now. Failure to do so places the nation at risk of experiencing the same dilemma that occurred during ONG. Without meaningful plans to address threats directed at their business interests, commercial space operators will be no more likely to support the United States during future crises than the commercial air transport industry was in 1973.
As previously stated, adversaries opposed to US interests can bring an impressive array of threats to bear against commercial space operators to make it too risky for them to do business with the US government during a crisis. For example, DigitalGlobe and Astrium Geo-Information Services provide imagery to the US government using remote sensing platforms in low Earth orbit (LEO). Those assets are vulnerable to direct-ascent antisatellite (DA ASAT) missiles like the SC-19 that China used to destroy its FY-1C satellite- and ground-based lasers that illuminated US reconnaissance satellites.3 For companies like DigitalGlobe, operating satellites costing $300 million in LEO without protective capabilities, destruction of a satellite, or damage to an imaging sensor could jeopardize revenues they depend on for survival.4 Faced with such threats to expensive revenue-generating assets, companies might “turn off,” reorient imaging sensors during passes over certain areas, or curtail business with the US government.
Currently, the US government relies on commercial augmentation for at least 40 percent of its military DC2 requirements. These include such operational staples as high-resolution satellite imagery, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and Blue Force Tracking (BFT). However, Washington’s purchases generate less revenue than demand from the energy (natural gas and oil), land management (forestry and mining), and commercial communications (television, radio, and broadband) sectors.1 Respectively, those sectors represent greater potential for business growth than sales to the US government—especially when one considers the dilemmas posed by shrinking government budgets over the next decade. In the commercial satellite communications sector alone, some estimates project opportunities for five to 15 percent growth while government purchases of similar services only represent opportunities for a maximum of five percent growth.2 In many cases, it is no exaggeration that a number of commercial space operators need Washington less than it needs them.
Adversaries can exploit that disparity of need to limit America’s access to commercial space capabilities by holding revenues and growth opportunities at risk during crises. Many adversaries can launch missiles, operate lasers, create jamming, or wage cyber attacks that can make the cost of doing business with the US government too high with relative ease.
Some observers have noted that the danger posed by orbital debris should be thought of fundamentally as a long-term environmental problem. Others perceive the danger as potentially affecting U.S. security interests, especially in its ability to interfere with consistent satellite support to U.S. military and intelligence organizations. However the issue is characterized, the space debris population, particularly in LEO, may have reached a tipping point. Catastrophic collisions are likely to continue to drive its growth, and the threat posed by orbital debris may be exacerbated by accidental or intentional debris-generating events. International compliance with mitigation measures is widely seen as critically important, but many experts believe that mitigation efforts alone are insufficient. For this reason, more aggressive measures, such as active debris removal, could be considered to protect U.S. national security interests in space and the long-term sustainability of the space environment.
Active Debris Removal is a form of remediation and, as the name suggests, involves the deliberate removal of debris objects from orbit. Various studies have asserted that the removal of orbital debris should be considered to stabilize the LEO environment. The National Space Policy directs that the United States will “[p]ursue research and development of technologies and techniques ... to mitigate and remove on-orbit debris....”56 According to simulations based on NASA’s current long-term orbital debris projection model, the LEO environment can be stabilized in the next 200 years if at least five large, intact objects are removed per year over the next 100 years.57 This assumes, however, that 90% of future launches follow NASA’s current mitigation guidelines and that no further explosions or other major debris releases occur. If international compliance with the 25-year rule does not reach the 90% level, the number of intact objects required to be removed each year could be higher.
The United States also pursues efforts to prevent future collisions in space. The National Space Policy directs the government to improve its ability to rapidly detect, warn of, characterize, and attribute potential disturbances to space systems, whether natural or man-made.36 This ability to detect, track, identify, and catalog objects in outer space is known as “Space Situational Awareness.” The State Department reported that, as of May 7, 2013, U.S. Strategic Command has concluded 37 Space Situational Awareness agreements with commercial satellite owners and operators to improve cooperation in this area.37 The State Department also actively supports efforts to establish two-way information exchanges with foreign satellite operators to facilitate urgent transmission of notifications of potential space hazards. DOD provides notifications to other governments and commercial satellite operators of potentially hazardous conjunctions between orbiting objects. The United States is currently reaching out to all space-faring nations and organizations to ensure that the Joint Space Operations Center has current contact information for both government and private sector satellite operations centers to facilitate notifications. In 2011 alone, the United States provided over 1,100 notifications to nations around the world, including to Russia and China.
In 2013, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC)29 reported the results of a NASA-led comparison study on the space debris environment. The study suggests that the orbital debris mitigation measures commonly adopted by the international space community are insufficient to stabilize the orbital debris environment.30 According to the report, simulations show that the current population of man-made objects in LEO has reached a critical density that will lead to a slow but unstoppable cascading effect of mutual collisions. In the study, each participating space agency used its own model to simulate the future space debris environment through 2209. The six model predictions were consistent with one another and found that even with 90% compliance with commonly adopted mitigation measures, LEO debris is expected to increase an average of 30% in the next 200 years. The population growth will be primarily driven by catastrophic collisions that are likely to occur every five to nine years.
A limited test ban would be verifiable by the United States via its unmatched ability to track launches, satellites, and debris. The ban would not address the possibility of breakout, in which an adversary stockpiles ASAT weapons without testing them. Stockpiling would be very difficult to monitor. But research, development, or stockpilingÑincluding placing ASAT weapons in orbitÑwould not violate the proposed agreement, which would not change the current lack of legal restrictions on these non-destructive actions. This proposal also would not address ASAT weapons that do not produce debris.
China. China entered the ASAT game late, but with a bang.194 China tested its KE mechanism – an interceptor launched from a mobile two-stage ballistic missile -- in space three times in 2005-07. The first two demonstrations did not involve any impacts or explosions or create any orbital debris.195 Then, on January 11, 2007, China deployed the system to strike an aging Fengyun-1C weather satellite at 860km altitude.196 The resulting collision produced three thousand of pieces of trackable debris, totaling approximately seventeen per cent of all the human-caused rubble then in orbit. This percussion is widely considered to be the worst space debris-generating event in history, because the altitude of impact will cause the debris cloud to remain in orbit for decades or centuries, obscuring the possibilities for safe space travel and operations in an unpredictable, ever-widening swath. Fully two-thirds of the payloads now in orbit will have to pass through the hazard zone.197
In January 2010 and January 2013, China again test-fired rockets -- without generating any orbital debris – labeling these as missile defense tests, rather than ASAT events, but the technological cross-over is undeniable.198 In August 2010, two small Chinese satellites maneuvered into close proximity and apparently “bumped” each other at low speed, in another possible ASAT experiment.199 More dramatically, in May 2013, China fired a DN-2 rocket into space – again, with no explosion or collision -- in an exercise widely interpreted as a first test of another new ASAT system, one purportedly capable of jeopardizing even satellites at high altitudes.200
During the cold war, the Soviet Union was as early and as vigorous as the United States in investigating multiple ASAT instruments. The U.S.S.R. tested its primary mechanism (relying upon 300kg of high explosives) in space approximately twenty times between 1968 and 1982. (Most of the tests were “fly-by” demonstration events, not producing any collisions or debris.) The system reached altitudes between 150 and 1600km, and was regarded by the United States as an “operational” capability.191 The program was decommissioned in 1993 and has been quiescent for years, but Russian interest in the ASAT concept has not dissipated. In 2009, responding to the continuing ASAT developments in the United States and China, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defense, Valentin Popovkin, cautioned, “[w]e can’t sit back and quietly watch others doing that; such work is being conducted in Russia.”192 Moscow’s efforts on DE ASATs are harder to assess. A site in Sary Shagan in Kazakhstan had long been suspected as the home of advanced high-energy laser research, with possible ASAT activities, or at least implications. However, an inspection of the facility in 1989 revealed little cause for concern, and its current status and activities are unknown.193