Humans can’t help befouling any place we visit, even outer space. An impressive man-made space junkyard now circulates the low-Earth orbit region where our satellites and space stations reside. The junk comes from satellite explosions, rocket stages, meteor impacts, and old discarded satellites. So much junk floats around the earth that the study and control of space debris has spawned a mini-industry of sorts to keep watch over the problem.

It’s pretty remarkable that NASA tracks over 9,000 man-made objects floating around the earth. What’s also amazing is that less than 3,000 of these are actual payloads still in use; the rest is orbiting debris. Over thirty countries and organizations have paid good money to sponsor putting this stuff into space; some of these countries assist in the tracking what remains of them via telescopes, radar, and other satellites. Keeping a careful watch over where objects are and how they orbit helps to avoid collisions in space. But a lot more debris exists that can actually be tracked because particles smaller than 10-cm in diameter are missed.

Some satellites are intentionally launched into lower orbits so they can be fall back to earth and not add to the space junkyard when they are no longer needed. During re-entry most things break up and are burned away harmlessly. Skylab and the MIR were dramatic cases of re-entry witnessed by the entire world. Less publicized events involve the occasional recovery of a chunk of metal. These are cataloged if reported to the Office for Outer Space Affairs (a UN office in Vienna), which records where the item was recovered and its size and possible origin. Of some concern to the OOSA is the safety of space objects with small nuclear power sources on board; member states are “invited to report” on a regular basis on that subject!

Keeping a lid on the growth of the space junkyard is tough. People don’t want to stop sending new equipment out there. Unfortunately, the more we send the more debris we create as byproducts of space launches. Way up there in orbital space we are fueling the number of collisions between orbiting objects by delivering more payloads. NASA attempts to predict the growth of the “debris population” by running mathematical risk models. Other statistical models project how a satellite may break up and where the debris might actually disperse in earth’s orbital space. Nonetheless, the bottom line is that the debris population is expected to grow faster and faster and could accelerate to exponential levels under certain circumstances.

This begs the question as to what’s the big deal and why the public needs to understand what we stand to lose over the next decade. The problem is that space debris can stay in orbit anywhere from a few decades to centuries, depending upon the orbital altitude. As junk begins to accumulate at an accelerating rate, the use of orbital space for commercial, military, and scientific purposes is jeopardized. The public has grown accustomed to services that rely upon satellites like mobile phone communications, TV broadcasts, data transfers, weather maps, global positioning system (GPS) for aviation, and so forth. Our national security interests are also heavily dependent upon military GPS and spy satellites. But even flecks of paint and drops of unspent fuel pose serious risks to anything or anyone they strike at speeds of over 17,000 miles an hour. To prevent the loss of human life and the loss of the craft itself, the Space Station being developed is the most debris-impact resistant craft ever in space. The FCC has expressed its own concerns, as one of their own reports indicates: “FCC Opens Proceeding Regarding Mitigation of Orbital Debris (03/14/02)”

Post-September 11, the response made by the present administration is to revive and accelerate the implementation of ‘Star Wars’-style weapons systems. Plans are being laid for the weaponization of space with little public comment or oversight. Under ‘Star Wars’ the military has set its sights on space-based missile intercept systems and anti-satellite weapons. Here are some simple definitions for these terms: 1) a missile intercept system intercepts and eliminates a missile in flight, 2) an anti-satellite weapon destroys or nullifies satellites, and 3) a space-based weapon system does its job from an orbit around the earth.

The weaponization of space is a dramatic policy shift. Space has been militarized with military-grade GPS, communications, and spy satellites. But no military satellite belonging to any country is weaponized at present. Many scientists do not support ‘Star Wars’ for practical and scientific reasons. Sharply divided camps even exist within the Pentagon over this direction. Right now treaties are being scrapped so that these systems can be tested and deployed. Instead, it’s “all systems go” for the new National Missile Defense Agency.

Regarding missile intercept systems, the plan is to deploy ground-based missile intercepts first and space-based missile intercepts eventually. The intercept weapon has failed if it allows as much as a single enemy missile passes through. At the moment, the military is having enough difficulty with its ground-based National Missile Defense tests. The Pentagon officials admitted using a broadcast beacon to help guide an interceptor to its mock warhead target during a July 2001 test. Complaints have been made before Congress about the dearth of testing under more realistic circumstances. More failures this March led the Pentagon to classify reports of subsequent missile test failures as top-secret information.

Shouldn’t knocking out a satellite from its predictable orbit be simpler than intercepting enemy missiles? Some of the ASAT proposals on the drawing board are ‘Star Wars’ concepts, like Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs). By accelerating a stream of high-energy elementary particles, atoms, or ions or by generating an intense laser or microwave beam toward an enemy's satellite, the DEW would obliterate its target or at least cause enough electromagnetic disruption to toast its electronics. Improvements to satellite skin technology and the difficulty in generating large amounts of energy quickly could make conventional technology, like arming satellites with missiles, more attractive in the near term. The testing and experimentation in space needed to develop enough knowledge to design any ASATs is a definite near-term likelihood. And it’s going to involve exploding things up there.

On April 10, 2002 former astronaut Sally Ride warned the packed audience in her delivery of the annual Sid Drell Lecture on the Stanford campus of the technical and policy problems that might arise if ASATs were tested in space. Her headline was “Anti-satellite weapons testing would have ‘disastrous’ effects”. Details from her speech resurfaced in July in an article featured in the Science Journal column of the Wall Street Journal: “Scientists (Again) Warn ‘Star Wars’ Threatens Safety of Space Orbit”. It would be ironic if testing of ASAT prototypes and technology rendered space orbit completely unusable for all purposes long before deployment!

Let’s summarize with a list of bad outcomes:

• Dangerous policy shift away from an unspoken agreement among the world's space powers to refrain from putting weapons in orbit

• Nuclear reactors orbiting in space

• Nuclear debris scattered on earth

• Satellite debris in space endangering existing commercial and military satellites

• Satellite debris endangering human life in space

• Billions of dollars tied up in never-ending weapons systems development

• Orbital space made unusable for centuries

Many sources on space debris, ‘Star Wars’, and missile defense are available for the layperson. Informative articles suitable for all levels can be found online at Space.com. Government agencies and defense labs provide plenty of information on space debris. But to get a taste for the truly bizarre, the following two sources are recommend . The RAND Corporation offers a most interesting review "Space Weapons Earth Wars", which takes an unemotional, strictly analytical look at the various space weapons strategies. This material is free. The Center for Defense Information offers some surprisingly critical comments about the missile defense program. For the latest, go to their website and click on the Missile Defense link.

Madeline Shaw is the COG Newsletter Editor

On January 23, 2002 Rep. Dennis Kucinich offered a bill (Space Preservation Act of 2002) to propose keeping space weapon-free “to preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind”. Ask your US Congressperson to co-sponsor this bill, HR 3616.

“... the defense budget grows with more money for weapons systems to fight a cold war that ended, weapon systems in search of new enemies to create new wars. This has nothing to do with fighting terror. This has everything to do with fueling a military industrial machine with the treasure of our nation, risking the future of our nation, risking democracy itself with the militarization of thought which follows the militarization of the budget. In recent years the Dept. of Defense could not match $22 billion worth of expenditures to the items it purchased, wrote off as lost billions of dollars worth of in-transit inventory and stored nearly $30 billion worth of spare parts it did not need.”

~ US Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-OH