Abstract
For roughly two decades, orbital systems, beyond their traditional strategic value, have gained a pivotal role in modern conventional security and defense activities. As a consequence, they have been considered as possible new targets in military confrontations, and the recent years have indeed demonstrated a renewed activity in the field of antisatellite researches and tests. This piece attempts to put these efforts in perspective and detail their different forms. It appears that besides the traditional kinetic destruction of satellites, leading to uncontrolled long-lived debris, other threats may have equally destructive consequences with more limited side effects. Directed energy weapons in orbit or even cyber attacks may become weapons of choice in the new space landscape. These likely perspectives must lead the international community to rethink the reality of threats related to space systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Strategic Armements Limitation Talks, treaty signed in 1972 by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev.
- 2.
Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft) to President Ford, Washington, July 24, 1976. For a more complete vision of the position of the US authorities at that time, refer more largely to the archives recently published under the direction of McAllister (2009).
- 3.
By the end of 2011, 100 countries had already ratified the Treaty, among which any major space nation.
- 4.
Official US information has stated the figure of 175 detected debris (at the difference of 3037 for the Chinese event) with the last one reentered in the atmosphere by the end of October 2009.
- 5.
See excerpts of the famous 1957 speech by B. Schriever at http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123040817 (accessed August 2012).
- 6.
Quoted in Stares P (1985, p. 48). Military strategies would be also made public, for example, in a 338-page book, The United States Air Force Report on the Ballistic Missiles written by Colonel Kenneth Gantz (and forwarded by the well-known Generals White and Schriever). It was published by Doubleday and Comp in 1958.
Besides the most common proposals aiming at developing antisatellite weapons, the US Air Force was proposing as soon as 1956 two different strategies for the military investment of space. One of those consisted in using a manned ballistic rocket (Manned Ballistic Rocket Research System project), while the other one (Manned Glide Rocket Research System) proposed the use of a reusable glide body launched from a main carrying rocket. If this latest project may recall the early NASA studies made about the shuttle at the end of the 1960s, this last project was purely military by essence as it envisioned the possibility to bomb the Earth surface since the altitude of 64 kilometers! On its side, the Army, via the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (where Wernher Von Braun would ultimately help the United States to launch their first working satellite in January 1958), had the project of a super powerful rocket that would allow “colonizing” the Moon as well as other planets for military purposes. For a detailed expose of the military position at that time, see also Baker (1985, pp. 12–30)
- 7.
Signed in 1972 in Moscow, this test was incidentally pleading for the use of National Technical Means for treaty verification.
- 8.
This subjective scale can be paralleled to what has been almost theorized, or at least symbolized, in some US Air Force doctrinal documents using the infamous “5 Ds” to materialize the scale of gravity of any space attack: “D eception, D isruption, Denial, D egradation, D estruction”. See USAF (2004), Counterspace Operations, Air Force Doctrine Document, 2-2.1.
- 9.
In this respect, it must be reminded that, at its apex, one of the several versions of this project was envisioning the deployment of many space and ground-based laser systems, possibly relayed by orbiting mirrors in order to destroy reentry nuclear heads. This complex network of sensors and effectors was considered as an addition to some more conventional 4,000 intercepting “hit-to-kill” missiles or even satellites.
- 10.
Obviously, the uplink remains the targets of choice for any action against the satellite itself.
- 11.
The report goes on blaming that “moreover, once inside the Agency-wide mission network, the attacker could use the compromised computers to exploit other weaknesses we identified, a situation that could severely degrade or cripple NASA’s operations.”
Source: NASA (2011).
- 12.
Again, this case has not been fully acknowledged, yet some other hypothesis (supported by ISRO) points out the loss of one of the solar arrays of the spacecraft. No official position about the incident has been confirmed up to this day.
- 13.
For example, it has been reported that, at this occasion, SES, the second largest geostationary satellite operator, had to proceed with many very precise maneuvers around some of its strategic orbital positions.
- 14.
Via the creation in 2009 of the Space Data Association, based on the Isle of Man. Obviously, considering the wealth of information contained in those databases, such a private initiative cannot be without consequences on the general management of international relations in space.
- 15.
Such as in the case of the US Operationally Responsive Space program, for example, even if this effort seems to remain in question nowadays.
References
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Pasco, X. (2015). Various Threats of Space Systems. In: Schrogl, KU., Hays, P., Robinson, J., Moura, D., Giannopapa, C. (eds) Handbook of Space Security. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2029-3_9
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