China Aims High

Some of the U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq's troubled Anbar province most likely wondered why the Air Force was sending a space weapons expert to help them fight Sunni insurgents. But U.S. forces there had a tough problem. Traditional artillery was too inaccurate for urban hotbeds like Fallujah, and insurgents took cover when they heard attack aircraft overhead.

Chinese men look at a satellite built by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight.

The Army offered what seemed like a good solution—the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, a mobile battery that fires precision missiles from miles away. The powerful new weapon, however, came with a serious glitch—the launcher sometimes relied on outdated coordinates from GPS satellites, which could send rockets hundreds of yards off target. Maj. Toby Doran, the space expert, helped find creative ways to prevent the error, and the launcher was put into action.

That's just one small example of how integral satellites have become to even the most basic daily operations of today's U.S. military, not to mention the broader U.S. economy. But any sense that this crucial sophisticated technology is out of the reach of potential enemies because it flies hundreds, even thousands, of miles above Earth disappeared early this year. On January 11, China blew up one of its own aging weather satellites with a rocket launched from a space center in Sichuan province.

The test was a vivid demonstration of something that the U.S. Air Force has long worried about behind closed doors—Washington can no longer take its massive and growing reliance on satellites for granted. Even though the Chinese have been working for years to develop an antisatellite weapon (similar to ones tested decades ago by the United States and the Soviet Union), the decision to test now is fueling sharp new fears about the possible militarization of space.

At the U.S. Air Force, it exposed a once top-secret debate over how far America needs to go to protect its valuable satellites—which give America a tremendous military and intelligence advantage over potential enemies. With many officials now pushing for more ambitious defensive capabilities, the skeptics point out that Washington also has the most to lose in a potential space arms race.

Today, satellites provide military capabilities that range from reconnaissance and communications to the link that allows pilots to fly unmanned Predator surveillance planes in Iraq and Afghanistan remotely from a base in Nevada. "We had the military folks do an estimate of a day in the life of the U.S. military if you didn't have space systems," says Gary Payton, the deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space programs. "Fundamentally, you go back to fighting a war like World War II where it's huge attrition rates, huge logistics, and huge expenses."

But even as satellites have grown more important, the U.S. government has spent little to defend them. China's test "was a wake-up call for a lot of folks who had not recognized the fact that space is not a sanctuary," says Gen. Kevin Chilton, who, as the head of U.S. Strategic Command, is charged with long-term planning on issues including space. "When you got into the budget debates...that never seemed to rise to the level of concern." In recent months, Congress did add some $50 million to next year's budget for space-related investment, hardly an impressive amount in the multibillion-dollar world of space projects. The Air Force is pushing for much more.

This is not, of course, simply a military or intelligence issue. Satellites are a $220 billion industry that is central to long-distance telephone calls, Internet service, navigation, just-in-time delivery, and even disaster relief. A special timing signal in GPS satellites is integrated into the country's basic infrastructure, including ATMs and traffic lights.

Arms race. But defending satellites is an expensive, difficult, and often controversial proposition. "There is potential for a revitalized arms race," says Tom Ehrhard, a former Air Force officer now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "As a strategist, I want to see multiple redundancy and a hardening of systems, and I am going to start thinking about an active defense." It's the latter that worries some observers. An "active defense" could be countermeasures like decoys, elaborate missile defense systems, or even full-fledged offensive weapons orbiting Earth.

For now, Air Force officials insist they are not eager to go down the controversial path of putting weapons up in space. "We aren't looking to arm space," says Maj. Gen. William Shelton at Air Force Space Command, "and hopefully our spacefaring brothers and sisters aren't either." Aside from the cost and the technological difficulty, there is the debris problem—China's weather satellite shattered into tens of thousands of pieces. Blowing up more satellites in orbit could make it almost impossible to operate in space.

The question of defending space has also become wrapped up in the larger debate over China. "Nobody in the space industry was surprised that China could do this," says Elliot Pulham, who runs the Space Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes activities in space. "But everybody is still pretty surprised that they would do it." Those who believe that China is trying to aggressively counter the U.S. military's technological superiority argue that there already is an arms race. "You really have got to have a defensive capability," says Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, a leading proponent of building missile defense systems in space. "If you have a rule about not militarizing space, that's already been violated." China's refusal to even discuss the test has only fueled suspicion.

At the same time, China's economy is becoming dependent enough on satellites that an attack on U.S. satellites would hurt China as well. "It is not in any nation's interest that has a vested interest in space to mess up satellites," says Michael Krepon, cofounder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, who argues that Washington should agree to negotiate a treaty over the use of space. "It is very hard for a country that has dominant space capabilities to accept deterrence, and the Pentagon is struggling with this." The Bush administration remains opposed to a binding space treaty but says it would discuss informal "rules of the road."

The U.S. military is also trying to maintain a deliberate strategic ambiguity over just how far America would go to defend its satellites. "I would argue that the rest of the world accepts U.S. space supremacy," says Joan Johnson-Freese, chair of national security studies at the Naval War College. "What the Bush administration claims is space dominance, and that's what the rest of the world won't accept." She worries that the U.S. government might pursue a strategy that would aim to maintain a veto over other countries' ability to access space. Air Force officials say they believe in the peaceful use of space by all nations, but they also assert a right to self-defense. "Veto is probably too strong a word," says Brig. Gen. John Hyten, the director for plans and requirements at Air Force Space Command. "If somebody's use of space or somebody's ability to threaten our space capability impacts our ability to act as a nation, then we need to be able to control that environment and prevent that from happening."

For commercial satellite firms, as well as the 58 other nations that own at least a share of a satellite in space, such statements are not comforting. "The space environment is very international, and politically, we as a country have just not come to grips with this," says Pulham. "The idea that we have any kind of veto over access to space is just absurd." Retired Chinese military officer Bao Shixiu, a research fellow at the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, makes a similar point. "The monopolization of space by a single country," he says, "cannot be accepted."

There are, however, some defensive options that are not at all controversial. The Air Force is already working to rebuild its space surveillance network, which atrophied after the end of the Cold War. Using a set of 28 radar sensors at 18 ground stations around the world, along with one sensor in space, officials currently track more than 17,300 objects in space, including satellites and debris. Built with a focus on the Soviet Union, the network today has some gaps in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres.

Quick clarity. One of the most important elements of the surveillance system is accidental—an 8-inch telescope strapped onto the side of an otherwise dead experimental missile-defense satellite launched a decade ago. Using this vestige alone, Air Force officials found that they can look deep into space and track a third of the satellites in geostationary orbit. Currently, it takes a few weeks to build up a complete picture, but the Air Force is planning to launch the next-generation surveillance system starting in 2009.

For now, the Air Force says it can currently detect a missile launch anywhere in the world, but it cannot track satellites all the way up into orbit in real time. "It's one thing to bear witness to what is going on in that environment," says Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, director of space and nuclear operations for the Air Force. "It's another thing to be immediately able to attribute what happened to someone. We've got a ways to go to have that kind of clarity as quickly as we need it."

Another way to deter countries from using antisatellite weapons is to be able to quickly replace satellites that are lost. But today, nothing is quick about how the U.S. military or intelligence agencies do business in space. The National Reconnaissance Office, which builds the nation's spy satellites, takes years to complete a system and runs perennially over budget. "The cost of building, launching, and operating a replacement for one of today's photo-reconnaissance satellites would be in the vicinity of $1 billion," says Loren Thompson, a space expert at the Lexington Institute. Moving toward a faster, more dynamic kind of satellite design would be revolutionary for the U.S. government—and expensive. "Would we be able to get funded so that we could be able to build satellites to follow on to something that we just launched?" says Rick Oborn, a spokesman for the NRO. "That's just not the way it works right now."

Good enough to win. The Air Force is running an experimental effort called Operationally Responsive Space, which is testing the feasibility of building a fleet of smaller but less capable satellites. "The reason that space has taken so long in the past is that every time we build a new system, we build a new infrastructure that goes with the system to deliver the best capability that we can for the tremendous investment the taxpayers are making," says General Hyten. "The piece you have to go at is what is good enough to win the conflict." The goal, adds Payton, is to build a common launch infrastructure and design satellites "more like a laptop computer" with ready-made parts that can be assembled and launched "in a couple of weeks rather than a couple of years."

Replacements for a lost satellite would not necessarily have to be based in space. The Air Force is working on a classified research effort to design an airplane that would be, in effect, a successor to the U-2 spy plane. The plane—which would fly fast enough (as much as six times the speed of sound) and high enough to evade most air-defense systems—would not be operational before 2020 at the earliest. More immediately, there are a growing number of commercial companies providing imagery, as well as communications and other functions, from their own satellites, which could serve as an emergency backup for military ones. Already, civilian satellites carry classified military communications, for example.

At the same time, there is nothing inevitable about a space arms race. For one thing, the Chinese themselves were surprised by the international backlash from the test, particularly over the debris issue. Bruce MacDonald, who worked on national security issues in the Clinton White House science adviser's office, points out that diplomatic pressure, or U.S. military planning, could still push Beijing in one direction or the other. "We have to find some middle ground between not responding at all," he says, "and responding in such a way that brings about a self-fulfilling prophecy."