April 6, 1965, it became a reality with the launching of Intelsat I, also called “Early Bird,” the first commercial geostationary communications satellite. There are today about thirty such communications satellites covering North America and more than a hundred orbiting the planet in different GEO locations. In 2002, the so-called Clarke Orbit, that is, the band where spacecraft can maintain a geosynchronous position with relation to the Earth, held over three hundred satellites of various kinds.80 The fifteen U.S. early-warning satellites monitoring missile launches, for example, are almost entirely in GEO, which is quite crowded.81 When a satellite finally wears out and ceases to function, scrupulous satellite operators have often provided small rockets and enough fuel to move them a few hundred miles higher into a cemetery orbit, but not all operators can or are willing to assume these costs.
One of the biggest communications satellites is the Department of Defense’s Milstar, the size of a city bus, with electricity-generating solar panels as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The six Milstars currently in orbit are the most secure of all the various communications satellites. They resist jamming and their electronics are hardened against the electromagnetic pulse that would accompany a nuclear attack.82 In addition to being used for direct broadcasting, these communications satellites act as relay stations, bouncing telephone calls, TV images, Internet connections, and other signals from one part of the world to another.
Many satellite functions are quite mundane. As Richard DalBello, former president of the Satellite Industry Association, explains, “When you go to Wal-Mart to buy a pair of sneakers, the credit card goes up to the satellite, gets validated and approved. Then the same satellite tells Wal-Mart that it just sold a pair of sneakers at your neighborhood store, and Wal-Mart adjusts its inventory accordingly.”83 Our dependency on such capabilities can be starkly revealed when they are suddenly withdrawn. On May 19, 1998, the satellite Galaxy IV, owned by PanAmSat, was in geosynchronous orbit above Kansas. At 6:00 p.m. it suffered a failure of its onboard control system as well as all its backup systems and began to roll aimlessly. Some six hundred stations of the National Public Radio system, the CBS network, CNN’s Airport Channel, the Chinese Television Network in Hong Kong, and the Soldiers’ Satellite Network, which brings entertainment programs to the armed forces, were instantly knocked off the air. Many self-service gas stations found themselves unable to accept credit cards. Private business television networks operated by Aetna, Microsoft, 3M, and the Ford Motor Company shut down, as did the Ohio, Minnesota, and Texas state lotteries. Some thirty-five million personal pagers on the East Coast went dead, causing hospitals and obstetricians’ offices to try frantically to reach doctors via telephone for emergency surgeries and unexpected baby deliveries.84
No one knows what happened to Galaxy IV—it seems likely that both the primary and backup onboard computers that navigate the spacecraft without ground intervention failed for unknown reasons. Nonetheless, it is air force doctrine that, until proved otherwise, we should assume that Galaxy IV was attacked by an antisatellite weapon operated by an unnamed hostile power.
Major General Daniel Darnell, head of the Air Force Space Command’s Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, has exhorted all satellite operators to assume that any disruption to their spacecraft is most likely a hostile strike.85 “The first response when something goes wrong,” he warns, “should be ‘think possible attack.’“ Actually, quite a number of events other than deliberate physical or electronic attack can cause a satellite to fail, including natural radiation emanating from galactic space (e.g., cosmic rays or solar storms), collisions with space debris, or technical malfunction.86 The problem is that the air force has no way of knowing which of these things may have caused a particular failure. As the Center for Defense Information’s Theresa Hitchens notes, “The Air Force does not have the capability at this time to ascertain on the spot whether any disruption of satellite operations is due to a malfunction, such as faulty software or space weather, or the result of some sort of deliberate interference or attack.”87 As usual, however, the military chooses to follow the worst-case scenario most useful for its future funding needs. As Lisbeth Gronlund, codirector of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, points out, its strategy for space combat is invariably “Fire, Aim, Ready” in that order.88
In an effort to “see” what is actually going on in space at any given time, the U.S. Air Force is working on “autonomous proximity operations”—orbital maneuvers that would allow satellites to inspect other satellites, diagnose malfunctions, and perhaps provide on-orbit servicing. The problem is that research in this area is devoted primarily to producing microsatellites, weighing less than one hundred kilograms, and nanosatellites, weighing less than ten kilograms, which the air force disguises to look like space debris and hopes to use to sneak up on other nations’ satellites. These minisatellites would not, however, be on innocent inspection missions. They are designed to surround other satellites and photograph, jam, blind, or collide with them. Microsatellites are inherently dual-use and could function as lethal antisatellite weapons. The main U.S. stealth satellites are in the top-secret Misty series, first put into orbit in 1990, which, by 2005, had reportedly cost us $9.5 billion. Although the air force thought they were undetectable from Earth, the first one was spotted almost at once by amateur space observers in Canada and Europe.89
The latest innovation is an experimental microsatellite, XSS-11, that deploys tiny probes to inspect or service spacecraft in distress, according to the carefully worded air force publicity statement. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on April 11, 2005. The plan is for the XSS-11 to remain in space for twelve to eighteen months and inspect six or seven spent rocket stages and dead U.S. satellites. Some space watchers have speculated that the XSS-11 is actually testing antisatellite concepts to disable enemy craft.90
Jeffrey Lewis of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs reports on two joint British- Chinese experimental microsatellites of fifty kilograms each, whose controllers were able to maneuver within nine meters of a Chinese target satellite. Lewis concludes, “If the Chinese were to conduct a proximity maneuver near a U.S. satellite, the reaction [in the Pentagon] would be apoplectic.”91 Nonetheless, Theresa Hitchens warns, “There will be a price to pay the first time a U.S. anti-satellite weapon shoots down an innocent Chinese communications satellite because a crucial widget on a U.S. satellite conked out due to faulty manufacturing processes.”92
These problems will only get worse. In order to protect our nation’s and others’ space assets from the air force’s hubris and incompetence, we must relearn how to cooperate with our fellow inhabitants of the planet and take the lead in crafting international agreements on the rules of the road in space, particularly treaties to control weapons in space. We need to agree, for example, that a country’s technical means of observing and verifying what other nations are doing are never appropriate targets of anti-satellite or other kinds of space weapons. We should outlaw all weapons that are designed to destroy other nations’ reconnaissance and surveillance satellites. This was the principle contained in the old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which we foolishly abandoned in accordance with the recommendations of the 2001 Rumsfeld space commission. The reason is that if one side blinds another, the country that is blinded is almost compelled to conclude that it is being set up for an attack and should therefore use everything it’s got, including nuclear weapons, in retaliation.
The United States has greatly damaged the integrity of international law by refusing to be constrained by its norms, even though no nation needs international law more than we do. International law offers guidelines to acceptable behavior for all nations, rich and poor, and, since violations of the guidelines invite retaliation, it provides deterrence against illegal behavior. The current cluttering of key orbits with debris, for example, reflects a lack of cooperation and our own shortsighted imperialist arrogance. Without any rules on space debris, a poor state with few technical capabilities could decide to blind the United States by the active deployment of space garbage. Such a genuinely “rogue state” could, for instance, detonate a nuclear weapon in space, which is banned by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty but is actively discussed in every military headquarters around the world, particularly since the United States pays so little attention to treaty obligations. Such a detonation would not kill anyone and would not create a worldwide “nuclear winter,” but its electromagnetic pulse would instantly fry the electronics in all orbiting satellites.
