At this month’s first meeting of the newly-reconstituted National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence announced the lofty goal of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon as a stepping stone to expanded human space exploration and the restoration of America’s dominance in space.
But the vice president also had a warning. “According to the U.S. intelligence community, Russia and China are pursuing a full range of anti-satellite technology to reduce U.S. military effectiveness, and they are increasingly considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine,” Pence said.
The early October gathering fell one day after the 60th anniversary of Sputnik, the beach ball-sized Soviet satellite that marked the dawn of the space age, a time when then-President John F. Kennedy famously compared space to a newly discovered ocean.
“Only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war,” Kennedy said in a 1962 speech at Rice University.
But Pence argued that under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. lost its way, falling behind Russia, suffering the indignity of having to pay a premium $30 million apiece for Russian rocket engines for American space launches, and $76 million a seat to hitch a ride on their rockets to the International Space Station.
“Rather than competing with other nations to create the best space technology, the previous administration chose capitulation,” Pence lamented.
Now, the growing gap in space capabilities is not just a matter of national pride, but also America’s security, and Kennedy’s vision of space as a “sea of peace” is as anachronistic as Sputnik itself.
The debate over whether space should be militarized is effectively over, says Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“Satellite surveillance and satellite navigation are critical areas of dependence for the U.S. military, so without those, a lot of the military systems we’ve developed are less effective or ineffective,” Clark said.
He points to a new generation of nanosatellites, sometimes known as “servicing satellites,” that are under development by Russia and China. They are ostensibly designed to repair satellites in orbit, but they could also be put to nefarious ends.
“Servicing satellites are providing the capability to go and manipulate satellites in orbit in a way that would cause them to be disabled or render them unable to do the job that they are supposed to do,” Clark said.
In theory, a small army of killer satellites could seriously degrade America’s global positioning satellites, wreaking havoc on not just the military’s navigation and targeting systems, but the civilian economy as well.
“I don’t think the general public realizes the extent to which the global positioning system’s timing signal is critical for ATM transactions and every other point of sale transaction conducted in the United States and throughout most of the world,” said former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at this month’s Space Council meeting.
“To what extent do we believe that we have defended ourselves if an adversary can bring our economic system near collapse? We may not lose a single piece of hardware, but we’re not functioning as a nation.”
To meet the threat, the U.S. needs a lot of backup systems, Clark said, such as old-fashioned terrestrial and inertial navigation systems, or even a reserve supply of replacement GPS satellites that could launch on short notice.
It also needs a strong deterrent posture.
“We need to be extremely clear that an attack on these assets is an attack on the United States,” Griffin said, “that we will not tolerate it.”
Retired Adm. James Ellis, a former commander of U.S. nuclear forces, agrees, saying there is a precedent for a clear statement serving as a strong deterrent.
“We’ve let adversaries know, particularly in relation to elements of the Nuclear Command and Control Network, how we would view anything that disrupted or disturbed, much less destroyed, those capabilities,” Ellis told the same meeting.
But what might also be helpful would be some “rules of the road” for space, suggests Clark, a former nuclear submarine commander who now studies space issues for CSBA.
“You could think of it like the Law of the Sea Treaty where everybody accedes to a certain set of minimum requirements for how you avoid interference with other people’s operations,” Clark said.
With more than 100 countries or companies active in space with satellites and space programs of their own, the U.S. is competing not so much in a “space race” as a “space scrum,” he said. “It’s becoming increasingly crowded, and there’s not that much governance, so it’s a little bit of the Wild West up there.”
The Space Council has been charged with coming up with recommendations for President Trump by mid-November, including proposals to deter, defeat, and counter space threats to the U.S.
At the close of the first meeting of the National Space Council, resurrected after 24 years by a presidential executive order in June, national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster had a stark warning for any potential adversary considering an attack on U.S. satellites.
“We may not start it,” he said, “but we’ll finish it.”
