Bold move escalates space war debate

The physics of space killing
Experts tell MSNBC.com that after a space-to-space collision, a hypersonic shock wave goes through the satellite. The shock wave tears the structure apart from the inside out and reduces it to shrapnel.

The collision almost instantaneously results in two separate clouds of debris where once there were two separate objects. Those debris clouds fly approximately along the original paths of the objects, gradually spreading out over time.

If, as in last week's case, one of the high-speed objects was in a suborbital trajectory, its cloud would fall back into the atmosphere fairly quickly. Perhaps it produced a short-lived meteor storm that ground observers might have wondered about.

The original missile ascent might also have been visible over hundreds of miles. In the past — especially in secretive countries such as Russia and China — rocket launchings have led to widespread reports of UFOs. These might trickle in over the next few days, and would be extremely valuable to analyze with the knowledge of what really caused them.

In 1985, the U.S. Air Force fired a kinetic kill vehicle against a retired military satellite called Solwind. The satellite disintegrated into a swarm of fragments, almost 300 of which were big enough to be tracked by ground radars. The last of them took 15 years to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

Soviet tests of killer satellites between 1968 and 1982 showed a different pattern of debris, because the kill mechanism was not a head-on crash. Instead, it was a high-speed buckshot cloud created by firing a shaped charge after the interceptor maneuvered close to the target (presumably to inspect it and verify it was hostile). As a result, the target satellite remained essentially intact, although spinning, with its solar panels and camera ports presumably smashed and a few small pieces possibly breaking off. In contrast, the attacking satellite itself was usually fragmented by the force of the shaped charge’s detonation.

For a number of years, misled by fighter pilot memories, U.S. Air Force analysts believed that the object that did not disintegrate had to be the winner over the one that did — a good example of being fooled by past experience.

The diplomatic orbit
The most obvious reason for China’s test at this time would be to push the United States, and particularly the new Democrat-controlled Congress, into signing a formal treaty banning the use of anti-satellite weapons. Otherwise, any ground-based missile — in a silo, on a submarine, or even on a test range — would have to be considered a potential anti-satellite weapon.

The United States, while asserting that it does not possess and is not developing such a weapon, has become diplomatically isolated on this issue in recent years by proclaiming that such a treaty is undesirable because it isn’t needed — because there has not been any “arms race in space” that would require a formal agreement. The Chinese test trumps that excuse.

The political response has been predictable, and probably just what China intended. For example, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., told The Washington Post that the Chinese action makes it essential that the administration begin negotiations to stop any possible space arms race.

However, there's a problem with relying on the proposed treaty to ban anti-satellite weapons.  The treaty would mean only what each signatory thought it meant — except in the United States, where a ratified treaty would become subject to federal court enforcement and thus would mean whatever any crusading judge wanted it to mean.

A Russian-Chinese working paper on disarmament (PDF file) is not reassuring. The diplomats discuss definitions of concepts such as “Outer Space” or even “Space Weapons,” but they argue that a treaty might not really need specific definitions — for the reason that it is so difficult to reach agreement on them.

Another problem relates to enforcement, particularly with regard to dual-use systems. There are a dozen different projects to develop space rendezvous robots for repair, resupply or inspection in orbit (consider, for example, the Russian-German TECSAS project). The flick of a joystick during close approach is all it takes to convert a rescue mission into an attack. How could a piece of paper ward off that eventuality?

Is the genie out of the bottle?
Now that a ground-launched anti-satellite system has been demonstrated, getting that genie back into the bottle may prove a daunting challenge. Henceforth, any reasonably sized military missile could be a satellite-killer with the addition of a Volkswagen-sized warhead.

Such ambiguities underscore the criticality of credible inspection of all space-bound objects. Both the Russians and Chinese, who are pushing for a treaty, have acknowledged the difficulty of this issue and have proposed identical solutions to the impasse: Forget about inspections, just sign the treaty and trust each other.

At a recent disarmament conference, Chinese representatives said verification of a space treaty was "extremely difficult to negotiate."

"For the time being, to put on hold the verification issue until conditions are ripe, and to negotiate a treaty without verification provisions could be a practical alternative,” the Chinese statement said.

Russian negotiators concurred. “Elaborating the treaty without verification measures, which could be added at a later stage, might be a preferable option,” they said.

Such an approach would eliminate principles of treaty negotiation that go back to the days of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev: verifiability and enforceability. If it all comes down to blind trust of nonbinding, ambiguous promises, why bother signing anything at all?

For China’s long-range military strategy, the potential payoff from last week's bold move is high: to compel the United States into a treaty that will hamper its own space activities, while avoiding collateral consequences. It makes a whole lot more sense than steering onto an expensive new arms race, especially if you can win the race at the starting post.

NBC News space analyst James Oberg spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer. He is the author of several books on international space policy, including "Space Power Theory" and "Star-Crossed Orbits."

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