Military launches long-debated satellite

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

The U.S. military on Tuesday launched a small missile-watching satellite after years of quiet preparation — and years of alarming reports from critics about its purpose.

The NFIRE spacecraft was sent into orbit atop a commercial Minotaur booster before dawn Tuesday from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Virginia's Wallops Island.

To the Defense Department, which owns and will operate the satellite, NFIRE stands for "Near Field Infrared Experiment." That encapsulates the mission's goal of observing the rocket plumes of military missiles to be launched past it later this year. NFIRE will map and characterize the brightness of the rocket plumes to help the Pentagon design future guidance systems for anti-missile weapons now under consideration.

But to its critics, NFIRE could well be spelled “Fire!” — as in, “launch the weapon!” The project has been labeled an irrevocable step toward the weaponization of outer space. The spacecraft's launch could light a new fire under the debate.

Just last month, Gen. Henry Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency, gave the official view of the NFIRE mission: “We plan to develop space-based sensors to provide a persistent identification and global tracking capability,” he testified to a congressional committee. These are tests of passive tracking satellites, precursors of operational vehicles that could watch for attacks on the United States and its allies. Obering and other program officials insist that nothing on this project relates to interception of such missiles or any other objects.

Two demonstration satellites are to be launched late this year to perform acquisition, tracking and handover tests with live missiles. Prior to those flights, Obering said the NFIRE satellite would “collect high-resolution infrared phenomenology data from boosting targets.”

The explanation is a plausible one, because rocket plumes exist in their true form only in the vacuum of space, and sensors to track them often use wavelengths that are normally blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. To field-test tracking sensors, you have to do it in space — and both Russian and American satellites (and manned spacecraft, such as Russia's Mir space station and the space shuttle) have been experimenting with better and better technology for decades.

Opposing orbits
Critics of U.S. military space activities have an entirely different view. In her latest book, "War in the Heavens," peace activist Helen Caldicott writes: "NFIRE would track and kill missiles … [but] initial NFIRE tests will not include the kill vehicle." Furthermore, she adds, "Obviously if NFIRE and other such systems are deployed, they will provoke countermeasures by powers such as China and Russia" since "it is only a short step from hitting a missile in outer space to hitting an orbiting satellite."

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The fuss over the "kill vehicle" peaked three years ago when an earlier version of the spacecraft was in final launch preparation. That object was indeed a component of a ground-launched anti-missile warhead, modified to carry more cameras and fewer maneuvering thrusters.

Caldicott’s book cited a Moscow newspaper for a quotation attributed to an anonymous Pentagon official upset with the NFIRE program. “We’re crossing the Rubicon into space weaponization,” the official was said to have remarked.

Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, insisted to MSNBC.com that the current NFIRE spacecraft is focused entirely on passive plume sensor tests.

"It’s just an experimental use of sensors to get data on rocket plumes," he said by telephone. “We can use that data to design the guidance system of the kinetic energy interceptor,” a high-acceleration anti-missile system that could be based on land or on ships near the border of a potential missile-launching state.

Lehner said the $10 million appropriation requested by Obering was for analysis and design. "There's no plan for prototypes or for construction," he said. Instead, the money would fund comparisons of the mathematical models and previous sensor tests with the actual results from the NFIRE observations.

“We will get data so that in the future we can make decisions from an informed position,” he said. No decisions about future deployments have been made, he insisted, nor would they be made for years to come. For now, this NFIRE mission is the only one planned, he said.

But that’s not the way that NFIRE and similar U.S. programs are being described around the world.

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