Military launches long-debated satellite

The Russian press has been highly vocal about sounding the alarm, with a classic example published on the newspaper Izvestia's front page on March 29.

"The United States is going to put an anti-missile shield in space – this was announced yesterday by General Henry Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency," correspondent Dmitri Litovkin declared. The reason? “In his opinion, that is the only way of protecting America”.

Obering’s March 27 testimony before the Strategic Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee is readily available (PDF file) and his actual words can be checked. They do not reflect what Litovkin claims they said.

After describing the orbiting sensor tests planned for this year, Obering elaborated on why an operational network of space-based sensors might be valuable. He urged lawmakers to consider deploying such a passive observation network — a network that would have been forbidden by the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that the current Bush administration withdrew from five years ago. The ABM treaty forbade any space-based components of an anti-missile system, whether or not they were actually related to weapons.

Confusing debate with decision
Obering did talk about actual interceptors in orbit, a concept that has been argued over for decades. In terms of pure practicality, a seemingly insurmountable operational obstacle has been the need for hundreds of fast-moving platforms to cover any possible location anywhere on Earth from which a missile might suddenly rise.

"I believe the performance of the [Ballistic Missile Defense] system could be greatly enhanced by an integrated space-based layer," Obering nevertheless continued, touching on the weapons-in-space issue. “Deployment of such a system must be preceded by significant, national-level debate.” To that end, Obering requested a budget of $10 million for 2008 “to begin concept analysis and preparation for small-scale experiments”.

That is hardly the description of an already-approved imminent deployment of a fleet of battle stations. Nor was it accurately reflected by the reporter for the Novosti news agency, who filed a story on the hearings with the headline, “U.S. missile defense chief argues for missile shield in space.” Novosti claimed that Obering said some elements of the missile defense system should be deployed in space, but what he really said was that the United States needed to debate that issue before making a decision years in the future.

Recognizing the realities
Russian press coverage is not universally garbled. A well-informed retired military officer named Vladimir Dvorkin uses original sources and direct interviews to correctly describe the over-wrought hyping of “U.S. space threats” by Kremlin officials. Dvorkin is one of the rare commentators in Russia recognizing the realities of the situation.

Fortunately, spaceflight is a technological exercise where physics is the ultimate judge of reality. The main fear about NFIRE seems centered on its potential to lead to orbiting satellite-killers, not merely missile-killers. None of these critics seems to have worked through the fundamental engineering of the NFIRE-type sensor system, which depends on tracking an extremely hot rocket plume trailing a powerful intercontinental missile.

Orbiting satellites, on the other hand, are in orbit, following a fixed course through space. Because they don’t emit enormous rocket plumes, they could not possibly be observed — much less attacked — by any weapons systems based on NFIRE-type sensors. They have no “fire,” hence nothing to fear from NFIRE.

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