Fear and loathing in orbit

This month's embarrassing collision between NASA’s space robot and its target satellite may have a regrettable "space spinoff" effect as well. The Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, or DART, could focus renewed attention on the question of how easy it actually might be to deliberately hit a space target with a military "killer satellite" — and whether such a weapon was desirable, or needed to be barred by international treaties.

This issue has been simmering for a long time, but it is rapidly approaching a diplomatic boil as some U.S. military space tests, along with alarmist rhetoric, suggest that such weapons are just over the horizon. So blatant are the political agendas involved, and so technologically naïve are the warnings, that any reliable public debate seems hopeless.

The DART spacecraft was supposed to approach and delicately circle a target satellite on April 15, but it apparently became lost and began blundering around blindly, quickly exhausting its rocket fuel. During the course of these wild swings through space, DART actually collided with the target, a small military communications testbed named "MUBLCOMM."

NASA officials did not release this information until journalists confronted them several days later with evidence received from space workers.

Runaway debate
Even before the launch, DART had been accused of being a cover for a space weaponization program directed by the Pentagon. Although space has been militarized since the very beginning with satellites that support earthside combat, and although surface-to-surface missiles travel through space along their paths, only on a few rare occasions has hardware actually been put into orbit to conduct direct combat. That’s what "space weaponization" has come to signify.

But is the test of a robot rendezvous satellite an unambiguous prelude to introducing such weapons? Space experts contacted by MSNBC.com unanimously dismissed such notions as unproven, unlikely and even in some cases preposterous.

Aside from the existence of several compelling non-weapon uses for such a robot rendezvous capability, these experts pointed out that other nations (such as Japan) and private corporations (such as Orbital Recovery Ltd.) are pursuing parallel development projects, none with any weapons application.

Some missions would refuel or repair unmanned satellites. Others would carry supplies to the international space station. When the time comes to bring back the first soil samples from Mars, the canister containing the samples must be linked automatically to a homeward-bound rocket in orbit around the Red Planet. Initial robot rendezvous test maneuvers at Mars are already being planned for later this decade.

But the theme of "space weaponization" is a challenging one, and the United States finds itself isolated on the issue for a number of reasons. Any hope of a logical resolution depends on a rational debate over U.S. capabilities and ambitions in space. DART’s accidental contribution to this debate will only make a bad situation worse.

The weaponization mantra
The DART collision came at a time of heightened suspicions about U.S. space technology tests. Besides DART, there is the XSS-11 military mission and even NASA's Deep Impact probe, aimed at deliberately colliding with a comet.

Another highly controversial weapons-related military satellite is called NFIRE, for “Near-Field Infrared Experiment.” The NFIRE launch was originally planned for last year, but has now been put off until late this year at the earliest. Designed to collect close-up readings of missile exhaust plumes from an orbiting observation point, it was to carry a satellite that dove in closer to the climbing rocket — arguably an “attack vehicle” against enemy satellites.

Russian news accounts tended to cast the DART exercise as a thinly veiled military exercise: In one article, Kommersant's Ivan Safronov and Gazeta.ru's Alina Chernoivanova reported that  Russia’s Defense Ministry was “alarmed at the American experiments on autonomous rendezvous programs for spacecraft.”

According to the Russian journalists, NASA’s DART satellite “independently determined the location, and based on the silhouette identified the target” for its approach. The military satellite’s silhouette “was given in advance,” the article claimed (erroneously), and added that DART then performed a military-style ‘IFF’ (Identify Friend-or-Foe exchange of radio signals). This also was inaccurate.

Similar alarms were sounded by the newspaper Izvestia, the Interfax-Military News Agency and the RIA-Novosti news agency.

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