Fear and loathing in orbit

Chinese join in the confusion
The Russian reports aren't the only examples showing how comments that seemed clear enough in English suddenly wind up sounding alarming in a foreign language. Writing in the Beijing newspaper Jiefangjun Bao, Zhang Cao followed the same pattern when he asserted that U.S. policy was becoming one of attacking other satellites whenever interference was suspected with an American satellite.

“In current U.S. military regulations,” he wrote, “a satellite attack will be regarded as the initiation of war, and the response from U.S. armed forces will be to ‘counterattack.’ Thus, we can see from this ‘pre-emptive’ strategic thinking that it is very likely that the U.S. military will blindly use its counter-satellite weapons to attack satellites of an innocent country when a U.S. satellite breaks down due to the malfunction of major parts, and this increases the possibility of the ignition of an unexpected war.”

As proof of this, Cao quoted Maj. Gen. Daniel Darnell, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Warfare Center, as saying, "If there is trouble with your orbiter, your response should be to 'think of a possible attack.'"

“This can be regarded as a hint by a U.S. official about the ‘pre-emptive’ strategy,” Cao concluded.

This conclusion appears to be a misinterpretation of Darnell’s advice that satellite trouble should be thought of as an indicator of a possible foreign attack on that American satellite. Darnell was clearly not advocating a hair-trigger counterattack whenever a U.S. satellite encounters trouble.

Technological truths
The level of confusion here doesn’t have to be disheartening. Unlike many other themes in arms control and general diplomacy, space weapons policy is subject to physical laws and engineering principles. This in turn allows conflicting claims to be measured and judged as to their practical credibility.

Take last year’s accusations about the NFIRE satellite. The Moscow Times said the test would mark a "sinister milestone," with the United States willing to break "a long-held taboo and launch the first weapon into the global commons of outer space." An ABCNews.com report called it the "first real step" toward the "unprecedented weaponization of space."

In reality, the test would have represented no such thing.

First, to calm down the Russian rhetoric: It's true that, over the years, both the United States and Russia developed ground-based anti-satellite weapons, some using air-launched missiles, some using components of existing anti-missile systems. But the only ones to test or deploy space-to-space weapons in orbit were the Russians. The United States did not respond.

Secondly, the idea that the NFIRE system could be used in an anti-satellite mode fails on the basis of the guidance technology. For anti-missile testing, a defensive weapon tracks the hot exhaust plume of the rocket in flight, or uses massive ground-based radars. An orbiting "killer satellite" based on NFIRE would have to look for free-flying satellites with no convenient rocket plumes streaming from them, and it wouldn’t have the electrical power to track a target at the range required for changing to an intercept course. The whole idea collapses under its technological impossibility.

The issue of basing weapons in orbit, whether for missile defense or satellite attacks, is well worth public and diplomatic debate. But spaceflight is such a tricky business, as NASA has taught us with lessons ranging from the Columbia shuttle disaster to the DART debacle, that the misinformation and misrepresentation threaten to make any reliable resolution impossible. So far, a rational debate on the issue of weapons in space has yet to be even launched.

James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer. He is also an expert on Soviet and Russian space policy and author of the book "Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance."

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