Air Force microsatellite passes key first tests

NASA’s plan for the Hubble repair envisioned a robot spacecraft that carried a manipulator arm to perform complex hardware changeout, and although that idea has now been dropped, a Russo-German project called TECSAS is attempting to develop the same ability. In another application, a canister carrying soil and rock samples could be fired into orbit by a Mars lander and then be picked up by a robot ship that would return it to Earth.

Baker said the Air Force project meshes well with the capabilities being developed elsewhere. “Like XSS-11, they are all about how do we connect, replenish, replace and repair in space,” he said. “And in a broader scope,” he added,” it’s about how do you operate safely around another object in space.”

Military applications
The Air Force is studying these basic capabilities as well as more specific military applications, senior Defense Department scientists said on condition of anonymity. Two potential military missions in particular are worth considering for follow-on testing, they suggested.

First, the U.S. needs a means of inspecting its own military satellites for external damage, either from accidental breakdown or from hostile activity, and a small "scout satellite" capable of detaching, flying around and reattaching itself could provide critical insights in diagnosing — or even warding off — such damage.

Secondly, a U.S. spacecraft near a foreign spacecraft could perform a number of highly valuable but entirely passive functions. Aside from a detailed physical inspection with a resolution far better than possible from a distance, an object in such a location would be able to intercept narrow-beam communications — radio, laser beam, whatever — that otherwise might elude ground-based sensors.

Such applications (and a few others that experts would not describe in detail) are of a fundamentally military nature, but are not "weapons" in any practical sense. They are neither illegal nor in any way destabilizing, the experts insist.

“It is not designed nor is it a U.S. objective to develop hit-to-kill systems or any direct interference,” a senior Defense Department space expert said. “These experiments are designed to do things in close proximity of other satellites. ... This is much different, and far more complicated , than hitting or disabling satellites.”

One top Russian defense analyst agrees with this assertion. Russian Maj. Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a senior scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Center for International Security, told journalists in June that Russian saber-rattling about “responding” to alleged U.S. space weapons was unnecessary because “in the near future as there are no such projects in the world.”

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