Rumsfeld's potential "pearl harbour" in space

[Annie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/washington/03laser.html?ex=130430880 0&en=0e5d7ccfe334c2ee&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
May 3, 2006
Administration Researches Laser Weapon
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress in February, is part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive. No treaty or law forbids such work.

The laser research was described by federal officials who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's political sensitivity. The White House has recently sought to play down the issue of space arms, fearing it could become an election-year liability.

Indeed, last week Republicans and Democrats on a House Armed Services subcommittee moved unanimously to cut research money for the project in the administration's budget for the 2007 fiscal year. While Republicans on the panel would not discuss their reasons for the action, Congressional aides said it reflected a bipartisan consensus for moving cautiously on space weaponry, a potentially controversial issue that has yet to be much debated.

The full committee is expected to take up the budget issue today.

The laser research is far more ambitious than a previous effort by the Clinton administration nearly a decade ago to test an antisatellite laser. It would take advantage of an optical technique that uses sensors, computers and flexible mirrors to counteract the atmospheric turbulence that seems to make stars twinkle.

The weapon would essentially reverse that process, shooting focused beams of light upward with great clarity and force.

Though futuristic and technically challenging, the laser work is relatively inexpensive by government standards — about $20 million in 2006, with planned increases to some $30 million by 2011 — partly because no weapons are as yet being built and partly because the work is being done at an existing base, an unclassified government observatory called Starfire in the New Mexico desert.

In interviews, military officials defended the laser research as prudent, given the potential need for space arms to defend American satellites against attack in the years and decades ahead. "The White House wants us to do space defense," said a senior Pentagon official who oversees many space programs, including the laser effort. "We need that ability to protect our assets" in orbit.

But some Congressional Democrats and other experts fault the research as potential fuel for an antisatellite arms race that could ultimately hurt this nation more than others because the United States relies so heavily on military satellites, which aid navigation, reconnaissance and attack warning.

In a statement, Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat on the subcommittee who opposes the laser's development, thanked her Republican colleagues for agreeing to curb a program "with the potential to weaponize space."

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs, said the subcommittee's action last week was a significant break with the administration. "It's really the first time you've seen the Republican-led Congress acknowledge that these issues require public scrutiny," she said.

In a statement, the House panel, the Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, made no reference to such policy disagreements but simply said that "none of the funds authorized for this program shall be used for the development of laser space technologies with antisatellite purposes."

It is unclear whether the Republican-controlled Congress will sustain the subcommittee's proposed cut to the administration's request, even if the full House Armed Services Committee backs the reduction.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years but discussed it in new detail in its February budget request. The documents stated that for the 2007 fiscal year, starting in October, the research will seek to "demonstrate fully compensated laser propagation to low earth orbit satellites."

The documents listed several potential uses of the laser research, the first being "antisatellite weapons."

The overall goal of the research, the documents said, is to assess unique technologies for "high-energy laser weapons," in what engineers call a proof of concept. Previously, the laser work resided in a budget category that paid for a wide variety of space efforts, the documents said. But for the new fiscal year, it has moved under the heading "Advanced Weapons Technology."

In interviews, Pentagon officials said the policy rationale for the arms research dated from a 1996 presidential directive in the Clinton administration that allows "countering, if necessary, space systems and services used for hostile purposes."

In 1997, the American military fired a ground-based laser in New Mexico at an American spacecraft, calling it a test of satellite vulnerability. Federal experts said recently that the laser had had no capability to do atmospheric compensation and that the test had failed to do any damage.

Little else happened until January 2001, when a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, warned that the American military faced a potential "Pearl Harbor" in space and called for a defensive arsenal of space weapons.

The Starfire research is part of that effort.

Federal officials and private experts said the antisatellite work drew on a body of unclassified advances that have made the Starfire researchers world-famous among astronomers. Their most important unclassified work centers on using small lasers to create artificial stars that act as beacons to guide the process of atmospheric compensation.

When astronomers use the method, they aim a small laser at a point in the sky close to a target star or galaxy, and the concentrated light excites molecules of air (or, at higher altitudes, sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere) to glow brightly.

Distortions in the image of the artificial star as it returns to Earth are measured continuously and used to deform the telescope's flexible mirror and rapidly correct for atmospheric turbulence. That sharpens images of both the artificial star and the astronomical target.

Unclassified pictures of Starfire in action show a pencil-thin laser beam shooting up from its hilltop observatory into the night sky.

The Starfire researchers are now investigating how to use guide stars and flexible mirrors in conjunction with powerful lasers that could flash their beams into space to knock out enemy satellites, according to federal officials and Air Force budget documents.

"These are really smart folks who are optimistic about their technology," said the senior Pentagon official. "We want those kind of people on our team."

But potential weapon applications, he added, if one day approved, "are out there years and years and years into the future."

The research centers on Starfire's largest telescope, which Air Force budget documents call a "weapon-class beam director." Its main mirror, 11.5 feet in diameter, can gather in faint starlight or, working in the opposite direction, direct powerful beams of laser light skyward.

Federal officials said Starfire's antisatellite work had grown out of one of the site's other military responsibilities: observing foreign satellites and assessing their potential threat to the United States. In 2000, the Air Force Research Laboratory, which runs Starfire, said the observatory's large telescope, by using adaptive optics, could distinguish objects in orbit the size of a basketball at a distance of 1,000 miles.

Another backdrop to the antisatellite work is Starfire's use of telescopes, adaptive optics and weak lasers to track and illuminate satellites. It is considered a baby step toward developing a laser powerful enough to cripple spacecraft.

Col. Gregory Vansuch, who oversees Starfire research for the Air Force Research Laboratory, said in an interview that the facility used weak lasers and the process of atmospheric compensation to illuminate satellites "all the time." Such tests, Colonel Vansuch emphasized, are always done with the written permission of the satellite's owner.

He said that about once a month, Starfire conducted weeklong experiments that illuminate satellites up to 20 times.

Though the House subcommittee recommended eliminating all financing next year for antisatellite laser research, it retained money for other laser development. Congressional aides said the proposed cut to the Air Force's $21.4 million budget request for such work would eliminate two of three areas of development, for a total reduction of $6.5 million.

At least one public-interest group has seized on the issue. Last week, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, based in Brunswick, Me., said that if Congress approved the antisatellite money, "the barrier to weapons in space will have been destroyed."

[chek]

It would be worth reminding the clowns behind these schemes that the objection to such systems, apart from the ethical ones, are that the continued efforts to create yet more space junk with no forseeable methods to deal with it will soon make space itself unusable for any purposes whatsoever.

"Orbiting our world at hypervelocity (10 km/sec), mostly in low-Earth orbits, are a large number of satellites (the real number is classified) and a debris field of space trash which travels at speeds of up to 17,000 miles an hour. As of 1987, orbital pollution was composed of more than 7000 objects 10 cm, 50,000 objects from 1–10 cm, and 10–100 billion paint chips which are now in orbit. By 2002, the US Air Force Space Command was tracking 10,000 objects 10 cm: “operating and dead satellites, explosion fragments from rocket engines, garbage bags and frozen sewage dumped by astronauts, shrapnel from antisatellite weapons tests, 34 nuclear reactors and their fuel cores, an escaped wrench, an astronaut’s glove and a toothbrush”. Returning space shuttles often have dings and window cracks. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell described how a paint chip nearly took out the Space Shuttle and that it is “nearly too dangerous now” to travel in space. The 1987 risk of a damaging collision during several years in orbit was 1 in 500. The volume of debris doubles about every 5 years and weighed 3000 tons in 1997. Pieces of space trash 10 cm must each be identified and tracked by complex military computers in order to differentiate them from a missile attack. Each piece of space trash is reported and registered annually with the UN.

In January 1978, when Cosmos 954, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite, fell from orbit over Canada, it released radioactive debris and dust contaminating a path 2,000 km long. That was not the first one. NASA’s New Horizons space probe heading for Pluto is powered by a Radioactive Thermoelectric Generator or “RTG” containing 24 pounds (about 132,465 Curies) of extremely deadly plutonium—mostly Pu 238, and about 12 per cent Pu 239 (aka ‘weapons grade plutonium’). The military connection to this launch is that covertly RTGs could be used for orbiting spy satellites, but the military will not admit using them. Military plans to use nuclear weapons and nuclear powered propulsion in space should be of great concern. Lower orbital space is already contaminated with uranium and its decay products from atmospheric testing. It remains suspended in the atmosphere until it is rained or snowed out of the air, depositing it in the environment.

The expanding ring of man-made garbage circling the earth at hypervelocity, is an increasing threat to spacecraft and satellites. Objects “greater than 1 mm will likely penetrate the skin of a satellite or a solar panel, those greater than 1 cm will cause the break-up of satellites, and those greater than 10 cm can cause the total fragmentation of a satellite”. The UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space reported in 1999 that 16,000 space objects had reentered the atmosphere in the previous 40 years. That is about one object a week with a cross section of one square metre.

Military and NASA officials dismiss claims by scientists and astronauts that weapons in space could leave so much debris that lower orbital space would be unusable. The danger of radioactive pollution from nuclear weapons in space is never mentioned.

In a speech in April 2002, Astronaut Sally Ride said anti-satellite weapons would be “disastrous”, particularly between 150 and 400 miles high. This zone includes the space shuttle, international space station, and reconnaissance satellites.

Yet in the face of the new upgraded Russian Topol and Bulova missiles, and of the complete failure of the US land-based anti-missile missiles, space-based weapons are the only defence possible. A high-tech space battle could be catastrophic as biophysicist John Primack argues, because if an enemy chose a low-tech delivery of “giant loads of rock or metal pellets into space”:

No actual space war even has to be fought. Any country that felt threatened by America’s starting to place lasers or other weapons in space would only have to launch the equivalent of gravel to destroy the sophisticated weaponry.

(“Scientist: Space weapons pose debris threat” Richard Stenger, CNN, May 3, 2002).

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2006/Earth-Weapon-Moret24feb06.htm

[THETRUTHWILLSETU3]

[scubadiver]

Given that Annie rejects the No Planes Theory I think I can predict her answer!



As for David? Who knows...

[Annie]

Hi TTWSU3

Well, all I did was post an article from the New York Times. I am just a humble reporter.....

In terms of the No Planes Theory, I would always encourage academic research. However, I have said many times that we have far stronger evidence that, at the very least, disproves the official version of 911. Let's concentrate on that as a campaign, rather that focusing on the minutiae. This issue is just too important NOT to spread the word as widely and effectively as possible.

Regards

Annie