The Irresistible Force Proposes to the Immovable Object
S. Raghotham

A Revolution in Space Affairs? - Part I
S. Raghotham

As it waits for George Bush to pronounce his policy on the weaponisation of space, the world stands at a moment of transformation. A combination of geopolitical/geostrategic change, accelerating pace of technology and the ongoing innovations in military thinking are launching back into space a part of the revolution that in the first place came from up there. Bush is likely to give this trend a hard push forward, but even if he does not do so, he is unlikely to either seek or be able to reverse it. For, the drivers of this transformation in space affairs are well underway and cannot be put back into the box and shut.

For most of the Cold War period, the US and the former Soviet Union were the only competitors that mattered in space and their competition was driven primarily by military considerations. Since the late 1980s, however, China, the European Space Agency (ESA) and India have stepped up their space activities. All three have built up major launch capabilities. China and the ESA are already players in the global satellite launch market. India, which has the largest constellation of remote sensing satellites orbiting the earth, is a major player in the data services market. One of the few areas where Russia still maintains world-leading capability is in space - both military and commercial. It dominates the space launch industry.

As a sign of their growing capabilities and confidence, they have all announced ambitious space ventures over the past few years. China, for instance, is embarked on launching a series of remote sensing, weather, navigation and communications satellites into high orbits. It is already capable of launching a five ton satellite into geosynchronous orbit and is now building rockets to double the capability. In October 2003, China became only the third nation in the world to have launched a man into space on its own. This fall, it will send two taikonauts into space for five days. China intends to follow this up with a second phase between 2006 and 2010 during which it will achieve space docking and space walking capabilities. By 2020, China plans to have its own 20-tonne class permanent space station operating.

Russia is moving purposefully, amidst economic difficulties, to replace its Soviet-era Soyuz manned vehicles with a reusable spacecraft called Kliper. It is now being increasingly courted for space launch and data services, including by the ESA. The ESA is building its own global positioning system, Galileo, which in time will evolve as a major challenger to the US GPS. Indias decade plan until 2008 includes several new remote sensing, weather and communications satellites. India is also building its own global positioning system, Gagan. It has signed up as Russias exclusive partner for the latters GLONASS global positioning system, which it will help upgrade. India is also in talks with the ESA to be a partner in the Galileo system, which would serve its civilian navigation purposes.

In the 1990s, driven by the explosion of mobile telephony, satellite bandwidth for the internet, earth-observation data for commercial and development purposes and President Clintons decision to open up the GPS navigation system for civilian use, private corporations became major players in the space launch and data services industries. This commercialisation has made it possible for even non-space-faring countries around the world to make use of space technology. Commercial success has spurred private corporations onto even more ambitious, but ever more realistic, investments of hundreds of millions of dollars to make space the next tourist frontier.

But the globalisation of space is most evident in the military realm. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelds commissions on ballistic missile defence and space in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and the 1999 Cox Report on Chinese espionage of nuclear and space technology had already put military space affairs in the spotlight during the last months of Bill Clintons presidency. Bushs 2001 withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the announcement of a multi-tiered missile defence system has made a renewed Space Race virtually inevitable and has accelerated the globalisation of military space. China is already making and testing a variety of missile decoys; it is known to have programmes to build ground-based lasers and kinetic anti-satellite weapons and has become an early adopter of micro- and nano-satellite technology in its quest to build orbital anti-satellite weapons. One innovative orbital weapon that China is reportedly trying to build is a parasitic satellite - a nano-satellite that would attach itself to a US spacecraft undetected. When directed, it would eat up its hosts electronics and disable it.

Russia has for long had the capability to deploy ground and space-based anti-satellite weapons as well as orbital nuclear weapons such as the Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS) of Cold War vintage. In 1975, the Soviets demonstrated the ability to disrupt American satellites temporarily by hitting them with a low-intensity ground-based laser. Now, Russia also has several ongoing programmes to build new nuclear missiles - including one that would fly as a ballistic missile in space but would have the low trajectory of a cruise missile when within the earths atmosphere -- that would penetrate missile defences.

At least some of Indias remote sensing satellites - such as the Resourcesat-1 launched in 2003 and the Cartosat-1 launched in May 2005 - are also useful militarily because of their high-resolution capabilities. In 2001, India launched its first dedicated military satellite. Called Technology Experiment Satellite (TES), it has been beaming one-metre resolution pictures to the Indian military. It was a star feature of a 10-day combined Army-Air Force exercise in May 2005 to try out a new networked warfighting doctrine in a nuclear environment. In 2006, India will launch a microwave radar imaging satellite (RISAT), which will give it observation capabilities at night and in cloudy conditions. India reportedly has plans to launch six military satellites as part of a $50 million project.

Following the American lead, the Indian Air Force has announced a desire to transform into an aerospace force. Towards this end, it is acquiring Phalcon AWACS and a number of UAVs that would be integrated with space data links. A former air force chief is reported to have said, and quickly retracted, that India is building a command headquarters for possible future orbital weapons. What is well known, however, is that India is keen to build a missile defence system for itself. It is building components of an integrated air and missile defence system indigenously. It has acquired the Green Pine radar and battle management system for the Israeli Arrow anti-missile system but has been unable to acquire the missile battery for the same due to American pressures. It is now, however, in high-level talks with the US to acquire the Patriot-3 anti-missile system.

Days before Chinas first manned mission in 2003, Japan restructured its space programme in an effort to gain a higher profile. Recovering quickly from a failed launch of spy satellites just a month after the Chinese manned flight success, Japan recently launched a communications satellite aboard its H2A rocket. JAXA, the new single national agency for space, is shifting focus from conventional satellite launches towards building a Japanese space shuttle to undertake manned missions.

But it is not just low and high orbit space that is becoming globalised. The phenomenon extends all the way to the moon. President Bush wants the US to return to the moon by 2020. The determination with which the US is pursuing interest in the moon can be seen in the radical changes NASA is effecting in the way it does business. In one such innovation, NASA has started to announce Centennial Challenges - $80 million in prize money for technology innovations that will help it ultimately to establish a self-sustaining lunar base. The latest such challenge announced is a $250,000 prize for technology that will pull oxygen out of moon regolith.

Japan wants to land robots on the moon by 2010. Soon after, it will build a reusable space shuttle to carry out manned missions to the moon. Japans plan is to achieve advances in robotics and nanotechnology that would help it to have a manned lunar base operating by 2025.

Russias Kliper passenger spacecraft is expected to begin taking humans beyond earth orbit in 2015 and is said to be capable of flying to the moon and beyond. China plans to send lunar orbiters and unmanned landers within a decade and lunar sample return missions by 2020. The ESAs long-term solar system exploration plans start with manned missions to the moon in 2024. India is preparing for its first unmanned moon mission in 2007. Called Chandrayaan (Moon Voyage)-I, the Indian plan is to launch a remote sensing orbiter and land probes from several countries. Both the orbiter and the landing probes will look for resources - minerals, water/ice, helium concentrations. If the 2007 mission is successful, the Indian space agency plans to follow it up with at least one more lunar mission before 2015.

National prestige is certainly a key motive in the plans for lunar missions and bases. While the US strives to keep its leadership position and enhance that lead, the Chinese and Indian desire to be seen to have arrived on the global power scene will mean a growing challenge to the American position in space. Physicist Freeman Dyson perhaps described the mood in Washington accurately when he said recently of the US lunar ambition, If the Chinese push us, well move even faster. Similarly, Japan finds it necessary to counter the growing international influence of China.

But the more salient factor driving lunar missions is the search for resources and this, indeed, will become critical in the decades ahead. The epic scale of growth in China and India means that these economies will need ever larger quantities of natural resources. Their demand for oil, for instance, has already pushed up world prices to record levels. This upward trend in prices is only going to accelerate in the next two decades as the world uses up its known reserves of oil at a rapid pace. According to the Worldwatch Institutes Vital Signs 2005 report, China is now driving the consumption and production of almost everything, threatening to deplete the worlds resources. Consequently, the costs of raw materials are rocketing up in the world markets. As Indias manufacturing sector expands, this situation will become critical. The West and Japan now also have to reckon with the fact that for the first time, China and India have the ability to project military and diplomatic power far beyond their shores. As their economies grow, they will tend to become increasingly involved in the politics and security of their resource bases and lines of communication. Thus, key Asian and African resources will become increasingly scarce or prohibitively expensive for the West and Japan, although even China and India themselves will find it increasingly expensive to acquire resources.

Meanwhile, the globalisation and commercialisation of space has caused a continuous fall in the costs of space launch (cost per kilogram in orbit) while technological advances are leading to gains in capability per kilogram in orbit. The idea of exploiting space in general, and the moons location and resources in particular, has therefore started to appeal to many in the US and the other space powers. Indeed, in the US, long-forgotten ideas from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Solar Power Satellite (SPS), are now being ferreted out and their feasibility re-examined in the light of new technologies. Japan, too, plans to build its own SPS by 2040. According to Jet Propulsion Laboratorys Dr. Neville Marzwell, using existing technology, a Solar Power Satellite could generate energy at a cost of 60-80 cents per kilowatt-hour, including construction costs for the first system. In 15-20 years, this could be brought down to 7-10 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour for conventional electricity.

An even more feasible and simpler idea gaining ground is to beam solar power as microwaves from the moon. According to physicist David Criswell, while building a massive satellite array in space to capture and beam sunlight would require immense gains in technology and costs that are still decades away, the natural base and resources that the moon provides makes it both currently viable and indispensable for a space solar power base.

The moon is also a rich source of helium that could fuel a future nuclear fusion reactor. But not just energy, the moon will also be mined for minerals and new materials. Indias lunar orbiter, for instance, is a remote sensing satellite being sent to find commercial and strategic minerals. Japans space officials have said their hope is to establish a base on the moon that could mine resources found on and under the lunar surface.

As space historian Robert Zimmermann wrote recently, "We are at the dawn of a new colonial age. The growing space competition between nations is in many ways very reminiscent of the 19th century competition between the European powers Today, a new list of nations - India, China, Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States -- are throwing their resources at space exploration in much the same way.

27 May 2005

In the 1940s and 1950s, the US and the Soviet Union coveted space as the ultimate High Ground from which to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, especially to watch each other as they raced on earth to build and test bigger nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles. In the 1960s, the first military communication, weather and navigation satellites were launched into higher orbits. The two militaries started to use satellites for nuclear command, control and communications and later for missile guidance. Attempts were made during the late 1960s and early 1970s to build orbital anti-satellite weapons and missile defences, but these were negotiated away. A combination of technological infancy and military and political prudence limited the purpose of space to being just the High Ground, and a mutually open and shared one at that. Sustained military presence was limited to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the military mission was restricted to Space Support - that is, to launch space vehicles and manage the satellites in orbit.

In the 1980s, the US military started to use space-based assets across the range of military activities and geographies due to three interrelated developments: one, the development in the 1970s of the ability to network computers; two, the ability to launch and utilise communications and navigation technology had matured; and three, advances in computing technology gave missile makers the ability to put fast onboard computers that gave missiles in flight the ability to react quickly to guidance signals from satellites. These technologies together made it possible for the US military to interact with US warfighters across the globe in near-real time. They also made possible precision, standoff warfighting. The 1991 Gulf War demonstrated the power of what came to be called the first Space War. As the US military realised its benefits, it added a second military space mission: Space Force Enhancement - the use of space to enhance warfighting capability on the ground, sea and air.

The Gulf War demonstration of high-tech warfare made the Chinese sit up and worry about what they would have to encounter if they attempted to take Taiwan by force as well as about increasing American hegemony in the post-Cold War era. Since then, the Chinese have keenly studied US high-tech warfare. The PLA has reformulated the Mao-era Local War doctrine to Local War under High-Tech Conditions. As a direct consequence of that reformulation, China has expanded and accelerated its space programme to include navigation, remote sensing and increased surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to gain information advantage. More importantly, since 1998, China has focused intensely on developing micro-satellite capabilities with an intent to build orbital anti-satellite weapons. In Chinese calculus, the opening shots in a US-China confrontation, possibly over Taiwan, would have to be its anti-satellite weapons destroying Americas eyes and ears in the sky and thus deny it information dominance, the very foundation of US conventional military superiority.

The flattering attention bestowed by the Chinese on their Space War made American military and civilian strategists aware of both Americas dependence on space as well as the vulnerability of its space assets. In their book War and Anti-War, the Tofflers quote Eliot Cohen: In the Gulf War we faced no attempts to blind or disable our satellitesIn the not-so-distant future this may change. In 1993, the Chief of Air Staff told Congress that We simply must find a way to get on with the construction of capabilities aimed at ensuring that no nation can deny us part of our hard-won space superiorityWe can limit our adversaries ability to use space against us.

The Clinton administrations National Space Policy statement in 1996 formalised this quest into a third military space mission: Space Control - the Department of Defense would maintain space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space and, if directed, deny such freedom to adversaries.

But the Clinton administration did not put the plan into action for two reasons. First, it preferred to treat China as a strategic partner. In fact, through the Clinton years, China acquired technology not only clandestinely through espionage, but the American administration itself opened wide the technology pipe to China hoping that that would help America engage China as a partner. And, second, the Clinton administration also believed that the US could continue to maintain its dominance in space by simply keeping afloat the threat that if any other power sought to weaponise space or use space against US interests in general, America would respond by weaponising it on an unmatched scale.

In any case, the US military did not have an acceptable plan that could be put into action in a time of declining military budgets. Like much else concerning the US military, its space programme too was heavily invested with Cold War attributes. It could readily be described by the words big, heavy, multi-mission, complex, mission critical, long lasting and costly. Heavy, long-lasting and multi-functional satellites would be launched into fixed, high and less-vulnerable orbits using heavy launchers. The satellites would then be constantly monitored and controlled throughout their life period from expensive, heavily manned, ground stations. Both the launch vehicles and the satellites would have to undergo several months of tests before they could be launched. Indeed, the planning for all this activity itself had to begin years ahead. A Space Control capability with these attributes could not be built within the $250 billion military budget of the Clinton era. Even if it could be built, it would not work -- in space, where one cannot man and protect assets continuously and permanently, agility and adaptability of launch and orbital systems and spacecraft autonomy are crucial to the protection of space assets, and the US space programme lacked these attributes.

Things have changed since then. In March 2004, retired Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, Donald Rumsfelds Director of Force Transformation, proposed that the US military should change the way it operated its space programme. Cebrowskis new business model is called Operationally Responsive Space(ORS). The logic of ORS is that space operations should move away from Cold War-era attributes of massive size and gold-plated technology towards the small and the fast and the many. Massive, multi-function satellites lifted by massive launch vehicles after long planning, production and testing phases would be replaced by single-function micro- and nano-satellites lifted into low earth orbits by small rockets that could be launched within days, and ultimately within hours, of a military request. That request itself would come from a tactical level commander rather than from the highest military and political officers. In short, every theatre commander gets his own micro- or nano-satellite whenever he needs one.

If realised, this business model for the ORS Space Support mission would bring multiple benefits to the US military: first, it would reduce cost and time of maintaining access to and utility of space; second, it would ensure availability of space-based assets to theatre commanders whenever needed and thus serve the Space Force Enhancement mission; and third, it would serve to protect US space-based assets from enemy action in space since the US would launch these mission-specific satellites only just in time for the mission. Moreover, they would be so cheap and quick to replace that the enemy would have no incentive to expend effort to destroy them. Thus, it would serve one part, called Defensive Counterspace, of the Space Control (or Space Superiority) mission - that is, to ensure for the US military its freedom of action in space.

To achieve such capability, DARPA awarded contracts to nine companies last April to study if they could come up with a service to launch 1000-pound class satellites into orbits 115 miles high with just 24-hours notice and at $5 million or less. In September, four of those companies - AirLaunch, Lockheed Martin, Microcosm and SpaceX, were given follow-on contracts to make preliminary vehicle design and demonstrations by 2007. SpaceX, which already provides certain launch services at less then $7 million, is expected to demonstrate a full launch later this year with 48-hours notice.

The second part of the Space Control mission is the ability to deny freedom of action in space to adversaries, Offensive Counterspace. The Air Force Space Command is deploying technology and systems rapidly to achieve such capability. In April, for instance, the US Air Force launched an experimental micro-satellite, XSS-11. Its declared task is to rendezvous with satellites already in orbit, inspect them and repair any defects. Once launched, it stays up in orbit for 12-18 months. It only needs to be told where the target satellite is. It then burns its own engines to scoot to the target, inspects it and takes action on its own. Clearly, such a satellite is more than a mobile repair service. It is a scoot-and-destroy anti-satellite weapon. It can destroy enemy satellites by simply bumping into them, by shooting an electromagnetic pulse to fry the targets electronics, or by shooting kinetic weapons.

This month, the United States Air Force awarded a $123 million contract to Integral Systems to build a Rapid Attack Identification Reporting System (RAIDRS). The system will detect interference with American satellites - both military and commercial - and geolocate the source of the interference so that countermeasures can be taken. The Air Force intends to follow this contract up with a second larger contract to build a full-fledged system to monitor and protect its space assets.

The Department of Defense gave a $5 million grant to a robotics laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania to develop large swarms of tiny autonomous robots that could work together to search large areas of the sky or ground. On the ground, they could be supervised to move over unfamiliar and complex terrain; in space, they could be directed by a ground operator to find and swarm towards a target.

The ability to identify the source of attack on ones satellites, on-demand spacecraft launch capability, spacecraft autonomy and scoot-rendezvous-inspect-destroy capability, and swarming robots that can be directed to surround and destroy a target are only some components of the Space Control capability that the US is currently developing. It is doing so in anticipation of a future when battles for supremacy on the earth will be fought in space as well - just as, earlier, the European powers fought their battles for European supremacy not only on that continent but over distant lands in Asia and Africa.

Srinivasa Raghotham
Srinivasa Raghotham is a journalist and strategic analyst.  He has written extensively on the technology industry in India and co-founded a successful magazine, DeveloperIQ.  He has also been a columnist and writer on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from business entrepreneurship to international politics.  He is currently a researcher with the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, Lancaster University.  He is interested in '4 Revolutions' (in military, politico-strategic, social and business affairs), '5 Technologies' (Bio-, Info-, Nano-, Energy, Space Technologies - BINEST) and relations between the existing (US, EU) and emerging (China, India) world powers.