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WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP proposed the creation of a space force, the newest branch of the US military, renowned columnists and nocturnal comedians embarking on warp.
Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, ridiculed the president's "demonic Galactic Space Force," and the late-night comedian, Stephen Colbert, said Trump had had the idea "of a happy toy Buzz Lightyear Buzz. "
However, Colbert was clearly not looking at the telescope in the afternoon of January 11, 2007, when the Chinese launched a ballistic missile on the mountains of Sichuan Province in a low Earth orbit and projected 3,000 pieces of gold. An aging Chinese weather satellite. show what they could do.
And he was not supposed to look at the stars in the fall of 2014, when Western space agencies noticed that an alleged piece of space debris, known as Object 2014-28E, was suddenly performing high precision maneuvers – rushing here and there, to other objects of space in what looked like the rebirth of a program of the Soviet era known as Istrebitel Sputnikov.
Translation: "satellite killer."
These low-profile episodes have highlighted what many aerospace defense experts believe: We are at the heart of a secret orbital armament race, with huge consequences.
Much of the mockery inspired by Trump's idea reflected Hollywood's assumptions about the appearance of military operations: armies of stormtroopers competing for territory on distant planets, inhabited gunboats crossing interstellar space. But if there is a war in heaven, you will only have 22,500 miles above the surface of the Earth, and the front-line fighters will probably be machines. Forget the Ewoks and the X-wing fighter pilots. It's all about satellites: blocking them, fooling them with lasers and shattering them.
Satellites have become an indispensable part of US military operations. They play a major role in intelligence gathering and recognition. They are at the heart of our missile detection system. They guide aircraft carriers and troop movements. And as anyone who has watched the Gulf War on CNN can attest, they have been directing bombs to their targets for decades.
They are also a pivot of the 21st century economy. Trade in space accounts for about $ 350 billion, according to the latest annual report of the Satellite Industry Association. This includes telephone services, television signals, agricultural monitoring, meteorology, aviation and broadband. And the sector is expected to grow only in the coming decades, thanks to heavy investments in space tourism and in asteroid extraction. There is gold in their rocks – literally. Silver, tungsten and iridium too.
Critics of Trump's space force are essentially asking: why now? What is the race? But national security experts ask a different question: how should a large bureaucracy adapt to new realities as our military apparatus and economic interests increasingly rely on equipment that is spinning? well above our heads?
The race to space began seriously in 1957 with the launch by the Soviet Union of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. It was a small vessel, just 23 inches in diameter. But the polished metal sphere sent a powerful radio signal to the Earth – and a wave of worry across the West. The Soviet Union gravitated above. Who knew what it would rain on us?
The Americans have stepped up their efforts to militarize the space, with the army, navy and aviation fighting for command. And although each branch receives a coin, it is the air forces that have imposed themselves.
Today, he controls about 90 percent of the army's space budget and some 38,000 people in the US Space Command, headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
Air Force leaders are reluctant to give up control. Deborah James, who served as Secretary of the Air Force under the Obama administration, said it was pointless to create a new, costly bureaucracy. Spatial force, she says, is "a solution in search of a problem".
But Douglas Loverro, who was Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Space Policy in the Obama administration, said that there was a problem. The air force is dominated by a pilot-hunter culture – "Fly, fight and win" – and the space has never been insufficient. It is a slump, with stagnant budgets and few opportunities for career advancement.
"I have been in the air force for 34 years and I love the Air Force," he says. "But unfortunately, my service does not get it."
The irony is that the Air Force's own story suggests the value of an autonomous service. After his separation from the army in 1947, he developed a culture, leadership and lobbying prowess that helped the United States dominate the skies.
Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that without this attention, the United States would remain bogged down in the indecision that has characterized their space policy for a decade or more.
Harrison points to the handful of large "Battlestar Galactica" -type satellites that we rely on for missile warnings and protected communications (yes, even space-supporting experts can not resist science fiction metaphors) .
The problem, he says, is that with the increasing spatial power of our opponents, these large fixed ships are becoming more and more juicy targets. Analysts have been saying for a long time that it is necessary to expand our missile alert and communication capability to a larger number of small, agile satellites. And yet, the bureaucracy is blocked.
For the representative Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat who has called for an autonomous force, the vulnerability is incredible: with a well-targeted space attack, a lower military power like Russia or China could quickly create a "fair fight" with the states. United States – or worse. "We could be deaf, dumb and blind in seconds," he says.
One of his main concerns is an attack on the global positioning system, or GPS. And that would have impacts not only on the army, but on the economy. We all know that the GPS can trace a route to the nearest Walmart or send a Uber driver our way. But his role is much more critical than that.
GPS satellites are loaded with atomic clocks, synchronized with each other and calibrated at the microsecond. Together, they serve as timers for ATMs to time stamps, mobile phone companies to coordinate their signals, and power grids to adjust the power supply.
Even a minor system disruption – an incident causing an overall clock of 10 or 12 microseconds – could have serious consequences. An intentional attack could be really catastrophic.
If the critical importance of our satellites is a reason to accelerate the space of the armament, it is also an argument in favor of restraint.
Space force destroys an enemy satellite and you end up with thousands of bursts of fire that whip the planet at a speed of 17,000 km / h. This glow can destroy other satellites, including ours. Then you have more debris, and so on. There is even a name for this cascade of destruction: the Kessler effect.
Still, the prospect of mutually assured destruction constitutes a real control over the so-called "kinetic" attacks, with the explosive in the space. The next war in space will probably be more cunning, more secretive and will not be prosecuted by the larger armies of the most powerful countries.
In 2013, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin showed that it was possible to "falsify" GPS signals or replace them with erroneous information – by sending an $ 80 million sailboat to the Mediterranean. Iran claims to have used similar techniques to neutralize an American drone in 2011.
North Korea has proved expert in another method: scrambling satellite signals. In the spring of 2012, he successfully disrupted air traffic at Incheon and Gimpo international airports in South Korea.
Then, of course, there is the scary prospect of a cyber attack. And even non-state actors have shown that they are capable of that kind of thing. In 2007, Tamil Tiger guerrillas in Sri Lanka had hacked a communications satellite and started transmitting their own propaganda.
With terrorist groups and rivals like Russia and China pushing further into space, and our own dependence on satellites, it is clear that the United States can not remain indifferent.
It's really just a question of how we strengthen our presence. We can try to do it through existing channels. We can count on the Air Force to look up to the stars as it has never done before. Or we can fire on our helmets, lower the visor and move forward with the space force.
David Scharfenberg can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @dscharfGlobe.
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