But the main culprit wasn’t the telescope itself, which is swathed in heat-reflecting Mylar. Blame the huge pair of solar arrays. Projecting well away from the vehicle and attached only at their center, framed in stainless steel rods and not positioned at the vehicle’s center of mass, they bent and flapped too freely. Hubble’s built-in compensatory measure—a hull that moves in the direction opposite to the array’s displacement—couldn’t fully overcome the unfortunate tendency of stainless steel to warp when assaulted by a sudden change in temperature. As soon as sunlight hit the array, the exposed side of the rods shot up to about 50 degrees Celsius, while the side that remained in shadow stayed at about –80 degrees. Each array, as Chaisson describes it, turned into a giant banana, a forty-foot longbow.35
As the go-to guy for the media, the White House, and anyone else who wanted substantive scientific information on the status of Hubble, Chaisson presumably knew how to be evasive yet accurate and how to keep control of what got said in public. Soon after the jitters were recognized, but before their cause was diagnosed, he was asked to appear at a closed meeting with several dozen officials involved in military intelligence work. The meeting was labeled “SECRET” and would be held at a secure location. Here’s how Chaisson describes what happened:
[W]hen I discussed the jitter enigma we were experiencing with Hubble, I was astonished to see so many nodding heads. Right then and there, midway through the briefing, a rage came over me. I felt like shouting, “Damn it, why didn’t you tell us!” For, apparently, these people—some of whom were Keyhole controllers—had years ago first noticed specifically this problem. . . .
Later that evening . . . I was stopped by a serious-looking person sporting short hair, gray suit, ID leash around his neck, and absolutely radiating that woods-are-lovely-dark-and-deep demeanor. He told me the name of someone to contact at Lockheed who, he said, might be able to help us. At which point the intelligence operative did an about-face and marched away.
Having passed along that name to the right person and plumbed other obvious channels, Chaisson began to grasp the closeness of the connections between Hubble and the series of twenty “Hubble-class” vehicles of whose existence he was aware. But since those vehicles, the KH-9 HEXAGONs, remained classified until 2011, Chaisson would have been unaware in the 1990s of salient facts about them. As an Air Force intelligence officer saw fit to inform him one day at the Naval Academy, the Hubble was a KEYHOLE-class satellite, not the other way around.
In any case, Chaisson came to realize that neither ill will nor turf wars was the reason the military hadn’t proactively shared its lessons learned:
The jitter problem had been known for several years prior to Hubble’s launch, but reconnaissance analysts were not bothered by it, largely because they had never needed to expose their surveillance cameras for more than a fraction of a second. Whether peeking, for example, at work in progress at the Krasnoyarsk radar site, or sensing how many infrared-emitting people inhabit a specific tent outside Tripoli, spying spacecraft need not take long exposures. They can quickly gather their data whether the spacecraft is stable or oscillating. [As a result,] they probably did not pass along knowledge of it simply because it did not affect their landscape. [T]he industrial contractors had compartmentalized their sensitive intelligence work so thoroughly that there was little or no cross-fertilization—and the civilian world was the loser.36
By the way, the Air Force wasn’t the only branch of the military whose projects overlapped with Hubble. Another was the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency in charge of America’s spy satellites. More unitary in its mission than the much larger USAF, the NRO proactively aided one of NASA’s foremost future civilian eyes in the sky—an instrument superior to Hubble.
Every ten years, the National Academy of Sciences facilitates a committee of US astrophysicists to prioritize spending on projects for the upcoming decade—a process that establishes consensus in the field and precludes public arguments about whose pet project should receive federal support. Astrophysicists who raise their own money, personally or institutionally, can spend it however they wish, but when it’s time to allocate federal or other shared funds, we follow the priorities of the report. Similar committees in earlier decades gave top ranking to the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Hubble Telescope in orbit, and, most recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.
In 2010 I served on one of these committees. Our final report, New Worlds, New Horizons,37 pegged the spaceborne Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as a number one priority. It promised to revolutionize infrared observations of the universe, whether of nearby exoplanets or of distant galaxies, and, in NASA’s words, “to settle essential questions” about dark energy. To make WFIRST happen meant we needed to drum up federal funding for the telescope’s costly new mirror and detectors.
Enter the NRO.
Fortunately for the future of astrophysics, the agency happened to have on hand two surplus, freshly declassified, Hubble-size but better than Hubble-class telescope mirrors and, in 2011, offered to donate them to NASA—stripped of their military-grade detectors.38 NASA, grateful for the gift, could now cross one big budget item off its fund-getting list. Why were these awesome mirrors now available? Because the NRO had begun to use even better ones.
Unfortunately for the future of astrophysics, the White House’s FY2019 budget request completely eliminates funding for WFIRST, on the grounds that “developing another large space telescope immediately after completing the $8.8-billion James Webb Space Telescope is not a priority for the administration.”39 Let’s put that in context. For many years, NASA’s budget—covering all ten NASA centers, the astronaut program, the International Space Station, and all space probes and spaceborne telescopes, including Hubble—has been less than one-half of one percent of the federal budget. A year and a half’s FY2019 proposed funding for the Department of Defense roughly equals the entire run of NASA funding across the agency’s sixty-year history. How much is the universe worth to the president? How much is national security worth to Congress? How much is knowledge of our place in the cosmos worth to the electorate?
As for Hubble itself, once the several post-launch problems were remedied via both emergency and preplanned servicing missions, the telescope was able to begin its working life as a distinguished detective and impresario. On its roster of revelations are the age of the universe; exoplanets; supermassive black holes lurking at the heart of brilliant galaxies; embryonic planetary systems swathed in previously impenetrable disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars; a patch of sky chosen for how devoid of interesting galaxies it was when viewed with ordinary ground-based telescopes but which, after a ten-day exposure by Hubble’s camera, showed itself to be populated by thousands of distant galaxies dispersed to the edge of the universe. Hubble was adored not only by scientists but by civilians, who in 2004 took ownership of it. When NASA proposed to cancel the telescope’s final servicing mission, the outcry from the general public was greater than that from the scientists. Congress relented, and the mission was reinstated. Hubble’s successor, the infrared-tuned James Webb Space Telescope, has, as far as we know, no military doppelgängers—yet.
7
MAKING WAR, SEEKING PEACE
Space is a physics battleground. Gigantic magnetic fields loop through the frigid emptiness. Bursts of plasma erupt from the surfaces of suns. Black holes flay and swallow every object that wanders near. Cosmic rays, gamma rays, and X-rays devastate any speck of living matter in their path. The infancy and youth of every planet consists of a ceaseless hail of rocks. Every day, millions of gigantic stars across the universe blow their metal-rich guts to smithereens, sending shockwaves and radiation across the light-years. Whole galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, collide and merge, just as will happen with our own Milky Way, doomed to meet and greet the Andromeda galaxy several billion years from now. Here in our solar system, a hundred-meter-wide asteroi
d sails into Earth every millennium or so at speeds upward of fifty thousand miles an hour, generating a destructive impact equal to 2,500 atomic bombs.
Some members of the human species have wanted to augment all that naturally occurring cosmic mayhem with some space apocalypses of their own doing. Barely had World War II ended when they embraced an even more devastating near-term scenario: the visiting of intentional nuclear disaster across the entire surface of Earth. Thus began a military shopping spree that continues to this day. By now the wish list is quite long.
Space war could take two main forms: direct physical attacks or cyber sabotage. Indeed, today’s Air Force Space Command speaks of “space and cyberspace” in the same breath. Cyberwar wouldn’t require a physical weapon, only a focused disruption. The seventeen hundred–plus operational satellites that circle Earth are the most obvious potential target. Nearly half of these are American, of which one-fifth are military, supporting contemporary technologies of warfare.1 As for the remaining satellites, the daily life of nearly every person in the world, but especially in the United States, depends on more than one of them, knowingly or unknowingly, directly or indirectly. Disable enough satellites—by whatever means—and people suddenly can’t use their credit cards. They have to reacquaint themselves with paper roadmaps and quickly unlearn their expectations of a reliable power grid and minute-by-minute updates on the weather.2
Think of cyberwar against space assets as weaponless sabotage—though “weaponless” can be hard to define, since almost anything, from a hand to a fork to a truck to a plane, can be and has been used as a weapon. Cyberwar’s potential reach is broader than that of all but the most unthinkable weapons.
“Space capabilities have proven to be significant force multipliers when integrated into military operations,” state the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stress space situational awareness, strategic deterrence, cyber support, and weaponless cyber interventions rather than space-to-space, air-to-space, or ground-to-space physical destruction—the kind of destruction that would result in huge new batches of space debris.3 Obviously, if shards and chunks of exploded satellites threaten anything and everything in their path, they’re as likely to disrupt one’s own space assets as the enemy’s. No technologically advanced country welcomes the prospect of being thrown back to the days of the wax candle, the water well, and the electric telegraph, and so, compared with the other options, limited cyberattacks and non-nuclear space-to-ground destruction start to look positively reasonable.
At the same time, the military knows its purpose, and that purpose does not end with awareness and deterrence. The commander of Air Force Space Command is clear about the mandate: “Our job is to prepare for conflict. We hope this preparation will deter potential adversaries and that conflicts will not extend into space or cyberspace, but our job is to be ready when and if that day comes.”4
In modern times, who are these potential adversaries? Notably China, China, Russia, Russia, and China. Even the most cursory Web search yields extensive evidence of America’s alarm about the speed and scope of China’s stunning achievements and ambitions in space. The Department of Defense’s 2016 annual report to Congress concerning the Chinese military says that China “has built a vast ground infrastructure supporting spacecraft and space launch vehicle (SLV) manufacturing, launch, C2 [command and control], and data downlink” and that it “continues to develop a variety of counterspace capabilities designed to limit or to prevent the use of space-based assets by . . . adversaries during a crisis or conflict.”5 China’s own military scorecard of 2015 reiterates the nation’s “strategic concept of active defense,” including “adherence to the doctrine that ‘We will not attack unless we are attacked, but we will surely counterattack if attacked.’ ”
China also voices alarm about the scope of its adversaries’ space achievements and ambitions: “Outer space has become a commanding height in international strategic competition. Countries concerned are developing their space forces and instruments, and the first signs of weaponization of outer space have appeared.” Responding to the perceived hostile conditions in language not very different from that of its adversaries, China vows to “keep abreast of the dynamics of outer space, deal with security threats and challenges in that domain, and secure its space assets to serve its national economic and social development, and maintain outer space security.”6 The rhetoric resonates with America’s own ambitions in space, although the long-lived US theme of “space superiority” is absent.7 As for space security, in the summer of 2016 China took a great leap forward in that direction when it launched the world’s first quantum satellite, which offers the promise of eventual hack-proof communications for everything from your pet food purchase to the military’s surveillance operations.
Say a country has stashed a few ballistic missiles, missile interceptors, and high-energy lasers around the globe to discourage attacks on its own satellites. Now, if it chooses, it can also readily attack another country’s satellites, however unwise such a move would be. If that same country adds some surveillance/reconnaissance platforms and satellite communication jammers to the mix, it will have what the United States calls counterspace: defensive as well as offensive measures meant to enable military “agility” and “resilience capacity” for the purpose of ensuring “space superiority.”8 Existence of and access to these technologies enables actions that would be impossible without them, just as access to a military-style semi-automatic assault rifle enables actions that a knife does not.
When most people hear the phrase “space war,” they’re not thinking weaponless cyber sabotage. They’re thinking actual, powerful weapons causing colossal explosions hundreds or thousands of miles above Earth’s surface.9 While possession of an arsenal is not synonymous with war, it can prove either a prelude to war or war’s strongest deterrent. A stockpile of bombs, missiles, and lasers is a stockpile of bombs, missiles, and lasers, whether acquired in the name of deterrence, protection, or attack. It can be deployed in both offensive and defensive actions. The difference is not inherent in the weapons themselves.
One de facto category of space weapon has nothing to do with intentional deployment: space junk. It’s already up there, the inevitable but inadvertent result of smashups, explosions, rocket launches, space-walk maneuvers, the ordinary dumping of trash, and the inevitable demise of assorted spacecraft. From a distance, it looks like a cloud of dandruff ringing our planet, mostly in low Earth orbit, because that’s where most satellites are found. But space junk populates all of nearby space, extending six Earth radii out to the zone of geosynchronous satellites.10 Besides a few notable mementoes of the late 1950s, such as the final stage of the launch rocket for the USSR’s first Sputnik and the entirety of America’s first Vanguard, hundreds of thousands of unguided bits of flotsam and jetsam orbit Earth amid our working satellites. Included in the debris are a couple of cameras, a dropped wrench, a glove, multiple bags of garbage, and blobs of unspent rocket fuel. All harmless until they plow into the belly of a satellite or space station at an impact speed as much as ten times faster than a rifle bullet. At that speed, even a paint chip causes real problems. As with our planet’s so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a continent-sized region in the Pacific Ocean that’s infused with suspended plastic fragments, dumped cargo, fishing nets, and chemical sludge—space garbage is a growing risk, unpredictable and largely unmanageable, at least until some technical breakthroughs give humans more control. Currently the Space Surveillance Network tracks twenty thousand pieces of debris that are grapefruit-sized or larger; half a million more are smaller than a grapefruit but larger than a cherry; millions more are smaller still.
Given the many capabilities, threats, and challenges created by the human presence in space, rational people have long mobilized against warfighting beyond the clouds. The most concrete results of these efforts are a handful of international treaties and resolutions, some of them voluntary. Legal instruments and voluntary agreements, of course, prese
nt very low hurdles to anybody willing to prosecute a fight by every means available. All-out war in space is still a hypothetical. But it’s certainly on many drawing boards, and many of the weapons that would be used to wage such a war—whether under the banner of deterrence, denial, or destruction—already exist in some form or are in well-funded development.
In past military parlance—notably in On War, by the early-eighteenth-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz—war was referred to as an art, firmly rooted in strategy and heavily dependent on the wise planning and psychological astuteness of a commander. The presumption was that warriors were fierce and strong and their weapons deadly. But the nature of the weapons themselves was often subordinated to questions of how and when they would be used. Sun Tzu, the oft-quoted sixth-century BC Chinese general, barely mentions weapons in his Art of War, singling out only the use of fire.11 By the beginning of the second millennium AD, detailed writings about weaponry, such as gunpowder-propelled fire arrows and rockets for military use rather than fireworks displays, were appearing in both East and West.
Common early weapons such as arrows, axes, clubs, swords, scythes, and spears were grasped in the hand and meant for close combat. The Iliad, epic chronicle of the final year of the thirteenth-century BC Trojan War, offers a cornucopia of grisly details of death by spear:
and the bronze spear-point plunged in his brow, then penetrated bone;
darkness covered his eyes,
and he fell like a tower in the mighty combat.
. . .
Accessory to War Page 26