Air Force seeks to strengthen satellite defense system

The Air Force is trying to reestablish the robust defensive system it had to counter Soviet satellites during the Cold War, the service's head of space acquisitions said Tuesday.

The effort will entail beefing up the service's ability to accurately track and monitor the position of other satellites in space, and developing systems that can destroy those viewed as a threat. Both ground- and space-based systems to handle any potential space-based threats are critical, said Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, director of the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center.

During the Cold War, "we took extraordinary steps to protect our satellites" from Soviet attack, Hamel said, speaking to defense reporters in Washington. "We're going to see a lot more investment to rebuild those capabilities."

Satellites are becoming more important to U.S. military operations as the Pentagon pushes its network-centric warfare vision, where military units worldwide are tied together by sophisticated battle command computer networks that transmit huge amounts of data via satellite. The 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review found that the military requires a greatly expanded portfolio of space-based imaging, surveillance and communications assets.

When the Cold War ended and defense budgets declined during the 1990s, the U.S. defense community lost a lot of expertise in monitoring and analyzing what is happening in space, Hamel said. There is an even greater need to know what foreign satellites are actually doing in orbit in today's world, as more nations become involved in commercial satellite communications and space-based research.

"We have to be much more proactive and have space situational awareness to know what's up there, and in the case of active satellites, be able to understand what they are doing -- both friendly as well as possibly hostile satellites," Hamel said.

A high-priority Air Force effort is the Space-Based Space Surveillance program, which will give the military a monitoring capability akin to a neighborhood watch program, and "distinguish between something coming close to a critical defense payload, whether it's just a wandering satellite or something with more threatening intentions," Hamel said.

For far too long, the Air Force, the service responsible for military space operations, has had a "catalog mentality," of simply listing the number of satellites in orbit, Hamel added.

He said that while most think of space as a vast, empty territory, there are specific locations in space -- such as the geostationary belt, which is about 20,000 miles above the Earth and directly over the equator -- that are considered prime real estate for communications and defense satellites. Those locations are getting crowded.

There are international bodies that coordinate locations, primarily to ensure there are no conflicts in radio frequencies among satellites located at particular nodes. But there is no similar process to eliminate conflicts in physical location, and it's possible to have as many as six to eight satellites registered to operate in the exact same place.

The United States also is trying to expand its understanding of the space environment so that when one of its satellites develops problems, the military can instantly determine whether it was due to natural environmental factors, such as radiation, or an attack by a hostile satellite.