Crowded Orbits

Conflict and Cooperation in Space

James Clay Moltz

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231528177
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

Space has become increasingly crowded since the end of the Cold War, with new countries, companies, and even private citizens operating satellites and becoming spacefarers. This book offers general readers a valuable primer on space policy from an international perspective. It examines the competing themes of space competition and cooperation while providing readers with an understanding of the basics of space technology, diplomacy, commerce, science, and military applications.

The recent expansion of human space activity poses new challenges to existing treaties and other governance tools for space, increasing the likelihood of conflict over a diminishing pool of beneficial locations and resources close to Earth. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience in international space policy debates, James Clay Moltz examines possible avenues for cooperation among the growing pool of space actors, considering their shared interests in space traffic management, orbital debris control, division of the radio frequency spectrum, and the prevention of military conflict. Moltz concludes with policy recommendations for enhanced international collaboration in space situational awareness, scientific exploration, and restraining harmful military activities.

1

GETTING INTO ORBIT

Rocket and automobile engines … have a basic similarity: Both are internal-combustion engines using the burning of a fuel-oxygen mixture to produce hot gases which create tremendous pressure.… In the automobile, the gases push a piston which … eventually pushes a wheel against the ground. In the rocket, the gases push … directly on the vehicle itself … making the rocket, in effect, a single, huge piston.… The automobile merely sucks [oxygen] from the air. But the rocket, designed to operate in space, must carry its own supply.

—Willard Wilks, The New Wilderness¹

The analogy is fairly simple. Getting into space involves understanding the basic physics of propulsion and mastering a specific type of mechanical engineering. Although a self-taught Russian mathematician developed the “rocket equation” in the late 1800s and a lone American physicist first demonstrated the “piston” technology for a liquid-fuel rocket in the mid-1920s, early civilian efforts still lacked adequate financial support to reach space.

If it were not for the fact that rockets can be used as ballistic missiles, space exploration might still be a dream. But the goal of Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II to bomb European cities that were more than a hundred miles away mustered the massive funding necessary to build the world’s first rocket to approach the edges of Earth’s atmosphere. It soon became the deadly V-2 missile.² After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union scooped up German military scientists, blueprints, and hardware to jump-start their missile programs and also bring space activity within their respective reaches. Their vast resources gradually led to the development of much-longer-range ballistic missiles designed to carry highly destructive nuclear weapons over intercontinental distances. These delivery systems offered lower vulnerability than bombers, promised to save the lives of pilots, and could transport weapons across the globe at tremendous speed, making attacks possible in less than an hour. Long-range ballistic missiles also made excellent space rockets. But the uncomfortable fact for scientists is that early space exploration emerged largely as a spin-off of these military programs. Spaceflight probably would have been accomplished before now by some country’s scientists even in the absence of military incentives and large-scale government funding. But it would certainly have occurred much later than 1957 and with far fewer accomplishments to date. As the historian Walter McDougall argues in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the space age, “In these years the fundamental relationship between the government and new technology changed as never before in history.”³

These points highlight an essential fact about space technology: its dual-use nature.⁴ A space booster can launch an intercontinental missile or a civilian scientific probe to a distant planet. Similarly, communications satellites may broadcast a movie, transfer financial data for businesses, or transmit military orders (such as to an unmanned drone). An imaging satellite can survey Earth to monitor deforestation, facilitate city planning, or check on the progress of agricultural crops. But it can also allow military observers to track enemy troop concentrations, weapons deployments, and the success of ordnance already delivered against targets. The real questions are often not technical ones about a spacecraft’s capabilities, but instead political and practical ones: who controls the spacecraft and to what specific use is it being put? Today, old lines separating military and civilian space programs are becoming increasingly blurred, as budget pressures and the growing sophistication of civilian technologies make it more efficient for military users to lease transponders on commercial satellites to carry military transmissions on an as-needed basis than to operate large military constellations for these purposes. The result is that everything from soldiers’ e-mail messages home to information on enemy forces to civilian television and radio broadcasts may be on a single satellite.

In order to discuss space activity intelligently, we need first to understand the technologies required for spaceflight and the physics that affect it. Once basic orbital mechanics and rocket technology had been understood and mastered in the 1950s, a new set of challenges arose in developing equipment that would enable living beings (dogs, apes, and humans) to survive in the harsh environment of space. Given the risks involved, only three countries have thus far launched humans into space, with the Soviets getting there first and the United States launching the majority of astronauts who have reached space to date. China is the newest member of this small group and one with ambitious plans. Finally, we examine military space technologies and applications, which drove much of the U.S.-Soviet “space race” and today continue to motivate many national space efforts. Consistent with the notion of dual use, not all of these technologies are weapons. In fact, few are. The main benefit of space for national militaries has been and remains information. A key takeaway from this brief history is that while the first space powers had to invent all of these technologies, many of them can be purchased today, and that availability has accelerated the growth of spacefaring countries.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPACE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Astronomy

In the past several hundred years—a mere blip in human history—scientists have gained a remarkable amount of information about Earth and its relationship to the rest of the universe. Though we won’t delve deeply into a long history that has already been well covered by others, it is important to run through a quick review of these still fairly recent (and radical) changes in human understanding.⁵

About five hundred years ago, after spending millennia viewing Earth as the center of all creation, philosophers and astronomers began to undermine long-held beliefs and religious doctrines regarding the planets. While the Greek Aristarchus of Samos had conceived of a Sun-centric solar system in the third century b.c., the concept failed to take root and was forgotten. But by the mid-1500s a wider scientific community and the first reasonably powerful telescopes helped convince others that the similar observations of the Polish Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus were true: the Sun (not Earth) must be at the center of our planetary system. Copernicus argued that the idea of larger celestial bodies racing around a stationary Earth made little sense, and that furthermore Earth must be moving, as well as rotating on its axis relative to the Sun to provide periods of day and night. Knowledge about Copernicus’s ideas began to spread throughout Europe’s budding scientific community.

By the 1590s, the German mathematician Johannes Kepler used observations by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe to prove further that because of the differential effects of gravity in relation to distance, the planets moved in elliptical orbits around the Sun rather than in circles. The Italian physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Galileo Galilei built on this knowledge to prove the rotation of the planets, while identifying through telescopic observation a range of celestial bodies (such as moons) never seen before in space, thus confirming earlier ideas about the distance of the stars. While his radical ideas ran afoul of the Catholic Church, forcing Galileo to live under house arrest, the truth could not be held back any longer. During the 1660s to the 1680s, the British philosopher and mathematician Isaac Newton developed new understandings of gravity and highly accurate laws of motion that created unprecedented levels of predictability regarding the celestial bodies and their relative movement with respect to Earth. With the cosmos largely in place, it now fell to engineers to get us there.

Launch Vehicles

Various peoples in Asia had developed simple bamboo rockets powered by gunpowder and other incendiaries by the 1200s.⁶ But these weapons lacked range and accuracy and could not be controlled once launched. The British military leader William Congreve updated certain Indian designs that had been employed against his troops in the late 1700s by using metal tubes and more standardized production. Such rockets figured prominently—if ultimately unsuccessfully—in the famous British attack on Baltimore in September 1814. It was these rockets’ “red glare” that eyewitness Francis Scott Key memorialized in “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

But the next leap for rocket technology required a new conceptual foundation. A deaf Russian high school teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, became the unlikely father of this revolution in the 1880s by coming up with the “rocket equation,” which described the thrust required for a rocket to leave Earth’s atmosphere.⁷ Tsiolkovsky was not an engineer, however, and while he understood the benefits of using supercooled liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuels to accomplish this task, his own limited financial resources and lack of the requisite tools and skills did not allow him to attempt building such a contraption.

Enter U.S. physicist Robert Goddard. Working at Clark University in Massachusetts in the 1920s, Goddard used his knowledge of both physics and engineering to build and launch the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926.⁸ He developed an odd A-shaped rocket powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen linked by metal tubing to create a controllable liquid-fuel engine. Ironically, despite his accomplishments, Goddard—like many of his predecessors—faced ridicule in the American press for even proposing spaceflight at all. Poorly versed but influential critics in the media at the time rejected the whole idea of propulsion in the vacuum of space by arguing that a rocket would have nothing to “push against” and would therefore quickly stop moving (neglecting the idea that it might push against itself). In the short term, Goddard was unable to prove them wrong, as his rockets still lacked the thrust needed to reach space. But, in 1936, German engineers Wernher von Braun and Walter Thiel used funding from the Nazi military to scale up Goddard’s conceptual breakthrough and create the first rockets to pass the edges of the atmosphere. Their eventual A-4 rocket represented an invulnerable missile capable of bombing Western European cities from a distance of up to 200 miles, although their accuracy remained quite poor. Hitler used more than 2,600 of the renamed V-2 (Vengeance) rockets against French, Belgian, Dutch, and British cities during World War II, killing more than five thousand people (almost all civilians).⁹

After World War II, a new and more powerful series of space boosters was developed from military-purpose rockets like the V-2. Now working in the United States for the U.S. military, von Braun developed the Redstone intermediate-range missile in the early 1950s and the larger Jupiter C rocket to test reentry vehicles for planned nuclear warheads, which would pass through space. Although the Jupiter C had the capability to launch a satellite, the U.S. Army had no authorization to do so and thus pursued only testing of weapons delivery systems.¹⁰ The Jupiter used a mixture of hyper-cooled (cryogenic) propellant in its first stage with solid-fuel upper stages.

Rockets that travel into space are normally configured into stacked sections called stages. The first stage, responsible for lifting the whole rocket and its fuel load, is the largest and requires the most thrust. After around two to three minutes, its job is done and—to remove unneeded weight—it separates from the rocket, falling back to Earth (or into the ocean).¹¹ The second-stage engine then ignites and carries the rocket closer to or into space. The final stages are normally for releasing payloads or positioning them in the proper orbit. The critical actions required to put a satellite into space usually take only six to eight minutes, although puttin...