The exploration of space has always had a military motivation. It was the Cold War that drove NASA and the Soviet Union to rush to launch objects into orbit. And 60 years on, the US is building autonomous satellites capable of dodging the nascent threat of Chinese lasers weapons.
The US military has revealed it is working to give its constellation of satellites orbiting Earth a “fighting chance.”
We have to give our mission systems a fighting chance
The US Air Force officials have confirmed they are working to create autonomous orbiting entries that can dodge missiles or even satellite-based weapons, according to a report by Defense One.
Michael Dickey, who runs the Enterprise Strategy and Architectures Office at Air Force Space Command, said: “We have to give our mission systems an opportunity to participate in their own defence, give them a fighting chance. We’ve begun to introduce changes.”
Colonel Russell Teehan, Portfolio Architect of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Centre, added: “We are doing a lot of work in that area.”
The laser incident came a year before the 2007 Chinese ASAT missile test against an orbiting weather satellite that created a dangerous orbiting debris field.
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“It’s not hard to imagine, if someone is shooting at you, you would maybe like to get out the line of fire and so creating some agility with our space systems becomes very important,” said Mr Dickey.
“Manoeuvrability takes fuel and thrusters and all of that.
“You will start to see that in the next round of modernisation.”
But there are limits to how well satellites can dodge and weave in space.
Satellites fly far above the atmosphere that allows fighter planes to manoeuvre, and they are too small to carry much rocket fuel.
“Our satellites aren’t pulling nine Gs, right?”, MrDickey observed, referring to gravitational force.
He described the manoeuvring as something of a slow-motion glide, “kinda like a Keanu Reeves thing in the Matrix.”
One key to helping satellites avoid attack is moving them out of what Teehan called “predictable orbits.”
These include geosynchronous earth orbits, positioning orbiting satellites over a specific spot over Earth, and low-earth orbits, in which they zoom around the world.
Mr Teehan said people are inventing solutions for quickly satellites from high orbits to low ones to provide an hour of intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance capability.
“Imagine the dynamic architecture you can create if you can create manoeuver in the domain?” he said.
Another key is getting better situational awareness data off those satellites and then sharing it with more people, faster.
Mr Teehan said: “A lot of this is: who else is watching what’s going on?
“And can I synchronise forces? Because if Johnny goes to the right, and Sally goes to the left, if we work just at the tactical level, you will not synchronise forces.
“It’s not just on board, it’s synchronising the sensors and data flows to operate as an enterprise organisation.”
Recent attention has focused on more exotic solutions, such as arming satellites to ward off incoming missiles or other enemy weapons.
The US Defence Department also has a program to put robotic arms on satellites to do repair work.
And a satellite could theoretically use such a robot arm to defend itself from encroaching enemy space weapon.
“We have a lot of things we can do,” said Mr Dickey, refusing to rule out either possibility.