“The Arms Race in Space”
by Richard Kaufman:
            This panel and these presentations are a part of a space weapons project that we have as a separate endeavor at EPS, and we’re very happy to include it in this conference these few days. The space project in a sense is a follow-up to one we did a few years ago, which we called “The Full Cost of Missile Defense.” And the reason I view it as a follow-up is that so much of possible weapons being developed today—that is, weapons that would be located in space—are off-shoots of the Missile Defense Program, as I will indicate in my talk.
            We have a very excellent and experienced panel of people who have done research and written extensively on the subject, and I will introduce each one, but not spend a lot of time doing that so we can just get at the talks themselves.
            So I will just go forward and say at the outset that some military experts argue that space is just another medium, like land, air, and the sea, and that war in space is inevitable. And you see that commentary when you read the literature from a lot of different sources. My own view is that death and taxes are inevitable; war is a matter of choice. And if you believe in free will, war should not be inevitable in space or anywhere else.
I’m not sure if the Bush administration believes war in space is inevitable; but its policy of space dominance will, if it is continued, increase the likelihood of space warfare. The administration simultaneously promotes the commercialization, militarization, and weaponization of space, as if it is not inconsistent to promote war preparations and peaceful commerce in the same place at the same time. This kind of contradictory behavior in government policy making, as has been shown in previous panels, is not uncommon. However, space commerce will be destroyed if there is space warfare, something that I’m not sure the policy makers think about a lot.
Former Ambassador Jonathan Dean writes about what he terms the “anarchic coexistence” of military and commercial assets in space. This situation may end, according to Dean, in one of two ways: one, if space is weaponized, and the weaponizing power, namely the U.S., promulgates its own rules of the road for space; or two, if a new international rule of law comes about through a former treaty or through political agreements. Dean’s concerns are well founded, and he leaves no doubt about his preferred outcome, namely a treaty prohibiting weaponization and assuring use of space for limited civilian and military purposes; for example, observation and communication. Weaponization of space, Dean believes, is not inevitable.
Unfortunately, weaponization is moving forward, and an arms race in space, at a low level so far, is already underway, in my view. Anarchy, meaning the absence of order and the presence of confusion, goes deeper in space policy than many informed observers appreciate or that Washington wishes to acknowledge or perhaps cares about.
It was asserted in conjunction with the release of the administration’s national space policy edict last year that new arms control agreements for space are unnecessary because there is no space arms race; but facts beg to differ. For one thing, the new edict changes in a stroke of the PC the official U.S. goals of space policy. Under Clinton, the primary goals were to enhance knowledge of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe, and to strengthen and maintain U.S. national security. The Bush administration’s goals are much more muscular, as they would put it, and [those are] to strengthen U.S. space leadership, assure that space capabilities are available, further U.S. national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives, and to “enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interests there.” Another passage in the edict warns others against either impeding U.S. rights or developing capabilities intended to do so. The document states flatly that the United States will oppose the development of legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space.
China’s recent use of an anti-satellite weapon can be viewed as a response to U.S. policy. It is known that the Chinese military has scrutinized U.S. use of satellite imagery and other space technology in America’s recent wars. China has also studied the way the U.S. has been able to monitor aspects of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs and how the U.S. could use satellite imagery in a crisis involving Taiwan.
            In turn, U.S. officials have stated recently that Washington will increase efforts to negate Chinese anti-satellite capabilities. This action-reaction dynamic concerning anti-satellite weapons typifies an arms race, and it began long ago when the U.S. and the former Soviet Union tested their anti-satellite missiles during the Cold War. U.S. anti-satellite efforts have resumed in recent years. Funding for these programs has been sometimes interrupted by Congress; but funding for missile defense has been ongoing and has included weapons such as the airborne lasar system, which can track targets in space and can become a potent anti-satellite weapon.
            In fact, the number of possible terrestrial and space-based anti-satellite weapons spinning off from missile defense seems to be multiplying. Among them are high-energy lasars, a multiple-kill vehicle, and several maneuverable micro-satellite projects. Perhaps most [ominous?] of the possible space-based weapons under development are the kill vehicles and related technologies which were ostensibly intended for missile defense. In view of the failure to develop an effective missile defense program, one has to wonder whether the real mission of that program has shifted to, or is shared by, the destruction of space systems.
            Just as China has noted the multiple military uses of space technology for military purposes, so have many other nations, and the list of those is growing. Aside from the U.S., Russia, and China, the nations using space technology for military operations on Earth include members of the European Union, especially France, Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Greece. In addition, Israel, which is collaborating with Russia to observe Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and Turkey, Algeria, and Egypt, Canada, and Australia are among those nations. As the U.S. forges ahead with possible space-based weapons intended to destroy satellites in space, it will likely be only a matter of time before others follow our lead. Russia, China, Europe, and India already are moving in the direction of space-based capabilities useful for attacking targets on Earth. And the deputy director of Russia’s space agency said, in response to the Bush administration’s 2006 policy statement, that it is the first step toward a serious escalation of the military confrontation in space, and that Russia too can place certain military elements into our space.
            Nevertheless, while the military establishments in the U.S. and elsewhere are busily moving in the direction of militarizing space and may be on the verge of weaponizing it, there are forces in many of the same nations who are just as busily entering into bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements regarding space exploration and other scientific research, technology exchange and development, and other projects. I’ve already mentioned the arrangement between Russia and Israel. Russia and the European space agency agreed to develop a Russian vehicle to replace the Soyuz space station, and also agreed to collaborate on communications and new technology. NASA and counterparts in Europe and Japan are in a joint project to monitor the sun. NASA and Taiwan have a project to launch micro-satellites. China has signed 16 agreement for space cooperation with 13 different nations. India has agreements concerning the Galileo navigation satellite with a number of countries, including Israel, China, Canada, Ukraine, South Korea, and the U.S.
            These developments lend some hope that the cooperative model of space development will prevail over the long term, except when one thinks about the way space technology is being used for war on Earth and how space weapons might be fielded and used in the future. Still, space assets are extremely vulnerable and difficult to defend, and one can hope that the next administration will understand that and make the appropriate changes in policy.
            As I’ve indicated, economic development and expansion of commercial interests in space depend, first, on peace conditions. For the reasons I’ve discussed, the future of the space environment is dicey, given the aggressive and unilateralist policy preferences of the Bush administration. But there is a second factor, namely, good information necessary for economic analysis of the space sector and its relationship to other sectors in the U.S. and globally.
            Commercial and civil activities in the space sector have grown rapidly in recent decades, so much so that they are considered by some observers as indispensable to the economy as a whole. But how [are they] indispensable? [Are they] really indispensable, or will [they] be truly indispensable some time in the near future? The answer is there are no definitive answers to such questions. The reason is the absence of adequate data. The full dimensions and significance of the space economy are not fully interested because of poor statistics and other measures.
            It is known that space technology provides important links to the overall economy and that it has a pervasive and growing influence in areas such as communications, navigation, weather forecasting, monitoring of the environment, resource exploitation, scientific research, and many other civil and commercial activities. Our ability to quantify the influences or the growth rates or the segments where public investment will be desirable is limited by the weaknesses and in some areas the absence of good statistics, public or private.
            For example, there are several problems with respect to federal funding of the space sector, the most serious ones being that there is no line item for space in the defense budget. Outside budget analysts are able to pull together approximate figures for defense programs in space subject to the fact that the Pentagon has a habit of releasing only partial information about its space programs and concealing altogether a substantial amount of classified space information. In addition, the Pentagon sometimes revises figures for past years without explanation. The Pentagon’s chronic problem of costs overruns and schedule delays in the space program may have something to do with that.
            But the problems of estimating the size, direction, and economic effects of the space industry go beyond what I have indicated about tracking government spending. Henry Hertzfeld, who is of course on our panel, has written extensively about this. He shows that there are different definitions of the space sector used by different government agencies; that there is double-accounting of government spending figures, which sometimes are included in project sales figures; that space is not even in the North American Industrial Classification System and thus is not considered to be a distinct economic activity by government data publications. The failure to include the space sector in national income accounting impedes government decision making, which currently cannot be based on an overall perspective of space in the economy, or in conjunction with the many publicly available databases maintained by various statistical agencies.
            Now, the lack of good economic data lends support to current military space policy, in my view, and the development of new space weapons. It does this by lowering a curtain that obscures clear vision of the complexity and magnitude of the space sector, the roles that it plays in civil, commercial, and military affairs, and the vulnerability of the space sector and the need to facilitate its growth for peaceful purposes.
            I believe that what is needed to address questions about the full cost of government space programs and the effects of the economy, of government, of commercial space activities is first an official space indicators report. This document would be modeled after the economic indicators published monthly by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. The economic indicators [are] comprised entirely of tables and charts prepared by a number of federal statistical offices. Space indicators would provide data on national and international trends. It would make it possible for government and non-government analysts, as well as policy makers in the executive branch and in Congress, to get overviews and insights into the space sector based on accurate, timely, and reliable information.
            That concludes my own remarks. Thank you very much.
            Now we will go to our panel, and Nancy Gallagher will speak first.

“The Costs of U.S. Space Dominance”
by Nancy Gallagher:
            Previous panels have dealt with the high cost of the Bush administration’s offensively oriented national security strategy, the Pentagon’s plans for defense transformation, and the ongoing wars in Iraq   and Afghanistan, topics that we all read about in the news on a regular basis. This panel is focusing on space, a topic that even most security experts don’t know very much about; but our job is to convince you that what happens hundreds or even tens of thousands of miles over your heads is very closely connected to the prospects for perpetual U.S. military and economic hegemony, or for escalating military competition with crushing levels of defense spending, or for closer international cooperation, not only on shared security problems such as proliferation and terrorism, but also on sustainable development and climate change.
            In my remarks I’m going to concentrate on four main points. Contrary to the comment that was made earlier about space being like anarchy, historically, even during the darkest days of superpower competition, early U.S. space policy emphasized cooperation over confrontation for the simple reason that space can’t be controlled through military means in the same way that territory on Earth can. The end of the Cold War and the rise of the global commercial space industry led most observers to expect greater international cooperation; but instead the Bush administration has decided that because the United States relies the most on space, spends the most on space, and has the most advanced space capabilities and expertise, it should be able to control how space is used. Current U.S. aspirations for military space dominance are completely unrealistic for technical and budgetary reasons, and I’ll argue that continuing this quixotic policy would make space a much more difficult, dangerous, and expensive place to operate.
            And finally, briefly, that international cooperation would be a much more cost- effective way to protect and promote beneficial uses of space; but that significant space cooperation requires equitable rules, not only about space, but also about terrestrial security.
            Now long before the first satellite was launched, the United States understood that the physical properties of space make it extremely valuable for collecting and transmitting information over large distances; but they also makes satellites extremely expensive and much easier to attack than defend. Therefore from the beginning we concentrated just as much on establishing a supportive international legal context for space as we did on developing the technology to launch an operate satellites. The initial concern was to legitimate the use of reconnaissance satellites as different from airplane overflights and other forms of espionage so that the United States could use this new technology to peer behind the Iron Curtain without having world opinion denounce the U.S. as aggressive and withhold the cooperation that we needed for our space program. But once the Soviets could launch ballistic missiles and put their own satellites in orbit, it was clear that they would be able to shoot down U.S. reconnaissance satellites if the two countries could not agree about which military uses of space should be tolerated and which should be outlawed or controlled through reciprocal restraint.
            The 1967 Outer Space Treaty and a whole package of other diplomatic instruments represent the culmination of a major American effort to get agreement on principles and rules for the uses of Outer Space. In the key parts of the Outer Space, first the part that the United States most wanted, the principle that space is free for all countries to use, was clearly conditioned on three requirements: number one, that the purpose is peaceful; number two, that the benefits are shared equitably; and number three, that one country’s use of space doesn’t hurt anyone else’s ability to use it now or in the future. The Outer Space Treaty’s Article IV explicitly rules out only a very small number of military activities in space: basically weapons of mass destruction in space and military bases on the moon or other celestial bodies. But Article IV is preceded by Article III, which very explicitly states that any use of space must be in accordance with international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, which was a way of saying in effect that any military uses had to be either defensive or authorized by the Security Council.
            None of these agreements explicitly ban anti-satellite weapons or other types of conventional space weapons. Instead, the U.S. preferred to rely on tacit restraint with the Soviet Union. But there was a clear policy in the United States of signaling to the Soviet Union that we wouldn’t push our own anti-satellite development efforts as far or fast as we could if they didn’t either, and that neither side should target the other’s military support satellites because they were generally seen as actually stabilizing deterrents.
            The United States’ policy of strategic restraint in space was based on four hard-headed calculations: First, that space weapons would be technologically challenging, expensive, vulnerable, and would offer the United States few if any advantages over land-, sea-, or air-based systems for most military missions. Second, that if the United States deployed space weapons, the Soviets would follow suit, so the advantages for the Unites States would be short-lived; whereas if the U.S. exercised restraint, the Soviets would either reciprocate, or they would take an incremental step towards space weapons that the United States could quickly counter. Third, the United States was more dependent on space than the Soviet Union was, so it had more to lose if attacks on space assets were legitimized. And finally, that most of the uses of space for military purposes were stabilizing to deterrents, such as for arms control verification, early crisis warning, transparency during crises; and that therefore it was actually in the security interests of both countries to tolerate the others’ uses of space for those purposes.
            Now the Reagan administration rejected the logic of reciprocal restraint in space because it was more concerned with space as part of a war-fighting strategy than as any attempt to stabilize deterrents with fewer numbers of nuclear weapons. Its plans for space-based missile defense received the most attention, but its policy documents also clearly authorized a vigorous attempt to deploy anti-satellite weapons at the earliest possible moment and preliminary work on space-based weapons; although none of those concepts went much further than SDI did.
            It should be noted that in 1985, the United States conducted an [ASET?] test against one of its own satellites that was very similar to the test that China conducted recently; so we demonstrated 20 years ago that we had that technology.
            The end of the Cold War, combined with the Information Revolution, economic globalization, and the use of space by an increasing number of countries for an expanding array of purposes created a widespread presumption that commercial uses of space would come to dominate military ones, and that the primary challenges for space security would be coordination problems, such as space traffic management, debris [medegration?], and orbital slot allocation.
            There were some U.S. defense planners, though, even in the 90s, who were thinking about ways in which we could use space-based information and communication assets as part of the revolution in military affairs, as basically a high-tech way to use information to substitute for fire power. And you’ve heard several people refer to precision-guided weapons, which are clearly space-enabled. But Admiral William Owens, one of the earliest proponents of this whole concept of the information technology-based revolution in military affairs, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at this time, was very clear that this was global technology, and that other countries could do it if they wanted to, and that the only way in which other countries would tolerate the United States having a major advantage in space-based military support systems would be if the United States shared that information with its allies and used its military capabilities for purposes that had broad international support.
            The Clinton administration’s own space policy was very ambiguous. It emphasized commercial and civilian cooperation over military applications; but the sections on military uses of space basically just repeated the vague language from the Reagan and Bush administrations’ documents, as opposed to challenging it. So it talked about using space for a variety of future missions, including space control, which is basically a euphemism for anti-satellite technology, and possible space force application, the euphemism for basing weapons in space that could target the Earth. But it specified that it was basically giving the military authority to think about these things, not telling it to go forth and do. It actively resisted putting a lot of money towards it; and it made it very clear that any military space activities should be done within the constraints of the Outer Space Treaty and all other legal obligations; and that we should be looking towards diplomatic and legal measures to protect our satellites, not just military means.
            Almost immediately after that document was released, though, the U.S. Space Command came out with its vision for 2020, which had a completely different notion of what we should be doing in space that essentially took the Reagan era ideas and updated them for a world in which we no longer had a pure competitor in space, but instead was the world’s sole space superpower. It argued that the global spread of space technology made a tax on U.S. commercial and military space assets inevitable; so the United States should prepare now for space warfare and try to lock in perpetual space dominance. It wanted space to become a full-spectrum command engaged not only in support for terrestrial operations, but also in fighting in, from, and through space. And finally it argued that the United States should have the goal of using space to be able to see anything anywhere on Earth, anytime of day or night, through any weather; to be able to target it and attack it; to be able to protect all U.S. space assets; and to be able to deny other countries similar capabilities. So it effectively was a blueprint for perpetual military dominance.
            Now there was never any kind of rational debate between these two visions of space, the vision that was dominated by basically commercial and civilian cooperation, versus a vision of dominance. Instead it was basically domestic politics, first the ascendancy of the Republicans in Congress; and then President Bush being elected and choosing Secretary Rumsfeld, a particular proponent of this vision, as his Secretary of Defense. It was the collapse, the IT technology bubble bursting, and the fact that the space commercial sector didn’t expand as quickly as people expected it to. And thirdly, export controls. There was a concerted effort in the United States to make it very difficult for American space companies to actually engage in any kind of global commerce, and so they went back to becoming very dependent on the military for their livelihood. Those three things together created a presumption that we were headed towards this world of space warfare and space dominance without anybody ever really stopping to think about whether this was a desirable policy, or whether it was even a doable policy. And I think that presumption has been reinforced by the Chinese anti-satellite tests, that now we’re assuming that there is a threat out there, that that threat arose somehow independent of anything that we did to create it or to inspire it, and that we simply need to, reluctantly perhaps, prepare to respond to that threat. And there’s very little understanding either of the ways in which expanded U.S. military space activities and talk about space dominance have stimulated other countries’ national security space programs and hurt our efforts to deal with security space challenges through cooperative mechanisms; or reasons why it’s not reasonable to believe that, even if we wanted to have space dominance, we actually could do it.
            So I want to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about what this concept of space dominance actually means; and why I, at least, think that it’s not realistic to believe that the United States, even if it made an all-out effort, could actually ever achieve it; and why it’s very dangerous and counter-productive to try.
            The new national space policy that President Bush released last fall formally endorses an effort to achieve U.S. military space dominance as outlined in Space Com’s vision for 2020 and a whole series of planning and doctrinal documents that were released [thereafter]. The Bush policy, anyone who talks about it from the administration tries to present as just continuing the same principles that the United States has always had for its space policy; but it actually represents a very radical reorientation in a number of ways.
            First of all, it puts U.S. space policy not in the context of deterrence and trying to stabilize deterrence, but in the context of President Bush’s national security strategy, which emphasizes coercive prevention, going on the offense to prevent threats from developing, rather than dealing with them later.
            Secondly, it asserts U.S. rights in space and defines those rights much more broadly than they were defined in previous documents; but it doesn’t acknowledge that other countries have corresponding rights.
            Thirdly, it explicitly rules out new arms control agreements or any other restriction on U.S. freedom of action in space.
            The new policy retains the vague language about military missions used in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton space policies, and, at least in the unclassified versions of it, doesn’t explicitly say that the United States is going to make a concerted effort to acquire a broad array of war-fighting capabilities in space. But if you look at it in conjunction with these other lower-level documents, and if you look at it also in conjunction with what the Bush administration has been doing for the last six years that they’ve been in office, it’s clear that what they have in mind is something that’s very similar to the array of capabilities outlined in Vision for 2020, or the Air Force’s Space Command Strategic Master Plan.
            First they talk about force enhancement, which is basically using space to improve our terrestrial military capabilities, make it possible to project precision power over long distances without any need for forward bases, without any need for allied support; to have information that can enable us to attack moving targets, for example, or very very small targets. So you’re still, in this case, talking about space to support terrestrial military operations, but in the goal of war fighting and as an active, integral part of our military systems, not primarily for deterrent stability.
            Space control, as I said, is the euphemism that we used for being able to say we should be able to do whatever we want to do in space, and we should be able to prevent anybody else from either stopping us or from doing things that we don’t like. And these documents talk about a whole array of space control capabilities, ranging from what they call they call complete situational awareness, i.e., being able to see everything that’s going on around you in space, to passive and active defenses for all U.S. space assets, to a variety of destructive and non-destructive ways of interfering with other countries’ space operations.
            Force application: space-based weapons. Basically we want to be able to hit a target anywhere on Earth within 60 to 90 minutes of being ordered to do so. And there a variety of space-based concepts for doing this, including a space plane, or using satellites to de-orbit kinetic weapons. There are also non-space-based of doing it; so most of what you’re hearing about global strike now is using space assets to guide, say, a conventional missile to do the job. But nevertheless, in the Space Com planning documents, they clearly see a role for space-based weapons here.
            And then finally space support, which is basically the word that’s used for space launch. And here the objective really is to be able to launch a whole variety of different types of satellites on very short notice so we wouldn’t have to worry about somebody shooting down one of our satellites; we’d just be able to pop another one back up again.
            Now these are very very broad, ambitious plans. If you’re in the mindset that thinks that space warfare is either inevitable or desirable, they all sound like things you’d want to have, things that you should be working to develop. But if you look at what we’ve actually done, there’s a very long way from being able to do most of this. The Bush administration has made a number of organizational changes, the most important one of which is to merge Space Com and Strat Com, to say basically our space assets and our strategic war fighting assets are now intimately connected. We’ve made a number of legal changes, the most visible of which is withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, which removes any constraints on space-based missile defense, and trying to reinterpret the Outer Space Treaty so that it’s only Article IV, not the rest of it. We’ve made major increases in spending on military space. You’ve already heard that it’s very difficult to actually track what’s being spent. The figure that’s most commonly used right now is about 20 billion dollars a year. That’s up sharply from what it was during the Clinton administration. It’s projected to go up even farther. The administration has stopped releasing those numbers, so that you can’t track the aggregate spending; all you can do is track individual programs. And the amount of money that’s being spent specifically on space acquisition has gone up even faster than the overall space spending.
            But if you look at what the United States is actually getting for all that money, what you realize is that it’s a lot of talk about dominance, and a lot of very provocative threat, but not a lot of new military capabilities. Most of that money is going into Clinton era military space support systems that are way behind schedule and over budget, and many of which we haven’t even started deploying yet. There are small amounts of money being used for experimental activities that could eventually have weapons applications, such as the space-based test bed, or a ground-based laser that could be used in anti-satellites. But the amounts of money are very small, but they’re nonetheless seen as provocative and very detrimental to existing legal rules for space.
            The amount of money that’s being spent on the truly transformative capabilities, like being able to see moving targets anytime, anywhere, and track them continually, is currently very small, especially if you compare it to what the total cost of these systems would be. And if you look at [them] over time, it’s clear that there are huge problems in the military space acquisition process. So we’ve been scaling back our ideas of how many satellites we’re going to buy, how quickly we’re going to be able to acquire them, such that what we’re likely to end up with are very incremental increases in capabilities, but not radical changes in our ability to use space for military purposes.
            Space Com has already admitted that, even with very optimistic assumptions about technology, acquisition, and future budgets, they’re not going to be able to afford to get everything they want on the schedule that they want to get it. And they obviously would like to see the space budgets increase significantly further. I think it’s clear from what you’ve heard from other panelists that, particularly with the war in Iraq, that’s not likely to happen; there are just too many other demands on the budget. And it’s also clear that the estimates that have been used are grossly unrealistic for how much all these kinds of things would cost.
            So I think the net result is that the United States is going to end up undermining the existing legal rules and protections in space; provoking other countries to start thinking about what they might to do in space, or what they might need to do to counter U.S. capabilities; but not being in a position to either get dramatic new benefits itself from space, or to be able to protect the space assets that it has. Thank you.

“Space Security and Economics,”
by Henry Hertzfeld:
            I have some slides.
            Thanks, Rich and Nancy. I’m going to repeat some things, but maybe with slightly different emphasis.
            I’m going to spend a few minutes at the beginning to talk about what we do know about the space economy and how and why it’s important strategically and commercially, and then move on and talk a little bit about space and security, but from a perspective of using economics and using commercial space for leadership, and whether that’s actually possible or not, and touch on a few of the other subjects, too.
            First of all, what do we know? Well, we don’t have a good definition of what the space economy is. The first thing that comes to mind is the narrowest one perhaps, and that’s, well, we know that the government spent money on R&D, and the launch industry is out there. We watch the television, and see the launch vehicles take off for space. Commercial satellites we of course know about, and we read an awful lot about this tourism and entrepreneurial activity, which really is quite insignificant at the moment in terms of money. Estimate maybe 100 billion dollars a year goes to the sum of those elements. I have some more detailed charts on some of these numbers in a minute.
            We can be a little more expansive. We can also think about all the terrestrial equipment, the GPS units that people buy and a carrier which you put in your cars, ground receiving stations, direct broadcast TV satellite dishes, and so on. It’s an enormous market. Is it space, or isn’t it? Well, it’s dependent on space, but it’s really, you’re going to your electronics stores, your Best Buys, and Circuit Cities, and so on, and buying that stuff, and you really don’t think about that as a space industry.
            We could also be more expansive yet, and we can think about all the spin-offs and the industries that have developed as a result of the investments that have been made in the industry. I don’t have a number for that. I don’t know what it is.
            And even more encompassing—I’ll spend a little more time again later on this—[is] space as a backbone and an infrastructure that we depend on. And if you begin to talk in numbers of that sort, you’re maybe talking trillions of dollars. I saw a number recently, some British consulting agency did something for the British space industry—three trillion dollars. I don’t know if it’s accurate or not, I think it’s a little high, but, you know, it’s out there.
            Richard talked a little bit about space economic indicators and some of the reasons why they’re not available. We do have quite a few aggregate statistics, but we don’t agree on definitions, similar to what I mentioned a second ago. We do have a problem with classified programs, but we have a pretty good aggregate idea of how much in total is spent on them, but not the details. Companies. You have Lockheed, Boeing, of course, Raytheon in the United States, EADS in Europe—they do everything from airplanes to software to space. Space is a somewhat small part of it, and trying to figure out what part of their sales and revenues are space is almost impossible. Go through the annual reports. You can’t pull it out. I’ve tried. And then there are numerous technical problems that range everything from the industrial coding system—not only is there not one space sector in the United States, in [NIACS?], or the old SIC classifications scattered over lots of different places—we can identify a lot of it, but it’s not clear—but internationally they’re differences in these codes too, and space is a global business; it’s not just in the United States.
            So we really need a uniform system of space accounts, and we need to develop this idea of leading indicators. More important, we have an idea of the absolute numbers—I’ll give you some of those—but we don’t have a good, consistent time series. There are a few efforts that are going on in the United States and elsewhere to develop those, but they are in their early stages. And we’ve been trying for years to get this started, and it hasn’t happened yet.
            Okay. These charts didn’t come out really that clearly, but let’s say the world economy, some numbers: 45 trillion dollars. I’ve seen some higher, but let’s take that. U.S. economy is over 13 trillion. Where does space fit? You can’t even see the little wedge that I have up there of that 180 billion dollars that I mentioned earlier. Civil governments around the world, not just the United States, maybe 28 billion on space security; military, most of it the United States, about 33 billion I estimate, plus or minus, who knows, again, depending on some of the secure programs, but that’s about right. And commercial programs maybe about 30 billion. And the blue here is the United States; the red is the rest of the world in those areas. We’re the elephant, and particularly in the military end.
            There’s another estimate done last year that the world’s pay sector is about 180 billion dollars. That again is about 100 billion more than the top three add up to. That would include the consumer equipment that I mentioned in the last chart.
            Just in comparison: Exxon Mobil, one company, has had annual revenues last year of close to 400 billion dollars. We’re nothing in terms of the economy. I don’t care whether this number is too big and you say 150 billion, or it’s 20 billion. It’s small. So why are we spending so much time on it? I’ll come back to that question in a minute.
            These are government statistics. They come out of the President’s Report on Aeronautics and Space. They’re gathered by every agency. I’ve put in the trend from 1959 up on ward. DOD’s in red, NASA is in blue, the black is the total. It also includes [?], and agriculture, and Interior, which spend relatively small amounts. If you can’t see the numbers, the top horizontal line is 45 billion dollars, and of course down to zero. Most of the numbers you’ll see for the rest of the world are down here under that 5 billion dollar range. And of course you can see the obvious trends: This would be [?] era, and this was Star Wars, and this was the Bush II administration over here on the right. So it hasn’t been even by any means, and the defense expenditures crossed with the civil expenditures back here sometime in the late ‘70s. And again we had another little scissoring effect right here in the Bush administration in fairly recent years.
            Europe. This is a little different. These are not government budget numbers; this is a survey of the turnover, the industry sales by customer. And it’s done by a group called Eurospace in Europe. Interesting that the military expenditures there have risen dramatically in recent years, the red line. The blue line [is] the civil expenditures, mainly European Space Agency, and each nation has their own space program as well. I won’t talk about it, but interestingly enough just about a week the EU issued a new European space policy, and they’re moving ahead on this even without a constitution. One of the major tenets, among others, is independent capabilities, independent of course of the United States. So they’re going to develop more security. Space security in Europe means something slightly different. They’re also talking environmental security; but it also means military security.
            This black line is commercial expenditures in Europe, and they go all over the place, up and down, and not very even. I don’t know exactly what we can say about it from a policy perspective other than it was almost nothing in 1991.
            Another chart showing world space expenditures. Again, it points out that the civil space, this adds up to about 28 billion dollars a year. NASA, the big big element in all of this. And you can see the trend, all these little countries. Richard mentioned some; there are many more, and they are all starting space programs of one sort or another. And that’s new, that’s within the last five to ten years. And many of them are looking at resources and looking at military objectives. The one that’s not in here is China—it is in here. It’s 134 million dollars. Forget it. That’s wrong. I’ve heard numbers around two billion dollars a year. But, you know, they put astronauts in space. They’ve done an awful lot of stuff. They’re capable, they have a full range of space programs mirroring from Earth observations to communications and navigation satellites—I’ll never do it in five minutes, but I’ll try. Anyway—[End Side A]  —or more in terms of purchasing power parity. I really think it’s much higher.
            Okay. I’m going to go real fast since there are some other points I want to […?]. Back in 1980, I first met my […?] at this conference in Strasbourg. I think it was one of the first conferences looking at economics of space. What were we talking about? We were talking about innovation, spin-offs, maybe a little bit about voice telecommunications. Is that what we’re talking about today? Not at all. We still have the R&D, and we still have of course the spin-offs, but—go to the next slide—what’s in the middle is just a little schematic of all the satellites in orbit. But that’s the backbone—cell phones, cable links, weather maps on the evening news, direct broadcast TV, the navigation systems, and even though the ATMs, the small aperture satellites, the very small aperture satellites that enable you to use your credit card anywhere in the world.    Next please. […?] when you say space. Astronauts, you know, all the stuff, launches--which, by the way, only have about a 96, 97 percent success rate, they’re not that good in terms of comparing to airplanes or something of that sort--, consumer products, we still have a Cold War mentality to space, and that same mentality permeates government. So okay, space is complex; it’s for rocket scientists. And it is. But that message is difficult to communicate to the world as to what we really are. And NASA may even be its own worst enemy. It’s into Mars, and Moon, and people, and that’s not what we’re talking about as backbone. It’s exploration, it’s interesting stuff; but it is not the economy.
            Question: We can’t measure that broad impact, but hypothetically, what if we turned everything off for 24 hours? We’d have very interesting reactions, I think, around the world. We wouldn’t be able to do business anymore.
            Space assets: We’ve heard from everybody, and it’s true, they’re very very vulnerable. They’re very fragile. We do not have a backup for these systems today. We’ve become dependent on something we can’t easily replicate, and war and weapons are not the only things that make them vulnerable. You’ve got natural phenomena, geomagnetic storms, base weather. You’ve got asteroids, comets, other things. And you’ve got operational debris. What I mean by that is when a rocket’s launched, it separates in stages. Those separations are little explosions. Things come out from that. They’re orbiting up there as well, not to mention things that really are self—I’ll call them stupid, like the Chinese [?], where, what did they do? They destroyed their own weapon. They didn’t do anything technically illegal, but boy, they mess up the polar orbit that is used for weather satellites. They not only made it difficult for everybody else, but for themselves in the future, too. It was not a very smart thing to do, even though we’ve done it in the past, too.
            Okay, space security: I’ll try to get through this quickly. First of all, this dominance of space for the United States in leadership is not new. It goes way back. It goes back to the Eisenhower administration. What is new is the tone of the Bush II policy of a few months back and how that’s been interpreted around the world. That is not good, and I don’t want to be an apologist for this policy. But in terms of leadership, we’ve been there for a long time. How would we have economic power in space? Either a monopoly or large market share. The large market share would also mean standards would be set. They’d be U.S. standards, and we’d have control in some way of satellites and space. We have to assume, though, that there’s a safe place up there, that it’s a stable environment, and in some way that would have to be enforced either by a large power or some sort of cooperative agreements.
            How has space changed, and how is the environment, the international environment, changed? First of all, globalization of networks. It’s out there. Technological capabilities don’t exist just in the United States and the old Soviet Union; they exist everywhere. Privatization was mentioned earlier, but the government is now just a customer of many many things and capabilities in space. Our government encouraged companies to consolidate back in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration. What’s happened? Other nations that compete with us have also encouraged their companies to consolidate. So it’s basically an oligopolistic type of competition. It is not a textbook-perfect competition out there. It never was and it’s not going to be for a long time, if ever. And we have a growing regulatory environment that I probably don’t have time to get into.
            I’d like to break down globalization into three things: geopolitical multinational corporations, financial markets, information and networks. The latter two were somewhere over here, toward globalization. Geopolitical, though—nations do not and will not give up territorial rights. Even where you see some improvements in that, like in trade and in intellectual property and other things, they’re giving up things only at the margins. So I’m not really very optimistic about the geopolitical aspect of it, and I don’t believe globalization is inevitable. It is a long-term trend, but it has, there have been a lot of setbacks, particularly after World War I and World War II.
            What about space? Well, on the supply side, all space applications are [?], no question about it. And we have commercial—and really the military end is responsible for a lot of the technology, not all of it—and there’s a symbiotic relationship there. Anyway, globalization enables a larger market, and we have a very expensive up-front cost in putting anything into space, and you have to pay that back. The larger the market, the more globalization you have that opens markets, the more profitable commercial space will be.
            On the demand side, again, you have digital [?] issues and other things, and it all feeds back, and if you can have more and bigger things in space, and bigger markets, you can do better.
            Government policy. Early policies were very much security and leadership. They said nothing about economics except the jobs created and maybe a few spin-offs. It really started in the Carter administration, was enhanced later on. Clinton, there was an awful lot of that, and the basic approach is leadership.
            A major point of what I’m going to get to here, just to really shorten this and give everybody else fair time, is that we’ve been our own worst enemy. Generally, economic policy and space policy have not been coordinated. One other thing: With the spread internationally, we have many competitors out there, and those competitors are essential now to even our military operation. We buy imagery from France, from Spot Image, we use Soiuz rockets to get to the space station since the shuttle was [?] and can’t do it all. And you can go on through the whole process, and they’re dependent on us, we’re dependent on them.
            Early on—a good example, The Symphony, a French-German communications satellite back in the ‘70s. It was an operational satellite. The policy was for the U.S. not to launch any operational satellite for another nation. They didn’t like it. We finally did, we called it experimental after a lot of pressure; but it stimulated a commercial European launch vehicle. That [?] was supposed to just launch scientific rockets originally. They saw a market. And we’ve done other things like that. I could go into great detail later.
            I mentioned this. So space policy can’t stand alone; it has to be coordinated with everything else.
            This is really the essence of it: Security policy has always trumped commercial space policy. There’s no question about it; it’s still there. Security policy trumps general fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policy on the economic side as well today. Government economic policy trumps commercial space policy. So to think that commercial space policy would be the driver of space power leadership is wrong. It just will not be in the United States the way we’ve organized things today. It can easily be undermined. Important point: We don’t have industry policy. Other nations, the European Union, the [?], and other nations invest in space for one reason: jobs, get on top of the technology curve and economic growth. It is industrial policy, and that’s what they’re out to do. They have to compete in the commercial sector. And we may think we are, but we’re not. Our policies don’t reflect that.
            So in some way what can we do? Well, not a heck of a lot. Of course, companies are only going to invest if there’s profit motive. If there’s increased risk in space, then you’re going to discourage investment. Do we require it? Are foreign assets essential for security? Yes.
            We’re stuck. We’re in a bad place right now. What can we do? Well, we can treat commercial space just as another commodity. We’ll never do that because of the dual use aspects. We can control it through military. As Nancy quite accurately said, we talk about it; I don’t think we can really do it. Can we stimulate renewed economic competitiveness in the United States? Maybe. But the big S, the subsidy word comes in there, and that flies in the face of a number of other agreements that we have, and even that may be difficult.
            What could we do? Maybe it’s a weak answer, but all I can say is, we can be offensive in doing more to keep ahead of everybody else. Stop putting our fingers in the dykes and trying to prevent everybody, but just bigger and better stuff through commercial and military I guess, but through investments in research and development, sell them abroad, and eliminate regulatory disincentives.
            We’re not doing any of that right now. Thank you.

“Space Security: Capabilities and Limits of Technical Solutions”
by Laura Grego:
            I seem to be the only thing between you and drinks and dinner. It’s not the most enviable place to be. Fortunately for you, some of the other panel members covered a lot of the introductory material, so I can speed it along.
            […?] invited to this conference. I’m a physical scientist, and so I don’t even speak the language. It’s an even worse position. But something that Nancy said, and looking at your brochure has a Somali proverb on the front: “War and famine, peace and milk.” I found that interesting because my in-laws are Somali, and I was over in eastern Kenya last year because my father-in-law was really sick. It was a part of Kenya that’s not even on the map. So I went out and got my guidebook and everything. People don’t even go there, we don’t even put this in the book. We visited the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, and they said, We can’t do anything for you if you’re there. It’s supposedly filled with bandits.
            Anyway, my brother-in-law picked us up at the airport, me, my husband, and my mother-in-law, and I asked him, So is this really really dangerous, this road we’re taking? And he’s like, Look, I know these guys. They go out in the desert and they shoot off their guns so they can get more money for the buses they drive. So they’re making their milk not necessarily from peace, but benefiting from the insecurity. And I think that’s something that Nancy said, that when there isn’t a commercial market, creating instability, creating insecurity provides a market for some of these big aerospace companies or the bus drivers who fire their guns to protect the bus. So keeping that in mind, I found this just—I can’t wait to bring this home.
            So I thought I’d just quickly—This is material covered a bit already, but just to orient you to space. What is interesting about space? Again, the United States by far is the dominant user of space. There are almost 850 satellites up there right now. The U.S. owns over 400 of those. The preponderance of those actually are civilian. And Russia is the next competitor, China is making a gain, and the rest of the world has an enormous number, too. In fact, at this point I think there are over 40 states that own their own satellites, and many many many more that use satellite services.
            In fact, I’m going to go back to Africa for just a second for another anecdote, which is that when we were in this very remote part of the country, there was a drought, and my in-laws’ compound was one of the local ones that had a cistern, and so we had lots and lots of people coming to get water. The nomad caravans came by. And so I was just talking to them this week, I called my mother-in-law, and in fact you can call there. Everyone has a cell phone. They have no water, there’s no electricity, there’s no movie theater, no one has TV; but everyone has a cell phone. In fact, I said to her, how’s the water situation? Oh, it’s fine, but we really need is a generator, because everybody’s coming to charge their cell phones at our house. It’s making us crazy, it’s so expensive. So now the telecommunications have become in that locality as valuable a commodity as water, which I find just enormously, just really fascinating.
            So while most of what I’m going to talk about is very U.S.-centric, other states very clearly have a strong stake in the outcome in space and certainly see themselves as part of the future in space.
            Again, how is space used now? Most of that is communications. It’s one of the most of the efficient ways—And again, for developing countries who may just leapfrog the whole idea of laying down fiber-optic cables and things, this is a way you can do distance education, you can send medical expertise to very remote parts of the country, and that’s really what space is good for. And of course GPS informs much more than just navigation; it’s timing signals. It’s very pervasive in our lives.
            And this may be not as interesting, but [?] means lowest orbits. So about half the satellites are fairly close to the ground, like not much further than the distance between Boston and New York. So those are the kinds of things that look at the Earth, like weather satellites, like environmental monitoring satellites, spy satellites.
            The stuff in geo-synchronous orbits, which is GEO, are the stuff that are the big commercial communication satellites. GO is about six Earth radii away from the surface of the Earth, so very remote from what we’re doing on Earth, and that is also where most of the money—Henry was talking a lot about, I think your figure was 180 billion, or whatever that is—Most of that, though, is located pretty remotely from the Earth, and so although we think that commercial satellite operators should be really interested in this question about space security, they consider themselves removed from it physically, and so they’re not always as interested.
            Those data that I just showed you come from something I thought you might be interested in. At Union of Concerned Scientists we’ve put a database together of all the active satellites on orbit, so you can make those kind of calculations. There’s lots more information than just where and what they do. So if you find something that you might be interested in, you can follow that website, or I can give it to you later.
            But following from that, I just wanted to mention that Outer Space has an enormous potential as an agent of stability and prosperity, and it’s mostly being realized. So I want to start with a common understanding. I’m going to be clear about which specific security issue I’m going to address.
            The term space weapons encompasses space-based missile defense, interceptors, ground attack weapons based in space and anti-satellite weapons, both ground and space-based, and we touched on those already. But while both space-based missile defense and ground attack weapons have serious security implications, and they might be part of serious future debates, they’re far enough away technologically and economically from the present that I’m going to set those aside for right now and focus on what I think is the most pressing issue right this minute, and that is the development of anti-satellite weapons.
            Because a satellite serves a number of civilian purposes, they serve an enormous number of important military missions, and they have significant potential physical vulnerability. So they’ve been long considered, as Nancy described quite well, attractive military targets. And some people argue that warfare in space follows naturally from warfare on the ground and in air. So there are these very valuable and very vulnerable assets, so obviously they are something that draw a great amount of concern.
            So how do we manage the strategic issue to preserve this beneficial agency into the future, and how do we insure that involving space doesn’t escalate conflicts on Earth? How do we transition gracefully from the present to a future where many more states have interests and assets in space?
            And I think the choices made now are going to be setting the tone for space operations, but also strategic relationships for a long time to come. And the United States, as a dominant user, really has an opportunity to shape the future. And we talked about how things have changed from the Cold War to the present; I won’t spend a lot of time talking about that.
            But satellites used to primarily function as strategic assets, stabilizing assets, which provided them a bit of cover. I have this next slide, which was meant to show you that the U.S. military spending was sort of 95 percent of the world’s total. I think I’m going to cop some of Henry’s slides next time because he shows those much better. But basically what I’m trying to get across is that satellites have gained new roles in the past decade. Space systems now play tactical roles that are critical to the conduct of conventional war in a way that they did not before. And in fact, the U.S. has recognized satellite systems as “an integral part of the deterrent posture of the U.S. Armed Forces.” And of all nations, the U.S. has the largest investment in military space and best exploits the military side of space for reconnaissance, for targeting, for communications, for surveillance, for all of those kinds of things.
            And that has led to a desire on the part of the military to preserve for itself those satellite space capabilities and to have the ability to deny those capabilities to adversaries when it wants to, presumably in a conflict. However, satellites are intrinsically vulnerable. Defending them from a determined adversary is very difficult because satellites are readily observable from the ground—that’s one of their benefits, that’s one of the reasons we use them—and they travel on predictable paths, so they go repeatedly exactly where you expect them to go, so it gives an adversary multiple opportunities to attack. And by design satellites are light and largely unarmored because space launch is so extremely expensive, and mass is at a premium. So this provides strong incentives to attack or disrupt them.
            In the National Space Policy, the new one issued last year recognizes this ascendance of military uses for space and emphasizes that those space assets need to be protected. But it also dismisses arms control and diplomatic approaches as largely irrelevant to doing that. Instead, it’s shrunk the tool box, and that’s a striking change from years past. That shift is consistent, however, with the U.S. diplomatic position in the United Nations, both in the First Committee and on the Conference on Disarmament. And in recent years, the U.S. has consistently opposed discussions of diplomatic approaches governing activities in space […?].
            The approach instead has been to focus a set of technologies--because we believe in technology, that’s a very American value—many of which have anti-satellite capability. And while the U.S. has available some sort of what we call non-permanent means of interfering with satellites, which is like [?] jamming, ways of interfering with satellite signals, things that you can do temporarily, and they’re reversible, so they can be used in a conflict, turned off later, things that are the least escalatory on the scale.
            More lethal options have been considered and continue to be considered. Nancy mentioned the air launch miniature vehicle, which we tested 20 years ago, which was a missile launched from an airplane that directly ascended to a satellite and blew it up. So we know how to do that.
            Congress stepped in pretty quickly and said we’re not going to do another one of those tests. Presumably we have some of that capability left, but the U.S. has largely abandoned those types of technologies.
            But 10 years later, the U.S. tested a system based on a high-powered laser that was coupled to a mirror that could track satellites, and continues to do this kind of research on lasers, on other types of anti-satellite technologies. The ground-based [?] missile defense system would be a pretty crummy missile defense system, but probably would provide a pretty decent anti-satellite capability that would be recognized by any other country that has physicists too. And also developing highly maneuverable microsats. Some people call them snuggle sats, meaning they will come up to your satellite and get close enough where you don’t have to have a very powerful or very sophisticated weapon to disable your target.
            So how do we defend against those? Well, some of the rhetoric has been talked about defensive satellites. They’re often called bodyguard satellites. And they’re sometimes discussed as a means of protecting those high-value satellites, but for various technical reasons it’s really difficult to impossible to imagine that working. And you can never provide enough confidence in the survivability of the satellite they were intended to protect.
            Additionally, almost all of those things designed as defensive satellite weapons would look a lot like an offensive weapon to somebody else, because you have to shoot something coming in, it has to be maneuverable. That’s the way another person would look at it.
            So with no legal restrictions on ASAT weapons—when I say ASAT, that means anti-satellite--and with the evident strong interest in ASAT-capable technologies by the leading space power, other states may decide that ASATs are in their interest, too, and that might be the answer to their perceived security needs. Our colleagues in other countries are always asking us, well, if it doesn’t work, why is the U.S. spending so much money on it? It’s hard to explain. Missile defense systems, for example. They don’t listen to their physicists. They listen to the money. If it’s being spent, there must be something behind it.
            The Chinese rationale for developing and testing its own ASAT weapon is unknown to us. We have no insights into that. However, its repeated calls with the Russian Federation at the United Nations for discussions about space security have been rejected over and over by the U.S. Although it’s impossible to say where those discussions would have led,  that there were no discussions insured that there was no law against this anti-satellite weapon.
            So I’m just going to talk about this test a little bit from my point of view as a physicist. These dots are not life-sized; these dots are positions. But what they show you is the amount of debris in space prior to this test. So that’s the Earth. Those little dots are in the lowest orbits. They’re hundreds, a few hundred to a few thousand miles or kilometers. And shows you also, the big circle on the left shows you where the geosynchronous satellites are.
            So the ASAT test basically destroyed an aging weather satellite, the [?], on January 11. That satellite had a mass of just under one ton, and it was at about 850 kilometers above the Earth when it was destroyed. The energy of the collision of this ground-based ascending missile destroyed the satellite completely. This test approximately doubled the density of debris larger than one centimeter in the region around the satellite for at least five years. That’s how long the stuff will stay up there, doubling the risk of a catastrophic collision at that altitude. So it wasn’t an isolated China testing on its own satellite; the junk that’s up there affects China’s own satellites; it affects every other country’s satellites at the same time.
            By late May, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network already catalogued 1600 pieces of debris that were fairly large, and probably a large fraction of this will stay up there for a long time. And what happens eventually is that it starts in a little ball where it explodes, it starts to fill in the orbit where the satellite was; but because of the perturbations in the Earth’s gravity--it’s not perfectly spherical, the pieces of debris start to spread out, and they start to form a shell around the Earth. Again, those are not life-sized pieces, but what they indicate are the number of pieces that are up there. Those pieces are flying so fast, they’re like 30 times the speed of a bullet. They’re even something that’s a centimeter, which is like the size of a marble. If it ran into you—an astronaut, I guess, or a satellite—it would destroy it completely. So everything in space is going at such high speeds, this is important. This is an environmental space problem. This is a danger to all other space users. At this altitude, the risk of running into a satellite has doubled.
            But fortunately, the absolute risk to satellites, debris due to satellites, is still low; but it could be much worse if China continues to test, or if other countries decide that they want to follow that lead. So if you look at something like—So China’s satellite that it destroyed was like a ton; but the big space satellites, like the obvious targets […?] like a big spy satellite, would be 10 tons. And that would make this problem much worse. In fact, it would increase the density of debris and therefore the risk of collision—okay, I’m almost done—by several hundred percent. And that’s the same kind of stuff we could avoid—There are all sorts of debris mitigation guidelines being worked through the U.N., and there’s a lot of hard work about good space behavior. We can wipe out 70 to 80 years of all that good behavior in the future by just blowing up one satellite, right? So it’s a concern to everybody.
            So pursuing anti-satellite technology in an absence of any restrictions on them will likely increase not only threats that U.S. satellites face from other anti-satellite weapons, but the environmental problem of debris. And clearly the approach in the National Space Policy of only using a few tools in the toolbox, the technical ones, but not diplomatic ones, is misguided.
            I’m going to skip ahead.
            There are some safeguards that countries can do to improve the security of their satellites. They can use a bunch of smaller satellites instead of one big, obvious target. They can make sure there are backups on the ground for important capabilities. All those kinds of things not only protect satellites, but they make satellites a less attractive, obvious target. So if you have something that’s not an Achilles heel, you might not bother working so hard to challenge it.
            Those kinds of solutions don’t get you all the way. And certainly the United States should implement them, but it should also take the lead on developing rules of the road for space, just like we have the law of the sea. And I have a whole suite of economists here, and I know you know the answer to the question. I don’t. But are there countries that have no rule of law, but are still continually prosperous and continually stable? It doesn’t sound like an environment conducive to prosperity. Certainly commercial satellite operators are agitating for these kinds of rules, and certainly they seem like the obvious thing to do.
            Although diplomacy won’t be perfect and won’t solve every security requirement, neglecting them completely as we do now is totally irresponsible.
            I’m going to go even faster. Actually I have a few specific recommendations, but if you’re interested in those, you can ask me during the question time.
            But I thought I’d just spend the last minute talking about the Chinese ASAT test, because I do think it’s important, and there are some insights to be gained from that. The Chinese ability to master that difficult technical challenge of running something, a high-speed interceptor into a high-speed satellite that’s the size of a golf cart speaks to their high level of technical capability; but the complexity of doing something like that really does suggest that without further testing that capability is not operational. That’s not something that they have and they can use at anytime that they want. So that there’s a little bit of space there to talk about these rules.
            We’re not privy to the internal decision-making process that led China to pursue this final destructive test; but we do know that the U.S. was not taken by surprise. The U.S. observed the preparations for the test. They had to load everything onto their launcher. We have certainly satellite reconnaissance abilities to monitor the high-value targets, like space launch pads. And we also know that the U.S. observed at least two previous tests of the system, tests where it didn’t hit the satellite, but they were tests of the system up to getting it near the satellite. The U.S. saw those. It was clear. And it admitted this.
            But yet, after seeing those tests, the U.S. decided not to contact China to protest or to ask them about it. Since China would know that the U.S. could see this test with the early warning censors, it may have interpreted this silence as a lack of concern, or maybe even tacit approval. It’s unclear. So although the State Department consistently says space arms control is unverifiable, one wonders what is unverifiable about this. We saw preparations, we saw that first test, we saw the final test. There was no demarchement of China in any of that.
            While the responsibility of the tests rests fully with China, the U.S. probably missed an opportunity, and the test might have been avoided with thoughtful diplomacy. Although reports indicated that U.S. officials assumed China was totally committed to the test and the U.S. had no leverage to stop it, we can’t evaluate that because the U.S. didn’t try. But we have evidence that this assumption probably isn’t correct. Based on information we’ve collected about the January test, there appears to be ongoing debate within China right now about the wisdom of that test and whether or not they really want to do further tests. It appears that the Chinese administration did not anticipate the strong international reaction to the test. It appears that the decision was fairly stovepiped, that it was made by a narrow number of people, and the foreign ministry appears to have been largely cut out of that decision. It appears that the community of people who studied space debris was not consulted in any systematic way, and that the decision makers may not have really understood the debris ramifications of the test and probably didn’t understand the harm it would do to other space-faring nations, which China has a number of strong partnerships with.
            Had the U.S. raised the issue with China prior to the test, they would almost certainly at least have brought in the number of people who were involved in this decision making and may have made them make a different calculation, or at least have handled the follow-on differently.
            What happens next is important because China doesn’t have a capability because of this. But if it tests again, it indicates, well, China’s really committed to this, to moving along space security, to moving along space weapons. If China backs off from this, it possibly indicates that it’s receptive to international reaction and maybe influenced by it.
            So I think it’s important to keep our eyes out ahead and I think, although the reaction seems to be punish China, disengage, I think really the smart thing to do would be to start talking.
            And again, I guess the last thing is I really urge us to ask the hard question: While the United States apparently abandoned the development of these kinds of ASAT weapons in the ‘80s, has taken a really good leadership role on space debris management, it has the most to lose because we have over half the active satellites, we’re so dependent on them, why didn’t we do more to make sure that no other country develops these weapons? Why did we sit by and watch this? What were we gaining about it? No one’s given us an explanation for that. Especially with so much at stake.
            So thanks for your time. I appreciate you being here.

Q:
            My question to, I think, particularly Henry—and by the way, my compliments on excellent coverage of the issues—is my informal impression is that space communications capacity is pretty well saturated, and the motivation for other countries putting up satellites is to compete with ours, rather than to add capacity. And I may be mistaken in that. I’d be interested, because what with 500 television channels, satellite television channels, do we need more? Is there a market for more? What is the potential market for adding capacity into space that is threatened by the militarization?

Richard Kaufman (?):
            It’s a difficult question to answer because there are a lot of parts to that. First of all, our military has its own satellites, but it’s not sufficient, and they’re constantly buying more broadband capability. Their plans in the future are to have every piece of equipment and every soldier have an ip address. Whether they can actually carry that out or not in the near term, I don’t know, and of course that would be done with domestic, it would have to be done with primarily domestic capabilities. But they’ll buy capability anywhere and everywhere.
            Again, it varies. We’ve got this Iraq business going on. It’s using an awful lot of capability. What happens when this is hopefully over, and hopefully soon? Will there be excess capability?
            Second: Space communications are also dependent on new services and new products. We’ll see what happens there. No predictions.
            But third: The fiber network. In Western Europe, the United States, Japan, developed nations that are wired, using space for at least voice and many telecom applications is not as cost-effective as it is when you want to go point to multi-point. You take Latin America or Africa or even Australia, where you have large areas that don’t have wires, there’s a huge market there. I had somebody from South Africa in my office about a week ago, and we were talking about this. I said, Do you think Africa could get wired? He said, No. It’s going to be satellite communications because of the money available and the vast expanses. So I think the opportunity is there to put more satellites up and do more, and each nation really likes to have control. They want to have their own equipment as well. But there is a risk over over-supply, and only to be caught up as the price goes down with development of more services. No clear answer to the question.

Mike:
            I want to make two points. First of all, I want to congratulate all of you. Richard, this has been a fabulous session. Every paper was terrific. And I would like to urge you to put together a report with these papers that we could publish through EPS, like your previous report on the full cost of missile defense, as a separate publication. I think it’s a terrific set of papers, reinforcing one another and addressing an issue that’s not as well discussed or studied as it should be. So I’d encourage you to move ahead, and Jamie and Thea, I want to suggest that to them as well.
            Second, I want to reinforce the point about the Chinese ASAT test that was made in the last paper and some others. It happens my wife is in the field of space physics. She does space physics and astrophysics. She does experiments on various spacecraft. She was extremely upset, as were all her colleagues, by that Chinese ASAT test. She didn’t understand why it didn’t get the recognition or condemnation it should have gotten in the world community. And your papers reinforced that view, which is very common in that specific community, but outside it’s totally unknown.
            Anyway, I’d like you to go ahead and get this out as a report.

Q:
            Two questions really. One is, if you look at space and space security and agreements between countries, can we view this more like the aviation industry at its early times, and what’s the difference between, say, space now and aviation in, say, 1915? would be one question.
            And the other question is that this organization is Economists for Peace and Security. And we’re talking about space security as  space security; but I’m wondering if you’ve thought at all about how space security relates to global security and peace? What’s the relationship between the two? Or, to put it another way, has space security enhanced global security, or not, and what are the prospects for the future?

Nancy Gallagher:
            Oh, big question. I think the fundamental connection in my view between space security and global security has to do with the purposes for which you’re using security-related satellites in space. And that’s why I kept emphasizing the idea that historically the military support satellites were to stabilize deterrence, to support arms control, to provide early warning functions that were generally seen as beneficial.
            We’re at a choice now—In effect we can clearly see we can use space for much more real-time information collection than we could in the past, and much broader collection, much higher resolution. There’s much more that we can do now than we could do in the past. And there are in effect these two different visions:
            One vision of using it primarily for purposes that are broadly defined as information that’s shared. The decision about that information is shared, sort of a cooperative security view of how you would use space. And when the Europeans talk about using space for security purposes, they’re defining security very very broadly. The Bush administration view of using space for security is for American military dominance. It’s predominantly to preserve our position on Earth, to make force easier to use, to make it quicker, to make it lower cost both in the sense of forward bases and civilian casualties, and to make sure in effect that we have a veto over how anybody else can use space.        Those are two radically different visions of what space is for. And in my view, if you want any cooperation to protect space, you’re going to have to reach agreements about what are legitimate support activities in space, what are legitimate security purposes, and what aren’t.

HH:
            One footnote to that: We do have a Department of Homeland Security, and they do use some space assets, which is beyond just the military.
            Just to answer your first question on aviation, it’s very different. When you look at the agreements in aviation, the Warsaw, Chicago, Montreal Conventions, they were primarily aimed at international safe, smooth operations of people and cargo from nation to nation. The Outer Space Treaty and the several others that followed—four or five, depending on whether you include the Moon Treaty, were negotiated in the late ‘60s by governments to support government programs and to protect government space assets. We’ve tweaked them and twisted them to try to accomplish commercial activity in space, but space basically is not commercially friendly, and aviation is. They were just done for two different purposes. There are analogies, but they’re not very close.

NG:
            And just follow on that: With aviation, you’re thinking about basically moving aircraft through the national airspace of individual countries, and how do you do that in a safe way. With space, the fundamental point of the Outer Space Treaty is to say that no country own space, that you’re talking about a totally different kind of environment, and so you have to create a different kind of rule structure for space.

Laura Grego:
            I have one additional point to that, on your second question, which is the ways that space security connects to ground security. And I agree with Nancy, and also, although I think it’s going to be very difficult to roll back these military functions in space, so I know she has some ideas about how to circumscribe that. When you look at, for example, war games that the U.S. military conducts about space, space assets often become a flash point when they started to include satellites. You know, you have to take them with a grain of salt, but you’ll see that if the military sees itself become blind, for example, if it loses a reconnaissance satellite, they go nuts, and they say, we have to hit them with everything we have. It’s this flash point that escalates conflict way out of control. And I think it’s really important—We don’t have any rules about what’s the consequence if someone attacks your satellite. We don’t have a Law of the Sea. We don’t have a this-is-how-far-you-can-get-from-a-satellite, this is what you can do, this is what you can’t do. We don’t have a context for that. And I think maybe the Chinese anti-satellite test will hasten that. We have to have a set of consequences and norms that we don’t necessarily, have not at least explicitly set out.

Jamie Galbraith:
            I’ll second what everybody else has said. This panel has been fascinating, and I know a great deal more about this topic now than I did an hour ago.
            One of the tasks of economists, one of their parlor games, is to try to infer from patterns of behavior what the motivations behind that behavior might have been. And we applied that methodology-- One of the rules of that game is that you assume that people are acting in their interests and have some coherent—[End Side B] –points of fact which I believe I gleaned from the various panelists just in the last hour or so to bear on it: One is the reality that missile defense is a sink for money which does not actually effectively defend against missiles. It may have some other purposes which are not stated, and […?] is very revealing to me, your comment that that was an anti-satellite network; but that’s leave that aside for a second.
            The second one was the statement that our policy is to, again, spend a lot of money protecting assets in space which in fact cannot be protected.
            And the third one had to do with this very fascinating story of the failure of the United States to act in its own interest, based on information that it had, to engage the Chinese and to prevent an action which could then be seen by the rest of the world, and would be seen by the rest of the world, and certainly in the U.S. policy community, as a provocation requiring a response--once again, a response which would surely escalate the contest for these assets. And that suggests to me that the correct model for the behavior of the administration in terms of its motives is exactly the model that we observe in every other aspect of its behavior, namely, the predatory capture of the public policy process by a narrow set of economic interests that are determined to use public resources, to divert public resources to their goals; and that what we have here is in a sense a high-tech version of what we observe in environmental policy in the regulation of public utilities in agricultural policy and absolutely every other aspect of the administration’s behavior.
            So, having laid the highly objective scientific hypothesis on the table before you, I invite your comments.

Henry Herzfeld:
            All of these things have a history. There is a protocol under discussion on orbital debris, and there is a committee, and China is part of it, as is the United States. Negotiations have been going on for years. Everybody recognizes the problems. Somebody from the State Department actually mentioned to me that there’s a loophole in there which was proposed, maybe by China, and which we agreed to. So that what China actually did, even though we knew about it in advance, was not illegal according to that agreement. Sometimes these agreements are less than perfect. You do what you can. But I mean our administration has, behind and in front, also been part of it. So what may seem as an apparent contradiction not always is. You have to start somewhere.
            What we don’t have is international harmony in regulations in space, international governance of a place without sovereignty, and we’re not getting any closer to it. And we also have an administration which does, as others have said earlier today and in this panel too, doesn’t want to sit down and negotiate multilaterally because they feel we have more to lose than we have to gain. Whether that’s true or not, we have engaged in bilateral negotiations. It’s not an answer, it’s not a solution; but there is something out there that has been going on, and there are [forums] for negotiations and discussion of these issues. They’re not easy to solve, and we can be hopeful that future administrations will take a more international perspective on this than this one has. But I also don’t think it’s fair just to say the U.S. has withdrawn completely from the table. It’s simply that the attitude is one that is not conducive to any agreements at the moment.

Laura Grego:
            Well, I think the U.S., until this year, has withdrawn completely from the specific idea of negotiating any kind of – Well, the Chinese and Russian proposals were for discussions about a treaty. First it was negotiations, then it was downgraded to discussions, and that didn’t move forward in the conference on disarmament because of the way it’s structured. It’s by consensus. […?]. And then this year it became complicated, which is right, because then it required a program of work, and then all the other countries had opinions about other arms control agreements.
            But I was at the Air Force Academy the very same day that the anti-satellite test happened, and Robert Joseph was the lunchtime speaker. And he said, there is no interesting space arms control agreement possible. Give me anything that could be verifiable and in our interests. And the very same day—Space isn’t completely messed up forever, but that was the harbinger of something that could happen in the future. And a law that would prevent destruction of a satellite is verifiable with what we already have, with U.S. capabilities now, and certainly Europe could approach that kind of verification capability very cheaply. That is verifiable, and, I would argue, in our interests. And I can see that as arguable, but to not discuss that possibility, I find it’s very irresponsible.

Nancy Gallagher:
            To try to get China and a lot of other countries to agree to a rule saying that you can’t destructively attack an ASAT, but it’s fine to use all the non-destructive means that the United States has and nobody else has—you’re not going to get international agreement; but then the onus is on China for saying no. So I think that there are benefits to saying let’s look for an incremental starting point that the Bush administration might actually see as disproportionately in its interests; but there are also real political risks that you run by doing that.

Henry Herzfeld:
            There’s another undertone here that I think is not well recognized, and that is, we talk about these as though they were space weapons, as though they were guns or bullets. And in fact space is vulnerable. Software viruses can be just as destructive to a satellite as a weapon. You mentioned snuggle satellites--I’ve heard the term parasitic ones—but at any rate, if you had good guidance, you can go up with a small, very small satellite and latch onto another one, and just move it out of orbit. It’s useless. You haven’t destroyed anything, you really haven’t created much debris; it’s just as effective. So what is a space weapon? I don’t think anybody has a really comprehensive, good definition of that.
            And just, again, parenthetically: Those parasitic satellites, there are commercial companies and commercial proposals for what they call space service, servicing satellites, basically bringing more fuel up to them, for example, so that their life can be extended. And what are they? They’re satellites that go up and dock with another satellite. There’s little difference between the commercial and the military, or destructive use of a satellite. A commercial space sector that’s unregulated or uncontrolled by defense interests I don’t think is totally realistic at this point.

Clark Abt:
            Apologies. I don’t know which panelist asked the question, but the question was, what is the relationship between space capability and national security, or international security? A short historical note: I believe that the drive for anti-ballistic missile defense, intercontinental anti-ballistic missile defense, is one of the things that’s driving U.S. policy makers to push militarization of space.
            In 1962, I ran the first Air Force study on space-based missile defense, the BAMBI study, and this was against a threat of a massive Soviet attack with ICBMs on the U.S. And there was no way a mid-course or terminal intercept could prevent or defeat that kind of attack, because it was too late, and there were too many decoys and too much dispersion with [?] of the missiles, and so on. So they came up with the idea of a boost intercept defense, with infrared homing, on the very substantial plume of the rocket at the first stages it was ascending. And that was a strong enough signal so that could home in on the boost phase before the decoys were deployed in the multiple warheads.
            But to do that for a launch from Siberia, or Western China, or the interior continent, you had to be within about 3 or 400 miles of the launch. So this implied that you had to be in roughly 300-mile orbit at all times of potential launch over the Soviet Union and China, and hence the concept of BAMBII, the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept.
            Now, the problem of mid-course interception and terminal deception has not gotten any further really, despite fooling around with high-power lasers and so on, than it was 40, 45 years ago. So if you really want to have a serious opportunity to intercept a significant intercontinental ballistic missile attack, you really have to be, you have to have some space assets that can actually intercept with probably infrared homing still. It’s simply the best way to solve that problem.
            Now I had thought that we’ve given up on the idea of fighting an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and they’ve given up on it, and this is not relevant to a defense against an Iranian or North Korean small attack. So I think if we could coordinate our opposition on very good rational grounds to the dream of anti-ballistic missile defense, we would do a lot to reduce the military pressure for weaponization of space. I think they’re very closely linked. If you really go into the technology of ballistic missile defense, you really have to have orbital assets, not just for counter-force targeting, precision targeting, but for actual intercept purposes. And so if we can just dispose of that fantasy of an effective defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles, we could, I think, reduce a lot of the pressure for space militarization. Likewise, if we could get rid of nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles aren’t a serious threat anymore.

Richard Kaufman:
            I want to thank everybody for staying with us this long, and hope you’ll join me in thanking the panelists.