Noah Shachtman's Blog

Axe is in Lebanon. So he’s not around to give his Pop Sci cover story, “Semper Fly,” a proper shout-out. Allow me.

The Marines have typically been the American military’s emergency fighter, its “911 force,” the guys you want to get to a trouble zone, ASAP. But these days, getting overflight rights and managing logistics right can slow things to a crawl. So a bunch of waaaay out-of-the-box-thinkin’ Marines have come up with an almost insanely ambitious new plan: send squads through space, instead. The concept is called “Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion,” or SUSTAIN.

Each Sustain lander is intended to hold a squad of 13 Marines. Mounted on wedge-shaped carrier aircraft, the lander would detach, climb, and accelerate with scramjet engines to 100,000 feet and then fire rocket engines to get above 50 miles, following an arc over hostile countries. Composite shields would absorb or deflect the searing heat of reentry as the vehicles angle for the landing zone.

Lafontant arrived at this Space Marines vision after years of analyzing military space needs. A 44-year-old Queens, New York, native who joined the Corps in 1984 as an infantry officer and progressed through Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he studied space systems operations and joined the small fraternity of Marine Space Operations Officers. In 2001 he took a job in the Pentagon working for the National Reconnaissance Office. He was serving as liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 2001 when the Marine Corps launched its deepest air assault ever.

Five hundred Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit prepared to fly 441 miles through the mountains of northern Pakistan in CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopters to capture an airstrip near Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was to be the beginning of the first large offensive against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. If all went well, the Marines expected to walk away with Osama bin Laden.

But political considerations sabotaged the mission. For weeks, the Marines had bobbed on the Indian Ocean aboard two assault ships while State Department officials negotiated with Pakistan for the right to fly through the country’s airspace. Pakistan granted access only after winning economic and military concessions that, some say, have reinforced a repressive regime. When U.S. troops finally touched down on November 25, bin Laden’s trail was cold. “We ended up selling our soul to the devil to get through,” Lafontant says. He grew determined to find a way around that sort of diplomatic entanglement. “What if we don’t have to have anybody’s permission?” he asked himself. “What if we just go above and drop in?”

Now, David just loves this idea. But he knows it’s pretty damn far-fetched. He does a good job at laying out the obstacles to making SUSTAIN happen. Not just the extremely high technical hurdles; the Marines’ total and utter lack of funds for the project, too. He warps up his story on a balanced note:

Whether or not Sustain ever makes it past the concept stage, it’s clear that military planners are looking to increase the mobility of American forces. A Marine space transport — one that would reduce politically charged bureaucratic delays and the potential for mission snafus — might sound impossible, but to Lafontant and others entrusted with imagining the future of war, it is simply the next logical step.

The Bush administration is warning about “threats by terrorist groups and other nations against U.S. commercial and military satellites,” the AP reports.

“A number of countries are exploring and acquiring capabilities to counter, attack, and defeat U.S. space systems,” Undersecretary of State Robert G. Joseph… the senior arms control official at the State Department… said.

…He said terrorists and enemy states might view the U.S. space program as “a highly lucrative target,” while sophisticated technologies could improve their ability to interfere with U.S. space systems and services.

Joseph did not identify terror groups or nations that might have such motives.

Nor, apparently, did Joseph mention that the Air Force already has a team of satellite-attackers in place, who’s job is to replicate terror strikes — using nothing but gadgets they can pick up at Radio Shack. My Popular Mechanics article explains:

Three or four times a year, small groups of junior officers gather at an Air Force Research Laboratory facility in New Mexico and try to figure out how to take down an American satellite using nothing more than sweet talk and off-the-shelf gear.

The U.S. military relies on satellites to relay orders, guide precision bombs and direct flying drones. But those multibillion-dollar systems can be surprisingly vulnerable to the simplest of attacks. So, it’s up to the members of the Space Countermeasures Hands On Program — Space CHOP, for short — to find those weaknesses before enemies have a chance to crack them.

Space CHOP was formed in 1999, and one of its earliest experiments used a UHF generator and a small amplifier purchased from an electronics store. The team pieced together an antenna out of copper wire, PVC piping and other easily obtained materials. (The Air Force won’t elaborate on Space CHOP hardware or targets.) By aiming the antenna at the sky and turning on just a few milliwatts of power, the team showed it could block signals from a military communications satellite.

“We demonstrated that a few unsophisticated guys with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment could interfere with a seriously sophisticated satellite system,” says John Holbrook, Space CHOP’s program manager. “If we had turned on full power, we would’ve knocked [the system] out.”

More often than not, the Space CHOP team doesn’t need any equipment to uncover a vulnerability. They scour the Internet for potentially damaging information. They case out Air Force bases. Or, posing as graduate students, they pump defense contractors and military officers for information until they’ve figured out a way to take down a satellite or its link on the ground.

The military also has personnel known as “red teams” — full-time mock adversaries who specialize in cyberattacks — Holbrook notes. But his team of outsiders often finds vulnerabilities that the red teams miss. “We’re experts in not being experts,” Holbrook says with a laugh.

A couple of months ago, I made a snide remark about those who advocate “pulling out of the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits [military] installations on the moon among other things.”

“Not that we have a plan for a [military] moon-base, but we might—you know?”

Right. So, nearly three years after President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned “foothold on the moon,” we may be getting that moon base—albeit a civilian one:

NASA’s Lunar Architecture Team, chartered in May 2006, concluded that the most advantageous approach is to develop a solar-powered lunar base and to locate it near one of the poles of the moon. With such an outpost, NASA can learn to use the moon’s natural resources to live off the land, make preparations for a journey to Mars, conduct a wide range of scientific investigations and encourage international participation.

“The architecture work has resulted in an understanding of what is required to implement and enable critical exploration objectives,” said Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator, Exploration Systems Directorate. “This is all important as we continue the process we have begun and better define the architecture and our various exploration roles in what is a very exciting future for the United States and the world.”

As currently envisioned, an incremental buildup would begin with four-person crews making several seven-day visits to the moon until their power supplies, rovers and living quarters are operational. The first mission would begin by 2020. These would be followed by 180-day missions to prepare for journeys to Mars.

The proposed lunar architecture calls for robotic precursor missions designed to support the human mission. These precursors include landing site reconnaissance, natural resource assays and technology risk reduction for the human lander.

[Read more at the NASA website.]

Anyway, the announcement contains nothing to suggests that the notional moon-base would be a military installation or in any way incompatible with the Outer Space Treaty.

But it did remind me of Cold War studies for lunar military installations. For a history of crazy military moonbase ideas, Jeff Richelson’s “Shooting for the Moon” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a great place to start.

– Jeffrey Lewis, cross-posted from Arms Control Wonk.com

After four years and some 35 drafts, the Bush White House has finally released its long-awaited rewrite of the U.S. National Space Policy. Obviously, the administration was keen to get the word out – they quietly posted a 10-page unclassified summary on the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s website at 5 pm on Oct. 6 – the Friday before the Columbus Day long weekend.

Hmm. Maybe not.

When asked about the document, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow replied: “What, this old thing? Just something we inherited from our Uncle Bill.” Well, not literally, of course. But in a further indication that the administration intends to downplay the significance of the document, insiders have been characterizing the new NSP as “nothing new,” just a variation on the themes set by the Clinton administration in the last NSP.

A cursory reading might support that conclusion – much of the language from the previous policy is lifted intact. But giving such an important document just a cursory reading would be a mistake. Slap down the new NSP, signed by President Bush on Aug. 31, and the old one, signed by President Clinton in 1996, side by side, and reach deep down for those old grad-school “textual analysis” skills, and it’s quickly apparent that we are dealing with two very different beasts. Though that won’t come as a surprise to those who have been playing the space game over the past decade or so.

While the Clinton version focuses on civil and commercial space, the Bush NSP gives primacy to national security and military space. Example: of Clinton’s five goals for U.S. space programs, two mention national security; of Bush’s six goals, four are related to national security and defense.

While the Clinton policy aimed to highlight international cooperation and collective security in space, the Bush NSP takes a go–it-alone stance, using strong language that asserts U.S. unilateral rights in space while possibly also being intended to “negate” the rights of other space-faring nations. In ominous tones, the document threatens in one section to “dissuade or deter others from either impeding [U.S.] rights or developing capabilities intended to do so” – raising the specter of preemptive action against other nations’ dual-use space technology.

Indeed, even as the Bush policy emphasizes the importance of space security, it goes out of its way to make clear that this security may not, under any circumstances, come from (shudder) international law: “The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduce research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests” [emphasis added].

While the new NSP doesn’t go as far as some space hawks wanted it to in openly endorsing the strategy of fighting “in, from and through” space, neither has it served to put a blanket – even a thin one – on those ambitions. And in taking a decidedly “us against them” tone, it is likely to further cement the view from abroad that the United States has taken on the role of a “Lone Space Cowboy.” And as much as people love John Wayne movies overseas, that will not be a good thing.

– Theresa Hitchens and Haninah Levine