20.04.2022

Until now, no US administration was willing to do anything formal, even if only making a public pledge, that would tie the military's hands in any way regarding the use of ASATs. 

WASHINGTON:  The Biden administration is pledging not to test destructive ground-launched anti-satellite missiles, a novel if narrow promise on the international stage, and is calling on other nations to follow suit to ensure the safety of the heavens.

“The destruction of space objects through direct-ascent ASAT missile testing is reckless and irresponsible,” states a White House fact sheet released today in support of the announcement today by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris told a group of Space Force Guardians at Vandenberg Space Force Base tonight that the move would “help us protect our troops.”

While not a surprise — senior administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, have been sending up smoke signals for some months, and many criticized Russia for a particularly destructive ASAT test in the fall — the move is nonetheless significant in that it represents a first formal US government commitment to constrain military space activities.

Senior US officials including top brass for more than a decade, and under both Democratic and Republican administrations, have said Washington doesn’t want to see the use of debris-spewing ASATs. And last July, as first reported by Breaking Defense, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed a first-ever formal memo mandating that the Pentagon abide by a framework set of norms for military activities in outer space that included refraining from tests that would create long-lived space debris, a term of art designed to give the Pentagon some wiggle room.

But since the time of President Jimmy Carter, no US administration had been willing to actually do anything formal that would tie the military’s hands in any way regarding the use of ASATs — even if only a political pledge with no legal repercussions such as today’s move by the Biden White House.

“It is, I think, a big step because it the US is making a huge unilateral commitment,” said Michael Gleason, a retired Air Force officer now at The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy.

A senior Defense Department official told Breaking Defense today that the Pentagon is fully behind the declaratory ban and “out stumping for it,” as military satellites have come under increased risk from dangerous space debris resulting from recent tests of such weapons.

At Vandenberg, Harris explained that the pledge is a first initiative under a package of norms being developed by the National Security Council to protect the security and sustainability of space. Harris tapped the NSC in December to lead the effort during the first meeting of the interagency National Space Council, which she chairs.

That effort, in turn, is designed to support the ongoing discussions at the United Nations on possible international norms to curb the risks of conflict sparked by dangerous and/or threatening military activities in space. The Biden administration has pledged to be a leader in the UN process, which was spearheaded last year by the United Kingdom and supported by a large majority of the 193 UN member countries.

Today’s US declaration falls far short of calling for a treaty to ban such weapons, as many arms control advocates and space scientists around the world have long urged. It also is extremely limited in scope to testing of direct ascent destructive ASAT missiles — a formulation that leaves open the possibility of using such ASATs in conflict, not to mention testing and use of a host of other types of both destructive (think directed energy) weapons and those such as jammers that create temporary disruptions to functionality.

That said, it goes directly to the problem that has been responsible for the creation of the most debris currently on orbit endangering all satellites, including those owned and operated by the US military and the Intelligence Community, said Marlon Sorge, principal engineer at Aerospace’s Space Innovation Directorate.

“These direct ascent ASAT tests have historically been the biggest producers of debris,” he told Breaking Defense. “You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pieces of lethal debris that get generated and, obviously, this stuff spreads around and it is a threat to anybody that is using space.”

Ukraine Clouds UN Norms Effort

The first substantive meeting of the “Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Reducing Space Threats Through Norms, Rules and Principles of Responsible Behaviours” now is set to launch May 9 in Geneva, Switzerland. A number of nations, including close US allies such as Canada and Australia, can be expected to welcome the US effort to set a norm against destructive ASAT testing, according to several sources involved in the UN discussions, and possibly make similar declaratory policy statements of their own.

“There is strong interest among our international partners to develop these norms” for military activities in space,” Harris said tonight. “We must write the new rules of the road. And we will lead by example.”

The actual outcome of the UN deliberations, however, is mired in uncertainty since any OEWG recommendations must be made by consensus and Russia has shown hostility toward the effort. The talks also are being clouded by Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with the widespread Western support for Kyiv leading to increasingly aggressive anti-Western rhetoric by senior officials of  President Vladmir Putin’s regime. This includes a series of ever-more outrageous tweets from the head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, threatening to withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS)  and turn the country’s civil space program toward the development of new military satellites. 

Russia last November for the first time tested its own direct ascent ASAT weapon, striking one of its own satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at about 480 kilometers above sea level — a highly active orbit home to many remote sensing and spy satellites. The test created more than 1,500 pieces of debris larger than a tennis ball (pieces of space junk as small as a centimeter in diameter can be lethal to an operational satellite) some of which barely missed the ISS, causing the crew, which includes Russian cosmonauts, to take shelter in case their module was breached by a collision. Much of debris will continue to threaten LEO satellites and the ISS for the next several years.  

The US has publicly taken Moscow to task for the test — along with Beijing for a similar test by China in 2007.

“The long-lived debris created by these tests now threaten satellites and other space objects that are vital to all nations’ security, economic, and scientific interests, and increases risk to astronauts in space. Overall, these tests jeopardize the long-term sustainability of outer space and imperil the exploration and use of space by all nations,” the White House statement said.

Of course, the US military also has tested destructive weapons in space over the decades since the dawn of Space Age in the late 1950s, including the 1962 Starfish Prime detonation of a nuclear weapon in space and the 1985 Solwind test of the ASM-135 ASAT missile launched by an F-15. The US also in 2008 destroyed an unresponsive NRO spysat as it tumbled back toward Earth using a modified Navy Aegis ballistic missile interceptor under Operation Burnt Frost — a move the administration of President George W. Bush said was necessary for safety reasons, but that most outside experts said was an obvious show of ASAT capability.

“Since 2005, the United States, Russia, China, and India have conducted another 26 ASAT tests in space, five of which have destroyed satellites and created more than 5,300 pieces of trackable orbital debris that will remain in orbit for decades to come,” Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden and Victoria Samson wrote in a January op-ed published by Scientific American.

Indeed, as the amount of uncontrolled space junk littering the heavens continues to climb simply due to the massive uptick in the number of satellites being launched every year, the problem of space debris has become more urgent for all space operators, military, civil and commercial. Even insurance firms, which traditionally haven’t been particular concerned about the issue, are becoming more and more antsy about congestion and pollution in LEO in particular, according to the Space Foundation’s quarterly space industry guide for the first quarter of 2022, The Space Report.

US Continues To Pursue Offensive Counterspace

Despite today’s announcement, the US has no intentions of giving up all options for weaponry designed to either attack adversarial counterspace systems aimed at disrupting or destroying US space assets, or the space systems used by adversaries to support their own military operations during a conflict.

While the US continues to keep most information about its own offensive weaponry against space systems highly classified, including specific program budgets, overall planned spending on military space systems has been on an upward trend for a number of years especially since the creation of the Space Force in December 2019.

“The Biden-Harris Administration’s Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Request includes the largest single increase in our military space capabilities in the nation’s history ($24.5B request). This reflects the Administration’s focus on national security and to ensure the Department of Defense has a resilient space architecture in the face of growing threats to our space enterprise,” a White House official said in an email.

Still, as Sorge said, given the difficulties of changing years of policy and developing new behavioral norms, the White House move can been seen a bit like the proverbial “crack in the door.” Once the hardest bit of wedging the door open is done, “then getting it to open wider may be easier,” he said.

Quelle: BREAKING DEFENSE