Related to ubiquitous space access is the subject of small satellites. Although trying to predict the future of space flight is often a futile act, if ubiquitous space launch is to be achieved, it will likely be initially capable of only launching small payloads. Advances in electronics have allowed more capability to fit into smaller satellites, making practical many missions that otherwise would be unaffordable. Today, the low cost of microsatellite construction has allowed a great proliferation in the number of nations (as well as universities) having their first satellites placed into orbit. These “first” satellites are making their way to orbit often by filling up unused capacity of other missions, piggybacking to orbit as possible within the constraints of the existing space-launch market.
Small satellites also have the potential to influence the shape of military matters in space. Similar to producing supercomputers from networked clusters of mass-produced computers (such as early model Playstation 3 gaming consoles1), for some missions a formation of small satellites can be combined to provide the services that otherwise would require a single satellite. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is pursuing this option under the Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange (System F6) program.2 This is a technology-development program. It is not meant to provide specific military capabilities, but instead to provide an architecture on which military capabilities, such as tactical surveillance, can be built. Among DARPA's goals for System F6 is to give each satellite a high degree of on-orbit maneuverability. Officially, it means the “capability to perform a semiautonomous defensive cluster scatter and regather maneuver to rapidly evade a debris-like threat.”3 Even without overt hostile action, the emergence of ubiquitous orbital access will increase congestion and the problem of space junk. The only difference between accidents and warfare is the lack of intent in the former.
Weaponized small satellites, due to their inherent low cost, are a prominent option that becomes all the more viable with ubiquitous space access. Small satellites as weapons are also a far-from-new idea. Before the small, micro, and nano-sat monikers became fashionable, small satellites and mass low-cost space launch made up an early deployment plan for space-based ballistic missile defense. During the later parts of the U.S. strategic defense initiative (SDI), more commonly known by detractors and some supporters as “Star Wars,” the space-based kinetic-kill vehicle (SBKKV) concept of having several interceptor missiles onboard a few dozen large satellites, effectively orbiting missile batteries, changed into a plan to maintain in orbit thousands of small satellite-sized interceptors, known as Brilliant Pebbles. Each Brilliant Pebble was a self-contained kinetic energy (ramming) interceptor, launched in numbers to provide both global coverage, and an overwhelming number of targets for Soviet anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities to counter. The original Reagan-era Brilliant Pebble and later scaled back Global Protections against Limited Strikes (GPALS) program of the George H. W. Bush administration were a desired military capability that pointed toward low-cost space systems and access, and factored into some advance launch vehicle research of the day.4 Similar to the collapse of the same era's portable satellite phone industry to ground-based cellular technology, space-based missile defense was supplanted by ground-based missile defense.
On a smaller scale than protecting the world from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack, is the concept to use a satellite to protect another satellite, a concept referred to as a bodyguard satellite. Without the need for global coverage, a much smaller number of bodyguard satellites orbit in formation with the satellite being protected. On detection of a threat, the bodyguard satellite could impose itself between the ASAT and the satellite it is protecting. The basic concept does not address the matter of the debris such a “save” would produce. Also the term defensive satellite is contentious as it only reflects a matter of intent, the same small satellite could instead of protecting a satellite, be used to attack another satellite. Expanding the concept from protecting individual satellites to proactive control of what may reach orbital altitudes leads back to comprehensive global ballistic missile defense concepts.
Notes
1. Bryan Gardiner, “Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3,” Wired, October 17, 2007, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer.
2. DARPA, “System F6,” http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/System_F6.aspx.
3. Ibid.
4. Andrew J. Butrica, Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 117.