Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.Today, like every day, more than six dozen employees of the Bellevue-based U.S. Strategic Command will use radar sensors and optical telescopes to track more than 22,000 chunks of metal and rock hurtling through space.
Lately, these StratCom space debris experts must feel like they are dodging very large bullets.
A chunk of an old Soviet satellite appeared to be careering toward the International Space Station — and Atlantis, the American space shuttle currently docked there — before military and NASA officials determined last week that the space junk would fly past harmlessly.
That close call comes on the heels of a much scarier situation in June, when a largely undetected piece of space rock speeding at a rate of 29,000 mph passed within about three football fields of the space station. It forced the station's six-man crew to climb into escape capsules and prepare for an emergency evacuation.
The goal of StratCom's Joint Space Operations Center is to prevent these close calls, detecting potential space collisions days in advance and notifying NASA or a satellite owner to steer clear.
But the reality, StratCom officials say, is that space has grown more cluttered and dangerous, especially since the military's current technology can detect less than 10 percent of the objects adrift in space.
"We're trying to work this as a global community, because this affects everybody," said Maj. Duane Bird, a space situational awareness officer stationed at Offutt Air Force Base's StratCom headquarters.
"The long-term impact of us not being able to use the space environment is huge," Bird said. "We need to take some action so we can continue to use the space environment for generations. So that's what we're doing."
About 80 people, including 60 members of the U.S. military, spend their time working in an area the military calls "space situational awareness."
The group's web of space sensors tracks all the space debris it can and sends that raw data to a computer system housed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California. The computers run a variety of tests, trying to determine whether two objects in space are on a collision course.
If they are, the space situational awareness team overseen by StratCom sends a warning message to NASA, an American satellite provider or even a foreign government alerting them that their space shuttle or satellite is endangered.
The group sends out 20 to 30 such warnings every day, Bird said. Those warnings cause a government or company to maneuver a satellite, avoiding a possible collision, once every other day, according to Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The amount of debris polluting space has nearly doubled in the past five years, thanks to two significant events, say military officials and defense experts:
» In 2007 the Chinese government shot down one of its old satellites with a missile, splintering thousands of pieces of satellite debris into orbit.
» In 2009 a defunct Soviet satellite collided with a communications satellite — the worst-ever collision of its kind — prompting the U.S. military to better track space debris and notify governments and companies of other potential crashes.
But the growing space debris problem isn't easily solved, Zenko wrote in a recent blog post.
Sixty countries own or operate satellites, he wrote, so no one country has sovereignty in space, leading to a "classic global governance dilemma."
Outdated technology adds to the problem, military officials say.
The U.S. space surveillance network can't detect many objects smaller than a football. That wouldn't be a problem, except smaller objects — maybe as many as 200,000, according to Gen. Robert Kehler, StratCom's commander — clutter the orbit used by the space shuttle, the International Space Station and many satellites.
Kehler compared the highly used parts of space to Interstate 80, in testimony to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee last month. Responding to a question from Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., he pointed out that the tiny pieces of space debris rushing down the space highway aren't going the speed limit.
"When you are talking about things moving at 17,000 mph, for example, collisions can occur at those speeds. That is faster than a .30-06 round, by the way . Those kind of speeds are particularly damaging if you talk about the unintended collision," Kehler said.
Help is on the way, but it isn't cheap or controversy-free.
The "space fence," which is in the development phase, is a comprehensive radar system that will allow the military to detect between 200,000 and 500,000 pieces of space debris when fully operational in 2020. The current radar system can detect about 22,000, according to Bird.
The new space fence will be able to see smaller objects and see them for a longer period of time because of advanced sensors placed around the globe.
This improved vision should allow the military to give satellite owners more lead time to divert their equipment, according to Scott Spence, Raytheon's space-fence program director and John Morse, Spence's counterpart at Lockheed Martin.
Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both giant defense contractors with Omaha offices, have been awarded preliminary contracts to start development of the space fence. The project is expected to cost $3.5 billion.
And the space fence won't be used just to watch debris, said John Pike, a defense analyst and former longtime policy director of the Federation of American Scientists.
The new fence will allow the U.S. military to better track other countries' spy satellites, Pike told The World-Herald last year. It will help the military better understand space debris, which is particularly important, because the nation is building tiny "stealth satellites" meant to mimic that debris, he said.
"A key application is to keep track of the Russians and the Chinese and anybody we might not like or might not like us," Pike said. "That's just common sense."
The space fence is expected to start helping the U.S. military detect smaller objects starting in 2015. Until then, the StratCom-led employees who monitor space debris will likely experience more tense moments.
"As we continue to put people into orbit, space debris is going to continue to be dangerous," Bird said. We have to "try to be smart, try to establish some behavioral normal for all space operators, so we can mitigate the (increase) of space debris."
Contact the writer:
402-444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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