Star Light, Star Bright...

I think I may, I think I might...

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca
2/17/08

As has been noted elsewhere, there’s a pretty big difference between a large unguided satellite tumbling helplessly out of a known orbit and with a transponder that tells ground control, “Here I am, Here I am, Here I am” and an enemy ICBM that, even with a known target, can veer and toss out confusing and ambiguous signals.

It’s like comparing a safari in Africa a hundred years ago with the captive bird hunts that the vile Dick Cheney considers “sporting.” Shooting a helpless bird that can’t dodge your bullets just isn’t the same as tracking an animal that is simultaneously tracking you, and has a fair-to-middling chance of getting you first. Doesn’t matter how much Dick Cheney wags his little American flag at us and declares it noble. It isn’t.

The US has been chasing after the “Star Wars” dream since the days of Carter, and while the computer and rocket technology has advanced greatly over that time, it has barely moved the notion, from the realm of “complete joke and utter waste of time and money” to the realm of “possible, but needs a lot more work.”

So my attitude towards the whole idea of “Star Wars” has evolved over the past two decades. Back in the day, it was nice to cling to the idealistic notion that humanity, as it became a space-faring race, would leave its deadly toys of destruction and need to fight behind. Space, it was hoped, would be international, much like Antarctica. People saw the Space Age as an opportunity for the human race to grow and evolve.

And maybe it did, just a little bit. Certainly it increased our awareness of how small and fragile the earth really was. Nobody tries to claim our resources are infinite anymore.

But our “space-faring” days have yet to come. A half-dozen trips to the moon, a few space stations, and a cosmic bus that keeps breaking down and blowing up, and that’s it. Humans haven’t invaded the galaxy; they’ve just taken the next step past Antarctica. If, as the popular conceit has it, ET s are watching us with an eye to welcoming us to the galactic federation when we show we are ready, they’ve probably concluded that we need at least a hundred more years just to get the technology right, and it may be that they look at the wide and elaborate collection of personality disorders that we refer to as human nature, and think we might need thousands of years to prepare.

Meanwhile, we’ve noticed that even while we’re doing the Greyhound local in earth orbit and tossing bottles at the other islands in the sky, it turns out that space is a fairly dangerous place, full of all sorts of things that can collide with us and really mess things up. What’s more, it happens fairly often. For really big collisions that wipe out most life on earth, about once every 100,000,000 years does it, and it’s been about 70,000,000 years since the last one. So, hopefully, we have a little wriggle room there.

But there’s a lot of smaller stuff that hits, and does so frequently. Just 100 years ago, something flattened several thousand square miles of Siberia, making a bang that was heard in London. Nothing against Siberia, but better there than over Paris, or along the Eastern seaboard. Bad enough if something comes along that takes out a major city, or creates a tsunami that takes out hundreds of millions of lives. But something like that could come along at a time when human nature is feeling particular irritable and agitated, hit something that various leaders consider strategic, leaders of various nations pull their heads back and exchange offended looks, and the nukes begin to fly, doing much more damage than the original meteor strike caused. All die, oh, the embarrassment.

Now, the fearmongers at the White House have been blowing this satellite up as a great danger, but the fact is, it is nothing of the sort. You’re far more likely to win the lottery than you are to be directly impacted by the re-entry, and while hydrazine, the fuel on board, is indisputably toxic and dangerous, if the thing should beat all the odds and hit 200 yards from you, you won’t be in any danger. The US doesn’t need to shoot the thing out of the sky for any practical reason.

But it behooves us to be able to knock things out of the sky, both manmade and bits of ice and rock that tumble out of the Kuiper belt.

I still have my original objection to Star Wars, which is that it makes the idea of launching nuclear tipped missiles more feasible if both sides expect the vast majority of them to be destroyed en route. Up until now, an intercontinental strike was pretty much final, no calling them back, and the horrific truth was that mutual assured destruction (MAD) was our friend. With Star Wars, nations might elect to launch as a feint.

But the technology is good to have. It will serve useful purposes, and might even save our butts one day.

The Chinese already have the ability to shoot satellites out of orbit. They demonstrated this last year, when they took out an obsolete weather satellite of theirs. And it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for the US to rely on China to resolve various orbital oopsies, especially those that the US sent up to spy on China and which the Chinese officially don’t know about. If the Chinese can do it, it’s a near certainty that the Russians can, too. We don’t want to be in a situation where there is a standoff of some sort, and they can threaten to knock our satellites out of the skies, and all the US can do is threaten to not invite them to any more parties in retaliation.

There’s also the fact that Vladimir Putin is strongly opposed to the US shooting down this satellite. I’m firmly convinced that over the next decade, the biggest danger the west faces will not be terrorism or China or Islamic jihad; it will be Vladimir Putin, and a resurgent Russia. Putin plays hardball, and between Putsch’s ham-handed approach and historic Russian paranoia about encroachment on what Russia sees as her sphere of influence (Eastern Europe and the ‘Stans), Putin doesn’t feel like he owes the west and especially America any favors. He’s going to be a serious problem, and sooner, rather than later. There have already been minor provocations, Russian aircraft buzzing US ships, that sort of thing.

What I expect to see happen is that the US will shoot at the satellite and miss. They may shoot several dozen times and eventually hit it. Embarrassing, but under the circumstances, nothing the US won’t survive.

And while I don’t want bad relations with Russia, I don’t think Vladimir Putin is going to give us much choice in the matter, and I think it would be a mistake to kow-tow to him.

In the meantime, for many people on earth, the space station will probably be obsolete in your life time, and have to come down. It’s already the biggest object in orbit around the earth other than the moon.

When that day comes, it’s good to know it won’t come hurtling down as one giant fireball.