13 Oct Bombing the Moon and Satellite War
I’m pleased to note that Glenn Reynolds and I have a new short opinion piece up at Forbes.com, Bombing the Moon. It takes the hook of the LCROSS mission last week to shift gears from explosions on the Moon to … orbital war on satellites. Here’s a short bit:
The LCROSS mission is an important and expensive scientific experiment. Nonetheless, comments on Web sites such as Scientific American and Nature indicate that quite a few people thought the whole venture to be some sort of outer-space vandalism. Some even wondered whether NASA might have acted illegally or violated an international law or treaty by setting out to “bomb the Moon” … The answer is no.
[T]oday the leading threat is to global communications and control of instruments crucial to economic and social systems, by means of weapons aimed against satellites. Nor does the threat necessarily require any specially designed weapon; satellites are horribly delicate and unprotected against kinetic force, and essentially anything with an engine and some maneuverability, including other satellites present for otherwise ordinary and nonthreatening uses, can create a threat to them. Think IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in space.
Ken & Glenn’s article highlights a key problem in attempts to control space weapons –namely a definitional one. The draft treaty proposed by Russia would define a space weapon as “any device placed in outer space, based on any physical principle, specially produced or converted to eliminate, damage or disrupt normal function of objects in outer space, on the Earth or in its air, as well as to eliminate population, components of biosphere critical to human existence or inflict damage to them.” However, as Ken and Glenn’s article points out the threat to satellites do not “necessarily require any specially designed weapon.” Other peaceful satellites could be turned into weapons with sufficient maneuverability. Because of this technological reality and definitional problem (as well as the general hesitation among many countries for new formal space law treaties), the likely path to seek to control the use of weapons, the testing weapons, and related problems such as space debris is a code of conduct being proposed by some NGOs and goverments (including the EU). A full discussion of this issue and other space security related issues will take place at the University of Nebraska’s Third Annual Space Law Seminar (held in conjunction… Read more »
Thanks Matt!