Why Don't Bad Ideas Die?

A few days ago Mike mentioned in comments that:

Apparently [Celluci] admits that only the NDP called it right when we said BMD would mean the weaponization of space. Everyone knew it, but was denying it (including the Libs).

I was reminded of this when reading this review of a book on the geopolitics of space. The author apparently argues that:

the US should “first declare that it is withdrawing from the current space regime [by which he mostly means the Outer Space Treaty of 1967] and announce that it is establishing a principal of free market sovereignty in space… Second, by using current and near term capacities, the United States should endeavor to seize military control of Low Earth Orbit… Third, a national space coordination agency should be established to define, separate, and coordinate the efforts of commercial, civilian and military space projects.”

Okay. Let's state this clearly: In the modern world, not only is the militarization of space a bad, bad idea, it's also fundamentally impossible - at least in the sense that this author seems to mean it. Low Earth Orbit cannot be "seized" in the same sense that say, the Panama Canal could be. This is one of the problems of thinking in terrestrial terms in space - low earth orbit isn't a "place", but rather a huge volume of space - most of which isn't above the United States. The problem is therefore more analagous to airspace control than seizing territory. The US would need to orbit several dozens, if not hundreds, of large satellites which would need to be armed with sufficient weaponry to fire on unauthorized launches. This might not necessarily entail a Reaganesque SDI, but it'd be damn close.

But all the old arguments against space weaponry still apply. The US cannot launch large satellites more quickly than about a dozen a year. While the US was building this incomplete system, enemy nations would be able to fire upon the satellites from the safety of their own countries. An anti-satellite weapon is simplicity itself - simply launching a bucket of nails on a fast orbit would be sufficient. You don't even need particularly strong rockets to destroy low-orbiting satellites - the difference between reaching high altitude and reaching orbital velocity is considerable. You don't need to orbit an anti-satellite weapon, you just need to get it close on the first try. Then boom.

Russia and the US already have anti-satellite weapons. But their simplicity means that countries like Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Japan, and maybe even (in the medium term) countries like Brazil or Nigeria might be able to develop one.

If you want to avoid the rocketry route, high-powered lasers could do the same job. The point is, satellites are by definition vulnerable to attack.

So how do you defend them? The short version is you don't. Rather, the US would almost certainly declare that an attack on it's satellites would be identical to an attack on American soil - even if said satellites were above enemy soil at the time. Push the logic a bit further, and you say that an attack on US satellites would require a nuclear response. So the dawn of the 21st century is still seized with the same fears that we've had since the middle of the 20th. Rather than some bold new form of power, the foundation of this approach would still essentially rely on Mutual Assured Destruction.

One wonders why the US would even want to do this. The reviewer suggests the recent collaboration of China and the EU over an alternative to the US-owned GPS system. Militarizing ("seizing") space seems a huge overreaction to Chinese geocaching. But - and I say this as a SciFi fan - this passage is more SF fantasy, and less serious policy advice.

This means that a space arms race is probably inevitable. Indeed, it has already begun. Over the next couple of decades the US will not only have to be ready to use space-based weapons to knock out incoming enemy missiles, warheads and satellites, but it will have to be ready to cope with asymmetric space weapons such as psuedo-debris, swarming mini ASATs, and proximity beam weapons, among others.

Really? No other power is preparing to militarize space - certainly not the EU or China, the reviewers main enemies. China can't afford it, and the EU wouldn't allow it. Moreover, most of the specific weaponry the reviewer mentions don't even exist yet. Some might be developing it, but they'd be a lot more likely to stop if the US would stop using words like "seizing" space.

Now, the hope of militarizing space actually becomes more realistic if there's an industrial base already in place. As just one example, John Lewis has proposed mining an iron-rich asteroid to armor the US's early-warning satellites. Putting a foot of iron around a satellite would make it essentially impervious to attack, but would be prohibitively expensive using conventional launches. It's probably that something like this can only be done if the US has a large space industry in place - which, in case you'd missed it, the US doesn't.

So to sum up: Militarizing space would be wrong, a bad idea, and impossible, unless it wasn't impossible, in which case it would still be wrong and a bad idea.