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8 September 2018

Space Is the Ultimate High Ground—That’s Why Militaries Fund Astrophysics

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang

Astrophysicists deduce nearly everything we know of the contents and behavior of the universe from the analysis of light. Most of the cosmic objects and events we observe materialized long ago, and so their attenuated light arrives here on Earth after delays that stretch up to 13 billion years. Most of the objects of our affection lie forever out of reach and are, at best, barely visible from Earth. They don’t grow in a laboratory, they release stupendous energy, and they’re immune to manipulation. So astrophysicists have learned to be lateral thinkers, to come up with indirect solutions, never forgetting that we’re the passive party in a singularly one-sided relationship.


Down here in our labs and offices, though, we become somewhat more aggressive, owing to our mutually advantageous alliance with the military. Many significant advances in our understanding of the cosmos are byproducts of government investment in the apparatus of warfare, and many innovative instruments of destruction are byproducts of advances in astrophysics.

As a group, astrophysicists don’t embrace a military approach to problem solving. Rarely do you find an astrophysicist thinking, I’ll do a or b so that it will someday help the military, or, I hope the military does x or y so that someday it will help me. The connection is more fundamental, more deeply embedded in the nature of the astrophysicist’s domain and the capabilities of the astrophysicist’s tools. Space — our turf — is the new high ground, the new command post, the new military force multiplier, the new locus of control, although in fact it’s not very new. Space has been politicized and militarized from the opening moments of the race to reach it.

Ifthe capacity to monitor an enemy’s movements has always been necessary to military success, what could be more useful to a 21st-century spacefaring superpower than the capacity to monitor not only our entire planet but also the surrounding envelope of space? Since time immemorial, it’s been obvious that defense is enhanced by surveillance and reconnaissance, which are enhanced by gaining the high ground. Having gained it, you may then be able to keep it and control it.

In 1958, while still a senator, Lyndon B. Johnson called space control “the ultimate position”:
There is something more important than any ultimate weapon. That is the ultimate position — the position of total control over Earth that lies somewhere out in space. That is… the distant future, though not so distant as we may have thought. Whoever gains that ultimate position gains control, total control, over the Earth, for the purposes of tyranny or for the service of freedom.

Given the perennial patterns of unrest in human history, the prospect of any single nation having total control over Earth is unlikely to engender universal confidence. As President Kennedy said, in a famous speech delivered to a joint session of Congress in May 1961, just six weeks after the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, “No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.” What’s certain is that if the past behavior of nations is any indication of the future behavior of nations, such mastery will not be wholly benign.

Benign or otherwise, monitoring to achieve even partial control is standard operating procedure. The U.S. military uses the term “situational awareness” for the product of its varied forms of monitoring. This awareness is achieved through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — ISR, a modern abbreviation for the age-old challenge of knowing what the enemy is up to. Hand in hand with ISR is C3I: command, control, communication, and intelligence. Whatever the acronym, it’s clear that neither rulers nor warfighters can make sensible decisions in defense of the nation if they can’t quickly muster the facts.

That’s where satellites come in, because nothing provides more hard facts today than the many hundreds of navigation, remote-sensing (also called Earth-observation), and weather satellites that now circle Earth 24/7.
“All earth observation satellites look at the earth. Whether you call it earth observation or spying, it is a matter of interpretation.”

Take America’s Global Positioning System, GPS — two dozen satellites in orbit at about 12,500 miles above Earth, more than 50 times higher than ordinary low-Earth-orbit satellites. You use it to navigate to a cousin’s new house 10 miles from nowhere for Thanksgiving dinner; geologists use it to chart earthquake fault zones in western India; conservation biologists use it to track the tagged grizzly bear population in Alberta, Canada; and people looking for sex use it to triangulate on potential partners within range of their own location. GPS is everybody’s handy helper. You probably wouldn’t guess that it was created for the U.S. Department of Defense and is controlled by the Air Force Space Command. Civilians can use GPS, but the navigation data they’re given is less precise than what is supplied to military interests. People in other countries use it too, but there’s no iron-clad guarantee of their having permanent access irrespective of changes in the political situation.

Then there are (and were) the satellites in America’s Defense Support Program, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, the Defense Satellite Communications System, the Missile Defense Alarm System, the Space-Based Infrared System, the Military Strategic and Tactical Relay system, the Galactic Radiation and Background program — all the various classified and declassified satellites whose ISR capabilities our multiple defense agencies rely on. Military satellites have been around for half a century, sent aloft shortly after the Soviet Union alarmed the United States by putting the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit on October 4, 1957. From the early days of spaceflight, ISR formed a major chunk of the agenda: America’s Corona missions, beginning in August 1960, and the Soviet Union’s Zenit missions, beginning in April 1962, were Cold War spies that took hundreds of thousands of photographs — although both programs were given a civilian, scientific face and a different name for public consumption.

The high-altitude cameras of today’s Earth-observation satellites are useful for planning roads and monitoring hurricanes, for locating ancient ruins swallowed up by sand or jungle, and for routing disaster assistance to villages cut off by fires, floods, landslides, or earthquakes. Most of them are mounted on satellites that orbit our planet somewhere between 200 miles and 22,000 miles overhead. The same (or similar) cameras that are used to surveil dwindling forests and shrinking glaciers can be used to surveil adversaries.

Most satellites, in fact, are “dual use.” And if, as Joan Johnson-Freese of the U.S. Naval War College points out, dual use covers both civilian/military and defensive/offensive uses, then “space technology is at least 95 percent dual use.”

India, for example, has a satellite called TES, Technology Experiment Satellite, which has orbited at an altitude of about 350 miles since late 2001. Asked whether TES’s optical camera, sharp enough for one-meter resolution of Earth’s surface, was intended for spying, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation responded: “It will be for civilian use consistent with our security concerns… All earth observation satellites look at the earth. Whether you call it earth observation or spying, it is a matter of interpretation.”

Uncountable changes have taken place since Galileo devised his nine-power spyglass. He could not have foreseen what this monitoring device would turn into. He could not have conceptualized the planetary reach of the telescope’s orbiting cousins. But knowing the value of early access to information, he might have been pleased to learn that his name would be attached to the European Union’s own emergent global-navigation satellite system. While being interoperable with GPS (as well as with Russia’s equivalent system, GLONASS), Galileo will circumvent what was once U.S. military control of information essential to all. As the agency that oversees the system states, “With Galileo, users now have a new, reliable alternative that, unlike these other programmes, remains under civilian control.”

Control, but not exclusive use. In 2016, the author of a report on the security aspects of the European Union’s space capabilities said that while Galileo and Copernicus, the EU’s Earth-observation satellite system, aid in such essentials as coordinating aerial transport and tracking changes in the atmosphere, “we should not be afraid to say that they can also serve the Common Security and Defence Policy.”

Ina now-famous 1961 speech, outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower described historical episodes of wartime production — say, the ramping up of optical glassmaking during World War I — as the part-time, temporary making of swords by the usual makers of plowshares, in contrast with the full-time making of armaments that had become standard practice by his time in office. The novelist John Dos Passos had already memorably warned America about the military-financial complex, with a pointed reference to the wealth of J.P. Morgan: “Wars and panics on the stock exchange, machinegunfire and arson, bankruptcies, warloans… good growing weather for the House of Morgan.”
Take this meshed military-industrial machinery, add the race for ever-higher high ground, factor in the skyrocketing profit margins invoked by Dos Passos, and you’ve birthed the military-space-industrial complex: aerospace.

Now Eisenhower warned America about the military-industrial complex: the underbelly of necessary cooperation among political, scientific, defense, and productive forces. Not the first to issue such warnings but certainly the highest-profile person to do so, he referred to “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought” and to the “prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” Wanting to have it both ways, Eisenhower also declared that America’s armaments must be “mighty, ready for instant action.” He worried that America’s citizenry might not keep itself well informed enough to guarantee “the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”

Take this meshed military-industrial machinery, add the race for ever-higher high ground, factor in the skyrocketing profit margins invoked by Dos Passos, and you’ve birthed the military-space-industrial complex: aerospace. Not many commentators have summed it up better than the fictional Madison Avenue creative director Don Draper of the AMC hit television series Mad Men, voicing a view that would have been current in late 1962:
Every scientist, engineer, and general is trying to figure out a way to put a man on the Moon or blow up Moscow — whichever one costs more. We have to explain to them how we can help them spend that money… [Congressmen] are the customer[s]. They want aerospace in their districts. Let them know that we can help them bring those contracts home.

Situational awareness now encompasses a vast swath of wavelengths, well beyond the merely visual. Distances are now measured in light-years rather than stadia. Yet a few armed zealots can now cause more havoc and destruction than entire armies once did, and the future of weaponry may pivot not on how many guided missiles live in your silo, but on how many cyber scientists work in your lab. One factor that hasn’t changed since Galileo’s day is money. Another is the existence and creation of enemies.

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