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21/06/2010 | War is Boring: Ambiguous U.S. Spacecraft Worries Rivals

David Axe

The new space craft's launch occurred without much fanfare. On April 22, the U.S. Air Force's X-37B prototype roared into orbit atop a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Some 15 years in development, the X-37's technology, performance and purpose all are cloaked in mystery.

 

Two months after the unmanned vehicle's launch, it is still in orbit, performing its unspecified tasks behind the military's veil of silence and ambiguity. That has caused concern among potential rivals of the U.S.

The X-37, which looks like a quarter-scale Space Shuttle, is just 29 feet long from nose to tail and boasts a 14-foot wingspan. Its payload bay is "the size of a pickup truck bed," according to Brian Weeden, an analyst with the Colorado-based Secure World Foundation. The X-37 uses a combination of solar power and batteries to power it during flight. Like the Space Shuttle, it glides back to Earth and can be re-used after a period of reconditioning. The cost of the program since its mid-1990s inception has never been disclosed, but Weeden told World Politics Review the sum is probably "in the billions" of dollars.

"The primary objective of the X-37 is [testing] a new batch of re-usable technologies for America's future, plus learning and demonstrating the concept of operations for re-usable experimental payloads," said Gary Payton, the Air Force's under secretary for space programs. "Take a payload up, spend up to 270 days on orbit. They'll run experiments to see if the new technology works, then bring it all back home and inspect it to see what was really going on in space. So this is a new way for the Air Force to conduct experiments, and we're really excited about that."

But what those payloads and experiments might be, the Air Force isn't saying. It's possible that the X-37 represents a powerful military capability that could prompt a space-based arms race. It's equally likely that the new spacecraft's missions are strictly peaceful in nature. Either way, the ambiguity itself could pose a strategic risk. 

"The smoke probably exceeds the fire," Eric Sterner, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Marshall Institute, told World Politics Review. Sterner said the X-37 is most likely intended to test ways of placing satellites into orbit more quickly and cheaply than is possible with the current generation of rockets and the Space Shuttle. This goal of an "operationally responsive" space capability is mostly a reaction to the rising cost of satellites and rockets, and to the planned retirement of the Space Shuttle this year or next.

Theoretically, of course, the X-37 could be weaponized. "You can have anything you want [in the payload bay], like a hard-point on an aircraft," Sterner said. "You can put sensors in there, satellites in there. You could stick munitions in there, provided they exist."

The Pentagon has studied techniques for dropping non-nuclear bombs from space, but has never admitted to formally developing such orbital weaponry. The U.S. is a founding member of the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning orbital nuclear weapons. 

With current technology, the X-37 "has near-zero feasibility as an orbital weapons system for attacking targets on the ground," Weeden wrote in a briefing on the subject. The craft's payload bay is too small for carrying a useful space-launched weapon, and the vehicle moves too slowly to perform bombing runs while re-entering the atmosphere, Weeden wrote.

But the X-37 could be used to sneak up on and probe -- or even capture or destroy -- satellites belonging to other countries. This "inspection" capability, more than any potential weaponization, worries nations such as India, China and Russia. Beijing, in particular, has urged the U.S. not to field vehicles capable of satellite inspection. With the X-37, the U.S. defied those requests. 

"The U.S. previously said that it would slow down the pace of developing the space plane project," said Zhai Dequan, an official from China's Arms Control and Disarmament Association. "But now with the [X-37] launch, it shows the U.S. has never really slowed down." 

Thirty years ago, the debut of the Space Shuttle stoked similar concerns in the Soviet Union and nearly sparked an arms race. "When the shuttle went up, the Soviets thought it could be a platform to go up and capture Soviet satellites," Weeden said. "That was a serious thing. They [the Soviets] developed their own version of the shuttle, the Buran, to go and do that." 

The Buran shuttle program ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And as it turns out, the Space Shuttle -- a so-called "dual-use" vehicle with military and civilian applications -- has spent most of its time on peaceful missions.

Today, tensions are exacerbated by the world's limited ability to monitor U.S. space activities. While the U.S. has extensive technology for tracking foreign spacecraft, other countries are mostly blind. "When another state, say Russia or China, uses their dual-use technology, the U.S. has the ability to determine that it was not a hostile act," Weeden said. "But when the U.S. does it, in most cases no one else has information to independently verify what's going on. That creates a problem."

To prevent the X-37 from sparking a Cold War-style arms race in space, the U.S. should share space-monitoring technology with the world, Weeden said. That would amount to a reversal of the current policy of deliberate ambiguity regarding the X-37.

But Sterner said even total transparency would not fully prevent foreign suspicion directed at the X-37. The craft's ability to quickly and cheaply place satellites in orbit itself represents a potentially destabilizing strategic capability. "If I'm Russia, China -- and less so India -- I see the U.S. moving into a next-generation space capability," Sterner said. "I'm going to be a little bit worried about the relative balance of power changing."

**David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of "War Bots." He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.

World Politics Review (Estados Unidos)

 


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