It was a Jason who thought up adaptive optics, and it was not until May 27, 1991, that the details of the research were made public. Addressing a packed room at the 178th meeting of the American Astronomical Society that afternoon, Robert Fugate, technical director of the USAF’s Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland AFB, began his presentation by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that laser guide star adaptive optics works!” Two images of the binary star 53 Ursa Major proved his point. One showed the stellar duo smeared into a single blob of light by the effects of atmospheric turbulence; the other, a beneficiary of adaptive optics, showed two distinctly separate, glowing objects. In that moment, Fugate had declassified adaptive optics. Space scientists could now take it to their own next level.114
The Pentagon’s interest in clearer seeing was consistent with the centuries-long military desire for more accurate information, and its interest in laser beacons meshed with the equally long-standing desire for new kinds of weaponry. Cold War thinking dominated US policy during the two decades of groundbreaking adaptive optics research before declassification. Not only did the intelligence community seek sharp images of newly launched enemy satellites, incoming enemy missiles, and troublesome space debris for the sake of space situational awareness; warfighters sought ways of directing powerful lasers at those missiles and satellites for the sake of destroying them.
In the early 1970s, sharpening the images could only be done through post-detection digital cleanup of short-exposure films, with deeply unsatisfactory results. Reliance on photographs, scanners, and mainframe computers meant delays of a day or more when measuring wavefronts. The military needed much better technology to provide instant information, and they were prepared to pay for it. The first adaptive optics system for a large telescope was installed in 1982 on the Air Force’s satellite tracker at Mount Haleakala on Maui. By then, on the laser front, the military had already seen considerable progress toward controlling and maximizing the intensity of the beam. Building on earlier research, in 1975 the Air Force began to transform an aged Boeing KC-135A into the Airborne Laser Laboratory, which in 1983 succeeded in shooting down a series of air-to-air missiles and ground-launched drones. The use of lasers in airborne antimissile defense held promise. Ronald Reagan’s 1983 public announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars—promised yet more.115
With declassification, the divergent goals and tasks of the warfighters and the space scientists came into focus. British-born electrical engineer John W. Hardy, who in 1972 developed the first successful image-compensation system to use adaptive optics, described the “vast disparity” in his 1998 book Adaptive Optics for Astronomical Telescopes:
Equipment for military applications must work reliably under the worst conditions, and must produce a specified level of performance[, which] usually requires advancing the state of the art, an expensive proposition. Astronomers, on the other hand, usually work in good [observing] conditions and are able to exploit small improvements in technology that allow more information to be extracted from their observations. . . .
The defense community must continually push the limits of technology to keep ahead of assumed adversaries; it usually takes some time for the value of new technology to be appreciated and to be applied to scientific work.116
“Some time” in this instance was less than a decade. By the end of the 1990s, space scientists were already benefiting from the new technology. And today almost every giant ground-based visible-light telescope incorporates a version of this corrective system. Unlike other cases, in which research progresses via the resonance of ideas, adaptive optics was a baton pass from the warfighter to the astrophysicist.
If the capacity to monitor an enemy’s movements has always been necessary to military success, what could be more useful to a twenty-first-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.117
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.”118 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 US 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 24/7.119
Take America’s Global Positioning System, GPS—two dozen satellites in orbit at about 12,500 miles above Earth, more than fifty times higher than ordinary low-Earth-orbit satellites. You use it to navigate to a cousin’s new house ten 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 immediate 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 US 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.120
The high-altitude cameras of today’s Earth-observation satellites are useful for the planning of roads and the monitoring of hurricanes, for locating ancient ruins swallowed up by san
d 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 two hundred miles and twenty-two thousand 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 US 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.”121
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.” If one hi-res remote-sensing satellite is good, two are even better. In the spring of 2009 India’s space agency launched RISAT-2, an Israeli-built satellite with all-weather, round-the-clock radar sensing, suitable for monitoring both crops and borders. On the question of its uses, the Times of India quoted a senior Indian space official as saying, “It will be primarily used for defence and surveillance. The satellite also has good application in the area of disaster management and in managing cyclones, floods and agriculture-related activities.” Undistracted by his references to natural disasters, the Times editors titled this report “India to Launch Spy Satellite on April 20.”122
Uncountable changes have taken place since Galileo offered the doge a 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 US 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.”123
Aside from facing the threats ceaselessly devised by our fellow Earthlings, all these eyes in the sky are vulnerable to a naturally occurring adversary: space weather. Unbeknownst to nineteenth-century electric telegraph operators and everyone else then living on Earth, the Sun is a giant ball of magnetic plasma that occasionally flares, ejecting blobs of charged particles across interplanetary space. In 1859 the biggest plasma pie in the past five hundred years hit Earth, mysteriously disrupting the world’s newborn telegraph systems. The blast was so intense that it merited a name—the Carrington Event, after the English solar astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to observe it. Today, with hundreds of military and communications satellites orbiting Earth, and widespread grids feeding our electrically hungry civilization, we are more susceptible than ever to such a burst. In response, power companies are hardening their electronics at major switching stations, and the European Space Agency, Natural Resources Canada, and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now have teams whose sole job is to monitor and predict space weather. These predictions will make it possible to switch satellites to safe mode in advance of a solar storm, thereby protecting their electric circuitry from an onslaught of charged particles.124
In a 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.”125 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.”126
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.127
Seven and a half centuries have now passed since Roger Bacon informed the pope that enemy armies could be seen at a distance with the aid of “transparent bodies.” Bacon’s carefully shaped, suitably arranged refracting bodies have been replaced by a staggering portfolio of detectors, ranging from night-vision goggles to space telescopes. Seeing has become situational awareness and 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 is money. Another is the existence and creation of enemies.
THE ULTIMATE
HIGH GROUND
5
UNSEEN, UNDETECTED, UNSPOKEN
Invisibility captivates the astrophysicist and the warfighter. Both engage in surveillance. With the aid of a telescope, astrophysicists, in pursuit of knowledge, probe the otherwise nonvisible cosmos at ever greater depths and ever greater distances. Warfighters, in pursuit of defense or dominance, probe the enemy’s hidden systems while seeking their own invisibility, gaining control while staying out of harm’s way. Besides the pursuit of knowledge, defense, and dominance, there’s the pursuit of secrecy, specifically the secrecy of information—yet another side of invisibility.1
For most of human history, we understood the world through our five senses. Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing gave us encyclopedic amounts of data. There was no particular reason to think that vast quantities of unseen, unheard, untouched, and generally unsensed objects and phenomena might be crammed into the world as well. Eventually the telescope and the microscope cracked open the door to the invisible, yielding extraordi
nary revelations: “an incredible number of little animals of divers kinds[,] several thousands in one drop” of Earth’s water,2 rilles in the Moon, spots on the Sun, rings around Saturn.
Even so, during their first few centuries, the microscope and telescope deepened human vision only within that narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum called visible light, enabling us to see better than before but only seeing the same kind of light we were already accustomed to seeing. Yes, we could now detect dimmer things, smaller things, more distant things. But we hadn’t yet grasped that much of the physical universe would require means of detection completely different from what our eyes, ears, and skin can provide.
What separates great scientists from ordinary scientists is not the capacity to answer the right question. It’s the capacity to ask the right question in the first place, and not let common sense dictate or constrain their thinking. Fact is, there’s nothing common about what you never knew existed. The formidable English physicist Isaac Newton, for instance, questioned the fundamentals of light and color. Everyone assumed that color was an intrinsic property of, say, the raindrops in a rainbow or the crystal pendants of a chandelier. Who in their right mind would have thought that ordinary light—white light—was composed of colors at all?
Accessory to War Page 18
