The explosion on June 28 of Space X's unmanned rocket at Cape Canaveral should be a national wake-up call — and not just because the untested Falcon 9 Full Thrust rocket engine clearly needs more work before it's used for any future satellite launch.
This debacle is proof — if any proof was needed — that America's entire space program needs a radical overhaul. It's a task any future president will need to take seriously if we are to protect ourselves from what could be a devastating attack on our space assets.
Forget about John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, the Space Shuttle and our vanished manned space program. It's our unmanned programs that are increasingly at risk, including our military and spy satellites — a vulnerability our foes are increasingly focused on.
We are a society now that runs on the 600 or so satellites we have in orbit, some as much as 20,000 miles above the earth. As Admiral Cecil Haney, current head of US STRATCOM, likes to point out, we need space to visit an ATM or to fly a combat mission in Afghanistan.
"We have to be ready to fight and win in that domain," adds General John Hyten, head of Air Force Space Command, speaking to Congress this past March.
But the sad truth is, where once we were the undisputed leader in space, we are steadily dropping behind in the civilian sphere, as the Falcon 9 explosion shows, and our lead is being seriously threatened in the military and defense sphere, where satellites are needed to gather intel, deploy drones and PGM's, and to communicate with each other.
The Pentagon has been watching China and Russia develop a generation of anti-satellite missiles as well as military doctrines aimed at taking out our communications with cyber-attacks or electronic jamming, for the past decade.
But everything changed two years ago last May, when China tested a launch vehicle at 22,000 miles above Earth — and the Pentagon realized it could be used to carry out attacks on U.S. satellites in deep space. That has galvanized support for finding more robust ways to protect our invaluable national security assets in space, and to make them less vulnerable to jamming, cyber hacking or outright attack by kill vehicles like the one in the 2013 Chinese launch.
The most recent defense appropriation forecasts spending an extra billion dollars a year on space defense through 2020, but that's not nearly enough. The recent explosion shows that there needs to be a radical rethinking of how America invests in space, and the tools needed to maintain our security in space.
The first step is to revamp how we obtain our rocket engines for space launches. Incredibly, the only alternative to Space X's engines is the RD-180 built in Russia, which is currently used for two-thirds of all national security satellite launches. We need to develop a third alternative engine through our major defense contractors, so we don't have to rely on a single company — or the Russians — to get our satellites into orbit.
Secondly, Moore's Law is just as potent in space as it is in computer development, and we need to take full advantage of its high-tech possibilities. We need to be designing and building satellites that are smaller, cheaper, but also more powerful and more resistant to hacking and jamming — and harder to detect and target in the event of an attack.
Third, we need to step up our own offensive capabilities to take back space in the event of a conflict, and deter an aggressor from thinking that it can deny us the domain that our armed forces, as well as our economy, needs in order to function. Navy, Army and Air Force brass are understandably reluctant to discuss the "deep black" offensive or "counterspace" programs they have under way. But all admit they are nowhere near operational.
That has to change. We need to unveil the equivalent of the Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite program that the Army built in the 1990s but the Pentagon killed off in 2001, this time as a lead item with full presidential approval and on the priority list of the next secretary of defense.
Finally, we need a president willing to make the kind of speech Ronald Reagan made on Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, that explains to the American people the need both to protect our space assets and to invest in a program that can deter foes who see attacking us in space as part of their first strike capability.
He or she may be derided, as Reagan was, for launching the latest version of Star Wars. But Star Wars is here, now: And just as SDI spawned the technologies that provide today's missile defense shields from Patriot to Aegis, so a revived space defense program could prevent an enemy strike in space that leaves us all — literally — in the dark.