“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.
Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51–like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.
These scenarios create another wicked problem for the U.S. military. Every modern nation relies on satellites to function. The synchronized encryption systems used by banks around the world rely on satellites. Weather forecasts are derived from satellite information, as is the ability of air traffic controllers to keep airplanes safely aloft. The U.S. global positioning system, or GPS, works on satellites, as will the European version of GPS, the Galileo positioning system, which will come online in 2012. The U.S. military relies on satellites not just for its drone programs but for almost all of its military communications worldwide. Were anyone to take down the satellite system, or even just a part of it, the world would see chaos and panic that would make The War of the Worlds seem tame. When considering the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union during the atomic buildup of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—the nuclear hubris, the fiscal waste, and the imprudent public policy—it is nothing short of miraculous that the space-based nuclear tests of the late 1950s and early 1960s did not propel the two superpowers to fight for military control of space. Instead, in the last decades of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR worked with a tacit understanding that space was off-limits for warfare. Neither nation tried to put missiles on the moon. And neither nation shot down another nation’s spy satellites. According to Colonel Leghorn, this is because “spy satellites launched into space were accepted as eyes in the skies that governments had to live with.” The governments Leghorn is referring to are Russia and the United States. But today, allegiances and battle lines have been considerably redrawn. At least one enemy army, that of al-Qaeda, would rather die than live according to the superpowers’ rules.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, his ninety-one years, Leghorn speaks with great authority. In addition to being considered the father of aerial reconnaissance, Leghorn founded the Itek Corporation in 1960, which developed the high-resolution photographic system for America’s first reconnaissance satellite, Corona. The Corona program was highly successful and, most notably, was originally designed and run by Richard Bissell for the CIA at the same time he was in charge of operations at Area 51. After leaving the Air Force, Leghorn spent decades in the commercial-satellite business. From the satellite images produced by Itek satellites, the CIA learned that in order to escape scrutiny by America’s eyes in the sky, many foreign governments moved their most secret military facilities underground.