The Bush administration’s new space policy is more aggressive and unilateral than its predecessors. Some critics warn that the policy’s stated refusal to sign arms-control agreements might fuel a space arms race with countries like China. In this week’s Seven Questions, FP spoke with space security expert Theresa Hitchens to find out what this new move means for the final frontier.
FOREIGN POLICY: [White House Press Secretary] Tony Snow has said that the new U.S. space policy is essentially an extension of the previous one. Is this true?
Theresa Hitchens: The new policy contains a lot of language from the Clinton-era policy. But it does change things. Whereas the Clinton policy talked about any nation’s rights in space, the Bush policy is much more U.S.-centric. That’s a big problem, and it has not been well received outside of the United States. The Clinton policy also had language about space control, [saying] that the United States reserves the right to take action. But the Bush policy is much more strongly worded. It mentions support for freedom of action in space, but then it turns around and says, “but we also reserve the right to take that away from you.”
FP: Do you think that this policy is a signal that the current administration wants to develop space weapons?
TH: I do. I think that if you look at this policy and you look at military documents that came out before this policy—documents like Counterspace Operations, released by the Air Force in 2004, which talks very specifically about anti-satellite operations—then this new Bush policy opens the door to a new space weaponization policy.
FP: So, can the military now develop space weapons as it sees fit?
TH: Whether it’s a blank check, I don’t know. But I read this policy as giving the OK, particularly to the Air Force, to pursue a very robust space-control policy. What I think is the most worrisome about previously published military documents [on which this new policy is based] is that they raise the specter of attacking, perhaps preemptively, third-party satellites that may be used by hostile actors. That’s a very controversial assertion of our rights under international law. There are things like laws of neutrality that stand in the way of simply saying, “I’m going to shut down the Saudi satellite because it’s being used by bad people.”
FP: How is this policy going to affect the policies of other space-faring nations?
TH: It has succeeded in upsetting our allies and providing political cover to those who might be interested in their own space control strategy, like China. I’m not naive enough to believe that [the Chinese] aren’t working on anti-satellite technology. But we are now the bad guy in space. We want to dominate and claim rights for ourselves that we don’t want to give to other people.
FP: Is there a space race brewing between the United States and China?
TH: There’s certainly a rhetorical space race. There are those in congress and in this administration who see China as the peer competitor. The Pentagon has, in its document on China’s military power, highlighted China’s research efforts in the area of space. It claims that the Chinese are probably trying to build anti-satellite weapons.
If you look at Chinese documents, they very much view the United States as a potential adversary in space. They see U.S. policies as trying to contain and block China’s progress as a space power. And second, they also see the value—and you would be stupid if you were a Chinese general and did not see the value—of disrupting U.S. space capabilities in any war over Taiwan. So what we’re seeing, particularly on the part of the militaries in both countries, is the development of a Cold War-like psychology.
FP: Destroying satellites in space creates space debris, which is difficult, if not impossible, to remove. Are there active efforts to clean up space debris?
TH: It’s not easy to do. There’s no Hoover for space. The only thing that we can do is limit the amount of debris. And in this new policy, there’s a sort of contradiction. Just as the Bush administration says freedom of action in space is paramount, yet we reserve the right to impede others’ freedom of action, the administration says we don’t want space debris and yet talks about weapons in space, which would blow things up and create space debris. There has been support in the Bush administration for space-based interceptors to provide missile defense, but that means hundreds of thousands of interceptors in space with rocket fuel. They sit there like time bombs, waiting to explode when they are hit by other space junk.
FP: If the United States were to start tomorrow, how far away would it be from developing functional space weapons?
TH: We could take out a satellite today with a missile. We did that in 1985. We’re experimenting with lasers on the ground that could disable, disrupt, and destroy satellites. We’re not there yet, and it’s probably another 10 years before we have an actual, working weapon. The limitations are the engineering, not the physics. We could launch—tomorrow if we wanted—a microsatellite designed to maneuver into a larger, target satellite. We have the prototype of that technology in space now. So we’re not far away from having those kinds of capabilities. And I would say that any other space-faring nation that wished to spend the money would not be far from developing those kinds of capabilities, either.
Theresa Hitchens is director of the Center for Defense Information’s Space Security Project.
