The concept of national air defense against aircraft and cruise missiles has been evolving in parallel with the Strategic Defense Initiative and is being referred to as the Air Defense Initiative. One of the most promising sensor concepts for the Air Defense Initiative is space-based radar. Operated at microwave frequencies as an instrument for wide-area surveillance, space-based radar may be useful in mission areas such as fleet defense and battlefield surveillance.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/237/4812/257.full.pdf

Space-Based Radar

ellites, long a mainstay of U.S. intelligence-gathering, are now presenting new challenges for U.S. national security. The United States and the Soviet Union have long since reconciled themselves to being spied on by each other from space. Now, however, the advent of imaging satellite systems owned and operated by a variety of third parties, including governments other than the superpowers (France, Canada, the European Space Agency, India, and China) and private companies, is raising new concerns for U.S. peacetime foreign relations and military activities, and for crisis management and wartime operations. These new satellites, primarily civilian remote-sensing instruments, are intended to gather information on subjects ranging from agriculture to urban planning, but they can also observe scenes of military interest, and their data are publicly available. They have already been used to reveal new information about Soviet military facilities on the Kola peninsula and to publicize deployments in the Iran-Iraq war. Attention has centered on the potential media uses of remote-sensing satellites (unsurprisingly, issues focusing on the media often garner substantial media attention).' But the issues raised by the loss of the superpowers' monopoly go far beyond the potential conflict between national security and First Amendment rights to gather and disseminate information. The prospect of using these systems for independent verification of multilateral arms control accords is already attracting growing interest among Europeans and

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3351&context=soss_research

The Opening Skies: Third-Party Imaging Satellites and U.S. Security

/pdf/no-more-secrets-policy-implications-of-commercial-remote-cbaj43xsaz.pdf

No More Secrets?: Policy Implications of Commercial Remote Sensing Satellites

Building a strategic defense against nuclear ballistic missiles involves complex and uncertain functional, spatial, and temporal relations. Such a defensive system would evolve and grow over decades. It is too complex, dynamic, and interactive to be fully understood initially by design, analysis, and experiments. Uncertainties exist in the formulation of requirements and in the research and design of a defense architecture that can be implemented incrementally and be fully tested to operate reliably. The analysis and measurement of system survivability, performance, and cost-effectiveness are critical to this process. Similar complexities exist for an adversary's system that would suppress or use countermeasures against a missile defense. Problems and opportunities posed by these relations are described, with emphasis on the unique characteristics and vulnerabilities of space-based systems.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/235/4796/1600.full.pdf

Uncertainties in Building a Strategic Defense

A summary is given of the status of reviews and studies that have recently been performed to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of various nuclear power systems for space mission applications in the 5 to 20 kWe range. The goal is to use these power systems for a generic surveillance satellite. The advantages and disadvantages of using nuclear and solar power are discussed. Conceptual 10 kWe designs for a SP-100 derivative, a STAR-C, and a SNAP-DYN(CBC) were used in this study. It is shown that these early-1988 concepts can successfully be integrated with a surveillance satellite spacecraft and its mission objectives. >

Space nuclear power integration studies for a surveillance satellite mission

The vulnerability military space systems depends on their orbits, functions, and other characteristics. The high-altitude satellites needed for warning and communications in particular could be vulnerable to prompt destruction by certain space-based systems and, in the future, possibly by ground-based high power lasers. A combination of passive countermeasures and arms control agreements could give these satellites some protection against such attack. Deployment of strategic defensive systems with the capability to reach far into space would invalidate this approach.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/232/4748/336.full.pdf

Michael M. May

Papers

Safeguarding our military space systems