By Ken W. White / Herald Forum
Late one night, I received a text message and video from my son. The video was of a strange string of light beads soaring across the evening sky. He wrote: “Saw this just now. Freaky. Any explanation?”
I had none, so I did what I usually do: I Googled it. I found a YouTube video from Netherlands-based satellite tracker Marco Langbroek showing dozens of SpaceX satellites moving in the twilight. Like my son’s video, it displayed a line of brilliant pearls jetting through the night.
On May 24, 2019, SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. SpaceX’s satellite constellation will supposedly provide affordable Internet access to people around the world. It aims for 12,000 such satellites.
Though fascinating and beautiful, Starlink is not without controversy. Astronomers raise concerns about a legion of orbiting objects joining hundreds of thousands already circling the planet. The satellites will add to a congested environment with possibly more light pollution and increased odds of collisions.
In fact, SpaceX founder Elon Musk told Space.com that he does “worry a bit what this will do to the night sky when there are thousands of them.” Consequently, SpaceX made several upgrades to their satellites to reduce brightness during operation. But astronomers still claim that the satellite’s optical and radio wavelengths will affect scientific observations.
Unfortunately, it is not just night sky pollution that we should be worrying about. Hidden behind the dazzling lights and the promise of cheap Internet is a far more serious matter.
It turns out that in March 2018, President Trump’s Under Secretary of Defense Michael D. Griffin created the Space Development Agency (SDA). Its goal is to accelerate development of new military space technology. Griffin was a key participant in the founding of SpaceX.
The Pentagon’s interest in SpaceX raises a question: Besides providing the world with satellite-based Internet services, will other shiny objects in the sky also be part of a military web of space weapons?
In the 1980s, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — nicknamed “Star Wars” —proposed a nuclear missile defense system. It was hawked as protection of the United States from attack by ballistic weapons.
SDI quickly became controversial, not because of light pollution, but because it threatened to destabilize the so-called MAD policy (Mutually Assured Destruction) and re-ignite an offensive nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. While sounding crazy, MAD is the rational notion that a massive nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming counterattack where both the attacker and the counterattacker would be mutually assured of annihilation.
The thinking behind the controversy about “Star Wars” missile defense is simple. If a superpower is supposedly protected by a shield of defensive space weapons that would destroy all incoming enemy nuclear missiles, then it is more inclined to use nuclear weapons first to eliminate another’s arsenal.
“Star Wars” destroys the equilibrium that keeps both sides from having an incentive to initiate war. In addition, critics charge that technology could not guarantee that every enemy missile would be disarmed. Any defense system would be overwhelmed and allow some nuclear missiles to get through.
Today, Russia has a nuclear stockpile of at least 5,000 warheads, each with between 100 and 800 kilotons of power, compared to the 20 kilotons that destroyed Hiroshima. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) estimates that even a single nuclear weapon would cause the deaths of millions — not just hundreds of thousands — of people; destroy a major city like New York or Los Angeles; and threaten the future health of millions of survivors with catastrophic long-term effects.
Political support for SDI collapsed but here we are again with Starlink. In 2019, Trump resumed space-based interceptor development, even though U.S. testing shows that all enemy missiles could not be stopped. There’s still the illusion of American space-based defense, and Starlink is in line for a major role. The U.S. military has forked out millions, perhaps billions, of dollars for Starlink and installed its satellite communication system on warplanes and other combat platforms.
The Starlink genie is out of the bottle and both Russia and China have invested in technologies (of course, technologies that also cannot be trusted) that they hope will enhance their ability to overwhelm US missile defense.
Consequently, Americans face a choice: be dazzled by the shiny objects of Starlink (where ignorance and silence might threaten real arms control and endanger any future world for our children and grandchildren) or have eyes wide open about the real purpose of Starlink.
Maybe it’s time to heed the warning expressed by the character Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse Five” when he asked: “How does the universe end?
The answer Billy got? “We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers.”
So it goes?
It’s up to us.
Ken W. White lives in Marysville.
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