SPACE WARS

...Another shock came when the collapse of the U.S.-backed regime in Ethiopia led to the closing of the American communications station at Kagnew, believed to be a satellite control facility...

...Some of the spacecraft operated by U.S...

...SPACE WARS The Air Force readies a grand finale untouched by human hands BY LENNY SIEGEL In the San Francisco Peninsula town of Sunnyvale, nestled in the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company complex at the interchange of California highway 237 and U.S...

...About one-third are in stationary orbit about 22,000 miles above the Earth...

...I think there are three floors inside, but I could never figure out for sure...

...Forinstance, if U.S...

...The United States got a foretaste of this in 1975 when Turkey, angered by America's adverse reaction to its invasion of Cyprus, shut down the Spacetrack radar station at Diyarbakir...

...But few of the three thousand or so who work there, to say nothing of the millions whose lives it may some day touch, are aware of the installation's central role in a burgeoning space race that is rapidly moving out of the realm of science fiction...

...First there is the problem of military vulnerability...

...It's not such a preposterous notion when you look at what's happening in the realm of Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, the technology known to nuclear strategists as CI—or see-cubed-eye...

...Sunnyvale monitors and evaluates reconnaissance data from Air Force satellites, tracking and controlling the path and orientation of each orbiting spacecraft...

...The Blue Cube controls four-fifths of the fifty-odd U.S...

...The Blue Cube is the busiest of the military ground stations...

...Several spacecraft orbit the Earth collecting photographic and electromagnetic intelligence...

...and because of their location in widely scattered and often remote places, the ground stations are sitting ducks for attack by saboteurs or organized military forces—to say nothing of the warheads that would be headed their way at the first sign of nuclear hostilities...

...The nuclear button in the hands of a robot 10,000 miles overhead...

...submarines, and to devise satellite-to-satellite communication systems...

...While the Satellite Control Facility keeps the United States in contact with its own military spacecraft, Spacetrack follows all space objects—especially those sent aloft by the Soviet Union...

...There is no concealing the general mission of the Sunnyvale Air Force Station, as the Blue Cube is more formally known...

...This is not as simple as it sounds...

...A man who once worked there says the inside looks like the set from a science fiction thriller: "Not only are there locks on all the doors, but there are locks on doors inside rooms with locks on doors inside rooms...

...And then there is the problem of politicalVulnerability...

...intelligence officials want high-resolution photographs of a particular spot in the Ural Mountains, they must maneuver a reconnaissance satellite into the appropriate orbit and then bring it to its perigee—the lowest point—over the target...

...What even fewer realize is that, futuristic and zany though it seems, the space war system symbolized by the Blue Cube is already becoming outmoded...

...Sunnyvale's Blue Cube can take over from the remote tracking stations if necessary, although that would delay the transmission of data and commands...

...But do they realize the connection in Guam, in South Korea, on Ascension, in the Seychelles...

...Air Force's elaborate strategic electronic presence in Danish-owned Greenland...

...Such plans spring from the realization that the most high-flying of space war systems is no stronger than its weakest link on Earth...

...Some satellite systems are designed to detect missile launches or nuclear explosions...

...four years hence, when a second control facility is scheduled to open near Colorado Springs, it will manage sixty-five...

...Today, in America, space-war see-cubed-eye begins at Sunnyvale's Blue Cube...

...But there are drawbacks: The mobile terminals would be able to carry out only a small part of the work and, because of their size and distinctive appearance, they, too, would be detectable by hostile satellites...

...The Blue Cube is the nerve center of a far-flung system of preparing for—and, if need be, waging—nuclear war in space...

...spacecraft when they are beyond Sunnyvale's line of sight...

...Many Australians believe protection of the U.S...

...the rest follow a variety of paths across the sky...

...Still on the drawing board are schemes to put up communications satellites that would orbit halfway to the moon, to develop satellites which might detect submerged Soviet submarines and communicate with diving U.S...

...It will no longer suffice to freeze, or even diminish, the mere quantity of weapons...

...Another important U.S...

...Here and there, peace activists are focusing overdue attention on the worldwide electronic tentacles of the nuclear arms race...

...Under construction is another satellite network, the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System, which is designed to supply extremely accurate navigational signals to U.S...

...He is writing a book, "Where the Chips May Fall: The Promise and Peril of the Semiconductor Revolution...

...A nearby cluster of parabolic antennae— pointed every which way, like a jumble of outsized teacups—makes it clear that the Cube has something to do with the space age...

...Today it handles forty satellites...

...By the same token, resistance to the nuclear arms race must take the rapidly advancing role of CI into fuller account if arms control and disarmament measures are to be rooted in reality...

...As the lead station in the Air Force's Satellite Control Facility (SCF), Sunnyvale operates in concert with remote tracking stations in Hawaii, Guam, Australia, the Seychelles, and Greenland...

...The race to oblivion has become a contest best measured not by the number or size of the warheads but by the accuracy, versatility, and relative invulnerability of their delivery systems...

...military and intelligence agencies provide communications links to ground stations, ships, aircraft, and other vehicles...

...intelligence apparatus in that country...

...weapons systems...

...It is an ominous step...

...101, stands a large, win-dowless building known as the Blue Cube...

...In Denmark, where long-standing government policy prevents the deployment of nuclear arms, attention is beginning to fall on the U.S...

...As a hedge against the military and political vulnerability of the ground stations, military planners are building redundancy into the system...

...Concerned about the growing vulnerability of their system to political disruption here on Earth, the planners and developers are now hard at work on improvements that would move even more of it out into space...

...operation at Pine Gap from domestic inquiry was at the root of Governor-General Sir John Kerr's dissolution of the Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975...

...mammoth, ten-story electronic towers in Massachusetts and northern California, and radar outposts in Florida, Massachusetts, and North Dakota, the Aleutian Islands, and the Central Pacific missile range...

...At the same time, the orbit must be carefully calculated to ensure that the spacecraft does not dip too deep into the atmosphere and burn up...

...In addition, the satellite must be oriented, without pitching or rolling, so that its picture-taking eye is fixed on the target...

...What does that mean...

...But redundancy is not enough...

...In the future, however, the Pentagon hopes to develop completely self-controlled satellite systems...

...These, in turn, are supplemented by electro-optical surveillance stations—telescopes linked to television cameras—in California, New Zealand, South Korea, and Italy...

...See "America's Mysterious 'Space Base' Down Under," by Peter L. Young, in The Progressive, July 1980...

...The latter will soon be replaced with more sensitive devices now being installed in New Mexico, Hawaii, South Korea, the Azores, and Diego Garcia in the mid-Indian Ocean...

...Having exhausted the limits of redundancy and mobility, the Pentagon is now investigating the possibilities of spacecraft autonomy in its search for survivable satellite systems...

...Robert Cooper, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), suggested one of the implications in a report carried recently by Aviation Week: "The aerospace industry needs to intensify technology work in robotics and onboard data computation that will allow spacecraft to function totally independent of human ground control...

...Thus far, the search has been limited to "direct data relays"—the transmitting of data satellite-to-satellite without using any intermediary ground facilities...

...military partner, the Pine Gap tracking station and a sister installation at Narrungar have caused friction...

...Like the proposed MX missile system, these critical CT facilities would be constantly on the move...

...By the late 1980s, NAVSTAR will have added eighteen new operational satellites to be managed by additional overseas facilities in such places as the Philippines, Diego Garcia, and Ascension, a British island in the South Atlantic...

...The SCF ground stations cooperate closely with another Air Force network called Spacetrack, a worldwide radar and telescope system which reports all orbiting objects to the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) underground headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs...

...To carry out that aim, the Air Force is currently negotiating with several major universities for establishment of a $7.2 million aerospace robotics laboratory...

...The alternate Blue Cube now under construction near Colorado Springs will duplicate many of Sunnyvale's functions...

...military satellite system is the Defense Support Program, which relies on three stationary satellites to detect Soviet missile launches as they occur, beaming the warning down to two Earth stations—one at Buckley Field near Colorado Springs and the other at Pine Gap, Australia, near the outback community of Alice Springs...

...electronic listening and watching stations in most of the continents and oceans of the Earth...

...Do they know it in Sunnyvale...

...Because their large radio antennae, their telescopes and spherical radomes must be plainly in view to maintain line-of-sight contact with satellites...

...Most of the world is still a long way from understanding how busily the Earth and its environs are being wired right now for nuclear war...

...At its core is the Air Force's missile defense radar system, which includes the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) sites in Alaska, Greenland, and England...

...The Marxist regime of President France Albert Rene recently renewed the lease for what has become the republic's largest single employer...

...The satellite tracking station now going into Diego Garcia was originally planned for Iran, but the 1978-79 revolution swept away the U.S...

...The Air Force also is developing small mobile ground terminals, reportedly in large trailers...

...Even in conservative Australia, normally a cooperative U.S...

...Do they understand what's happening under the big white radomes at Concrete, North Dakota, and at Fy-lingdales Moor in England...

...it links a vast network of Lenny Siegel is director of the Pacific Studies Center, a California-basedpublic interest information center focusing on foreign and military affairs...

...Others emit signals to guide military ships, aircraft, and missiles...

...That may be the blueprint for future space wars—wars from which the Earth itself and the humans on it have been cut out of the loop...

...In our search for security more certain than our imperfect earthly human systems can provide, we may wind up putting the nuclear button in the hands of a robot in the sky...

...One politically sensitive terminal is the Seychelles tracking station, located in the southwestern Indian Ocean due south of the Ural Mountains and the Persian Gulf...

...In fact, TRW, Inc., contractor for the new tracking stations, has recommended that future Middle Eastern and East Atlantic terminals be "relocatable" in case of changes in the political climate...

...Spacecraft totally independent of human ground control...

...military satellites that now patrol the heavens...

...The Australian-based Association for International Cooperation and Disarmament has pointed to Pine Gap and Nar-rungar as Australia's avenues to vulnerability and complicity...

...The remote stations, equipped with the same teacup antennae, maintain two-way contact with U.S...

...All must be monitored or controlled from the ground...

...The presence of American intelligence and communications bases has given rise in recent years to protest demonstrations in Sydney, Melbourne, and other Australian cities...

...In order to free it from its earthly shackles, the architects of the new military technology may be leading us to the ultimate nuclear nightmare: a war waged against us by our own satellites...

...The command, control, communications, and intelligence systems that girdle the globe and threaten to achieve a life of their own in space have become the essence of the nuclear arms race...