Arms Race Feared in Test of Space Laser

Alarmed by a boom in commercial spy satellites, the Army is poised to fire up a furnace in the New Mexico desert, collect the raging energy on mirrors and focus it into a laser beam aimed to cripple a satellite hundreds of miles up in space.

Army scientists hope the million-watt laser, the nation’s largest, could blind orbiting eyes that might reveal the position of U.S. and allied troops and weapons in times of war. A successful trial of the laser, based at the White Sands Missile Range, would give the military at least theoretical dominance over the realm of satellite reconnaissance.

But whether the test goes forward has become a political issue of extreme sensitivity. Arms-control advocates worry that it would set off a renewed space arms race among nations that have observed a de facto moratorium on such work since the late 1980s.

“This would open a whole anti-satellite race,” said Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., executive director of the Arms Control Assn., a private advocacy group. He called the test “provocative and wholly unnecessary.”

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In recent days, the test proposal has gone for final approval to officials at the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said earlier this month that it was his “inclination to allow some sort of test.”

The decision appears to be near, with officials at the Army’s Space and Strategic Defense Command scrambling to be ready if they receive the go-ahead that many people close to the issue expect.

The Pentagon has tested or studied other satellite killers, ranging from orbiting “kill vehicles” that bash satellites with huge paddles to aircraft-mounted missiles. But none has proved its effectiveness.

The laser experiment would be the most dramatic demonstration of a weapon that was born in the Reagan administration’s Star Wars program. The weapon has been showing off its futuristic capabilities for more than a decade.

The weapon, known as Miracl--for Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser--is housed in a huge complex that looks like a utility plant. The white-hot 6-foot-wide laser beam is generated through a complex reaction.

At the core is a chamber that burns ethylene fuel, akin to rocket fuel, along with an oxidizer, giving off excited fluorine atoms.

As the atoms cool, they release not only huge amounts of heat but also light that can be shaped and concentrated by means of mirrors and sent through a telescope to targets located far away in space.

The Miracl was first used in the mid-1980s to show that Navy ships could use lasers to defend against missile attack.

Since then, it has been used to show that lasers can track and shoot down pilotless drone aircraft and missiles. It has blasted five BQM-34 drones and a supersonic Vandal missile out of the sky.

The laser’s tracking system has been gradually improved so that scientists believe that there is little doubt that it can locate a satellite flying hundreds of miles in space. In this case, the target would be an obsolete $60-million craft called the MISTI-3 that has been used to improve the tracking of ballistic missiles from space.

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Defense officials have hinted that they do not intend to destroy it immediately. Instead, they will probably show that they can strike the satellite--revolving 260 miles above the Earth--with the beam but leave it working so that it can relay information on the test back to Earth, say space experts.

Some questions remain unanswered, such as the extent to which atmospheric turbulence could weaken the beam. But experts have little doubt that it could find and disable satellites, which have a number of parts that would quickly be destroyed by intense heat: solar panels, sophisticated sensors and, at greater heat, electronic circuits.

“They know the answers to a lot of the questions already,” said Steven Aftergood, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists.

Defense officials have said that a top goal of the test is a defensive one: to discover what adversaries could do to the U.S. satellite fleet, which is by far the most sophisticated in the world.

Even so, it has been clear for many years that the Pentagon is concerned about U.S. vulnerabilities caused by the advent of commercial spy satellites.

That satellite boom was in large part set off by the Clinton administration as it sought to find new uses for defense industry know-how after the Cold War. The administration opened the way for aerospace firms--including top California contractors--to get to work on a generation of spy satellites that are just now getting to market.

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Among the front-runners are companies called Earthwatch and Space Imaging EOSAT, both based in Colorado, which are due to launch satellites soon that will offer high-resolution images to anyone who will buy them, at prices beginning at a few hundred dollars a picture. Commercial vendors often stress the benign uses of the photos, from checking farm yields to monitoring environmental conditions.

But it is also clear that U.S. adversaries, rogue states, even terrorist groups might want to buy pictures showing the location of troops and weapons or, for instance, key civilian buildings they might want to blow up. Experts have predicted that the world’s worst villains, even though they can’t afford their own spy satellites, now will be able to retrieve pictures quickly and cheaply for use as gun sights for their bombers and missiles.

With this prospect, “it’s clear why the military planners would be concerned,” Aftergood said.

In the late 1980s, after demonstrating that it can strike a satellite with a missile fired from an F-15 fighter jet, the United States halted its anti-satellite program. The Soviets followed suit. And Congress moved to block further anti-satellite research by prohibiting the expenditure of any money for that purpose.

But when Republicans regained control of Congress, they undid that move. And in recent years, anti-satellite budgets have increased, jumping from $30 million in fiscal 1996 to $75 million in the fiscal year just ending.

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Last month at Edwards Air Force Base, the Army conducted a successful early test of its other leading anti-satellite technology, the so-called kinetic energy kill vehicle. The vehicle is sent aloft on a rocket, maneuvers toward a satellite with small rockets, then bashes the target with an approximately 20-square-foot coffin-shaped device that looks like a cosmic fly swatter.

Pentagon officials say they would prefer to use the less violent means at their disposal to shut down dangerous satellites. U.S. officials can apply diplomatic pressure to keep commercial companies from distributing the spy pictures from the ground stations that receive them from space. They can also shut down transmission with electronic jamming.

Yet Army officials know from the Persian Gulf War how pivotal satellite images can be in defeating an enemy. For that reason, one officer said, they would like to know that in the Miracl laser and other technologies, “we’ve got some kind of fallback, if things really get ugly.”