Missile Defense Future May Turn on Success of Mission to Destroy Satellites

WASHINGTON — The order by President Bush for the Navy to launch an antimissile interceptor to destroy a disabled satellite before it falls from orbit carries opportunity, but also potential embarrassment, for the administration and advocates of its missile defense program.

The decision was described by senior officials as designed solely to protect populated areas from space debris, and not to showcase how the emerging missile defense arsenal could be reprogrammed to counter an unexpected threat: in this case hazardous rocket fuel aboard the dead satellite.

Even so, the attempt, expected within the next two weeks, will again throw into sharp relief the administration’s antipathy to treaties limiting antisatellite weapons, which puts the United States opposite China and Russia, which just this week proposed a new pact banning space weapons.

Often compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet, the shooting down of ballistic missiles with an interceptor rocket is difficult, as an adversary’s warheads would be launched unexpectedly on relatively short arcs — and most likely more than one at a time.

So it should be easier for the Standard Missile 3, a Navy weapon launched from an Aegis cruiser in the northern Pacific, to find and strike a satellite almost the size of a school bus making orbits almost as regular as bus routes around the globe, 16 times a day.

Should it succeed, the accomplishment would embolden those who champion even more spending on top of the $57.8 billion appropriated by Congress for missile defenses since the Bush administration’s first budget in the 2002 fiscal year.

It might even revive a dormant effort to focus the military on antisatellite operations, as well. Failure, on the other hand, would be cited as hard and fresh evidence for those who point to the futility of space-warfare programs.

Beyond arguments over whether antimissile weapons also provide thinly cloaked antisatellite capabilities, and Russia’s caustic opposition to building American missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, the highly unusual mission to destroy an American spy satellite has highlighted what historically was a sideshow of superpower nuclear arms control negotiations, the question of whether to ban space weapons altogether.

The United States is perhaps the nation most dependent on satellites, both for commerce and for military communications, reconnaissance and targeting. And, to be sure, the Bush administration was harshly critical when the Chinese launched an antisatellite missile last year, the first time any nation had blasted an object in space in the 22 years since the United States last conducted such a test.

At the same time, however, the United States has resisted suggestions that a new arms-control regime be negotiated to govern space weapons, and has asserted its sovereign right to defend its own access to space and to deny it to others in future wars.

“The administration places a higher priority on military flexibility and does not want to constrain military options,” said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, an arms-control advocacy organization.

That assessment is not refuted by White House officials.

“The United States is committed to preserving equal access to space for peaceful purposes,” a White House spokesman, Scott M. Stanzel, said Friday. “At the same time, we oppose the creation of legal regimes or other international agreements that seek to limit or prohibit our use of space.”

Mr. Stanzel noted that previous administrations opposed similar treaties, in part, he said, because they are hard to verify and police, since any object in space, even debris from a destroyed satellite, can act as a weapon.

During the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union conducted about 50 antisatellite tests: a significant number, but small compared with the 2,000 nuclear weapons tests carried out in that same grim period of superpower arms races.

Efforts to ban space weapons, like the treaty proposed by China and Russia, are generally favored by arms-control analysts, even though they view the latest such initiative as deeply flawed.

During a session of the Conference on Disarmament earlier this week in Geneva, China and Russia proposed a pact that would go beyond the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans orbiting weapons of mass destruction, and would prohibit all weapons in space.

Mr. Krepon of the Stimson Center said the problem with the new proposal, a hindrance that has bedeviled previous efforts, was how to define a weapon.

For example, lasers can be used harmlessly for determining distances in space and gathering information on objects in space, as well as for beaming communications back to earth, but also can be used as weapons. Similarly, debris from a decaying object in space, a satellite for example, can be as dangerous to other platforms in space as a missile fired from Earth.

The new proposal, by focusing on weapons in space, also “does not cover ground- and sea-based means that could be used to harm satellites, such as the Chinese ground-based antisatellite weapon tested a year go,” Mr. Krepon said.

Despite renewed interest in antisatellite weaponry sparked by Thursday’s announcement in Washington, the reaction from Beijing and Moscow thus far has been muted.

Russia's Defense Ministry on Saturday said that US military plans to shoot down a damaged spy satellite carrying toxic fuel could be a veiled test of US missiles' capability to down enemy satellites.

The Ministry accused the US military of failing to provide "enough arguments" to back its plan to smash the satellite next week with a missile so other countries could assess possible dangers.

"There is an impression that the United States is trying to use the accident with its satellite to test its national anti-missile defense system's capability to destroy other countries' satellites," it said in a statement.

The US has insisted that the goal of the operation is simply to protect people.

In a cable sent to all US embassies abroad by the State Department, diplomats were told to draw a clear distinction between the coming attempt and last year's test by China of a missile specifically designed to take out satellites, which was criticized by the United States and other countries.

"This particular action is different than any actions that, for example, the Chinese may have taken in testing an anti-satellite weapon," spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. "The missions are quite different and the technical aspects of the missions are quite different."

Known by its military designation US 193, the satellite was launched in December 2006. It lost power and its central computer failed almost immediately afterward, leaving it uncontrollable. It carried a sophisticated and secret imaging sensor.

Left alone, the satellite would be expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. About half of the 5,000-pound (2,268-kilogram) spacecraft would be expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would scatter debris over several hundred kilometers (miles).

Military and administration officials said the satellite is carrying fuel called hydrazine that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it hits the ground.

"In fact, behind the words that the satellite represents danger, there are preparations for sophisticated tests of anti-satellite weapons," the Russian Defense Ministry said.