Space Wars [NOOK Book]

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Chapter One DEADSATS 3 APRIL 2010/IN ORBIT, 200 MILES ABOVE EARTH The first shots were silent. No incendiary blast of explosives. No bombs exploding over a battlefield. No dramatic flash of a nuclear fireball to signal the onset of high-tech combat. Only a silent, single burst of electrons. High above the Earth, drifting noiselessly in the black deep freeze of orbital space, a multimillion-dollar satellite simply died, a casualty of tiny but critical electronic circuits that failed when bombarded by a surge of electrons, exceeding the microprocessors' design tolerances. There was a brief protest of overload, a signal, then silence. The spacecraft's final, automatic "Mayday" call--a short-burst scream that something was amiss in orbit--consisted of an innocuous stream of digital ones and zeros. Beamed to a ground station hundreds of miles below, that critical few-millisecond transmission of encrypted, coded blips would mean nothing to a casual observer. But it was the only clue that trained spacecraft engineer-detectives would receive. In its last electronic gasp, the satellite had done its part. Now its human creators would decipher the mystery, assigning meaning to brief, terminal spikes in receiver temperature measurements and power supply output voltages and currents. Nothing new there. Engineers and technicians had done that before, hunched over computer terminals in windowless rooms scattered across the U.S. mainland. But this time, it would be several days before those on the ground could decode the subtle, sinister messages of those last digi-words from EarthView-4 and relay their chilling conclusions: the first shots of World War III had been fired. 4 APRIL 2010/STRATEGIC COMMAND HQ/OMAHA, NEBRASKA United States Air Force General Howard Aster frowned, yet nodded. "Continue your briefing, colonel. We'll get into the 'hows' and 'maybes' later." Interruptions from the civilians scattered around the room irritated him, and he was anxious to get back on track. He had been dreading this precise moment for months, the time when his recurring space nightmare would become hard reality. As commander of U.S. Strategic Command, or STRATCOM, Aster occupied a high-backed leather swivel chair at the head of a long, carrier-deck-like table lined by his uniformed military staff, several gray-haired vice presidents from three commercial satellite companies, a squat and very round National Security Council representative, and J. D. Hart, a NASA technical troubleshooter. Behind them, lining the walls of a large STRATCOM headquarters conference room, sat and stood a multitude of lower ranking officers and civilians. An odd mix of people and skills, Aster thought as he scanned the crowd. One of only a handful of four-star generals designated America's "Combatant Commanders," the Air Force officer wielded considerable power within the U.S. military's chain of command. Today, though, he was simply an aging former fighter pilot trying to understand jargon tossed about by an ad hoc group of staff officers, consultants, and corporate executives assembled to assess what was quickly turning into a technological nightmare. At least that's what Aster hoped it was. Because if what was happening hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface was not just a collection of random events, but something engineered by intelligent design, Aster knew he'd soon find himself in a world of shit. At the opposite end of the table, Army Colonel Jim Androsin, a tall, thin, ramrod-straight officer, stood beside a big-screen, high-definition display that dominated an entire wall. He leaned over the long table, tapped the keys of a notebook computer, and the huge screen displayed a computer graphic of multiple satellites drifting above a crescent of blue-marble Earth. "To recap the situation, sir," Androsin continued, "three Trans-America Satellite Company--TransAmSat, if you will--spacecraft have experienced technical problems over the past month, and a fourth had a similar anomaly early this year. TAS-5, a comsat, is the latest casualty. It appears to have a faulty battery that will force the company to shut off several transponders about one hour every day for a month during the spring and again in the fall." "Why's that?" Aster interjected. "Those are the solar transitions, general," responded Jack Molinero, a conspicuously well-fed TransAmSat vice president in a poorly fitting pin-striped suit and food-stained tie. His taut white shirt flowed over his belt as he slumped in a chair trying to compose his thoughts. The tired-looking company vice-president ran TAS operations. And, today, Jack was obviously not a happy man. "In essence," he said, "there won't be enough sunlight hitting the solar arrays each day to keep our remaining good battery charged up through the night portion of each orbit. So, we off-load the power system by selectively shutting down some of the least-critical transponders. We intentionally 'brown-out' the satellite." Aster barely nodded his thanks and motioned with an eyebrow for Androsin to continue. Although he had been on the job as STRATCOM chief for a little over a year, the general was still getting up to speed on the finer points of this space business. As a fighter pilot, he had spent his entire career below 50,000 feet. Space, so-called Information Operations, and missile defense were new games for him--and for a lot of other people in this room, too, he realized, glancing at the faces turned toward the colonel. Back in the early 2000s, STRATCOM had been reconstituted, absorbing the old U.S. Space Command, and was subsequently assigned a host of additional responsibilities. On top of its traditional nuclear-deterrence role, the command's bulging portfolio had been a handful for his predecessors, a fact he appreciated more each day. Although rumors claimed that Aster had been in the running for the Air Force's vice chief of staff slot, the service's top general had asked him to take over as the nation's number-one, four-star "space warrior." Obviously, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already given his approval, or the USAF chief would never have offered him the job. Aster had jumped at the joint-command opportunity, preferring to remain close to front-line operations and as far from Washington, D.C., as possible. Two previous tours in the Pentagon had bred a strong dislike for things political, and it showed, despite attempts to conceal it. Because he knew it showed, he finally stopped trying to play the game. He was a warrior, not a politician. Evidently, he hadn't irritated too many on Capitol Hill, though. After several meetings with the Joint Chiefs chairman, the secretary of defense, a slew of congressional staffers, and even the president himself, Aster's confirmation had breezed through the Senate without a hitch. The Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman's only proviso had been that Aster remain in the critical STRATCOM job a full four years. That was the same as pointedly telling him: "You'll retire in the job. This is the end of your military career." That was acceptable, though, because he was now on the cutting edge, leading the nation's most powerful combat forces. And his unofficial title--"Chief Space Warrior"--underscored the reason Aster had jumped at an opportunity to command STRATCOM. He was acutely aware that space was the new high ground of military matters, a theater of war. Now, his was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to help shape the battleground of the future, a rare opportunity for any military commander. Unfortunately, as he stared at the table of officers and experts, listening to their somber, highly technical discussions, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the future had already arrived like a hungry wolf pounding on the front door with a vengeance. U.S. space assets were dying in orbit at an alarming rate, a pace well in excess of coincidence. And, for the moment, nobody understood why or what to do about it. When Aster was a freshman, or "dooley," upperclassmen at the Air Force Academy had nicknamed him "Steve Canyon" thanks to his cartoon-like square jaw and blond hair. Aster was no longer that same young man. Today, the tall, prematurely white-haired STRATCOM general leaned forward, the weight of the world on his back, trying to assimilate all that the Army colonel was describing. He fought to keep his mind on the conversation in the room, but it drifted back. Too tall to fly fighters, huh? He half smiled at the memory. What the hell did they know? Somebody had told him that nonsense as soon as he'd begun flight training as an Explorer Scout, while still in high school. Even the senator who'd interviewed him during his Air Force Academy application process had told him he probably couldn't fit into a sleek fighter. "Better think about bombers or transports, son," the senator had advised. But Aster had tossed off the advice of all naysayers. Good thing he had, too. There was nothing like flight in a powerful, single-seat fighter, cruising thousands of feet above the Earth, snapping your craft into a steep bank and watching the horizon go vertical through the canopy, then pulling the stick back until g forces threatened to crush your body, trying to drive your butt through the ejection seat. Nothing like it. And nothing like nudging your fire-control radar's target-designation box over a hard-turning Iraqi MiG's red icon, hearing the growl of the missile-locked tone in your helmet's earphones and squeezing off an AIM-120 air-to-air radar-guided missile. Bad guys could run, but never fast enough to outrun an AMRAAM. But that seemed a lifetime ago. Human voices intruded on the memories, pulling him back to the present. A buzz of techno-babble indicated the group was still trying to reason through whatever was killing America's eyes and ears in space. "Two similar TransAmSat birds, Nova 4 and Nova 7, experienced failures of primary spacecraft-control microprocessors in just the last few weeks," Androsin said, pointing to a colored graphic of both satellites on the big screen. "Nova 7 is running on a backup processor, but Nova 4 lost its last backup in May. 'Four' is totally out of service now--which cost TAS the use of 48 transponders. That was most of the company's spare transmission capacity for serving the U.S. market. TAS-5, the bird with this new battery problem, serves Mexico and Latin America. Finally, TAS-6 started having problems with solar arrays last year, and that's forcing the company to gradually turn off its transponders as available power diminishes." Androsin looked around the room and asked, "Questions about the TransAmSat birds before we move on?" Adrian "Matt" Dillon, a no-neck, fire-plug-shaped Army colonel, the service's Colorado Springs-based space-operations commander, hunched forward, elbows on the big table. Anybody who'd followed college football in the late 1980s remembered Dillon's end-around sweep during that certain Army-Navy game, shedding tacklers as he rumbled like a freight train toward the end zone. The guy had never been fast, but once he built up a head of steam, legs pumping like a pair of pistons, he could drag swarms of would-be tacklers along for the ride. The Denver Broncos had drafted him, but he turned down a promising NFL career, believing his duty was to serve as an Army officer. After all, American taxpayers had shelled out for his West Point education, and he'd damn sure pay them back, with sweat-and-blood interest. Dillon stared at Aster as if they were the only two in the room. "Sir, to get everybody here on the same baseline, I'd recommend having Jim summarize other commercial satellite losses over the last few months, before we discuss the loss of EarthView-4." "Good idea, Matt. Could you do that real quickly, Jim?" the four-star asked Androsin. The demise a week earlier of EarthView-4--a commercial, multi-spectral imaging satellite often used by the Pentagon to augment classified-spacecraft coverage around the world--had triggered this mass meeting, and sorting through its convoluted particulars and ramifications would take a while. Aster wanted all commercial satellite losses on the table before they tackled the latest imaging-sat problem. The loss of EarthView-4 had clearly set off alarms in Washington, because the bird had constituted a critically important chunk of the nation's remaining commercial eyes-in-the-sky fleet. Its demise had hurt private-sector customers, but--and more importantly from Aster's viewpoint--it had left the intelligence community "blind" to activities in specific world hotspots. Budget shortfalls over the past decade, plus considerable political pressure to underwrite a chronically struggling commercial remote-sensing satellite industry, had left the national security community far more dependent on private-sector imaging satellites than many believed was wise. In short, as Congress confronted a dramatic run up of oil prices prior to the first skirmishes with Iran, it had turned to military R&D and acquisition budgets, repeatedly slashing them with abandon. At the time, cutting military funds in favor of social programs had paid political dividends, but in the end, had proven extraordinarily costly in security terms. The Armed Services Committee still routinely rejected Pentagon attempts to build large, very costly but robust government-owned intelligence-gathering spacecraft, relying more and more on the commercial sector for high-resolution images of ground targets. Damn! Now we're paying for all that stupid money-saving! Aster fumed silently. Department of Defense satellites were far better protected from all sorts of threats, designed to weather everything from radiation produced by nuclear blasts in space to sunspots. Commercial birds weren't. But they were much cheaper to build and operate than the DOD's "Battlestar Galactica" spacecraft, as the antimilitary media had dubbed them. Aster and his staff were under considerable pressure to deliver answers--and soon--because Congress and the White House were starting to ask hard questions about what was happening. So far, he didn't have a hell of a lot to tell them, and what he did have was decidedly not good. An Air Force major had handed a list to Androsin, who scanned it briefly, then continued. "Sir, we have EarthView's loss of their EagleEye 1 commercial sub-meter imaging satellite in December 2008. That was the company's first high-resolution image-sat, and it cratered . . . er, was lost . . . just days after a successful launch from Svobodny Cosmodrome in eastern Russia. Everything looked fine initially: stable, circular orbit and all key parameters were nominal, as were the communication links. Four days after launch, ground controllers lost contact with EagleEye 1 as a result of 'an anomalous satellite undervoltage condition,' according to EarthView. They tried to power down all noncritical equipment, then slowly recharge the battery, but failed. The bird was declared a loss a few weeks later," Androsin summarized. "Bull!" a new voice, challenging and authoritative, bellowed. Every head turned toward J. D. Hart, a NASA troubleshooter, who had developed a reputation for solving extremely complex on-orbit problems with government-operated civil and military satellites. Although he had little experience with commercial spacecraft, he stayed abreast of the rapidly changing technology they employed, and tracked every news account of on-orbit problems. Both Aviation Week & Space Technology and Space News reporters routinely consulted Hart about in-flight satellite glitches, because his explanations were more forthcoming, logical, and technically understandable, and generally superior to those offered by career-conscious bureaucrats. A no-spin guy whom the technical publications trusted, the casually dressed Hart also was viewed as a loose cannon by most of official Washington. And he was showing why as irritated military brass shifted in their chairs to see who had challenged the accepted groupthink. This was precisely why Hart was definitely not trusted by those in power, rarely consulted by them until the last possible moment, when everybody was ducking to avoid debris splattering from the proverbial fan. "Hell, half the people in this industry know damned well that a receiver fried itself on EagleEye," Hart growled. "And that dragged down a power supply. They ran out of battery trying to command the bird back to life. Regardless of what the company says in public, their space geeks never did figure out why the receiver nuked itself in the first place. We gotta count this one as an unknown." Hart glared back at the somewhat stunned stares around the table, his disheveled salt-and-pepper hair sticking forward like a prickly ledge above thick eyeglasses. A pin-striped dress shirt looked as though it had skipped an ironing board on its way to and from a suitcase. Hart's knock-this-block-off-my-shoulder bearing had frightened more than a few rapacious defense contractors into revising their cost overruns before resubmitting them to the Pentagon's procurement managers. Back in the day, Hart had been the go-to guy when the secretary of defense had a budget gap to close and couldn't figure out how to do it. Colonel Androsin stifled a grin. He had strongly recommended that Hart be included in this eclectic group, and not just for the man's broad expertise. Hart was notorious for being brash and so nonpolitically correct that he had been banned from testifying on Capitol Hill. NASA still needed the aging troubleshooter, but tried to keep him well away from the D.C. spotlight. Androsin liked him for the very same reason, and had found him a refreshing counterbalance to traditional thinkers during wargames. Hart called the shots as he saw them, niceties be damned, and was one of the best engineering minds in the nation when it came to sorting out spacecraft conundrums. The NASA expert was a pioneer of what had rapidly become a valuable and rare breed: multidisciplinary engineers who could dissect downlink bit streams to meticulously determine what had triggered a satellite's death throes. A failed component? Poor systems engineering during fabrication? A burst of radiation from a solar flare, or maybe a grain-of-sand-size micrometeoroid slicing through a critical part at more than 17,000 miles per hour? Or had someone intentionally disabled the bird? Androsin broke the awkward silence, returning to his list. "Although nobody can prove they're related, sir, there've been other unknowns, as Mr. Hart mentioned. We lost a NASA remote-sensing Landsat last fall. It went into the drink after launch, a casualty of a launch vehicle's staging failure, but we still don't know why. And the Israelis lost their Ofeq-9 all-weather imaging satellite under suspicious circumstances. But they're not talking, so we don't have much to go on. There've been several other failures and losses, like a few of the Excalibur Big-LEO comsats, but no airtight link has been pinpointed to particular causes, either." It took a long second for Aster to recall that "Big-LEO" referred to the many satellite constellations of communications birds crisscrossing the Earth in LEO, or low-Earth orbit. Once distinctly out of favor, "Big-LEOs" had quickly become the cornerstone of a resurgent global commercial space industry in the late 2000s. Eventually, more than a hundred Excalibur spacecraft would be in orbit, bringing high-bandwidth data and anywhere, anytime voice communications to subscribers in both hemispheres. The promise of the now quaint, low-bandwidth, 1990s-era Iridium satellite constellation had finally come to pass. Once the Excalibur space infrastructure was in place high above the Earth, customers could use tiny handheld, media-convergent personal communicators to call or access various types of data from any point on the globe. And do so without the exasperating dropped calls and fade-in-fade-out signals of first-generation cell phones, which had transformed on-the-go communications almost a decade earlier. Further, road warriors were already able to plug their featherweight notebook computers into those handheld communicators and have instant high-speed access to what was now being called by geek types the "Extranet." Excalibur would expand that capability to worldwide coverage. Handheld communicators--combinations of personal data assistants, palmtop computers, and digital mobile phones, all with "nanopaper" touch-sensitive screens--had proliferated over the past five years, combining net-cam surfing with text messaging and conference-calling. The success of Apple's iTunes online sales outlet in 2005 brought television and independent movies to these devices, turning WiFi-enabled commuter trains along the Washington-to-Boston corridor into rolling personal movie theaters. Millions of users across the globe now routinely accessed their own private Extranets anytime, anyplace. Consequently, the loss of even one broadband communications satellite quickly overloaded already stressed digital pipelines. Businesses around the globe had come to depend on a robust, always-there satcom infrastructure, and they were suffering now. From boardroom execs to Washington Beltway wags and even sales reps in suburban Boise, comm-sensitive customers were well aware that something in space was going very wrong. Excalibur and its copycat systems were the leading edge of yet another communications revolution, one that could reshape a nation's demographics, tech-journalists were saying. After all, Excalibur would enable people to live and work wherever they chose, yet have the same high-speed wireless access to data and electronic files they previously could only get via their office's internal high-bandwidth local area network, or scattered wireless "hot spots" in certain cities. Excalibur and its ilk would truly be freedom-sats benefiting millions. IF the damned satellites are still up there and functional! Aster grimaced, stealing a look at an oversized pilot's chronometer on his wrist. Two bits says the SecDef and somebody from the White House will call in the next few hours, and I'd damned sure better have something smart to tell 'em. He sensed that the group around this table still had a lot of ground to cover. Aster thanked Androsin for his briefing and turned to three vice presidents at his right. "Would you gentlemen care to give us a brief rundown on your troubleshooting efforts, and your educated guesses about what's going on here?" The general's tone was courteous, but his look underscored "brief." TransAmSat's Molinero stood up and almost wearily shuffled to the front of the room, where he poked at the tablet computer Androsin had been using. He quickly flipped through several PowerPoint slides, occasionally pointing to a graphic projected on the big screen to illustrate subtleties of often arcane, nonintuitive orbital mechanics. Finally, he faced the assemblage and carefully aligned fingers of both hands along the edge of the conference table before speaking. "The bottom line is, we can't find anything--anything--in the design of the satellites, the systems engineering, the prelaunch test data, or anything else that would explain the anomalies on TAS-5 or the two Novas." "So, what's your best guess, Jack?" Aster urged, after a strained-silence pause. Molinero didn't relish what he had to report. Aster noted how the man shuffled his weight from one foot to the other before continuing, appearing to consider how the group would accept his conclusions. "General, we think . . . ," he hesitated, lips pursed, "we think somebody is interfering with our birds. No other explanation makes sense." The room's skepticism was palpable, hanging in the air like steam. "What evidence supports that?" The question came from a one-star general, the U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) director of operations, who had flown to Omaha that morning for the troubleshooting session. As the command's senior representative, he spoke for the bulk of America's military space force. The Army and Navy also boasted space commands, but the USAF's was the largest. The service had been tapped as the nation's executive agent for military space based on an investigative commission recommendation. And that one-star was now responsible for "Space Control," a mission that encompassed protection of spacecraft, military or commercial. This crap is happening on the good brigadier's watch, and he isn't happy, Aster thought as he smiled to himself and watched the one-star squirm. "Only circumstantial. No proof," Molinero conceded. "On the other hand, to be frank with you, sir, we're worried sick that we'll lose more of our birds. And you Air Force guys had better do the same! Yours could be next!" he barked at the general. Aster smiled, unable to resist an opportunity to lighten the darkening mood. "Jack, this isn't an inquisition. Take it easy!" A titter of uncomfortable laughter fluttered around the table, and Molinero winced. "Yeah, yeah. I guess we're all in this mess together. But we'd better figure out what the hell is going on, and try to stop it before we collectively go completely deaf and blind in space. Look, when Nova 4 died a few years ago, something like 43 million pagers in the U.S. went stone cold dead. Doctors couldn't get emergency pages inside their own hospitals, for crissake! The loss of just that one satellite, Nova 4, knocked out banking networks, automatic teller machines, gas-pump credit-card verifications, and a few specialized corporate comm networks." Molinero paused to let that sink in. "As you all know," he continued, his hand sweeping the room. "Every one of the spacecraft this industry lost around that timeframe had the same kind of symptoms that have been discussed here today, at least what we've talked about so far. You might think we're just revisiting an old situation. But this time, my gut tells me it's not a manufacturing--" Aster interrupted. "You're right, Jack. This smells different. I think we all agree on that," he said, standing abruptly. "Look, I have to step out to make a call, so let's take a ten-minute break. My handheld is still working, and it's squawking right now." To polite laughter, the general nodded and headed for the door, a muscular uniformed aide in close trail. Copyright © 2007 by William B. Scott, Michael J. Coumatos, and William J. Birnes. All rights reserved.