Oath of Office

“So you two are my resident experts,” President Ryan said after Mary Pat brought the newcomers up to speed with a quick brief. “On the science at least. I want you both to speak freely. Give me your opinions as well as scientific facts — just make sure you make it clear which is which.” He heaved something between a groan and a sigh. “So tell me, how real is this threat proposed by Sahar Tabrizi? What are the odds?”

“If Iran is able to hit the correct satellite,” Van Orden said, “what Dr. Tabrizi calls ‘Crux,’ then the odds of a cascading effect are high. She is a gifted physicist. Her theories as well as Kessler’s are sound.”

“If I may, Mr. President,” the secretary of defense asked.

Ryan nodded.

“How quickly would this debris from Tabrizi’s Crux affect the remainder of our satellites in low earth orbit?”

Van Orden turned to Hardy.

“My father is a police officer,” the midshipman said, making Ryan like the kid even more. “His ballistic vest is made of Kevlar, but the steel shock plate over his heart and lungs is covered in material to prevent spalling. If a bullet were to hit a metal shock plate that was not coated and angled correctly, then spalling occurs. Metal fragments are sent flying off the plate and become just as deadly to my dad as the original projectile. Even a glancing missile strike on a satellite would create a great deal of debris. I’m sure you’ve all seen what a particle the size of a grain of sand can do to the window of the Space Station.”

Everyone in the room gave a solemn nod.

Van Orden took up the conversation. “There are almost eight hundred satellites in low earth orbit, including some for communications such as satellite telephones, ISR, and the International Space Station, and others. Some of them small cubes just a few inches across. Others weigh several tons and are the size of a bus.” He turned to Hardy, giving him the floor to continue.

“We track over eighty-five hundred bits of debris — space junk if you will — that are larger than ten centimeters. China used a kinetic kill vehicle to take out one of their own weather satellites in 2007, creating over two thousand pieces larger than a golf ball. Some estimates put the pieces of junk over two millimeters but too small to track at more than a million. To put that in perspective, a .22-caliber bullet is 5.56 millimeters. Space, even low earth orbit, is a very large place, but the odds of catastrophic damage rise exponentially.” Hardy paused, then said, “With each successive satellite creating more and more bits of debris, each traveling at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour, it wouldn’t take too many days to create a ring that would make low earth orbit a very unfriendly environment.”

Van Orden nodded in assent. “And that does not address what would occur when the orbit of that debris starts to decay. Much of it would burn up on reentry, but a significant portion would fall back to earth — right on top of us.”

Foley raised her fountain pen. “Since reentry would burn up many of the pieces, would not a nuclear detonation do the same thing?”

“A kinetic kill would be better if their aim is to create more debris,” the midshipman said.

Burgess said, “Then we have to assume they were just after the guidance system on the missiles. It wouldn’t be difficult to leave the warhead unarmed. PALs should render it incapable of detonation even during a direct, head-on engagement.”

A PAL, or permissive action link, was a security system designed to keep a nuclear device from blowing up except when positive actions were taken. As one nuclear weapons expert put it, “bypassing a PAL should be about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.”

“So what do we do about a kinetic kill vehicle?” Arnie van Damm asked.

Hardy gave a solemn nod. “My friends and I worked through this,” he said. “You can move a satellite a couple of different ways. Some of them have solar antennas. We could deploy those and move the bird with solar radiation pressure — sort of like wind on a kite.”

“Too slow,” Van Orden said. “A missile with any guidance system at all would merely reacquire.”

“True,” Hardy said.

“Can’t you just move it?” Foley asked.

“You could,” Hardy said. “A lot of satellites require periodic boosts to maintain their orbit. We could boost its orbit to take it higher temporarily.”

“Just temporarily?” van Damm asked.

Hardy nodded. “That’s correct, sir.” Hardy and Van Orden began to talk between themselves, running numbers and scenarios.

Ryan interrupted. “But we can move it?”

“We can, Mr. President,” Van Orden said. He muttered what to Ryan sounded like strange incantations about pi and vis viva, and orbital decay, while preforming calculations in his head. He looked at his protégé. “A point-five-degree flight path change…”

Midshipman Hardy, who’d been working through the same mental calculations, finished the professor’s thought: “…would mean movement in tens of meters from the original location.”