U.S. military expands efforts to track satellites

'It's amazing what one collision will do to the resource spigot'

The U.S. military said last week that it is tracking 800 maneuverable satellites on a daily basis for possible collisions and expects to add 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year's end.

The U.S. Air Force began upgrading its ability to predict possible collisions in space after a defunct Russian military communications satellite and a commercial U.S. satellite owned by Iridium collided on Feb. 10.

Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, called the collision the "seminal event" in the satellite industry during the past year and said it destroyed any sense that space was so vast that collisions were highly improbable. He said military officials had wanted to do more thorough analysis of possible collisions in space but had lacked the resources.

Before the collision, he told a space conference in Omaha, the U.S. military was tracking fewer than 100 satellites a day. "It's amazing what one collision will do to the resource spigot," he said.

The crash, which was not predicted by military or private tracking groups, underscored the vulnerability of U.S. satellites, which are used for a huge array of military and civilian purposes.

Chilton said the Air Force was was aware of more than 20,000 satellites, spent rocket stages and other objects in space, up from just 14,000 a few years ago. But he said there were estimates that the actual number was much greater, posing a potential threat to satellites on orbit.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Larry James, who heads the strategic command's Joint Functional Component Command for Space, told reporters the Air Force met its goal for tracking possible collisions among the 800 maneuverable satellites in September, ahead of an October target date.

"Our goal now is to do that conjunction assessment for all active satellites . . . roughly around 1,300 satellites . . . by the end of the year and provide that information to users as required," James told reporters.

To increase its ability to predict possible collisions, the Air Force has been buying computers and hiring analysts. It also works with commercial satellite operators to share data collected by their spacecraft and by U.S. government sources.

Chilton lauded the efforts but said the work was still "decades behind where we should be."

Victoria Samson, with the nonprofit Center for Defense Information, said that the Air Force needed more trained operators to do the analyses and that the goal of adding 500 more satellites to the analysis might be "somewhat optimistic."

-- Reuters