Review: Weapons in Spaceby Jeff Foust
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| SDI included “multiple, seemingly contradictory, elements of Reagan’s space and foreign policy agendas,” Bateman notes. |
The new book Weapons in Space by Aaron Bateman, a professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, offers a new history of SDI. (A free ebook version is available from the publisher, MIT Press.) As he notes at the beginning of the book, SDI “is often viewed in isolation from broader developments in the military use of space in the 1970s and 1980s,” something his book works to correct as it examines the development of SDI and views within the government and among allies.
Years before Reagan announced SDI, there was a shift in US policy towards the use of weapons in space. By the mid-1970s, fears about development of Soviet ASATs and growing capabilities of Soviet military space systems led President Gerald Ford to conclude that space could not be considered a “sanctuary” and authorized development of an American ASAT. Jimmy Carter continued that work even while trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate an agreement with the Soviet Union to ban ASATs. A space arms race was already brewing when Reagan took office in 1981.
SDI was a major change that Bateman says was just part of the “most radical” shift in American space policy since the Kennedy Administration, moves that included endorsing Space Station Freedom and backing greater space commercialization. It was, from its beginnings, a peculiar program, developed from the top down by Reagan and top advisors rather than through interagency discussions used for other policies. SDI included “multiple, seemingly contradictory, elements of Reagan’s space and foreign policy agendas,” Bateman notes, addressing the perception that the US had fallen behind the USSR in many military space fields but which Reagan at times offered to share with Moscow.
One chapter examines the effect SDI had on America’s allies in Western Europe. There was no single European body at the time that could offer a united front to collaborate with the US on SDI or seek to modify it. (The closest was the European Space Agency, but it focused on civil, not military, space activities.) Instead, major allies like Britain, France, and West Germany took their own approaches to working with the US on SDI, in some cases trying to find ways for companies in their countries to get pieces of SDI work despite challenges with technology transfer.
| “Studying the origins and evolutions of SDI does not provide easy solutions to current space security challenges,” he concludes, but does offer the lesson that technology alone will not be the deciding factor. |
SDI, of course, never achieved Reagan’s goal of developing a shield to protect against a ballistic missile attack, a failure linked to technical problems, the changing geopolitical environment as the Soviet Union collapsed, and changes in administrations in the US. The book is primarily a policy book and so does not go into detail on the technical developments and challenges SDI faced beyond noting that it faced problems not just developing space-based interceptor technology—kinetic or laser—but also deploying it in the large numbers envisioned, particularly after it was clear the Space Shuttle would not achieve its cost and flight rate goals. (Those concerns prompted a development not mentioned in the book: funding by the Strategic Defense Initiative Office in the Bush 41 administration of an RLV tech demo project, DC-X; that never led to the envisioned single-stage-to-orbit RLV but had an impact on other launch vehicle efforts that continues to this day.)
SDI was a missile defense system, but many also saw it as an ASAT capability (as well as a capability whose space-based elements would themselves be vulnerable to ASATs.) “The complexities that stemmed from the entanglement of missile defense and ASAT technologies are a recurring theme in the book,” Bateman writes early in the book, a sentence he italicizes for emphasis. That entanglement continues to the present day, where countries have repurposed missile defense systems for destructive ASAT tests. He notes that “policymakers today are concerned with many of the same space security issues that their predecessors raised in the 1970s and 1980s” including the military utility of ASATs and the viability of space arms control.
The US, for now, is not planning space-based missile defense or ASAT systems, focusing its efforts on constellations of tracking and communications satellites to support terrestrially-based interceptors. But, Bateman notes that reductions in launch costs and increasing concerns about missile proliferation might change that calculus. “Studying the origins and evolutions of SDI does not provide easy solutions to current space security challenges,” he concludes, but does offer the lesson that technology alone will not be the deciding factor.
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