February 7, 2006 :: MSNBC :: News
James Oberg of NBC News analyzes the U.S. Air Force’s Experimental Small Satellite 11 (XS-11) microsatellite, which completed a successful series of orbital rendezvous maneuvers with another satellite in September. The Lockheed Martin-built XSS-11 is a small spacecraft, roughly the size of a dishwasher and weighing only 300 pounds. It is managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s “Space Vehicles Directorate Integrated Space Experiments Division” at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and operated by the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center’s Detachment 12. The XSS-11 was launched aboard a modified Minuteman missile on April 11. It spent the next several months activating and exercising its sensors and guidance computers. The rendezvous exercises took place around the derelict upper stage of the modified missile. Program manager Vernon Baker stated that the XSS-11 made its first approach in late July at a distance of 1.6 km, and has since completed several other approaches, in one case coming as close as half a kilometer. More approaches are planned.
If future tests are equally successful, the Pentagon hopes to modify the design of the microsatellite for a wide array of space missions. Oberg comments on the potential military applications of the XSS-11:
Two potential military missions in particular are worth considering for follow-on testing. … First, the U.S. needs a means of inspecting its own military satellites for external damage, either from accidental breakdown or from hostile activity, and a small “scout satellite” capable of detaching, flying around and reattaching itself could provide critical insights in diagnosing—or even warding off—such damage.
Secondly, a U.S. spacecraft near a foreign spacecraft could perform a number of highly valuable but entirely passive functions. Aside from a detailed physical inspection with a resolution far better than possible from a distance, an object in such a location would be able to intercept narrow-beam communications—radio, laser beam, whatever—that otherwise might elude ground-based sensors.
Such applications (and a few others that experts would not describe in detail) are of a fundamentally military nature, but are not “weapons” in any practical sense. They are neither illegal nor in any way destabilizing …
Although not intended for missile defense applications, XSS-11 draws comparison to the deep-space probe “Clementine” that NASA launched in 1994. One year after the Clinton administration ended the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1993, Clementine used hardware that had been intended for the “Brilliant Pebbles” system, the top missile defense priority for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Brilliant Pebbles had been an attempt to deploy a 4,000-satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit that would fire high-velocity projectiles at long-range ballistic missiles launched from anywhere in the world. By “space qualifying” this hardware, Clementine proved that the Brilliant Pebbles technology worked, and that space-based missile defense was not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy as Reagan’s critics had claimed. The XSS-11 microsatellite project proves yet again that the technology for space-based missile defense exists. The XSS-11 rendezvous mission—an orbital maneuver that included locating a specific target and meeting it in space—is similar to the maneuvering required of a space-based interceptor. (Article)
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