Military Possibilities of the Space Shuttle (1981)

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and AT&T and the Bell System Companies. Good evening. The Columbia Space Shuttle completed its first day in orbit today, apparently performing flawlessly. It will land tomorrow afternoon at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the first spacecraft in history to be flown back to a conventional Earth landing. The astronauts, Young and Crippen, carried out flight tests sent back TV pictures and talked to the White House. Vice President George Bush told them their mission was a forerunner of great things to come. Just what those great things are is a matter of debate, now that the costly, long-delayed shuttle is safely in orbit. The Soviet Union has consistently charged that the shuttle represents a big military push into space.

Some American critics say the shuttle will carry the arms race into outer space. Tonight, the military possibilities of the space shuttle. Jim? Robin, there is no question the Defense Department has a big stake in the space shuttle Columbia. Of the first 75 shuttle trips to space, it and its sister ships will take, 21 are already reserved for the Pentagon. Air Force and other military planners have one major use in mind. For now, to launch new reconnaissance, otherwise known as spy satellites, and repair those already up there. Satellites could be used eventually for sophisticated early warning of missile attacks and for advanced and improved navigation and communications for ships, planes and other military equipment. Research is also underway on laser and particle beam weapons that could be employed from space, if it ever should come to that. The Soviet Union is known to be working on killer satellites, satellites that seek out other satellites and destroy them, presumably ways of getting the Soviets killer satellites before they could get ours could be employed from the space shuttle. All of this, and other military potential, caused then defense secretary Harold Brown to

tell Congress last year the space shuttle was essential to U.S. military planning for the future. Robin? The former defense secretary, who is also a former secretary of the Air Force, is with us this evening. Mr. Brown is now visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Mr. Secretary James Van Allen, the former NASA scientist, said recently that the military use of the shuttle is going to be dominant, so why not be honest and call it a military program? Is he right? The shuttle was developed and will be operated principally by NASA. It will carry, can carry, either military payloads or civil payloads. Space after all is a place, it's not a function and a shuttle is a way to get things there. It can get things there to carry out civil functions. It can get things there to carry out military functions. NASA is the organization, properly in my judgment, charged with developing it and doing the initial operation.

You say initial operation. Ultimately will the Air Force take over the operation of the shuttle? It will operate those missions which carry military payloads. But it won't take over the administration of the shuttle program? There's no particular reason for it too, in terms of the program itself. It depends, I suppose, on the nature of the funding pattern and the nature of the political winds that blow. There's a perfectly legitimate and indeed legally established function for a civilian space agency in the Space Act of 1958. Do you see those political winds blowing in the direction that there would be more Pentagon involvement with the running or running arbiter? Well, without getting into the rights or wrongs of the matter, it's clear that the Pentagon is better funded, and the Defense Department is better funded than most other agencies. That was claimed to be the case, even in past administrations. Whatever it was, it's more so now, and who decides what kind of a payload goes up there depends largely on who can

afford to pay both for the development and production of the payload, and also for the recurring launch costs, which will continue to be considerable, even with the shuttle, even with a reusable spacecraft. You testified last year about the practical military uses, the immediately practical military uses of the shuttle. Could you just enumerate those two systems? They're not very different from what we've been talking about in a practical sense now for 25 years, and there are the things, some of the things that Jim Lehrer mentioned: reconnaissance, surveillance, communications, early warning. How in a practical sense would the shuttle be used for those things? Well, it would put up the payloads that do those things. I don't, it's not proper for me to go into the details of how such payloads work, but each of them, in the case of reconnaissance, surveillance and early warning, look at the

surface of the Earth to see what they can see or hear or otherwise detect there. The communication satellites operate as receivers and transmitters. The principal argument for using the shuttle for those military or corresponding civil purposes, and I'll leave it to others to say the first things about what those civil purposes are, the main argument for the shuttle has been that it both allows you to put up larger payloads for the same amount of money and also by virtue of its size and by virtue of being able to carry people, also will allow you to do some unspecified things that you haven't thought of before. I think there's some merit to both those arguments. The merit of the first one, the lower price, is eroded, of course, by the length and time and the overruns that have gone on in its development, and it's still a developmental

vehicle. It's going to cost a lot more money, but in the end, I think probably it will be somewhat cheaper per pound than expendable boosters would have been. Is one of the practical uses that you could also go up and collect one of these reconnaissance satellites and bring it back down to the Earth and do anything you wanted to do to it? Or you can repair it, you can repair it in orbit with people. By taking it on board and ... Yes. Yes. And of course, preliminary experiments of this kind were related to this. We're done with earlier U.S. spacecraft, and of course, the Soviets have a semi-permanent space station to which they bring people and do things. What do you think of the more visionary military uses of the shuttle that have been talked about? Well, that's what I think of them. They're more visionary, and I don't necessarily mean that in a laudatory sense. Death rays, particle beams, anti-ballistic missile capabilities. It is possible to design on paper such systems.

The question that I've always asked myself, and when I had the authority, asked of those who were trying to sell such systems, was in what way can you do these things better by using space, or in fact do you want to do them at all? There is, in my judgment, no doubt that you can send up spacecraft, or equip spacecraft already sent up with laser beams. Laser beams to defend themselves, that's easiest of all, to defend other satellites considerably harder, but probably feasible, or even to, in principle, to destroy ballistic missiles. Conceivable, but in my judgment, not practical in that case, at least not for decades and not without costs running into the $100 billion range, so that those schemes are, as you said, more visionary.

In my judgment, it would be a mistake to promote a race to do that with the Soviets. On the other hand, it's necessary to recall that the Soviets have had six or eight tests of an anti-satellite system. The killer satellites, not using lasers or death rays, just using ordinary means. It would be very damaging to our military posture, which depends upon some of these capabilities of satellites now up there. If anti-satellite warfare should begin, and I suppose we could retaliate, in fact, in my tenure as Secretary of Defense, I insisted that we go forward with some anti-satellite capability to act in part as a deterrent. But from the U.S. point of view, partly because we depend rather substantially on space for some things more than the Soviets do, I believe that the most desirable situation is for neither side, to engage in destruction of the other satellites.

There have been preliminary discussions toward an agreement of that sort, as often happens. That one, those got to a degree bogged down in legalisms, definitions, and so forth. But again, in my judgment, it's in the long-range interest of the United States that active warfare, not extend to space. Well, thank you. Jim?