Part One:
Playing Games in Space
WASHINGTON Sept. 29 – It all began January 21, the day after the presidential inauguration. The political pressures had been building for months, although few knew about the crisis. Now, around a table in a secured room, sat the president of the United States, the vice president, secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Behind them sat their staffs and aides. The crisis had quickly escalated.
The first attack had rendered silent America’s constellation of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. The GPS control center in Colorado Springs reported it had lost contact with the constellation, first by signal degradation -- then completely.
Within hours of that crisis, the president received notice of another space disaster. Several commercial communication satellites used by the military to route communications and pagers to ships at sea had been disabled; how was not yet clear. At
Cape Canaveral, terrorists had contaminated the fuel storage facility for the space shuttle fleet.
Without firing a shot, the nation’s winged ships were grounded.
And now came the most threatening news of all:
NASA Johnson Space Center was reporting that the International Space Station had been damaged by a wave of small objects let loose from a ballistic missile.
The president and his staff now faced the most serious decision ever made by a U.S. chief of state: Did the attack on U.S. space assets constitute a first strike against the nation? High up in silent space, had World War 3 begun?
If this sounds threatening and frightening, that is the whole idea. For these scenarios will be facing not the real U.S. president and his Cabinet but a simulation. Stand-ins for the president, vice president, secretary of defense and the whole U.S. military leadership will take their places around a table on January 21, 2001 -- the day after the next real U.S. president takes office.
"We need to learn how to better protect our space assets. In this way will we be better able to develop our future plans."
The simulation, the Air Force’s first all-space war game, will test how well U.S. space assets would withstand an attack. The answers might well shape how the military and civil space programs evolve in the years ahead.
"This will be the first Air Force level space war game, " said Rob Hegstrom, game director for the Schriever 2001 space war game. The weeklong simulation of an air and space attack will be held at the Schriever Air Base in Colorado Springs next winter, the first of an annual series.
The goal? "We need to learn how to better protect our space assets," Hegstrom said. "In this way will we be better able to develop our future plans," he added.
~
Space war games are not a new exercise. The U.S. Army, as part of its "Army After Next" effort has held three such simulations. Each produced surprising results and, according to some, disturbing questions that have yet to be answered by U.S. national policy.
Questions such as the depth and level of the responsibility of the U.S. military to commercial space industry when its systems are used for national defensive purposes. "We pose questions such as how will these results shape the baseline [military] force in development," Hegstrom said.
For the week, two separate teams will portray U.S. leaders facing a gradually escalating crisis. One new scenario will be added each day, and the president and his staff must plan responses in real-time just as if the simulated events are happening.
Since the day-to-day game is classified, specific plans are not detailed. But the scenarios all focus on a U.S. space capability as projected in 2015, with the rise of a geopolitical 'peer competitor' to the U.S. that has developed a major space program.
While Hegstrom said that no specific war game plan can be discussed, it was reasonable to assume that, with a permanent U.S. orbital outpost in 2015, "terrorist threats to the space station could easily be assumed as a valid possibility," he said.
Other assumptions about the state of the space program in 15 years include advanced navigation satellites, military spaceplanes, advanced launch vehicles, space stations and a capability the Pentagon calls "Launch on Demand" -- the ability to rapidly launch boosters and piloted craft within hours of an order. Today such a launch takes months and years to prepare.
"Once military leaders 'hot wash' the results from the weeklong play," Hegstrom said that 'gold nuggets' -- major lessons learned from the exercise -- will be passed up the chain of command for consideration.
"The Air Force will be addressing long-range issues, such as denial of access to space, terrorist attacks on space installations and jamming of space communications," Hegstrom suggested, so that programs can be developed now to counter any potential future threat.
And the final condition of the U.S. space program after the crisis? How will it evolve in the game? "This is a free-play war game," he said. "Anything can happen when a world crisis arises."
In Part Two: How the "battlelabs" are training new spacers.
advertisement
