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Wynne: Safety of space assets not assured

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — America can no longer count on the safety of its space assets, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said during a keynote speech at the National Space Symposium.

Combined with last year’s Chinese anti-satellite missile demonstration and the constant attempt to jam GPS satellites, the Department of Defense has a pressing need to mature America’s ability to understand what’s happening in space and who could potentially attack one of its military or commercial satellites, Wynne said.

A year has passed since DoD officials sounded the same warning at the 2007 symposium a few months after China struck one of its aging weather satellites, but both Wynne and Gen. Robert Kehler, Air Force Space Command head, agreed more investments must be made to ensure America’s space situational awareness improves.

Since then, America has demonstrated its own ability to strike a space target when the Navy intercepted the USA193 intelligence satellite in February as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere before its fuel tank could pose a threat to people on the ground.

“No longer can we simply design and put up scientific instruments and believe that we can surveil and measure without contest,” Wynne said. “There are lots of ways to contest, and we’re finding out each and every one of those.”

Certain Cold War-era defense satellites are designed to withstand threats as extreme as a nuclear blast, but Kehler said many other satellites are vulnerable to adversaries like China, who are heavily investing in their space program.

“The visibility of the space mission has gone up because the space capabilities are essential to the American way of warfare,” Kehler said. “Others out there have taken notice of our use, and that’s created challenges for us. We are being challenged in our space capabilities that we will expect in any future conflict we will be challenged.”