Military Implications of an SPS

The International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (INTELSAT) has been suggested as a model for international arrangements for SPS. Whatever the relative merits of setting up an analogous international arrangement for SPS, it is necessary for the purposes of examining the military implications of SPS to focus attention elsewhere, not on the legal entity or entities controlling, funding, and managing the DDT&E, startup, and routine construction and operations phases of the program. Our focus here will be on the operational entities which design, build, and maintain the power satellites and which design, control, and operate the launch facilities, the launch vehicles, the orbital bases in low Earth orbit and in geosynchronous Earth orbit, the orbital transfer vehicles, and any other facilities in space. This focus on the operational organizations results from the following considerations: (1) These operational entities will have continuous "hands on" access to space vehicles and space facilities, including the power satellites themselves, from DDT&E through decommissioning, whether or not they own these devices. Therefore these entities will be in a unique position to be co-opted by military interests of their own national government(s) or of the government(s) of allied nation(s), and to covertly deploy military adaptors for the SPS. (2) These entities will have primary responsibility for implementing any technological means for reducing or eliminating vulnerabilities of the power satellites and other SPS elements in space. Thus these organizations would be in a unique position to be subverted in such a manner as to increase the vulnerability of the power satellites and other system elements, or to install "Trojan horse" devices aboard power satellites to be sold to other countries which would permit disabling the power satellite upon command of a hostile entity at a later date. Short of thorough audit and inspection procedures by other organizations, it is difficult to see how legal and institutional arrangements analogous to those of INTELSAT, per se, could provide protection against the dangers suggested above. 1.3 Assumptions The subject of the military implications of a Satellite Power System planned for deployment in the period 20 to 50 years in the future is vast. Certain assumptions had to be made to guide the directions of inquiry, to limit the scope of the problem, and to provide a background context for the SPS program. The assumptions

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