Space junk, weapons threaten global security, economy

Posted Sat Sep 15, 2007 6:44pm AEST

A newly-released research report says human security and technologies from cell phones to weather forecasts are more at risk than ever from anti-satellite weapons and space junk.

An anti-satellite test by China in January, and increased US opposition to restrictions on space weapons, were cited as two main global threats by "Space Security 2007," the fourth annual report by the Space Security Index.

"The dismantling of the space sanctuary for communications satellites, and weather satellites, and those other divides on which the modern economy depends so greatly, thereby making it impossible to utilize those devices, would be negative to every single person in the world," said report co-author Thomas Graham.

"You wouldn't be able to have cell phones, Blackberries, pagers, the kind of television you have now," Mr Graham said, warning that 30 nations now have the ability to shoot down satellites.

"If we don't keep space as a sanctuary ... once an arms race begins in space all those satellites become very vulnerable."

The Space Security Index warned that international tensions over space are rising, but while "it is in all nations' self-interest to safeguard use of the space environment ... there is a widening impasse on how to do this".

It focused on the United States's "small and controversial program for space-based ballistic missile defense and proto-technologies that may form the basis for future space-based weapons," and Earth-based weapons programs.

"There is growing tension between the US and China over the security of outer space, largely driven by mistrust and suspicions over weapons programs," said co-author Ray Williamson of Secure World Foundation in the news release.

The report said China's test "created 1500 pieces of trackable debris in heavily used orbits - one of the worst manmade debris-creating events in history - but debris caused by routine space operations is also a problem."

"Even a small piece of metal, traveling at 7.5 kilometers per second, can destroy a spacecraft worth billions of dollars," said William Marshall of the NASA Ames Research Center, an advisor to the space index.

"The number of objects in Earth orbit have increased steadily; today there are an estimated 35 million pieces of space debris," said the report, noting that 90 per cent of 13,000 orbiting objects large enough to damage or destroy a spacecraft are space debris.

The report will be presented to the United Nations First Committee on international security on October 22.