IN 1991, IN THE HEADY DAYS after Desert Storm's swift victory over Iraq, U.S. analysts exulted that they had broken the classic military habit of "fighting the last war." Instead, the space assets of the Pentagon were so effectively integrated into military operations that some even suggested calling the conflict "the first space war."

That term is premature, but surely not by much. As more and more commercial satellite systems come on-line equipped with services once exclusive to the U.S. government, there will be widening opportunities worldwide for military as well as civilian applications. This development in turn will awaken a growing desire to apply "negation techniques"--some passive, some active, some violent--to such space systems, even as their commercial owners insist unanimously they will never get involved in military conflicts.

So perhaps unintentionally, and most probably unexpectedly, the stage is being set for a conflict deserving of that 21st century term, the "first space war." It's a safe bet, too, that the United States will be intimately involved, as both a target and a targeter. Next year, and the year after that, is probably still too soon, so there may yet be time to perfect countermeasures and actively ward off events that could harm the country and worldwide commercial space activities in the bargain.

Observation satellites are the most immediate concern, although commercial communications and navigation satellites are also of great military interest. Two considerations bring observation satellites to the fore: the great value--both psychologically and militarily-- of the visual data they supply, and the greater vulnerability of observation satellites to a wide variety of countermeasures compared with other kinds of satellites. Because of these considerations, observation satellites seem likely to be the first targets of intentional malicious interference.

Space for the war-maker

Most analysts believe that a monopoly on space assets was the key to the U.S.-led coalition's victory in 1991. That monopoly embraced observation, communication, navigation, weather forecasting, and other functions. But nobody had better plan on any replays of that rout. Access to space capabilities have since been so transformed that any future conflict will occur in a technological environment as different from the Gulf War as the Gulf War was from World War II.

In a word, future U.S. adversaries will have at their disposal many of the space-based capabilities that the United States employed so effectively in 1991. They will not need to develop a space industry, launch constellations of satellites, or operate them. The prerequisites will be merely a major credit card, Internet access, and the addresses of an array of new globally owned commercial satellite service providers.

Among these services is rapid-response high-resolution ground imaging that can show troop deployments, road construction, and even the locations and types of individual tanks and aircraft. Another is high-bandwidth secure mobile communications for voice and data. Reliable navigation and time-keeping aids are only a pushbutton away, as are good weather forecasts for just about any part of the world.

In 1997, the United States completed a new national space policy, parts of which are still classified. But one task assigned to the U.S. Department of Defense was made very explicit: to ensure that an adversary cannot frustrate U.S. use of space, and moreover, that the United States can counter any space systems used for hostile purposes.

U.S. Air Force General Thomas Moorman, formerly vice chief of staff of the Air Force and now retired, focused on the negative side when he addressed the national convention of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in January 1998. In his paper, "The Explosion of Commercial Space and The Implications for National Security," he asked, "How does the military deal with adversaries who can access up-to-date imagery benchmarked against GPS [global positioning systems] on their personal computers? Not only will ensuring the element of surprise in military operations be infinitely more difficult, the imagery becomes the targeting database for the rogue nation or terrorist."

Other military analysts appear to agree. "A new type of space threat seems to be emerging," wrote James Lee in a master's thesis for the U.S. Air Force's Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Ala., in 1996. "Although future conflicts for the U.S. will probably be confined to militarily inferior regional powers, the increasing availability of space technologies and products could offset the U.S. military advantage...," for example, "by eliminating the U.S. ability to achieve strategic and tactical surprise."

Writing in the Winter 1999 Naval Institute Proceedings, Lieutenant Commander J. Todd Black of the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I., pointed out that "commercial satellite systems are quickly becoming indispensable to the U.S. military, and they are almost certainly growing more useful to potential enemy military, paramilitary, terrorist, and other unconventional forces...." He added that "even crude applications of commercial satellite technology may produce disproportionate, asymmetric advantages." Black's article, "Commercial Satellites: Future Threats or Allies," warned that "ignoring the possibility that an adversary may be using the widespread capabilities of commercial satellite imagery, locating data, and communications would be reckless."

Farewell to U.S. space monopolies

The era of the U.S. (and to a lesser extent, Russian) monopoly on military use of space assets is drawing to a close. "We don't think that superiority is going to be there 15 to 20 years from now," warned recently retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Lyle Bien, former deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs.

Analysts point to the victorious strategy over Iraq and how it will never again be possible, thanks to commercial space systems.

In the memorable post-mortem speech General Norman Schwartzkopf made on allied strategy, he highlighted several key ways the victory was facilitated. Prominent among them was the coalition's ability to deceive Iraq about its planned sweep around the western end of the defense line.

"Saddam never imagined we would be able to maneuver through this area without getting lost," Schwartzkopf explained, "because he knew that whenever his own forces went there, they always got lost." But with the global positioning system now widely available, it is unlikely that any army--Iraqi or other--will get lost anywhere ever again.

Schwartzkopf also detailed the massive logistical effort to build up allied forces on Iraq's left flank, facing north. This build-up went totally unobserved by Iraqi commanders, who were fixated on diversionary U.S. Marine exercises implying amphibious landings near Kuwait on the right flank. But a single commercial satellite photograph would have revealed allied troop dispositions right down to the battalion level.

Recent military simulations have provided good reasons to be concerned about military use of commercial space systems. Last February, the U.S. Army completed a major war game set in the year 2022, where the "Blue" forces (the United States and its allies) tried to replay a Kuwait-style liberation from occupying "Red" forces. Red aggressively exploited commercial space systems to offset Blue advantages, and the Blue forces got badly mauled until, in desperation, they unleashed attacks in space on the troublesome commercial satellites. The resulting loss of space services for commercial applications severely damaged the world economy even long after the "war" had ended.

Of all near-term commercial space services, high-resolution (better than 1 meter) surface imaging is the most visible to the public. The need to balance such commercial services against national security was addressed recently by Gil Klinger, the director of policy for the National Reconnaissance Office, part of the Department of Defense. Speaking on 26 March to a government-industry symposium, he said his job was to find the middle ground between unfettered commercial operations and "protecting the things that need to be protected."

One-meter imagery may be wonderful for agriculture, urban development, and disaster relief, he admitted, but "clear and present danger may occur if the Husseins and Milosevics of the world gain control of such technology and information."

Spokesmen for the commercial space imaging community in general prefer to downplay the military utility of their products, although they damage their credibility by simultaneously lobbying the Defense Department to buy more. Last year, for example, Jeff Harris, president of Space Imaging Inc., Thornton, Colo., was asked directly by Launchspace magazine, a McLean, Va.,­based publication, about his concerns over the use of his company's imaging for military purposes. His reply was that the post­Cold War world made such concerns obsolete.

"Satellites did provide a lot of information about closed societies," Harris explained. "But as societies have now opened, it's relatively easy to use a cellular phone, or a computer, or the Internet and reach into these heretofore closed societies to find information." It's the big information picture that's important, he insisted, and "satellites are a much smaller piece than they were at the beginning of this technology."

Maybe. But there are still plenty of entities on earth desirous of finding things out about others' activities that are not covered on the Internet. And there are plenty of activities on earth that some people, including the U.S. government and many of its friends, want to protect from observation by others. Despite innocent stares and protestations of purity from imagery providers, their expensive space systems could easily--and in the near future--wind up as tools or as targets for hostile action, or both.

Unacknowledged targets

Although those who stand to profit from commercial space imaging assure the public that there is no military threat from unrestricted space imaging, they also are eager to convince the Department of Defense that it should become a major "anchor client" for their imaging services. For many years, U.S. national security groups have happily purchased Landsat and SPOT imagery, and the newer, sharper-eyed satellites will be even more attractive.

According to Warren Firster of the trade weekly Space News, this group "intends to invest US $1 billion over the next five years to utilize commercial capabilities." The group is led by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and includes the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which uses satellite and other data to make maps for the U.S. national security community. In order to allow government-operated systems to concentrate on more critical targets, NIMA spokesman Jennifer Lafley told Firster that "we envision increased use of commercial imagery as more capable systems are launched and this market matures."

By being offered to the U.S. military, commercial space systems have become potential targets of anyone else in the world who might wish to weaken U.S. military capabilities. Granted, the extent of U.S. military vulnerability can be mitigated by maintaining backup military-owned capabilities. Nevertheless, it is clear that, over the next decade, the negation of many commercial space systems would seriously handicap U.S. military capabilities.

Alternatively, such systems could wind up in U.S. crosshairs (as in the war games just cited) if their services were utilized by U.S. adversaries. So far, the U.S. government has been content with "shutter control," the power to tell an imaging system not to observe certain limited areas during certain limited time intervals. But this power applies only to imaging systems owned by U.S. entities.

The notion that the U.S. government might opt to destroy private property in order to maintain national security is not unthinkable: when NASA's Seasat radar satellite unexpectedly broke down in 1978, many space experts initially suspected that it had proven too effective in detecting submerged submarines and therefore "had to die." (It turned out to have failed because of a badly designed power system, but that's beside the point. The notion was indeed thinkable.)

As decades of experience have shown, citizens who have attempted to make images of highly-classified U.S. facilities can have their film or tape confiscated and even from time to time have their observation equipment destroyed. National security has on a regular basistrumped private property rights, although the government sometimes pays restitution, so it is certainly a plausible scenario for space-borne equipment, too.

Defining high resolution as about 1 meter is not entirely arbitrary. Imaging at this resolution serves not merely to detect vehicles but also in some measure to identify aircraft and surface transportation. Tanks can be differentiated from trucks, and specific types of aircraft can be determined. Ground transportation features such as barricades and bridge conditions, which are critical to planning surface deployments, can now be seen as well.

In recognition of this higher level of military usability, Presidential Directive 23 (PDD-23), indicated that dissemination of high-resolution imagery might "compromise" U.S. national security, and it established case-by-case licensing requirements. The directive's fundamental goal was to "support and enhance U.S. industrial competitiveness in the field of remote sensing capabilities while at the same time protecting U.S. national security and foreign policy interests," and it recognized the value to the United States of developing such systems.

Valuable spies beyond the sky

Joseph Dodd, vice president for government programs for Orbital Imaging Corp. (OrbImage), Dulles, Va., described the key market segments for his company's services: "One is the precision agriculture market where, say, a farmer may want to lay down pesticide on a 1- or 10-meter grid instead of over hundreds of thousands of acres. Another market is mapping and surveying, such as updating city maps in terms of urban growth. Another application is with insurance companies that want to identify, let's say, roof types to see what kinds of insurance rates to set."

He noted that other markets include the oil and gas industries, especially from the regulatory and exploratory perspectives. "If you are a company accused of polluting some area and you can use remote sensing to show that it was the company next door whose runoff created the problem, this is a very powerful thing to be able to do," he observed.

These are attractive applications, and dozens and even hundreds more will undoubtedly be developed as such imagery becomes more widely available. What concerns many U.S. military analysts, of course, is how many of these applications will turn out to be harmful.

"Although America is the world leader in the exploitation of space reconnaissance systems, her allies and adversaries are closing the gap," wrote Cynthia McKinley in a master's thesis presented at the U.S. Air Force's Air University in 1996. "They will be skilled at using indigenously produced or commercially procured space imagery. The imagery will assist them in maintaining regional peace as well as waging war."

McKinley's monograph, ominously entitled "When the Enemy Has Our Eyes," continued: "Commercially available imagery data give, at the very minimum, the ability to procure and maintain strategic databases. This allows an adversary to develop attack plans and rehearse missions."

Because of precisely these dangers, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the French SPOT program stopped selling space imagery to Iraq but went on providing it to the U.S.-led coalition forces, who used it very effectively for planning air strikes.

To quote McKinley again: "If the air crews had been limited to using standard maps, they had approximately a 30 percent chance of destroying a target. Using SPOT data, the first strike success rate jumped to 70 percent."

Personal experience

Like thousands of other customers, I've bought spying space services myself. In 1973, I ordered a Landsat photograph of the earth from the Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDS) in Sioux Falls, S.D., half expecting a knock on my door by some men in suits. I had learned that controllers had switched the satellite into a continuous-imaging mode because onboard problems ruled out commanding observation of specific regions. So I thought to exploit the opportunity for a little free-lance photoreconnaissance by sending in an order for a special location, specified only by latitude and longitude.

The region was in the USSR, near 46š N and 63š E. On official Soviet maps it was empty desert, but all Western databases knew the location as the main Soviet space center. The Central Intelligence Agency referred to it as Tyuratam, after a nearby railroad station. Moscow referred to it as the Baykonur Cosmodrome, deliberately naming it after an unimportant village 300 km away.

After several weeks, I noticed my check had been cashed. Then came the knock on the door. But it was only the U.S. Postal Service with a package too wide for the apartment mailboxes. It was the photograph.

My bold ploy had been rewarded with incredible luck. The photograph happened to have been taken soon after a snowfall, so all of the structures and roads stood out in vivid black-on-white (most other space photos of the desert area that were published later showed only gray-on-grayer low-resolution images). This spectacular image, covering about 100 km on a side, was smack dab in the middle of the space center, exactly where Western observers had theorized, and far away from the official Soviet claim. The space picture was the first unclassified documentation and refutation of this particular Soviet lie.

A space spying shopping list

Commercial space imagery has many obvious applications for constructive civilian purposes. But once resolution reaches the 1-meter range, analysts keep coming up with additional tasks that clearly would anger people whose activities could be observed. They need not even be military in nature.

Reconnaissance experts realistically expect that all imagery users will not be benign. While the potential for beneficial use is extremely high, Christopher Simpson, a reconnaissance expert at American University in Washington, D.C., told The New York Times last April that "the potential for abuse certainly exists, and we'll no doubt see some of that."

Imagine being able to spot a research ship doing underwater archeology on a Phoenician shipwreck, whose location in international waters was being kept secret to prevent looting. How much would some black market dealer in antiquities be willing to pay for that information?

Imagine a cocaine producer being able to locate all the deep-jungle airfields of competing cocaine processors, including the types of aircraft used in ferrying their products. And imagine he could learn the status and deployment of interdiction forces--vehicles, aircraft, even new fencing--that he intends to evade. What might that be worth?

Imagine being able to locate a deep-sea oil rig and detect, from what it's dumping into the sea around it, how successful the search has been. What would Wall Street speculators consider a fair price for that data?

Imagine being able to keep track, car by car, of railroad traffic into a competitor's industrial plant, including the rough configuration of shipping containers.

(The lawfulness of such "industrial espionage" is not clear, according to Craig Ehrlich, a professor of law at Babson College, Wellesley, Mass. "The legal issue concerns trade secrecy and whether taking an image of a competitor's facility may or may not be misappropriation of their trade secrets," he told Space News last May.)

For military purposes, an attacker would like to observe the target area layout, the order of battle of mobile forces there, the state of transportation lines, and the terrain characteristics during approaches to and returns from target points. A defender, meanwhile, would also want to monitor the deployment and level of readiness--measured by activity at fuel depots, for example--of enemy forces. Post-strike damage assessment can also be done commercially.

"The biggest military value of commercial satellite imagery is pre-hostilities," Washington-based military space program analyst Dwayne A. Day told Spectrum. "You'd use it for precise mapping of target locations, such as command facilities and barracks." But once the shooting starts, the commercial systems would have to shut down to protect themselves against attack: "It's a shut down or be shot down situation," Day explained.

Writing in the same issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings, Commander Black was more cynical about potential customers: "Given the expense involved, there are only two reasons one might insist on high-resolution satellite photos: first, that one does not have access to the target area, and second, that one wants to obtain information without the knowledge of the area's owners." In that case, imaging satellites will be used to thwart the desires of objects being imaged, and there may be steps those objects can take in response.

Fleets of spy satellites for hire

Civilian observation satellites have been in use for decades, with the 50-meter­resolution Landsat of the 1970s being supplemented with the European SPOT system (5­10-meter resolution) in the '80s. In the '90s, both India and Israel launched systems with 5-meter resolution, and in the mid-'90s, even the Russians began commercializing their 2-meter­resolution spy satellites.

Now the 1-meter­resolution level is at hand. Several companies are on the verge of commercial operations. Space Imaging, mentioned earlier, is building the Ikonos (pronounced eye-CONE-os) satellites, and despite the loss of the first satellite to a launch vehicle failure last April, is pressing ahead. OrbImage, also mentioned earlier, already has some medium-resolution imagers in orbit, but its OrbView-3 satellite, expected before the end of the year, will provide the magic 1-meter­resolution level. EarthWatch Inc. Longmont, Colo., is building Quickbird-1 for a late 1999 launch--an earlier test satellite failed to activate properly in orbit. Autometric, of Springfield, Va., but incorporated in the Cayman Islands, plans to begin operation of an Israeli-built, Russian-launched 1-meter vehicle, also before the end of 1999.

Even before these new satellites were available, commercial systems showed features like roads, but now users will be able to see--and identify by type--the vehicles driving on them. One feature of these imagers is that in general they have little or no image storage capacity. The early SPOTs could store 22 minutes of data; newer versions can store up to 40 minutes' worth. Many newer commercial imagers cannot store images at all, but must transmit "live" to ground stations. For most orbits of interest, the satellite must be within 2500 km of a ground station to be within range.

For example, Space Imaging will franchise stations in other countries to receive and then sell images within their range. Besides U.S. sites in Alaska and Denver, Colo., Space Imaging has already established foreign affiliate sites in Athens, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Japan. "They lease the time on the bird," explained an official to Spectrum, "they uplink the aiming commands, and they own the data."

Since Space Imaging is a U.S. corporation, it is bound by a recent Government ruling that no images of Israel with a resolution of less than 2 meters may be released. Since the company does not even see the images downlinked to foreign affiliates, it meets this requirement by writing it into its contracts with its franchises. The Athens and UAE sites will receive images at the satellite's maximum resolution, but if the scene includes Israeli territory, they have agreed to fuzz-down the image to the required resolution before delivering them to customers. Just how reliable such virtually unenforceable agreements certainly evokes cynicism.

Once, customers waited weeks, or even months for images. For its commercial customers, SPOT can sometimes provide images within a few days (depending on orbits, between four and 14 days). The new systems will be even faster.

Steven Kilston, a remote sensing specialist with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo., described the other extreme--an emergency high-priority request. "If the orbit and the weather are ideal," he told Spectrum, "the order can be specified as late as 10 minutes before a collection tasking upload to the satellite, and retrieved and distributed probably within a very small number of hours." The exact numbers, he continued, "are probably still proprietary information."

Orbiting in herds

Common operational considerations make it likely that commercial imaging satellites will cluster together rather than follow random orbits.

The better to compare ground views over time, system designers seek repeatable local lighting conditions. The most useful kind of orbit for this purpose is called "sun synchronous," meaning that the satellite passes over ground targets of interest at approximately the same local time every day. To optimize both lighting and shadows, this time is usually either late morning (the "10 a.m. satellite") or early afternoon (the "2 p.m. satellite").

In practical terms for a customer of space imaging, or an avoider of space imaging, the upshot is that there will be two particularly busy times of day for imaging satellites--near 10 a.m. and near 2 p.m.--and much less exposure to imaging at other times.

In the orbits most commonly used by imaging satellites, altitudes of 200­1000 km, the swath that can be observed is fairly narrow, perhaps a few hundred kilometers before the angle of the line-of-sight to ground level gets too shallow. Typical observation systems will concentrate on even narrower regions within that swath, based on tasking schedules loaded by the satellite's control center.

Closing the 'open skies'

While space imaging industry officials keep on stressing how harmless they are to everyone, and hence how unlikely they may be as a target for somebody wishing to limit or terminate their operations, U.S. military experts disagree. General Moorman, in his 1998 address to the AIAA, stated: "The proliferation of high-resolution remote-sensing systems presents opportunities for our adversaries to target our forces and facilities from space. I think our commanders in the field would want a system to negate the threat posed by this targeting capability."

"Negation of function" is something that unwilling targets should be expected to attempt. It clearly is something the United States will be willing to try. There is a wide variety of tactics to accomplish this.

As a new lieutenant just out of graduate school, I reported to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, in February 1970. My very first "extra duty" was to become the lab's spy satellite avoidance officer.

Every morning I picked up a folder of messages from North American Air Defense Command (Norad) headquarters in Colorado Springs, which detailed the orbits of all Soviet reconnaissance satellites.

Using a simple cookbook set of procedures and paper templates, I converted the tabular orbital data into periods when each spy satellite was within observation range of our base. Certain laboratory activities that sought to escape observation from space were simply not out in the open during those limited intervals. Thirty years later, all around the world, thousands of people are still performing this same function, with the same success.

Just how crucial this avoidance strategy is can be judged from a little-known episode from the Cold War when U.S. operators managed to beat the system. In 1976, a new-generation U.S. observation satellite, which for the first time sent high-quality real-time imagery back to earth on a radio link, was disguised as a broken old-style satellite using ejectable film canisters. The Soviets were fooled into believing it was not actively observing the ground, so they removed it from their list of observation satellites that needed to be avoided. They stopped hiding significant activities when it passed overhead, so it saw things the Soviets hoped would never be seen.

The results, according to insiders, were astounding. The camouflaged spy satellite caught images of new Soviet submarines and aircraft as they were in the open, shuttling between covered shelters. It obtained views of impact craters created by Soviet missile warheads before the craters were "adjusted" by earth-moving equipment so as to disguise a missile's true accuracy. Much of what had previously been estimated, based on what earlier imagers had seen from their predictable orbits, turned out to have been counterfeit.

Then a U.S. CIA employee sold the operating manual of the stealth spy satellite to the Russians, and they quickly rescheduled their ground activities to avoid it.

For decades, the small number of orbiting imagers has made this avoidance strategy practical, but now three trends are subtracting from its effectiveness. First, more and more vehicles will soon be in orbit, entailing a shorter and shorter period between observation passes (although, as mentioned, commercial imaging satellites will tend to cluster around late morning and early afternoon fly-overs).

Second, high-resolution imagery from greater distances is being developed, permitting a high-orbit slow-moving observation satellite to stay within range of a ground site for hours rather than minutes. (In a decade or two, industry observers expect that 1-meter resolution from geostationary orbit will become feasible, making possible uninterrupted surveillance.)

Third, in the next decade or so, the arrival of high-resolution imaging from commercial radar satellites will allow all-weather 24-hour observation. "Avoidance" may then not be enough to achieve negation, and more serious techniques will have to be considered.

Camouflage strategies

In 1998, India successfully hid its preparations for its atomic tests from U.S. satellites using techniques of camouflage and masking, aided by cloud cover. Masking smoke can also hide limited areas for limited time periods.

During the Cold War, the USSR's Ministry of Defense had a special directorate entirely dedicated to what it called Strategic Deception, or maskirovka. Its purpose was to reduce the utility of U.S. photoreconnaissance satellites through camouflage, disinformation, and other techniques. Today, as a near-bankrupt Russian government seeks foreign sales of its military technology, it may soon realize that exporting its maskirovka expertise is potentially a most profitable activity.

But driving military-related technologies underground may produce unexpected and beneficial stabilizing effects, one anonymous expert told Spectrum. In a witty reversal of a common saying, he explained that under the threat of imaging satellites, "You can hide, but then you can't run." That is, the measures for protecting a resource from observation by space imaging systems may also hinder or even prevent its operational exploitation.

Another disinformation method would be to set up false ground sites that look interesting. "You could build so many decoys you overload the system," suggested Chris Haakon, chief executive officer of Autometric, adding, "there aren't a whole lot of trained image analysts."

Legal constraints...

Operating in space, beyond the boundaries of national sovereignty, the commercial imaging companies are fervent believers in "open skies"--no constraints on what they look at or to whom they sell images. As Ball Aerospace specialist Kilston told Spectrum: "I know of no protection planned for private assets or privacy."

While beyond national sovereignty, space is not beyond international law, as decades of work on treaties and other agreements shows. It is possible that this apparently lawless and unconstrained activity may gradually be subjected to international agreements. But they are probably years, if not decades, in the future.

Governmental restraints are another matter. "Shutter control" is a red flag to commercial space imaging companies. It is the process by which somebody in the U.S. government tells all U.S.-owned imaging systems not to observe certain geographic areas. It remains so controversial that the U.S. Department of Commerce is still working on a 14-page regulation about how it is to be implemented.

...and commercial countermeasures

If you cannot legally bully imaging satellites into selectively closing their eyes, you can buy them off. That is the technique offered by one provider, the company called Autometric, and it may set precedents that other providers could follow.

First of all, Autometric is not a U.S. corporation--its parent company is based in the West Indies--and it will use satellites built and operated by Israel and launched commercially by Russia. Its 1-meter­resolution worldwide database will be located on Cyprus but accessible worldwide through the Internet.

The satellite transmissions are designed to be compatible with the two dozen SPOT-Landsat receiving sites around the world, with the addition of simple data converters and recorders. To keep the satellites cheap, no data is stored on board, so all images are transmitted in real time and received only by ground stations within line-of-sight (out to a range of about 2500 km). As part of the commercial agreements for access, all sites must send data tapes to the Cyprus repository within a few days of receipt.

Autometric CEO Chris Haakon explained to Spectrum that a special encryption scheme could give any particular customer exclusive access to the imagery produced anywhere within the range of the customer's ground station. That is, no other user would ever have access to any of the downlinked images. "Countries can sign up for $10 million per year," he explained, citing India as one example and Israel as another. "Three or four countries have already purchased this option," he told Spectrum, but he would not identify any others.

Customers may also purchase nonexclusive options that provide a set number of accesses over a specific geographic area. The satellite does not image all areas it passes over, but must be aimed by commands from the control center in Israel, and after all, selecting specific areas for imaging is what customers pay for. Otherwise, they can browse through the archives of previous images and purchase any that happen to be of interest.

Haakon insists that these satellites are of no threat to anyone, and hence are in no danger from anyone. "No one cares," he told Spectrum, when asked about possible national security issues. "We've never found any concerns for images going anywhere."

But there must be some level of concern. In its absence, Autometric would have no customers for its $10 million blackout deal (and that's the price per satellite--Autometric plans to launch up to eight in the next three years).

But since buying exclusivity from only one of several different satellite systems could thus cost in the range of tens of millions of dollars per year, it is possible that entities seeking to hide something may choose to spend that much money on other strategies, both passive and active.

If an unwilling target cannot cajole, bully, or bribe the owner of an imaging satellite not to observe it, then it may have to resort to more active measures. "Disruption of ground stations could be the most effective means of direct action against commercial satellite systems," wrote Commander Black in his recent article on the threat of commercial satellites. "The most straightforward way to disrupt ground stations is simply to destroy them."

Even a demonstration of the ability to jam, spoof, or--as a last resort--destroy ground links may be enough to persuade the managers of a space imaging system to deliberately desist from trying to image certain regions. These demonstrations and these persuasions may take place completely out of sight of the public and of governments.

Baffle 'em or dazzle 'em

The most spectacular threat, if backed up with real capability, would be to the spacecraft itself. And for an imaging system, its most vulnerable component--its optical sensors--may be the target of either direct damage or, more likely, credible blackmail.

The old engineer's proverb about technical presentations--"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with BS"--has been turned on its ear by observation satellites. The first choice of a countermeasures strategist is to baffle the unwanted observer with BS, namely, deception and camouflage. If that is unworkable, then the fall-back strategy could be literally to dazzle the observer with brilliance, using a number of widely available technologies.

A dozen countries already have lasers powerful enough to dazzle the optics of imaging satellites, threatening them with permanent harm. And even some medium-tech attacks are becoming feasible. "It might well be possible to have some very large mirror focusing sunlight on the satellite," remote sensing expert Kilston explained to Spectrum, "which could damage the focal plane sensor array."

With such a threat, a government could simply declare a "no spy zone" over specified areas and announce that it would be randomly illuminating overflying imaging satellites with enough energy to harm their optics. Closing the aperture shutters would be all that was needed for safety, and all that the threatener desired.

There is no real legal justification for such action, nor is there effective legal protection for imagers. The United States and the USSR both agreed not to interfere with each other's "national technical means of verification," to reassure each other that arms control treaties were being abided by. But private satellites have no such protection aside from post-damage lawsuits, unless their national governments cared to take up the issue.

Space lawyers could argue that such action was illegal, perhaps based on provisions of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. But as with so many other aspects of space law, the absence of an effective enforcement provision makes compliance with most of the statutes a matter of national whim. And an attack on an unmanned object lacks the emotional force of incidents involving people--its severity better compares to interference with a buoy or weather balloon.

A much more difficult technological challenge is "shooting down" an unwanted space spy (actually, just killing it--the dead satellite would remain in orbit). But the feat is well within the capability of countries possessing intermediate-range missiles or operational space boosters. They include France, China, Japan, India, Israel, and North Korea, with Pakistan, Iran, and even Iraq and Brazil nearly there. A credible threat would not need a high probability of a single-shot kill; even the prospect of a half ton of sand thrown up in front of an approaching satellite could frighten imaging satellite operators into abiding by the wishes of the rocket-holders.

As the 1-meter threshold in space imaging is crossed, the world had better learn to live with it and expect the skies to be more and more open. Commercial space imaging is probably here to stay, at better and better resolution and with better and better technology to penetrate attempts at avoidance, camouflage, and other deception techniques.

Looking at the bright side

Space law expert Joanne Gabrynowicz (of the internationally respected Space Studies Department of the University of North Dakota) points out some benefits of this development. "The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has written that commercial remote sensing could enable Government and civil groups around the world to monitor treaty verification and compliance procedures," she told Spectrum.

But, as commercial systems proliferate, those on earth with things to hide will step up their camouflage and disinformation efforts, which will make the job of the traditional U.S. reconnaissance agencies even more difficult.

Despite all the threat of better attack planning based on space imaging, perhaps the silver lining is that preparations to attack tend to be more visible than preparations to defend. One highly placed military intelligence expert spoke to Spectrum off the record: "The primary utility of space sensors is not in the generation of unilateral advantage, but in the ability to limit the capacity of others to act in secret." If, as Commander Black warned, space imaging eliminates "the U.S. ability to achieve strategic and tactical surprise," then it does so even more for everyone else. And if an attack cannot achieve surprise, it may never be launched.

Black was also unwilling to be alarmist about the potential for threats to national security from commercial space imaging. "If ignoring the threats arising from an adversary's use of commercial satellite systems would be foolish," he wrote, "overestimating those threats might be equally so."

"Military thinkers tend to 'build' an enemy that has a perfect ability to exploit all the advantages that might be available to it," he continued. "This mindset is useful when imagining all the courses of action possible for an enemy, but rarely if ever can an enemy actually do each and every conceivable action. Thus, with regard to commercial satellite systems, although they can certainly provide substantial capabilities, an adversary must be able to exploit them."

Chris Haakon of Autometric is also skeptical of the severity of the threat. "The picture is not enough," he told Spectrum. "The people who get usable knowledge are those who can process the data," a complex and expensive process. "I would not think that'll happen in the next 10 years."

Another senior intelligence community official told Spectrum that while "it's never smart to be completely dismissive," the threat of terrorist use of space imaging, for example, is overblown. The key question here is the level of expertise. In his view, terrorism in general doesn't look for complicated answers, and for most imaginable applications, hand-held cameras by ground-walking humans would provide all the required imagery for terrorist planning.

Haakon agreed that terrorist use of high-resolution space pictures was implausible: "I really don't think so. I think he can get hand-held 35-mm with resolution of inches or less, of target facilities. They're not going to plan a bombing with only an overhead image."

Somewhere between the faith in harmlessness of the commercial space imagers and the fear of threat from national security experts, the real future of commercial space imaging will play out. To imagine that nobody will find military applications of such images, and that nobody else in turn will seek to counteract such capabilities by any means necessary, seems naïve, at best.

In their quest to make the world more visible, commercial imaging companies may well be blind to some uncomfortable features of that world, especially people's ability to find harmful uses for any new tool, and the temptation to fight over any new valuable resource. If history is any indication, the flourishing of commercial space systems will bring with them not only the marvelous benefits, but also the threat that someday the so far meaningless term "first space war" will finally refer to something real. *

Setting the record straight

The article "Spying for Dummies" [November 1999, pp. 62-69) contained some inaccuracies relating to Autometric Inc. Certain statements or opinions in the article that commercial satellites pose no potential threat to U.S. national security were incorrectly attributed to Autometric's chief executive officer, Chris Haakon. Autometric is a private U.S. corporation and is neither a parent nor a subsidiary of a West Indies company. Autometric holds no financial interest in a West Indies company nor does a West Indies company hold any financial interest in Autometric. Autometric does not own or launch satellites and therefore has no involvement in "shutter control." Nor does Autometric have any involvement with the business relationships between the satellite owner and its customers.

Based in Springfield, Va., Autometric is a geospatial information technology company that analyzes and produces imagery products from geospatial data provided by Autometric's clients. For more information about Autometric's products and services, visit its Web site at www.autometric.com. or contact Sophie Barrett by phone at + 1 703 923 4037 or by e-mail at sbarrett@autometric.com.

Michael J. Lockerby
Richmond, Va.

This correction will appear in the January 2000 issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine.

To probe further

A broad treatment of photographic reconnaissance can be found at the Federation of American Scientists' World Wide Web site at www.fas.org/irp/imint/index.html.

J. Todd Black's paper, "Commercial Satellites: Future Threats or Allies?," can be found on the Web at www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/1999/winter/art5-w99.htm.

Cynthia McKinley's paper, "When The Enemy Has Our Eyes," can be found on the Web at www.fas.org/spp/eprint/mckinley.htm.

"Planning Satellite Reconnaissance To Support Military Operations," by Thomas Behling and Kenneth McGruther, is another helpful background report. Its Web site is at www.odci.gov/csi/studies/winter98-99/art10.html.

Spectrum editor: Michael J. Riezenman