Space securityU.S. faces serious future threats in space

Gen. William Shelton, the commander of Air Force Space Command, said last week that U.S. dominance in space will be challenged by very real threats in the years ahead.

As Defense One reports, the general also added that those threats might consist of “jammers, lasers and tactical space nukes,” with any of these challenges exponentially more dangerous thhan in the past as the technology becomes more common.

Jammers are potentially devastating weapons as they could quite easily disrupt global positioning systems (GPS), which operates 31 GPS satellites across the globe.

The United States has yet to face a jamming attack, but there are currently countries using them against one another. In 2012, North Korea launched a series of jamming attacks on South Korea, reportedly effecting the navigational equipment of hundreds of aircraft and some ships.

Additionally, the army has released its Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy, and, purportedly, much of the defense world took notice when Russia encountered issues with its own form of GPS in April.

In the optical field, lasers are becoming increasingly more common on the battlefield. While not an entirely new problem — the FAA has classed blinding laser pointers a threat for many years – research bears evidence that there are many tactics to employ against such beams. In June, NASA also displayed the available range of such weapons when it beamed a 2.5 watt laser from the International Space Station to Earth to test a new light-based communication system called Optical Payload Lasercomm Science (OPALS).

Defense Onenotes that the logistics of employing a similar and potentially disruptive laser, which would be beamed into space, would be even simpler, given the lack of size and weight restriction when operating from the ground.

Shelton’s last listed threat, space-based nuclear weapons, remains the most menacing. He said that “A high altitude nuclear burst…has prompt effects if you happen to be in the area but sustained effects because of what it does to the Van Allen belts (the rings of radiation around the Earth). It pumps up the magnetic field around the Earth with charged particles and potentially, everything in low-Earth orbit has its electronics fried.”

More alarmingly, any country that possessed such a weapon and had intercontinental ballistic missiles would be capable of such an attack.

As Defense One summarizes, “The space race isn’t a race that ever ends. It just gets faster.”