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By Root 958 0

in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.

Indian Springs is the old airstrip where Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, and all the other nuclear physicists used to land when they would come to witness their atomic bomb creations being set off as tests from 1951 to 1992. Indian Springs is where the atomic-sampling pilots trained to fly through mushroom clouds. It is where EG&G set up the first radar-testing facility on the Nevada Test and Training Range in 1954. Indian Springs is where Bob Lazar said he was taken and debriefed after getting caught trespassing on Groom Lake Road. And in 2011, Indian Springs, which has been renamed Creech Air Force Base, is the place where Air Force pilots sit in war rooms operating drones.

For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world. By the Pentagon’s definition, “Wicked problems are highly complex, wide-ranging problems that have no definitive formulation… and have no set solution.” By their very nature, wicked problems are “substantially without precedent,” meaning the outcome of them cannot be known because a wicked problem is one that has never before been solved. Worst of all, warned the Pentagon, efforts to solve wicked problems generally give way to an entirely new set of problems. The individual tasked with keeping abreast of the wicked problem is called a wicked engineer, someone who must be prepared to be surprised and be able to deal with unintended consequences because “playing the game changes the game.”

By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese—unannounced and unexpectedly—shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wicked-problem scenarios in space.

Around 5:00 p.m. eastern standard time on July 11, 2007, a small, six-foot-long Chinese satellite was circling the Earth 539 miles up when it was targeted and destroyed by a Chinese ballistic missile launched from a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility in Szechuan Province, running on solid fuel and topped with a “kinetic kill vehicle,” or explosive device. The satellite was traveling at speeds of around sixteen thousand miles per hour, and the ballistic missile was traveling approximately eighteen thousand miles per hour. The hit was dead-on. As radical and impressive as it sounds, the technology was not what raised