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By Root 935 0

satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

These scenarios create another wicked problem for the U.S. military. Every modern nation relies on satellites to function. The synchronized encryption systems used by banks around the world rely on satellites. Weather forecasts are derived from satellite information, as is the ability of air traffic controllers to keep airplanes safely aloft. The U.S. global positioning system, or GPS, works on satellites, as will the European version of GPS, the Galileo positioning system, which will come online in 2012. The U.S. military relies on satellites not just for its drone programs but for almost all of its military communications worldwide. Were anyone to take down the satellite system, or even just a part of it, the world would see chaos and panic that would make The War of the Worlds seem tame. When considering the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union during the atomic buildup of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—the nuclear hubris, the fiscal waste, and the imprudent public policy—it is nothing short of miraculous that the space-based nuclear tests of the late 1950s and early 1960s did not propel the two superpowers to fight for military control of space. Instead, in the last decades of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR worked with a tacit understanding that space was off-limits for warfare. Neither nation tried to put missiles on the moon. And neither nation shot down another nation’s spy satellites. According to Colonel Leghorn, this is because “spy satellites launched into space were accepted as eyes in the skies that governments had to live with.” The governments Leghorn is referring to are Russia and the United States. But today, allegiances and battle lines have been considerably redrawn. At least one enemy army, that of al-Qaeda, would rather die than live according to the superpowers’ rules.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, his ninety-one years, Leghorn speaks with great authority. In addition to being considered the father of aerial reconnaissance, Leghorn founded the Itek Corporation in 1960, which developed the high-resolution photographic system for America’s first reconnaissance satellite, Corona. The Corona program was highly successful and, most notably, was originally designed and run by Richard Bissell for the CIA at the same time he was in charge of operations at Area 51. After leaving the Air Force, Leghorn spent decades in the commercial-satellite business. From the satellite images produced by Itek satellites, the CIA learned that in order to escape scrutiny by America’s eyes in the sky, many foreign governments moved their most secret military facilities underground.

Out in the Nevada desert, while the CIA redoubled its efforts at Area 51 to develop ground sensor technology and infrared tracking techniques to learn more about underground facilities (which also requires the use of drones), the Department of Defense and the Air Force got to work on a different approach. In the 1980s, the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground. Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from