Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (16 page)

In common with the rest of the planetary-defense community, the Secure World Foundation was and remains emphatic about the danger being global and that it therefore requires a unified international response.

Kirill Benediktov heartily agreed. He was a bestselling Russian author, historian, and policy analyst who made a presentation,
“The Asteroid-Comet Danger and Planetary Defense: A View from Russia,” at the opening session of the Schiller Institute conference in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on April 13–14, 2013. The institute is an international political and economic think tank with headquarters in Germany and in the United States. After the obligatory references to Halley's Comet, Tunguska, and Chelyabinsk, and after noting that Apophis will have a “dangerously close encounter” with Earth in 2029 and 2036 and perhaps cause a “catastrophe on a planetary scale,” Benediktov quoted Boris Shustov, the director of the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Astronomy, as saying that the number of potentially Earth-threatening objects is between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand—only two percent of which have been identified.

“We need to significantly increase the effectiveness of currently available early warning systems…. We need to create a single planetary network for detection and prediction of asteroid and comet hazards.” The network should include both already-existing centers, such as the Minor Planet Center, JPL, and the laboratory at the University of Pisa, and new ones, he said. “As for Russia, the work ongoing within individual institutes and research institutions should be systematically organized; a single coordination point has to be set up for data collection and processing. This center should be formed initially as a node of the global (supranational) network.”
²⁵

Then Benediktov startled the audience by quoting Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin, his country's representative to NATO, as proposing a civilian-military defensive system that would not only protect the planet from asteroids, comets, “and other space objects,” but also from the respective superpowers' intercontinental ballistic missiles; in other words, an international ballistic-missile defense system. “Rogozin stressed that the idea of such a major project under the auspices of the U.N., among other things, gives Russia an opportunity to seize the
strategic initiative from the U.S.A. in deploying a global BMD system, including its segment in Europe. It will also make it possible to ‘package' a decision on establishing a truly unified and joint European missile defense system into a major civilian project for space exploration in which Russia has its own unique scientific, practical, and industrial role to play. Essentially,” Kirill Benediktov said, “Russia and the United States could take on a noble mission to save the planet.”
²⁶

That is what Congress had in mind when it stipulated in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 that NASA ask the National Research Council, which is the investigative arm of the august National Academy of Sciences, to conduct a study of near-Earth-object surveys and hazard mitigation strategies. That resulted in the creation of the ad hoc Committee to Review Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, which, in turn, formed a Steering Committee, a Survey and Detection Panel, and a Mitigation Panel.
²⁷
The panels met to hear experts—astronomers and other scientists—explain the nature of the situation so the extent of the danger could be determined.

The Survey and Detection Panel met at the National Research Council's headquarters in Washington on November 5–7, 2008, to get the procedure straight. Then it heard testimony there at the end of January 2009, followed by a meeting in Tucson on April 20–22, and a wrap-up session in Santa Fe on July 13–15. The panel's fourteen members were treated to a tour of the Catalina Sky Survey operation while they were in Tucson.

The presentations—scores of them—were appropriately specific and detailed. A representative of Northrop Grumman talked about ASTER, an “Asteroid Structure, Trajectory, and Exploratory Reconnaissance Mission” that could have been sent to size up Apophis. Jon D. Giorgini of JPL and his colleagues described an “Improved Impact Hazard Assessment:
Existing Radar Sites and a New 70-m Southern Hemisphere Radar Installation,” while Mark Boslough of the Sandia National Laboratories briefed the panel on “Modeling the Effects of Small NEOs: Low-Altitude Airbursts” (noting that the Tunguska forest was full of dead and rotting trees before that meteor burst clobbered much of what was left standing). And Joseph A. Nuth III of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, to take one more example, held forth on “Diogenes A: Diagnostic Observation of the Geology of Near Earth Spectrally-Classified Asteroids.”

All the presentations were deftly consolidated into a single volume, replete with excellent illustrations, called
Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies
that was published by the NRC in 2010. It amounted to a briefing manual whose chapters covered risk analysis, survey and detection of NEOs, their characterization and mitigation, challenges of researching the subject, and, inevitably, national and international coordination and collaboration.

The chapter on mitigation showed that the sixteen members of the panel that produced it were well aware of the scenarios that had been worked out by other organizations involved in planetary defense, including the space agency and the B612 Foundation. It therefore suggested four progressively decisive courses of action: (1) civil defense, which would involve evacuating the region around a small impact; (2) the slow push or pull method, which would gradually change the orbit of an NEO so that it misses Earth; (3) the kinetic-impact approach, which would hit the asteroid or comet head-on with so much momentum and energy that it would be abruptly knocked off course; and, if all else fails, (4) using that nuclear warhead to change its orbit. The committee wrote:

Nuclear explosives constitute a mature technology, with well-characterized outputs. They represent by far the most mass-efficient method of energy transport and should be considered as an option
for NEO mitigation. Nuclear explosives provide the only option for large NEOs (> 500 meters in diameter) when the time to impact is short (years to months), or when other methods have failed and time is running out.
²⁸

The NRC was also on the same page as the rest of the planetary-defense sector where the need for international cooperation was concerned:

Responding effectively to hazards posed by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) requires the joint efforts of diverse institutions and individuals. Thus organization plays a key role that is just as important as the technical options. Because NEOs are a global threat, efforts to deal with them may involve international cooperation from the outset…. Arrangements at present are largely ad hoc and informal in the United States and abroad, and they involve both government and private entities.
²⁹

To solve that problem, the committee recommended that “the United States should establish a standing committee, with membership from each of the relevant agencies and departments, to develop a detailed plan for treating all aspects of the threat posed to Earth by Near-Earth Objects.” And, the report added, “The United States should take the lead in organizing and empowering a suitable international entity to participate in developing a detailed plan for dealing with the NEO hazard.”
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That made the course of action compelling and unanimous, but only among the experts in the global community, not among their political leaders.

A specter is haunting NASA (not Europe…). It is a victim of its own success, and it is therefore an agency without a mission as profoundly important as the one that got its astronauts to the Moon six times from 1969 to 1972. But there is a new mission, and it is far more important.

NASA's seeds were planted at the imaginatively named First Annual Symposium on Space Travel, which was held at the Hayden Planetarium in New York in October 1951. The event's organizer was Wernher von Braun, the charismatic German aristocrat who masterminded the slave-labor program that made the rocket-propelled V-2 ballistic missiles—the “vengeance weapons”—that rained down on London and elsewhere in the closing stages of the Second World War. He and a little more than a hundred of his colleagues turned themselves and a veritable mountain of blueprints and other technical documents over to the US Army in the closing weeks of the war in an operation first called Overcast and then Paperclip. With the Soviet Union quickly looming as a menace, and the place of the ballistic missile in warfare clearly established, von Braun and six of his top echelon, together with the cache of documents, were spirited to the United States, where they were out of reach of Joseph Stalin's feared Red Army. Six of the “prisoners of peace” (as von Braun called them) were taken to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where they were put to work translating, evaluating, and cataloging the documents. Their leader was taken to Fort Bliss, Texas, as the advance
man for the rest of the rocket team and eventually to the Army Ordnance Guided Missile Center at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they designed constantly improved (and ever larger) ballistic missiles. It was at Redstone that von Braun created the gigantic Saturn V rocket that would get six Apollo crews on the Moon.

But von Braun had long since metamorphosed from being a master rocketeer to being a handsome and personable visionary—a space savant—and a publicly recognized celebrity who believed that it was humankind's destiny to explore space and, as the saying of the time went, conquer it. He was to become the face of space for millions of Americans who emerged from the Second World War with a craving to extend their civilization to inhabiting the space around their planet and then extending it to the Moon and to Mars. Walt Disney understood that and capitalized on it by making Tomorrowland one of the four theme parks at Disneyland in California. (One of the others, Frontierland, featured Davy Crockett, who became another American television hero played by Fess Parker, and that had millions of kids wearing coonskin hats, complete with tails.) Typical of Disney's genius, he offered von Braun a consulting job on the project, and the visionary eagerly accepted it. Following that, von Braun took a consultant position on Disney's television show, called
Disneyland
, to work on the “Man in Space” episode, which aired on March 9, 1955, boasting that it was “science factual.”

“If we were to start today on an organized, well supported space program, I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within ten years,” von Braun said on camera. “Now here is my design for a four-stage orbital rocket ship…” A second segment, “Man and the Moon,” which Disney Studios claimed was a “realistic and believable trip to the Moon in a rocket ship,” showed von Braun with an excellent prop in his shirt pocket: a slide rule.
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And he was as knowledgeable and prophetic
as he was charismatic, of course, and therefore attracted a coterie of like-minded individuals who had science and engineering backgrounds and who enjoyed writing about it.

They came together at the symposium on space flight, which was held at the Hayden Planetarium in 1951, which was sponsored by
Collier's
magazine. The magazine's editor, Gordon Manning, had come up with the idea. “Within the next 10 or 15 years, the earth can have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite which will be man's first foothold in space,” von Braun predicted in a reference to what would come to be called the International Space Station (ISS). “Inhabited by human beings, and visible from the ground as a sedately moving star, it will sweep around the earth at an incredible rate of speed in that dark void beyond the atmosphere which is known as ‘space.'…From this platform, a trip to the moon itself will be just a step, as scientists reckon distance in space.” (He was overly optimistic about the time frame, since the first section of the ISS was not carried to orbit until 1998, and it was not manned until late 2000.)
²

“When man first takes up residence in space, it will be within the spinning hull of a wheel-shaped space station rotating around the earth much as the moon does,” science writer Willy Ley told the audience in a presentation on the space station. “Life will be cramped and complicated for space dwellers; they will exist under conditions comparable to those in a modern submarine.” Ley was another German-American, a historian of science, and a space advocate. He got the shape of the station wrong but was on the mark about the cramped living conditions. A crater is named after him on the far side of the Moon.
³
Heinz Haber, a German physicist and science writer, delivered a presentation about survival in space that began by enumerating the many mortal dangers, including cosmic and ultraviolent rays and “ultra high-speed projectiles”—the meteors that can easily puncture any protective armor. He concluded his presentation, stating that, while spacefarers would never
be completely safe against hazards such as meteors, they could be protected to the point where they “will probably be safer than pedestrians crossing a busy street at rush hour.”
⁴
Joseph Kaplan, a leading geophysicist, described the space environment, while Oscar Schachter, an expert on international law, gave his talk, titled “Who Owns the Universe?” (Everyone and no one, as the master sleuth Sherlock Holmes would have put it.) And Fred L. Whipple, the chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard, ended the session with a presentation called “The Heavens Open,” which was appropriately optimistic about humanity's place out there.

Collier's
magazine ran eight cover stories that greatly expanded on the meeting, collectively called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” as the first installment was named. All of them were illustrated with what was then exotic, futuristic space pictures by Chesley Bonestell, a noted commercial artist. The series ran from 1952 to 1954. The pictures included an astronaut in the “world's first space suit,” a spacecraft landing on the Moon (it bore no resemblance to the
Eagle
), and one of another spacecraft approaching Mars. All eight articles were published as three books:
Across the Space Frontier
in 1952,
Conquest of the Moon
in 1953, and
The Exploration of Mars
in 1956.

The meeting at the planetarium and the articles and books that came from it, with their diverse subject matter, were about one overriding fact: humanity's future absolutely and irrevocably involved a permanent presence in space; that space, hostile though it may be, would become an integral extension of its home on Earth. Humanity was destined to “conquer” space, occupy it, and thrive in it indefinitely. It was the critical mass that became the American space program. It was widely accepted by that time that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were going to come true; that humankind was poised to take to space for both military and civilian reasons. The operative word for the US presence in space was
control
, meaning not that the
United States would dictate everything that happened there but that nothing could be allowed to happen there that would endanger US national security.

In May 1946, with the guns of the world war barely cooled, the RAND Corp., a California think tank, issued the first in a series of studies ordered by the US Army Air Forces on earth-circling satellites in general and then on reconnaissance “platforms” in particular. The advantages of aerial reconnaissance had been appreciated since Chinese soldiers on kites were used to locate Mongol invaders and follow their movement. And using aircraft to do the same thing—aerial reconnaissance—had played a decisive role in both world wars. As everyone who had ever surveyed a neighborhood from a rooftop knew, the higher the observer, the more could be seen. The fact that a satellite was going to be able to see a great deal more than anyone in an airplane was a given. The first report,
Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship
, was completed and submitted in 1948 and was followed by several more specific and detailed studies. It was understood that the unmanned “recce” satellites would be part of an armada of robots that would forever change humanity's relationship with the space around Earth. The reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, together with those that would handle long distance communication, meteorology, navigation, and other important assignments, were to be the unmanned part of the space program. The manned program would be the other part.

The epic meeting at the Hayden Planetarium and the
Collier's
series were extremely important for informing the public on what the budding aerospace community knew was coming. The community included members of the venerable National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was formed in March 1915 as an emergency organization to promote and coordinate action by the aeroplane industry (the manufacturers of what were then called aeroplanes), academe,
and government in fighting the war. But with space operations in the offing, an organization that handled only aviation would obviously be wholly inadequate. One that would oversee all aspects of the civilian space program was obviously going to be needed. It was eventually decided that a single federal entity that was responsible for both air and space operations—they were taken to be a continuum, as the X-15 high-altitude experimental aircraft's forays to the edge of space showed—would be optimally efficient. And that entity would run and coordinate both of them. Advising in that circumstance was clearly a non sequitur. The NACA lived on, but tenuously.

Then there was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While the Soviet military was taken with utmost seriousness, Russia as a whole was the subject of derision and ridicule by people who, hearing that Russians not only claimed to have flown the first airplane in St. Petersburg in the early 1880s but also claimed to have invented baseball, tended to think of them as stoic workers, peasants, and soldiers whose vaunted Red Army turned back Hitler's previously invincible Wehrmacht, but they also thought of Russians as rowdy buffoons; bearded Cossacks in fur hats who danced the kazatsky and whose veins contained equal parts of blood and vodka. So there were “Russian jokes.” “What did the Russian people light their homes with before they started using candles?” one apocryphal story asked. Answer: “Electricity.” Another had Stalin noticing that there were mice in his study, so he complained to Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who offered this advice: “Why don't you put up a sign saying Collective Farm? Half of the mice will die of hunger and the other half will run away.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago
, a widely read account of his and others' experiences in Stalin's forced-labor camps (published in the West in 1973), confirmed the brutality of the Soviet system and, by implication, the country's barbaric backwardness. The
Russians were a large, resolute, and potentially powerful people who had produced world-class writers and composers, to be sure. Everyone appreciated Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov; Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. But Russians were also thought by their very nature to be nowhere near as consequential in science and technology as the Americans, the British, and the Germans. Dmitry Ivanovsky, who discovered viruses; Ilya Mechnikov, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as an immune system pioneer; Ivan Pavlov, who won the coveted prize for founding modern physiology; George Gamow, who came up with the big bang theory; Nikolay Basov, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing the laser and the maser; and Vitaly Ginzburg, who developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb, were among hundreds of Russians who showed their country's mettle in the entire array of sciences. (Ginzburg was not awarded a Nobel Prize for coming up with his nation's city-buster…) Most Westerners were unaware of Russian scientific and medical advances, however, and believed that the Russians were definitely underachievers in those areas.

That abruptly changed on October 4, 1957, when a huge R-7 rocket lifted off the concrete launchpad at the new launch facility at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh Steppe and tossed an 83.6-kilogram, polished metal sphere called
Sputnik
into Earth orbit. It was part of the Soviet Union's previously announced contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which was the first major study of Earth by its leading scientists of several nationalities.
Sputnik
carried a radio transmitter, three large batteries, and two sets of antennas so it could broadcast its position to everyone with a radio. Its purpose was to send down information on the density of the extreme upper atmosphere and the ionosphere. More important, it was politically as well as scientifically important, since it required a substantial scientific and technological capability that surprised and impressed many Americans.