Chapter XII
On February 6th, 1966, the Combat Operations Center of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, went fully operational within the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Founded as a direct result of the Cold War on May 5th, 1958, NORAD coordinated and linked both Canadian and US ground and satellite radars to create an early warning trip wire for the defense of North America against intercontinental missile and hostile bomber attack. In many respects, NORAD’s interests were consumed by a doctrine biased to focus upon what is launching and from where, what is in the air, approaching, or in danger of violating North American air space. NORAD even tracks the progress of Santa Claus every December 24th for the past forty-odd years.
The reverse of this doctrinal bias is the task of the Air Force Space Command, or AFSPC, located nearby NORAD at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Fully operational since 1985, this command’s monitored and cataloged, via powerful radar and optical sensors, any object within the Earth’s immediate near space neighborhood. Readily available online via the Internet for public consumption was the so-called Satellite Box Score. In essence, the SATCAT readout of what was orbiting the planet, who owned it, and how many of them there were. The current total is some 20,000-plus objects from fifty-three nations or organizations that range from active satellites, space probes, payloads, rocket bodies, platforms, and debris of all sorts, shapes, and sizes – spent booster canisters, two wrenches, odd nuts and bolts, even an astronaut’s outer glove. Needless to say our near space would be even more dangerously crowded if it were not for mother Earth’s gravitational pull and the fact that over 24,000 or so items have already succumbed to incineration upon re-entry.
As to how far out into near space the AFSPC considered its domain remains an open question. If that organization routinely tracked the meanderings of space probes, then that would suggest ground and satellite tracking radar assets of considerable number and technologies. As the military was naturally reticent about revealing its performance capabilities, one has only to look to NASA and its many scientific collaborators to get an inkling of what truly may be possible.
A good place to start was the delicate subject of near-earth comet and asteroid detection – collectively known as NEAs. Several civilian, NORAD-like detection systems have been on watch for these potential threats to mankind’s welfare. After all, it would take just one such impact of sufficient magnitude to end all human life as we know it. To that end, a graduated scale has been established for the assessment of such an eventuality – the Torino Impact Scale.
One of these civilian watchdog organizations was Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking, NEAT for short. This organization focused upon the detection, calculation, and monitoring of those asteroids considered a potential hazard to Earth. Officially called PHAs, for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, NEAT tracked their orbits in considerable detail using the massive radar observatories of NASA’s Deep Space Network at Goldstone, California, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. In one example, Asteroid 1950 DA, an object about two-thirds of a mile across, NEAT calculated its potential close encounter with Earth some eight hundred years into the future. The radar data gathered that made this astounding estimate possible was taken from a distance twenty-one times that of the Moon’s orbit, or about 5,017,029 miles out into space.
At a minimum, therefore, one can assume that the assets and level of technologies available to AFSPC must be far greater than what is available to any American civilian research organization.
“Near” space indeed.