Tough questions for Congress – in space

How do we know that Russia is dropping bombs in Syria?  How do we know that China is building artificial islands in the South Sea?  How do we confirm that Russian planes are delivering specific armaments to Syria, or that either country is interfering in other locations?  How do we discern that Iran or North Korea has developed certain capacities, installations or facilities of vital strategic interest?

More simply, how do we assess that hurricanes are churning over the South Atlantic, portions of the sea dead or dying, or atmospheric conditions shifting in a given year?  The answer, without being too specific, is rather obvious, is it not?  We observe these events – from space. 

{mosads}But what if our eyes in space went out?  What if uncertainty rather than mutual certainty defined our understanding of national and international security?  What if fear and failure to know replaced confidence and knowledge?  What if America lost visibility, predictability, understanding and the ability to plan for our own security with our own assets in space?  The answer is hard to fathom.  More, it is terrifying.  Which is precisely why these questions have to be asked. 

Why ask now, and why worry about this sort of dismal day?  The answer is this:  The United States Congress seems at least hard of hearing, and arguably deaf to the intense conversations that are being hard around varied national security venues, not least by the United States Air Force before the very chambers that must listen and act to protect our security.

To be specific, the US Air Force has made the point without ambiguity, that they do not believe that all the United States Congress can fully fund, nor can the private sector with national security experts fully develop, test, prove, refine, certify and deploy an American made rocket engine – one big enough to carry critical loads into space reliably – by 2019.  Yet, in a bit of mental slight-of-hand, members of the US Senate and House appear to have agreed to block American access to the only rocket engine presently available to lift our own Atlas V rockets into space with heavy lift payloads – that is, with the assets we need to put there regularly for our own defense. 

How can this be?  The answer is that few members of Congress are rocket scientists, and only a couple qualify as “rocket men.”  They have therefore decided to punish the country that carries our astronauts into space and brings them home regularly, by blocking our own purchase of their RD-180 rocket engines.  This may appear satisfying to the layman, but those who know – the real thinkers and expert planners for access to space, who aim to preserve our eyes in space – are telling Congress that they took a wrong turn.  It is time for Congress to listen. 

No one wants Russia to be rewarded for misdeeds, but no one wants our own capacities to see from space what is happening on earth to be handicapped, or worse blinded, after 2019.  That is where we are headed now, if Congress does not start asking the hard questions – and pressing back into law American access to Russian rocket engines.  There is little time left to do this in the current congressional session, but someone needs to add this to the end of year omnibus bill, or we will all go wondering.  Since national security and uncertainty do not sit well together, let us have congressional leadership fix this now.  National security space matters – it always has.  It still does.

Mosbey is a university instructor and researcher in national security and military matters, currently completing a PhD in Russian geopolitical issues.