LOTTMAN: How do people's economic well-being and livelihoods depend on the use of space, and particularly, military uses of space?

PIKE: Modern society really is dependent on space systems in a lot of ways people don't recognize. Obviously, you know, the weather forecast is coming from weather satellites. Much of our communications, financial transactions are going via communications satellites. Increasingly people are using the NAVSTAR global positioning system navigation satellite, to make sure they don't get lost. There are a variety of other remote sensing applications that are finding uses in things ranging from crop forecasting to urban planning. Really, modern society is, in a lot of ways, really predicated on commercial satellite systems.

LOTTMAN: When you say commercial, does that mean that there's no government involvement in building or maintaining these systems?

PIKE: Basically, the American space program is really three different programs. There's the commercial program, such as communications satellites; there's the civil government program, NASA, the space shuttle, the space station, scientific-robotic missions; and the national security sector, ranging from military communication and navigation satellites to spy satellites. The civil and national security sectors are paid for by the government; the commercial sector certainly benefits from government facilities, such as launch facilities at the Cape and Vandenberg.

LOTTMAN: Those three different sectors that you mentioned-what's the trend? Are they becoming more independent of one another, or more interdependent on one another, or has that pretty much stayed the same?

PIKE: Well, there are basically two main trends in the relationship between the commercial, civil, and military sectors of the American space program. The first one is that the budgets for the government parts, the civil and military, are basically the same as they were ten years ago, whereas the commercial sector is growing at about 10% per year. The second main trend is, that as a result of the growth of the commercial sector, the governmental and military sectors are increasingly dependent on commercial technologies and commercial innovation to reduce the cost and improve the performance of their systems.

LOTTMAN: We talked a little bit about the economic dependence on space-what about the national security dependence?

PIKE: I think it's increasingly clear that American military space systems are really the thing that's unique about American superpower. Other countries have airplanes, other countries have nuclear weapons. But the United States is really the only country that has the sort of information dominance that we achieve through our military communications, navigation, weather, and spy satellites.

LOTTMAN: To what extent is outer space a field of international cooperation-in exploration or other utilization of these systems?

PIKE: Well, it's evidently the case that space is a very large place. Humanity is small. And there have been an awful lot of opportunities for a small humanity to cooperate and engage in the very large cosmos. There are a number of international organizations that deal with coordinating communications satellites. Really, you wouldn't be able to do international communications without international cooperation to make sure the satellites didn't interfere with each other. We also have the international space station, a partnership of America, Russia, Europe, Japan, Canada, and other countries, that's the leading form of human exploration in space. There are a number of other bilateral, cooperative endeavors.

LOTTMAN: The United States military is very concerned that outer space will somehow be used by other powers to harm the United States. Is this concern justified? What ways could space be used in a threatening manner against the US.

PIKE: Well, I think that when the American military looks at all the neat things they can do in space, they are justifiably concerned that maybe somebody else might be able to do those neat things as well. Obviously, one thing you'd be concerned about would be an adversary using spy satellites to keep track of our military movements here on earth. You might also be concerned about an adversary poking our eyes out by attacking our satellites. Now, in the real world, both of these, I think, are distant threats. Today, the countries that we're most worried about, such as North Korea or Iran, are the countries that are probably the least likely to put up their own spy satellites. And although they are a little more likely to be able to take a shot at our spy satellites, fortunately, we are increasing the number and raising the altitude of our spy satellites, to make it a lot harder for somebody else to shoot at them.

LOTTMAN: Shoot at them? What would you use, a long-range missile?

PIKE: Well, the most obvious threat that a country like North Korea or an Iran could pose to American spy satellites would be to take one of their long-range missiles and basically, fire it straight up with a high-explosive warhead, that would send out, say, a barrel full of nails. One of our big satellites might be fairly easy to track. They are the size of a city bus. And travelling at 17,000 miles an hour, if it ran into that cloud of nails, it could get shredded.

LOTTMAN: The threatening uses of space you mentioned are more in terms of intelligence gathering capabilities, and being able to use that in some sort of terrestrial operation against the United States. Is there some way space could be used to directly attack the United States, beyond shooting nails at satellites? Or, as far as what's realistic, is it just that sort of thing that we're looking at?

PIKE: Well, generally when people think about space war, they think about something out of Star Wars, with tie fighters zooming around shooting at each other. In the real world, however, space is primarily useful to the military for gaining information dominance. To be able to figure out what's going on, on the battlefield, on the ground, and convey that information to your own troops, while hopefully making sure your enemy doesn't have similar capabilities.

LOTTMAN: To the extent that we rely on space assets, and they benefit humanity in various ways, they have to be defended against attack. How can this be done?

PIKE: The easiest way to protect satellites from attack is simply to make sure that they are out of harm's way. Most of our communications satellites are in very high orbits, over 20,000 miles above the earth's surface. It's difficult to get a communications satellite up there, and it would be extraordinarily difficult for a country like North Korea or Iran to be able to shoot at a satellite at that high altitude. Now, a lot of our spy satellites are at much lower altitudes, but just to make sure they are out of harm's way, over the next decade, we're going to increase the number, and raise the altitude of those satellites. So I think it would be very hard for a country like North Korea or Iran to be able to attack our spy satellites successfully.

LOTTMAN: Looking at the next generation of space systems-say more countries have satellites, or develop more offensive capability to attack ours… I guess what I'm getting at is, beyond placing them in certain areas, are there other ways to defend satellites, in a military sense-defending them as a military asset?

PIKE: Well, over the next decade or two, given the threats that North American military space systems are likely to face, I think simply making sure that we have a lot of satellites, and that we have a lot of satellites in high orbit, is going to make it very difficult for any likely adversary to be able to attack our space systems. In the event that, on end of the third millennium, we face a more robust adversary, there is the possibility of giving our satellites the ability to detect the fact that they are under attack, making sure that we have a robust space surveillance system, so we can detect that attacks are in progress, hardening our satellites against laser beams, giving them the ability to maneuver out of harm's way if they are attacked, and making them more resistant to the sort of attacks that they might likely face.

LOTTMAN: But where do you see that kind of scenario? Is that way, way off into the future?

PIKE: Well, I think that if you look at the countries the United States is likely to get into a war with… I think that if you look at the most probable adversaries of the United States over the next decade or two, countries like North Korea or Iran, their ability to pose a threat to our space systems is really quite limited. During the Cold War the Soviet Union began developing the ability to attack our satellites, but they didn't get very far before the Cold War ended.

LOTTMAN: You mentioned two countries, so I'll just throw this out there: what about China? Aren't they more sophisticated?

PIKE: Obviously, one of the big differences between China and a country like Iran or North Korea, is that China has had a space program for quite some time, and does have a robust launch capability. Over the next decade or so, I think the Chinese potential for damaging American military satellites is probably quite limited.

On the other hand, if our relations with the Chinese sour, if the Chinese become more focused on posing a military threat to the United States-if you look a couple of decades down the road, China certainly has the technological potential to eventually pose a hazard to American military space systems, that would require a lot more effort on the part of the United States than just protecting them against the odd Scud missile fired by North Korea.

LOTTMAN: China is trying to take some leadership role in trying to push for an international treaty against weapons in space. What's your opinion of that effort? Is that an effective way to try to close the possibility of war in space, of satellites attacking each other and that sort of thing?

PIKE: I think the Chinese are interested in a ban on space weapons as a way of capping American missile defense programs. I think the United States should give serious thought to a ban on space weapons, because right now, we're the ones that have the most to lose if weapons are developed to attack things in space. We've got the military satellites. Our military forces, with global presence, are dependent on the global awareness that satellites provide, and it's in our interest to discourage other countries from thinking that they can attack our satellites and get away with it. An international treaty banning such activity would be one way to raise the stakes that any country would face if they wanted to attack our satellites.

LOTTMAN: Given what you've just said, why does the United States hesitate to give its full support to that effort?

PIKE: I think the US government currently feels that this ban on space weapons being advanced by the Chinese is simply a way of criticizing American missile defense programs. And at a time when America is having trouble renegotiating the ABM treaty to engage in yet an additional arms control negotiation, I think, is more trouble than the administration is prepared to get into.

LOTTMAN: Military leaders in the Air Force, the Space Command, now speak of space warfare as though it were inevitable, that it's simply going to happen someday. What is your opinion on that?

PIKE: Well, for the last four decades, the US Air Force has had a doctrine that they call aerospace power, which proceeds from the assumption that air and space are basically the same thing, only space is a little higher up. So all the doctrinal constructs that they developed for air power, they believe to be equally applicable to space power. That means if we have bombers in the air, we'll have bombers in space. Fighters in the air? We'll have space fighters eventually as well. Now, the Air Force has been talking about this for the last four decades, but thus far they have been absolutely unable to translate this air power doctrine into space weapons.

I think that this is basically a feudal quest, because if you think about it, air and space really don't have much in common. The most successful spacecraft, like Sputnik 1, which was a sphere, or the ungainly spider of the lunar module that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon with, those don't look anything like airplanes at all. So it seems to me that maybe mother nature is trying to tell us something: that outer space is very different from the air, and that the doctrine that we use for military operations in space is going to be very different from our doctrine for the air, for the ground, for going across the shore with the Marines, or out at sea.

So all of this doctrinal imperative to come up with space fighters and space bombers, that grows out of air power doctrine, I think is fundamentally misdirected. They can talk about it a lot, they've been talking about it for four decades, I don't think they're gonna be able to pull it off.

LOTTMAN: ...“Space control” as a means to maintain military dominance on the earth. What sorts of new developments might this lead to? Can this be adapted to the realities you describe?

PIKE: Well, if you think of space as just being an extension of Air power doctrine, then you would think about space the way you do gaining air superiority. Basically, making sure that your airplanes fill the sky and that nobody else's planes are out there. But space really doesn't have much to do with air power. It's got a lot more to do with information warfare and the information economy. Microsoft is able to control the information market without having to physically blow up the offices of its competitors.

Today, the United States controls space, because we have more satellites, better satellites, and they are hooked together more effectively than everybody else put together. We are going to continue to have space dominance by improving our military space systems, and the ability of our forces here on earth to utilize those. We can do that pretty much regardless of what everybody else is doing in space, because space is a very big place, as long as other people can't shoot our satellites down, and as long as they don't have satellites that can directly threaten us.

At least for the next decade, and probably quite some time to come, the United States is going to control space, simply because we have more and better satellites than everybody else put together. Nobody is going to be able to shoot at our satellites, and none of our likely adversaries are going to have satellites that would be worthy of shooting at by us. So this is a very different vision of space control than you get out of the Air Force, basically because the Air Force doesn't understand that space is different from the air. It's a different medium, it requires different systems, and different doctrine.

LOTTMAN: What about space-based weapons with some offensive capability, to attack earth targets, other satellites, is that a pipe dream, or what?

PIKE: Back during the Star Wars era in the 1980s, there was a lot of talk about using space as a way to attack targets on the ground. When you sit down and do the math, though, and consider all the trouble that you have of getting something into orbit, which is very expensive, and then recognize that something that's in orbit is going to spend most of its time driving over the ocean, or on the wrong side of the planet from the target, it turns out that space is an enormously inefficient way to try to attack targets on the ground.

Simply due to the physics and economics of the matter, I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that you're ever going to see weapons in space intended to attack targets on the ground. Airplanes, cruise missiles, rifles, and hand grenades are going to continue to be the weapons of choice-certainly not battle-stars driving around in space.