A colossal volume of water has flown in the past 23 years since India began celebrating its National Technology Day on May 11. Since then, India’s economy and stature have grown tremendously. Although this day is intimately connected to atomic science and technology, the reason India decided to cherish it for ‘technology’ in totality is a reckoning fact. Over the years, India’s national security apparatus has witnessed the evolution of fifth dimension operations that our country needs to adopt and adapt. We have increasingly become appreciative of the axiom ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’, which in practical parlance is often called Situational Awareness (SA).
Although the initial understanding and usage of SA occurred in the military domain, it is today a cross-domain aspect. SA can be loosely defined as the ability to have a sensory perception of the entire environmental realms and events happening in both space and time of consequence to the user. Be it the military, civilian or commercial entities, SA users are very likely to use it to ward off unfavorable situations. But each of them has a typical approach to SA. For the military, the SA is essential to have complete dominance over a battlespace. But for civilian activities, SA is crucial for maintaining the reliability of business operations. When national security requirements are no more limited to military operations but have widened in their scope, SA for each domain needs to be examined separately. One such domain is planetary defense.
Planetary defense may initially sound like an outlandish attempt to save the planet from a threat. Those who are a bit more imaginative will immediately connect it to the phenomena shown in the movies Armageddon or Deep Impact. However, for all its practicality, planetary defense has been one of the most prominent SA exponents.
In 1994, the NASA spacecraft Galileo, observing Jupiter, sent back spectacular images of the comet Shoemaker-Levy disintegrating into the giant planet’s atmosphere. The photos, also taken separately by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, made tremendous media news worldwide. This natural event made the International Astronomical Union (IAU) take notice. The IAU’s Working Group on Near-Earth Objects decided to initiate ‘Spaceguard Surveys’ around the world. Many ground-based astronomical observatories from the United States and Europe proactively started sky-surveys to identify near-Earth objects, including those that are potentially hazardous objects. Such objects can either be comets or asteroids, or large fragments of these solar system bodies.
The surveys, over the years, have cataloged thousands of near-Earth objects. Some of them have been categorised as potentially hazardous as they can rarely cause mass extinction level events. While numerous lesser dangerous objects can cause explosions equivalent to nuclear weapons of various magnitudes.
Space Situational Awareness has been a variant of the Spaceguard, explicitly designed to monitor artificial objects in outer space. Over the years, both civilian space agencies and military agencies of the United States, Europe, Russia, and China and their partners, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Five Eyes (US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) have set up a network of ground- and space-based SSA sensors. These sensors continually monitor, catalog, and warn their stakeholders about defunct satellites, spent stages of rockets, and disintegrated fragments of artificial objects in orbit.
For a long time, SSA was mandated to military agencies, space agencies, and through nexuses of civilian-military collaborations. However, recently, particularly the Five Eyes have joined hands by bringing in their respective private sector to commercialise SSA. The private American SSA company, Leo Labs, is working in conjunction with the Pentagon and New Zealand. It has set up SSA radars in Alaska, Texas, Costa Rica, and New Zealand quickly. The US Space Force, the newest military branch of the Pentagon, has set up a new-generation SSA system in the middle of the Indo-Pacific on the Marshall Islands. European Space Agency’s SSA division is currently in talks with Australia to set up a new SSA ground station for collaborative use.
Like the US-led grouping that currently collaborates for joint use of SSA and its intelligence-sharing, China has its own group. Since 2005, China has led an intergovernmental legally-recognised institution known as the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO). APSCO’s members include Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan, Mongolia, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Russia, the Philippines, and Argentina. Currently, APSCO runs an SSA network known as the Asia-Pacific ground-based Optical Space object Observation System (APOSOS) with observation nodes located at Sonmiani in Pakistan, Mahdasht in Iran, and Huayou in Peru with Data and Operations Management Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. The APOSOS has the capabilities to track artificial objects in low-earth and geosynchronous equatorial orbits. The People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force, established in 2015, could likely be sharing SSA operations and management data from the CAS.
Planetary vigilance for matters of science and national security has become an increasingly crucial undertaking. This is because powerful nations do not like to get surprises, but they do want to give. This hypothesis is pushing them to increasingly advance SSA capabilities. Where is India positioned in the SSA race?
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has recently established the Directorate of Space Situational Awareness and Management within its headquarters in Bengaluru. As the first SSA Control Center, ISRO, in December 2020, launched NETRA in its ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network Campus in Bengaluru. Perhaps, in the coming years, ISRO may engage with some of ISTRAC’s international partners to set up a global network of SSA. But before that happens, New Delhi must realise that there is value in segregating scientific, commercial, and military SSA. And in that scheme of things, the ISRO SSA at best can be deemed as civilian and partly commercial.
In the recent space reforms of May 2020, the Indian government has off-loaded numerous commercial responsibilities from ISRO and given them to the teeming private sector. This being the case, ISRO now has a free hand to engage in cutting-edge R&D, which it could not fully undertake because of the commercial responsibilities. With this new development, it will be wise if New Delhi employed ISRO for scientific SSA and in the R&D of SSA technologies. Like the US Space Force and the Chinese PLASSF, India’s newest military unit, the Defence Space Agency, established in 2018, could be made to take charge of the military SSA.
Shoemaker-Levy disintegrating into the giant planet’s atmosphere
The three SSA arms can collaborate, interact and exchange data and protocols with each other. But to be absolutely focused on the minutiae of each of the three, they must remain independent and grow in their respective domains freely.
Operation Shakti, in its times, did the needful for India. It established India as a powerful engineering nation and, over the years, opened many doors. However, the rooms that such doors lead to are not for life. In the modern world of informationalized warfare, command, control, computers, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) are central to national security. For a long time, C4ISR was limited within the ambits of terrestrial, maritime, and aerospace media. However, with a growing global economic footprint in outer space and increasing dependence on space-based assets, the C4ISR of space, also known as SSA, becomes a second-to-none priority. When India has already demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities through Mission Shakti, it becomes vital to complement assertion with C4ISR as SSA provides. SSA is crucial from the standpoint of India’s military and economic security. It is an essential tool of science and technology and certainly one of the brightest spots in the emerging space economy. India must exploit it through the civilian, commercial and military ‘Trimurti’.
*The writer is Founder of DAWON A&I, a space and aerospace consulting firm based in Pune. He has an award-winning PhD in Astrochemistry and has spent doctoral and postdoctoral years in Germany, France, US and Japan. He was a crew member of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
