By: The Economist
July 18, 2019
DEEP WITHIN Vandenberg Air Force Base, a rugged 50km stretch of America’s Pacific coast which is home to rolling fogs, sporadic wildfires, the odd mountain lion and the 30th Space Wing of the US Air Force, sits the Combined Space Operations Centre (CSpOC), a windowless area the size of a couple of tennis courts that could be mistaken for an unusually tidy newsroom. The men and women in it, mostly Air Force but some from allied countries, guard the highest of high grounds: space.
In one corner sits the 18th Space Control Squadron, tasked with “space situational awareness”. Using a worldwide network of radars, telescopes and satellites (see map), it tracks the 2,000 satellites, American and otherwise, that are currently at work in orbit, and a larger number that are defunct, derelict and partially destroyed. All told it tracks some 23,000 objects down to the size of a softball moving at enormous speed and predicts when they will come close to something valuable. In 2013 CSpOC sent satellite operators 1m “conjunction data messages”—warnings that something else was going to pass nearby. In each case, the risk of an actual collision is minute; only very occasionally will the orbit of something valuable be tweaked to keep things completely safe. But as time goes on, space fills up. Last year CSpOC sent out 4m messages.