The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Save Earth - Hardcover

William E. Burrows is a professor of journalism at New York University and the founder and director of its graduate Science and Environmental Reporting Program. He has reported for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Smithsonian Air & Space. He is the author of seven books on aviation, space, and defense, including This New Ocean and Deep Black, the award-winning classic work on spying from space.

A daring new vision of our future in space from an internationally renowned science journalist.

"The U.S. space program, which hasn't had a coherent goal since the Apollo missions to the Moon, is in shambles. I believe its overarching goal in the future ought to be the protection of Earth from the many dangers that threaten it -killer asteroid impact, nuclear war or terrorism, famine or pestilence, natural disasters. The obstacle to this goal is not technological. The tools necessary to reach space and stay there are well understood and at hand. What is needed is the will ."
--William E Burrows, The Survival Imperative

Praise for William E. Burrows

"Burrows's richly documented book tells the story of how simple earthlings--fallible creatures living under imperfect political systems--transcended foibles, corruption, depravity and flawed machines to discover other worlds and, what is more important, their own. For the space enthusiast, Burrows offers a complete, authoritative history of the technology that allowed us to explore space and the people who created and managed that technology."
--Publishers Weekly on This New Ocean

"'When the history of this century is written,' Burrows says, 'the story of mankind's first breaking gravity's relentless hold and touching places beyond Earth will be one of its most exciting and important chapters.' Burrows tells the story engagingly.... all the milestones of the first space age appear in the rich tapestry Burrows has woven."
--Scientific American on This New Ocean

"The most successful general survey of space history yet to appear."
--The New York Times on This New Ocean

"William Burrows has written the missing book on space-based intelligence systems."
--McGeorge Bundy on Deep Black

"Deep Black is not only first-rate science writing, but a fine exposition of the links between the advanced technology and politics of arms control that may ultimately save us from Armageddon."
--San Francisco Chronicle

Chapter One

Hell on Earth

It came out of the Oort Cloud almost 2 million years ago, and by the time it sped past Earth, its velocity was twenty-six miles a second. Then the Sun's gravity took hold and its speed increased to nearly four hundred miles a second. As it swung around the far side of the Sun, the scorching heat broke it into a six-hundred-mile-long string of huge rocks, ice, and other cosmic debris. When it came out from behind the Sun, the string headed right back to Earth. It got there twenty-nine days later.

The string was finally spotted seventeen hours, nine minutes, and forty-two seconds before it began impacting, so there was no real warning time (as if it would have mattered). It was picked up almost simultaneously by an observatory in Australia and an incredulous and thoroughly terrified seventeen-year-old amateur in Japan.

Spaceguard, which was supposed to spot such intruders and give plenty of warning time, alerted NASA, which alerted the White House, which sent the warning to the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The command's mission was to protect the country from threats in space. But the threats were defined as man-made and consisted mainly of long-range ballistic missiles and weapons launched by enemies that wanted to knock out American spacecraft. It had been accepted during the Cold War that the Soviets would have "taken out" U.S. reconnaissance and ballistic-missile early-warning satellites as a prelude to all-out war because doing so would effectively have made the nation's defense blind. That kind of threat could be dealt with by attacking the enemy in space or on the ground. After all, a weapon conceived by men could be defeated by them. But there was no possible defense against a string of giant rock and ice fragments as long as the width of France that now slowed back down to twenty-six miles a second and appeared with very short notice.

The military was put on Defense Condition 1, the highest level of alert, but of course that was a charade. Meanwhile, the National Security Council hurriedly met and debated whether to tell the people of the United States, and therefore the world, that the string was heading right for them at searing velocity. The council also discussed warning India, Pakistan, China, and Russia. It was decided not to tell the public for fear of starting a panic that would cause chaos and probably political and social disintegration. But the men and women who sat around the long table in the White House decided to quietly warn the Russians and the Chinese.

The men in the Kremlin and in the Forbidden City were of two minds about the news. Some thought it was a diabolical trick designed to destabilize their countries by causing mass hysteria. Others suggested that the dire warning masked an impending nuclear attack ordered by the archconservatives in the White House. So the Russian and Chinese militaries, including their strategic missile forces, were also put on hair-trigger alert. That information was quickly sent to Washington. A deterrent is useless, after all, unless the opposition knows about it.

Moscow University's large telescope was down for repairs, but the one at Zlatoust, high in the Urals, was trained on the string as soon as the alert came from Moscow. The shaken astronomers at Zlatoust spotted it right away and reported what they saw to their leaders. But it wasn't going to matter.

The string streaked past the Moon. Then, at a little before eight in the evening, it came in high over northeastern Australia, causing a clap of thunder that smashed windows. The rocks were now glowing crimson because of atmospheric friction. Then they began to break into fiery chunks, some as small as fifty meters, as they plowed deeper into the atmosphere over Southeast Asia.

One huge icy rock exploded like fireworks six miles over Peshawar in northern Pakistan. The place had become notorious in early May 1960 when it was revealed that Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union, had taken off from the air base at Peshawar. The facility was still active when the first rocks in the string came in. There were sixty-seven military aircraft at Peshawar that day whose mission was to stop Indian bombers before they reached Pakistani targets. The exploding rock showered the base with hot fragments and disappeared in a blinding flash. Most of the planes, structures, and vehicles were destroyed, and there were scores of dead and wounded.

The United States knew what was going to happen at Peshawar even before the explosion. Technicians routinely monitored asteroids and comets with optical, X-ray, dosimeter, and other sensors carried on spacecraft and with ground-based telescopes and other equipment in a Nuclear Detonation Detection System that had been developed during the Cold War. The system was created to provide near-real-time information on the enemy's nuclear weapons programs and to verify compliance with the Limited Test Ban and Non-Proliferation treaties.1 But Pakistan had no such system. Its early-warning radars, which were crude by U.S. and Russian standards, interpreted that first exploding rock as an attempted first nuclear strike on an important military airfield by the despised Indians. Most of the scientists, politicians, and military officers in Pakistan's Nuclear Command and Control Authority conferred immediately on an emergency conference line and advised the president to retaliate before more targets were hit and the nation became too crippled to strike back. All sixteen of Pakistan's long-range Taepodong nuclear ballistic missiles were therefore launched at preassigned targets in India, including New Delhi and Bombay, seven air bases, and what were thought to be missile installations. The Taepodongs were from North Korea and had been traded for Pakistani nuclear-weapons technology, which had in turn come from China.

Still another fragment the size of a small house struck Korolev, the site of the Russian space operations center, on the other side of the beltway eighteen miles northeast of central Moscow. The town was pulverized and the space operations complex, including the mostly gone-to-seed Yuri A. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, effectively disappeared. So the Russian space program was now dysfunctional, its communication links broken and most of its best engineers and administrators dead. Several other towns in the area were severely shaken, and airplanes at two regional airports were knocked to their bellies. Most of Moscow itself was spared. But other large chunks impacted along the steppes, some turning whole towns into smoking craters, others crashing harmlessly into farmland and meadows.

Another of the string's rocks, this one a quarter of a kilometer wide, streaked toward St. Petersburg. The shock wave it made as it split the thickening air immediately before impact knocked down every structure and living thing along a seventy-mile-wide swath of countryside as if they had been caught in a titanic earthquake. An instant before it impacted, it turned the evening sky brighter than the Sun. The noise was literally deafening.

The rock struck as the city's symphony orchestra was starting to play the allegro molto of Rachmaninoff's second symphony. Those in the Grand Hall in the Philharmonia on Mikhailovskaya Street, like most of the city's 4 million souls, never knew what hit them. If they saw and heard the instrument that ended their existence, it was in the barest fraction of a second. They were lucky. Many thousands of others would suffer terrible burns or be severely crippled, some for the rest of their dreadful lives. Three centuries of culture was vaporized in as many seconds, first by the shock wave, and then by the impact itself. The venerable Peter and Paul Fortress, where czars were buried, the Hermitage, the...