. . . Ruby lips above the water, Blowing bubbles soft and fine, But alas, I was no swimmer, So I lost my Clementine. Oh my darling, Oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine, You are lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry Clementine.

Last week, I provided considerable backup for cost estimates to build and operate a modern Brilliant Pebbles (BP) space-based interceptor system, based on SDI efforts of a quarter century ago. BP was the first SDI system approved by the Pentagon’s Acquisition Executive to enter the formal Demonstration Validation (DemVal) phase of a regular acquisition program.  Click here for that defense of an estimate that a constellation of 1000 BPs could be built in a few years and operated for 20 years for less than $20 billion (in today’s dollars), based on a large number of detailed critical technical reviews a quarter century ago.

Such a constellation would have a very high probability of intercepting all of an attack from a few hundred ballistic missiles.  Such intercepts could occur

• In the “boost phase” of the attacking missiles, while their rockets are burning and they are easy targets;
• During their much longer mid-course phase above the earth’s atmosphere, provided they are able to defeat the attacking missiles’ penetration aids; and
• Upon reentry into the upper atmosphere as those decoys and other penetration aids are stripped away.

This history has been recounted by SDI leaders from that period, with additional details provided from SDI Historian Dr. Donald R. Baucom’s  “The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles” — published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2004, pp 143-190. Click here (or link to it from the bottom of the High Frontier webpage (www.highfrontier.org) for his authoritative first hand historical account.

While my last message focused on BP costs, it is important to note that Baucom also discussed in considerable detail how this most impressive capability was derailed by congressional opponents who opposed space-based defenses and instead emphasized that U.S. homeland defenses be limited to less cost-effective defenses permitted by the ABM Treaty.  Regrettably, we have since suffered institutional amnesia.

See in particular pages 172 – 183 of Baucom’s article, which includes (beginning on page 176) an April 9, 1992 Senate Arms Services Committee (SASC) hearing when Chairman Sam Nunn (D-GA) made his views abundantly clear to me in opposing the BP DemVal program that had been approved the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board (DAB).

Subsequently on August 9 in the floor debate on the National Defense Authorization Act for 1992, he was joined especially by future SASC Chairman Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), in cutting the budget and directing that the BP effort be reduced to a research program status.  This redirection of previously approved BP efforts ultimately forecast the end of the road for BP.

Even so, the Bush-41 administration’s strong support for SDI led Congress to appropriate $300 million for BP in 1992 — well over $500 million in today’s dollars. Keep that thought in mind when considering what is to be achieved with Congress’s recently added funding for ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs.

Whatever . . .  that budget cut sent a clear message (at least to me) that even if the President Bush were to win re-election in November 1992, the congressional Democrats were going to do their best to kill even the residue of the BP program, in my judgment the most cost-effective product of the Reagan/Bush-41 SDI era. 

Actually, as Baucom noted I had in January 1992 already set out to find a “politically correct” way to assure key BP technology could be demonstrated in space — and the Democrats on Capitol Hill reinforced that perspective.  That concern led us to initiate the Clementine program, jointly supported by NASA and its administrator Dr. Dan Goldin, who had led the BP DemVal program at TRW — one of the two contractors selected (the other was Martin Marietta) from a competition of six contractor teams. 

Clementine was so-named to reflect its mission: To return to the Moon for the first time in a quarter century; to go into Lunar orbit, while its sensors (actually scavenged from early Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) variants of BP sensors designed to meet Red Team countermeasures) recorded1.8 million frames of data on the Moon’s surface in 13 spectral bands; and then to sling-shot back by the Earth on its way to a deep-space asteroid and to go into orbit around the Sun — there to be “lost and gone forever,” in the words of the ballad. 

Clementine’s extraordinarily successful mission — conducted by a very small team of physicists and engineers from SDI, the Naval Research Laboratories (NRL) and LLNL — was also discussed by Don Baucom on pages 185-189.  The Clementine mission space-qualified all the sensors in the Baucom “season of studies” discussed last week as being needed to assure BP could deal with all then conceived offensive countermeasures. And as Baucom noted it also validated the LLNL approach of exploiting technology from the commercial, rather than the military, sector — a lesson again pertinent today as the private sector is outpacing the Pentagon’s efforts.

That these preparations were well justified was made explicitly clear in early 1993 when the former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Les Aspin, as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, “took the stars out of Star Wars” by killing the BP effort entirely and dispersing the technology and its technologists — and apparently even purging the files since there seems to be corporate ignorance in the Pentagon as to what was achieved a quarter century ago. 

Notably, an April 1994 report by the DoD Inspec­tor General, during the Clinton administration, noted that this fully-approved Major Defense Acquisition Program — the SDI’s first — had been managed “efficiently and cost-effectively within funding constraints imposed by Congress” and the termination of key contracts “was not a reflection on the quality of program management.”

To augment Baucom’s history, I encourage the reader to consider Appendix I of the Independent Working Group (IWG) report , Missile Defense, The Space Relationship and The Twenty First Century.  Appendix I was largely based on contributions by Drs. Lowell Wood, Ed English, Lyn Pleasance and Arno Ledebuhr, key LLNL principals in con­ducting the Brilliant Pebbles and Clementine programs — and also knowledgeable of Motorola’s Iridium communication satellite system, which actually exploited Brilliant Pebbles’ concepts. Click here for this 2009 IWG report and scroll to Appendix I, which begins by sadly noting:

“Since withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, the United States is no longer legally pre­cluded from acquiring highly effective space-based inter­ceptor defenses, moreover in a very short time-interval. The primary impediment to doing so arises from lack of political will, rather than difficult or costly technical challenges. The needed technology was developed during the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations (1984-1992), was abandoned by the Clinton administration in 1993, and has not yet been revived. At best, there have been hints that the current administration may initiate a plan to begin a “space-based testbed” in a future administration, sometime in the next decade.

“Such plans often reflect a false view that space-based in­terceptor systems are much more complex and costly — or less ‘technically ready’ — than ground-based defenses, which are the primary focus of ongoing missile defense programs. But that premise does not square with history, which should be reviewed from time to time to make clear that the choice for not giving the American people the benefits of space-based defenses is purely a political decision — made quite deliberately by the past two administrations, indicating the bi­partisan nature of the political aversion to building effec­tive space-based defenses.”

And of course, the Obama administration did nothing for the next eight years.  Thus, it has now been a quarter century since there was any serious consideration of space-based defenses such as was demonstrated by the BP effort. And today’s question is “Will the Trump administration be different?”

Following these introductory comments, the subsequent IWG discussion, based on the LLNL contingent’s inputs, briefly traced the evolution of space-based interceptors during the SDI era and technology demonstrations through the mid-1990s, when all the needed technologies were demonstrated especially via the Clementine program, such that there can be little objective doubt of the SDI claims for space-based interceptor systems.

Clementine’s implementation and mission-execution reflected a basic division of labor between NRL and LLNL. NRL built the Clementine spacecraft, inte­grating into it then-state-of-the-art technologies that were to be used by the Brilliant Peb­bles sensor suite to accommodate different and to some degree more demanding conditions of the ex­tended Clementine space mission. Though heavier than BPs, the mass of the more extensive sensor suite still compared very favorably to the far lower-performance ones of the kill vehicles of current missile defense systems.

Remarkably severe budgetary stringencies and the un­precedentedly fast pace of the Clementine mission com­pelled creation of spacecraft-controlling software through­out virtually all of the mission, with required software often delivered to the spacecraft mere days before its mission-critical use — another Clementine ‘first’. This unique “just in time” mode of software delivery worked spectacularly well for the first 7 months of the remarkably-complex mission, but resulted in a crucial failure after the main portion of the mission — the lunar mapping — had been completed, just be­fore the asteroid “near-miss” in deep space could be attempted.

The Clementine spacecraft was in circumsolar orbit and operational in 2009 when contacted by NASA’s Deep Space Network, more than a year after mis­sion-termination. In recognition of its many unique features and singular accomplishments, Clementine’s flight back-up spacecraft is on permanent display in the Lunar Alcove of the National Air and Space Museum, next to the Lunar Lander. See below. And the small SDI/NRL/LLNL team received well deserved awards from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.

Most notably, Clementine space-qualified all Brilliant Peb­bles technology except for the light-weight miniature pro­pulsion system — and that capability was demonstrated on an Astrid flight test in 1994. 

The Astrid flight-test series employed a 21 kg fully fueled ground-launched rocket using 3rd generation Brilliant Pebbles pro­pulsion hardware. A lightweight titanium propellant tank formed the vehicle structure and a re-configured BP pro­pulsion system was constructed to support the simultane­ous thrusting of four axial thrusters. Fast liquid valves us­ing warm pilot gas were used to control the four thrusters. This experiment successfully dem­onstrated all the key subsystems needed for a Brilliant Pebbles propulsion system.

With the award-winning publica­tion of the scientific fruits of the Clementine mission early in 1994-5, it seemed reasonable to expect that DoD would permit follow-on work to proceed toward realization of a set of advanced technologies useful in a wide variety of DoD spacecraft. However, President Clinton employed his short-lived line-item veto to de-fund all Clementine follow-on work. Congressionally “earmarked” funding had kept the program proceeding at a minimal level on a year-by-year basis up un­til that point — when the cognizant White House staffer, Robert Bell, pro­claimed in a press conference that this represented the fi­nal termination of the Brilliant Pebbles program.

When the line-item veto was overturned by a Supreme Court decision, the Clinton administration’s Air Force of­ficials proceeded to re-program the Congressionally-ear­marked funds to other purposes, and Clementine died — and so ended the Pentagon’s deliberate efforts to advance key technology that would support effective space-based defenses.

Clementine and Astrid demonstrated the space-wor­thiness of all the 1990-vintage technology needed to build and operate the Brilliant Pebbles spacecraft — one at a time. But aspects of building, deploying, and operating a Brilliant Pebbles system of 1000 spacecraft remained unproven — and key to proving the viability of an effective space-based interceptor system. Then, the Iridium space-based global communication system also validated a couple of additionally important Brilliant Pebbles operational con­cepts, as discussed below.

The BP system concept called for 1000 essential­ly-autonomous pebbles to be operated by a very small of­ficer-cadre,  and DoD had never mass-produced spacecraft — nor had DoD launched satellites in such quantity or at high rates.  Furthermore, the U.S. practice had been to “body-wrap” each of its operational military spacecraft, en­veloping each one with an average of not much less than 100 (military+civilian-contractor) operational personnel, and it was widely asserted that this was a prerequisite for space­craft mission-performance up to DoD specifications.

Thus, SDI understood that a new way of building, deploying and oper­ating spacecraft was required to achieve the Brilliant Pebbles system goal — and built the development of such innovative attributes into its DemVal program. These key aspirations and programmatic initiatives also died with the Brilliant Pebbles and Clementine programs.

Nevertheless, these concerns were also laid to rest in the 1990s by a Motorola-led consortium, with its manufacture, launch-integration, launch, orbital deployment and subse­quent operation of the Iridium worldwide satellite cellular te­lephony-supporting constellation.

Iridium built and launched a constellation of 95 mid-sized (800 kg each — over 10 times more mass than the 50 kg pebble) spacecraft between May 1997 and November 1998, at a peak build-rate of 4 space­craft-per-week, employing 19 launchers from a wide variety of American and foreign space-launch service-suppliers. Spacecraft quality was operationally demonstrated to be exceptionally high, with an in-service mortal­ity rate unrivalled in mass-produced spacecraft of all types and origins. The Iridium constellation provided world-wide coverage for communi­cations via handheld cellphones and pagers.

Moreover, the peak build-rate of these much larger spacecraft was spacecraft-mass-com­parable to that planned for Brilliant Pebbles by the Bush-41 DoD. The total cost for developing and deploying the 66-sat­ellite operational constellation within a half-decade inter­val was about $5 billion, all paid for by the private invest­ment community.

Quite importantly, the entire Iridium constellation, in full commercial operation, was originally operated by a ground-crew of fewer than ten people, implicitly validating the pebbles es­timate of a required ground crew of the same magnitude —  versus the thousands of personnel postulated by tradition­al rules-of-thumb.

Clementine demonstrated that a first-of-a-kind, very high-performance deep space mission can be controlled by a mission control center crew of typically two people (in marked contrast to the many dozens of staff characteristic of NASA missions of comparable complexity). Iridium es­tablished that complex operations of large constellations of sophisticated spacecraft can be controlled, year-after-year, by a literal handful of staff support­ed by highly automated expert system control software.

Iridium, though an economic disaster for its initial inves­tors, has been an outstanding technological success. Quite importantly in the present context, the creation and opera­tion of Iridium has provided complete, essentially quantita­tive validation of several of the key economic, logistics and operational postulates of the Brilliant Pebbles ballistic mis­sile defense architecture. And a new generation is being deployed.

When combined with the legacy of Clementine and As­trid, Iridium demonstrated two decades ago that there cannot be any ratio­nal controversy regarding any of the major technical issues to be addressed in building a cost-effective effective space-based interceptor system.

And as discussed last week, the total life-cycle-validated cost-estimates for the Bush-41 BP de­ployment, including all of its RDT&E expenses, all of its pro­duction and launch costs, all of its operational and testing costs for 20 years — plus complete replacement of the con­stellation (involving the orbiting of another 1000 pebbles) — would translate to $20 billion today.

Thus, a detached observer perhaps could be excused for some puzzlement as to the origin and nature of the differences in ballistic missile defense tastes, judgments, and directions of the Bush-41 and Bush-43 administrations. To return to Baucom’s history, note that although the date on this reference was in 2004, it actually was a republication of a presentation at an International Flight Symposium sponsored by the North Carolina First Flight Centennial Commission on 23 October 2001, as indicated in its first footnote.  

That fact should be accounted for in considering Baucom’s final optimistic comments suggesting that in 2001 LLNL presentations would be well received in calling for resurrecting BP technology and concepts of the Bush-41 administration to develop a “new class of miniature kill vehicles.” Disappointingly, the Bush-43 administration did nothing of the kind — and of course neither did the Obama administration.  Indeed, nothing has been done beyond the Clinton years to revive the BP concept or to take advantage of its associated SDI technological advances. 

And now, others are employing concepts pioneered by Ronald Reagan’s SDI program and could pose significant threats to the United States. Click here for a recent Politico article aptly titled “a Space War is coming — and the U.S. is not ready.”

President Trump’s recently stated interest in a “Space Force” is indeed timely. So, what will he and his troops do?  See the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Review Report, alleged to be forthcoming in May for clues.

Will BP concepts at long last be exploited — or still be “lost and gone forever” . . .

Stay tuned. 

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

Click here to make a tax deductible gift.  If you prefer to mail a check, Please send it to 500 North Washington Street, Alexandria, VA 22314.

E-Mail Message 180410

Please click here to read Past Weekly Updates!

Please help High Frontier continue this important and timely work!

Be sure to follow us on our Social Sites!

If you found this letter via our Social Sites, and you would like to subscribe, please click below!