Survival Imperative Using Space to Protect Earth

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 fiBurrows, William E. is the author of 'Survival Imperative Using Space to Protect Earth', published 2007 under ISBN 9780765311153 and ISBN 0765311151.