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Sun Tzu advised in The Art of War, “When the enemy occupies high
ground, do not confront him.”
This is why, since the advent
of flight, all battlefield commanders have sought to control the
airspace above the battlefield – the “ground” above the high ground.
Control of the airspace grants its occupant a clearer view
of an enemy’s movements, better communications with friendly forces
and the freedom to move quickly and unpredictably to attack downhill
well behind the enemy’s front lines.
Forces on land, at sea
and in the air all reap the advantages of the establishment of air
superiority – the keystone to victories from World War II to
Operation Iraqi Freedom. Just as important, occupying that high
ground denies those same advantages to the enemy.
In
peacetime, maintaining air superiority provides a deterrent to those
potential adversaries who heed the warning of Sun Tzu.
That
is why the Air Force and its researchers are constantly looking far
beyond the horizon of the current battlefield to develop new
technologies enabling access to the highest ground possible – space.
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August 10, 2017 - Dr. Wellesley Pereira, a senior research physical
scientist with the Air Force Research Lab's (AFRL) Space Vehicles
Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. stands in the museum of
the Phillips Research Site named for Air Force Gen. Samuel Phillips,
on left, who served as Director of NASA’s Apollo manned lunar
landing program from 1964 to 1969. (U.S. Air Force photo by Joseph Eddins, Airman Magazine)
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Even before the Soviet Union successfully launched the
first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit in October 1957, the
United States was developing its own top-secret satellites
to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
(ISR) of potential adversaries – Project Corona.
While Sputnik was little more than a beeping aluminum ball
orbiting the Earth, it was an undeniable Soviet flag planted
on the global high ground. The U.S. government knew that
ceding that high ground greatly increased the chances of
defeat should the Cold War with the Soviet Union turn hot.
Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, who oversaw the fledgling
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), firmly
acknowledged the national security benefits of advancing the
peaceful exploration of space in 1963.
"I, for one,
don't want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon,"
said Johnson.
To this day the U.S. Air Force has
remained at the forefront of pushing farther into space,
from launching communications and Global Positioning System
(GPS) satellites to providing astronaut Airmen who first
ventured into Earth orbit during Project Mercury, walked on
the Moon during Project Apollo to Col. Jack D. Fischer
currently aboard the International Space Station.
It
is a legacy that surrounds and drives Dr. Wellesley Pereira,
a senior research physical scientist with the Air Force
Research Lab's (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland
Air Force Base, New Mexico.
The very site at which
Pereira conducts his research is named for an Airman who led
the charge to put an American on the Moon.
The
Phillips Research Site is named for Air Force Gen. Samuel
Phillips, who served as Director of NASA’s Apollo manned
lunar landing program from 1964 to 1969. That program
culminated in the first humans, Neil Armstrong and then Air
Force Lt. Col. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, landing on the moon in
1969 as Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Collins piloted the
Apollo 11 Command Module overhead. It was the kind of
aggressive manned exploration of space that Pereira would
not only like to see continue, but accelerate.
“The
Air Force and its Airmen are seen as trendsetters, as in the
case with GPS, benefiting all humanity, or with
technologically-inspired precision airdrops from 30,000 feet
of lifesaving supplies during humanitarian crises,” said
Pereira. “In doing this the Air Force establishes itself as
a global power in which it does not cede higher ground to
anyone… It pays dividends to be at the leading edge of that
technology as opposed to playing catch up all the time. The
Air Force can really send a very positive message by being
that trendsetter in space.”
Pereira is currently
researching infrared physics and hyper-spectral imaging as a
means to provide ISR data over a wide range of light not
visible to the human eye.
“We simulate cloud scenes
viewed from spacecraft,” said Pereira. “ (Examining) all the
aspects that affect an image from space like the artifacts
caused by movement in the space platform; trying to process
signals, trying to process information. We try to simulate
these things in our lab just to understand spacecraft
processes and how we can deal with this in post-processing.”
Pereira’s current position at AFRL as a research
scientist coupled with a background in astronomy, physics
and space research gives him the opportunity to think deeply
about space and human space flight.
“As a research
scientist, I've been involved in building payloads for the
Air Force on satellites,” said Pereira. “This has led me to
think about satellites in general; launch, orbits, moving in
and out of orbits, the mechanics of orbits and the
optimization of orbits.”
Those contemplations have
led Pereira to envision an Air Force of the future that will
propel its assets and Airmen to increasingly higher ground
in space in a cost-effective way that combines technology
old and new – sails and lasers.
“Up until now, we've
been using chemical propulsion to get into space. Chemical
propulsion is limited in what it can do for us in the
future. We cannot go very far. We have to take resources
from the Earth into space, which is a big issue considering
we only can carry so much mass, we only have so much power,
and so on. It is limited by chemical bond, but it is also
limited by size, weight, power,” said Pereira.
The
concept of solar sails has existed for quite a while. A
solar sail uses photons, or energy from the sun to propel a
spacecraft. Photons have energy and momentum. That energy
transfers to a sail upon impact, pushing the sail and
spacecraft to which it is attached, farther into space,
according to Pereira.
“The Japanese have already
proven that we can fly stuff with a solar sail. In 2010,
they sent up an experiment called IKAROS, Interplanetary
Kite-raft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun. This was a
very successful project,” said Pereira.
“In the same
vein as solar sails, futurists have also thought about laser
sails. I think this is an area where the Air Force can
develop an ability for us to propel spacecraft farther using
lasers, either in the form of laser arrays on Earth or
taking a laser array and putting it on the moon, to propel
spacecraft without the cost of lifting spacecraft and
chemical propellant from the Earth’s surface.”
In the
near future, Pereira sees this method as a cost-effective
way the Air Force can lift satellites into higher Earth
orbit.
“You have spacecraft go into orbits that are
just about 300 to 600 kilometers above the Earth. We call
those Low Earth Orbits or LEO. Likewise, you have orbits
that could be about 36,000 to 40,000 kilometers above the
Earth. We call them Geostationary Earth Orbits or GEO
orbits. Many communications satellites, as well as, a few
other satellites are in Geostationary orbit…the way of the
future, would be to use laser based arrays, instead of
chemical propulsion, to fire at a satellite’s sail to push
it to a higher orbit,” said Pereira.
“Our goal is to
try and minimize taking resources from earth to space. We
can literally just launch a rocket using a catapult that
could boost to about 100 meters per second and, once we get
it to a certain altitude, we can have an array of lasers
focus on the sail on the rocket, propel it out farther,
whether it's intended for a LEO orbit or whether it's
intended for a GEO orbit. As long as you can build material
that can endure the laser energy without tearing, I think
this is a far cheaper way to go and it could save the Air
Force a lot of money.”
According to Pereira,
developing this technology would naturally lead to the
ability to propel spacecraft carrying Airmen farther into
the solar system where they could establish self-sustaining
outposts on ever higher ground.
“NASA's Orion
Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the MPCV, is essentially a
spacecraft designed to take astronauts farther than any
human has ever gone before. One test flight concept is to
visit an asteroid called 1999 AO10, in around 2025,” said
Pereira. “This asteroid does not have a lot of gravity and
not a lot of surface area, so rather than walking on the
asteroid, the idea is for the spacecraft to connect itself
to the asteroid, and for the astronauts to do spacewalks to
mine materials, so that they can bring them back to Earth
for analysis.”
Past and current Air Force research
during manned space flight has led to increased
understanding of human physiological response to
microgravity and exposure to radiation, development of life
support systems, nutritious food packaging, sophisticated
positioning, navigation and timing software and systems that
could one day enable Airmen to routinely fly to and mine
asteroids and planetary moons for needed resources.
Pereira also sees Air Force cooperation with commercial
companies developing space flight technologies as a benefit
to both, from developing suborbital space planes, manned
capsules and space waypoints, or “hotels”, to projects as
ambitious as Breakthrough Starshot, a proposed mission to
send a microchip all the way to Proxima B, an exo-planet
orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, and transmit data back
to Earth.
“They want to do this at about 20 percent
of the speed of light, meaning it will take five times as
long as it would take light to travel between the Earth and
Proxima Centauri, approximately four light years away. So it
could take only about 20 years for this chip to get to
Proxima Centauri. Then if it beams images back at the speed
of light, it would take another four years for that data to
come back. In about 24 years, we would get data from Proxima
Centauri, our nearest star,” said Pereira.
Pereira
believes that the Air Force participating in such ventures
into the space domain could lead to technologies that could
send Airmen to the moons of outer planets in our solar
system within a person's lifetime, benefiting the human race
and keeping the Air Force firmly atop the high ground.
“First and foremost, Airmen, as many times in the past,
can serve in the capacity of professional astronauts:
providing services in scouting and setting up breakthrough
scientific missions, establishing colonies for repair and
mining in order to reduce or avoid having to take materials
from Earth to space…enabling safe pathways, providing
in-flight maintenance, refueling crews, more effectively
than machines might be able to do.”
“There are so
many wonderful things about space that are so fascinating
that we can explore and learn so much more if we just keep
that aspect of space exploration going. We can achieve this
by having our Airmen lead the way to an era of exploration
enabled by human space flight.”
By U.S. Air Force Joseph Eddins, Airman Magazine
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2017
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