After the high fives were concluded between NASA and JPL engineers watching DART’s spectacular collision with the small Dimorphos asteroid, worries will surely surface over whether and when its autonomous technology will be weaponized, if it hasn’t been already.
US military officials are worried China may already have the ability to target and even destroy satellites just above Earth, a capability which would be devastating for communications and GPS capability at the heart of many global systems for manufacturing, commerce and trade, not to mention provision of safe water, food and healthcare.
The issue of weaponizing DART never came up in the hours after the collision 7 million miles from Earth—why would it?—but top NASA officials know where they stand amidst a mix of politics, international relations and working shoulder to shoulder with the US Space Force. The talk on the eve of DART’s final moments was about planetary defense, not offensive capabilities.
“We are showing planetary defense is a global endeavor and it is possible to save out planet,” said NASA Administration Bill Nelson, a former astronaut and US Senator. Doubtless the Chinese are hearing the the rhetoric and Nelson’s choice of the word “defense” used repeatedly over the five-plus years of the DART mission.
DART was an international mission and NASA has gone out of its way to show global cooperation, even with Russian astronauts cooperating with Americans on International Space Station missions. DART’s autonomous capabilities were on full display on Monday, as engineers cheered when the spacecraft locked on to Dimorphos about 20 minutes before the final crash. It was not locked on a target, per se, but there’s little doubt the egg-shaped asteroid was indeed a kind of target and could easily be construed by a military mind as just another 500-foot long aircraft carrier or a futuristic space station or habitat on the Moon or Mars.
Modern missiles on Earth used today in wars already have sophisticated guidance systems not totally different from DART, with their ability to assess terrain to compare with stored data and GPS to find their targets. DART had no GPS, obviously, but made constant comparisons with stars in its field of view through the DRACO camera system aboard, then used those inputs to make adjustments with onboard rockets when needed.
Whether or when this autonomous capability is harnessed for weapons in space is undoubtedly going to progress, which points back to the tenuous relationship NASA and other space agencies around the globe have with military operations. How easy would it be for any nation to equip a future DART with nuclear capability? As poetic and peaceful as DART's mission to bump an asteroid may have seemed, the underlying concept is not all that different from a missile used to destroy something in a catastrophic manner.
Engineers and scientists usually want to just try things, test, explore and experiment, but once again as they had to do in World War II with the creation of The Bomb, they face the impossible role of being diplomats and ethicists as well as rocket experts. It really is a ton of responsibility and not talked about very much—at least in public. This really is rocket science of another order of magnitude.
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