Ledyard King

Washington Bureau

ARLINGTON, Va. – Two satellites the Air Force will launch Wednesday from Cape Canaveral will give the U.S. military a capability it hasn’t had before: a “neighborhood watch” program in space to protect sensitive assets and report on potential troublemakers launched from other countries.

That’s how the head of the Air Force Space Command described the once-secret Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP.

The satellites, two of four being launched in pairs, will fly on a Delta IV rocket into geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles up. Once there, they’ll maneuver around and monitor other spacecraft, in essence keeping an eye on the satellites that keep an eye on Earth.

The second pair is scheduled to launch in 2016.

By talking about the program, Air Force Gen. William Shelton said he hopes to discourage other countries from engaging in “nefarious” activities in space, such as launching spacecraft to damage American assets.

“It’s just like posting that sign in your front yard that says, ‘I’m part of the neighborhood watch program.’ You hope that that is a deterrent to potential thieves,” Shelton told reporters at the Pentagon Tuesday. “Same thing in geosynchronous orbit. We hope that people realize that this is an electro-optical platform that will take very precise images, that has maneuvering capability to do rendezvous and proximity.”

In other words, he said, “You can run but you can’t hide.”

The Orbital Sciences Corp.-built satellites will be controlled from Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo. They’ll be able to nimbly approach and sidestep spacecraft “to get the best possible vantage point for collecting images when required,” Shelton said.

Though the Air Force wants other nations to know about the GSSAP, Shelton said the Air Force has no plans to publish two-line element sets for these satellites, which could have countered perceptions they might be used offensively on foreign spacecraft.

“There are lots of non-governmental observers out there and we know (the GSSAP satellites) will be monitored, and that’s fine,” he said.

U.S. military spacecraft in that region of space -- including some whose existence is not publicly acknowledged -- provide early warnings of rocket and missile launches, collect intelligence, and would provide secure communications during a nuclear conflict.

Currently, most satellites are tracked from Earth by distinguishing which objects in the night sky are moving (spacecraft) and which aren’t (stars). Monitoring satellites up close should give the Air Force a much better idea of their purpose and capability.

The use of satellites to study what other spacecraft are doing isn’t new.

Small, experimental U.S. satellites reportedly inspected a missile-warning satellite that had failed for unknown reasons in 2008. And as far back as 1967, U.S. spacecraft took pictures of the Soviet Union’s lunar landing system during orbital tests, said Charles Vick, senior analyst with GlobalSecurity.org.

“This kind of thing, to protect ourselves against other nations’ potential intentions, it’s just a modernized version, a much more up-to-date and real-time kind of thing,” Vick told Florida Today newspaper earlier this year.

Shelton told reporters that GSSAP is also an acknowledgment that space isn’t as friendly as it used to be.

“Up to this point in time, I think we largely considered space to be a peaceful sanctuary,” he said. “You could build relatively fragile spacecraft. You didn’t have to worry about necessarily defending them, other than potential collisions… That’s not true now… (And) It’s a perfect reason for why we’re launching GSSAP.”

Contributing: James Dean, Florida Today

Contact Ledyard King at lking@gannett.com; Twitter: @ledgeking