Space: Cosmos 1402 Is Out of Control

Soviet spy satellite threatens to leave a trail of radioactive debris

While the rest of the world anxiously watched and waited, the Soviets struggled last week to keep one of their spy satellites from plunging prematurely and dangerously back to earth. The high drama was reminiscent of NASA’s unsuccessful attempt to control the fall of Skylab four years ago, when fragments of the unmanned U.S. space station harmlessly hit the Australian outback. But the problem with the Soviet satellite had a particularly frightening element. Aboard the faltering Red star was some lethal cargo: a miniature nuclear power plant that could spray deadly radioactive material over a wide swath of the earth.

The object of the international concern was a spacecraft innocuously dubbed Cosmos 1402. Launched last August, it is a five-ton bundle of electronics, including a powerful radar used by the Soviets to track U.S. naval vessels. In 1978 a similar satellite, Cosmos 954, scattered radioactive fragments over Canada’s Northwest Territories. Though no one was killed or injured, the embarrassed Soviets paid Canada $3 million to help defray the cost of the difficult cleanup.

Initially, Soviet officials brushed off Western concern about the satellite: But as evidence accumulated from tracking stations that Cosmos 1402 was falling, Moscow finally admitted that the satellite was in trouble. Although it insisted that the reactor, containing 100 Ibs. of nuclear fuel, would burn up in the atmosphere, U.S. officials said that some radioactive debris would reach the ground. As a precaution, they mobilized special teams to gather the “hot” material. Meanwhile, Soviet ground controllers were radioing a flood of signals to the errant craft, which is tumbling wildly through space at an altitude of about 150 miles, in an effort to control it. Unless they succeed, Pentagon sources said, Cosmos 1402 will make a fiery, meteor-like re-entry into the atmosphere before month’s end, possibly around Jan. 24.

Because of the highly inclined plane of the satellite’s orbit (about 65° to the equator), Cosmos 1402 could crash almost anywhere, from as far north as Greenland to the southernmost tip of South America. That orbital path precluded any rescue attempt by the new U.S. space shuttle Challenger; even if it could be launched in time, it would be unable to achieve so tilted an orbit. As to just when Cosmos 1402 might strike, one U.S. intelligence officer said: “We’ll be able to make some hard calculations about the time and place of landing when the satellite’s period [the time it takes to make a complete swing around the earth] degrades to 87.4 minutes.” Last week Cosmos 1402 was circling once every 89.3 minutes.

The Soviets have been launching ocean-surveillance satellites at the rate of two or more a year. Their radars and other sensors are not run by electricity from solar panels or chemical fuel cells, the power sources used by American spy satellites like the Air Force’s Big Bird. Instead, the Soviet satellites rely on a type of small, portable nuclear reactor called Topaz (after the gemstone), which uses as its fuel enriched uranium 235, the same highly radioactive material “burned” by nuclear power plants on the ground.

During the international storm that followed the crash of Cosmos 954, the Soviets briefly stopped launching nuclear-powered spy satellites, but flights resumed in 1980. Moscow insists that the reactors do not violate any treaty. The U.S. has not pressed the issue. For one thing, the Defense Department is itself considering using reactors to power laser and particle-beam weapons that may eventually be deployed in space. Also, NASA has already sent nuclear power packs to the moon and uses them regularly on robot spacecraft to the outer planets, like the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. (Reason: sunlight is too weak to be tapped as an energy source.)

To American space scientists, the real problem is not that the Soviets are sending reactors into space. As Jerry Grey, spokesman for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, points out, it is that they are doing it “so damned stupidly”—operating the nuclear-powered satellites at such low altitudes that they easily become vulnerable to premature return. (If an object is launched high enough to avoid the upper atmosphere’s braking effects, it can orbit indefinitely, like the moon.) At times, in order to do closeup snooping, the Soviets let their satellites descend to as low as 100 miles, then boost them up with onboard rockets to prevent any further orbital “decay.”

But there are limits to the sorties a satellite can make; usually it will exhaust its rocket fuel after six or seven months. When that happens, the Soviet controllers radio commands that explode the satellite into nuclear and nonnuclear components. The nonnuclear parts are allowed to sink back into the atmosphere, where most of the metal burns up in the frictional heat of reentry. The reactor is lifted with one last spurt of rocket fuel to an altitude of 500 to 600 miles, where it can drift safely for hundreds of years.

By late last month it became clear to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, whose cameras, radars and computers keep track of the more than 5,000 objects now in orbit, that Cosmos 1402 was not following this scenario. When it broke into three pieces on Dec. 28, all languished in the same orbit, perhaps because of a booster failure. With each swing around the earth, the nuclear reactor’s orbit shrank a little more. Some U.S. officials speculate that the Soviets might be able to destroy the reactor with a remaining explosive charge, or even a burst from one of their killer satellites, a risky procedure that would leave a sinking radioactive cloud in orbit. Or they might have enough maneuvering fuel left to steer the lethal package into the sea. At week’s end the fate of Cosmos 1402, as well as of the people in its path, was still very much up in the air.

—By Frederic Golden. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Washington