Pentagon eyes crash analysis on 1,300 satellites

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Tuesday it is now tracking 800 maneuverable satellites on a daily basis for possible collisions and expects to add 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year's end.

The U.S. Air Force began upgrading its ability to predict possible collisions in space after a dead Russian military communications satellite and a commercial U.S. satellite owned by Iridium collided on February 10.

General Kevin Chilton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, called the collision the "seminal event" in the satellite industry during the past year and said it destroyed any sense that space was so vast that collisions were highly improbable.

He said military officials had wanted to do more thorough analysis of possible collisions in space, but had lacked the resources. Before the collision, he said they were tracking less than 100 satellites a day.

"It's amazing what one collision will do to the resource spigot," he told a space conference in Omaha, Nebraska.

The crash, which was not predicted by the U.S. military or private tracking groups, underscored the vulnerability of U.S. satellites, which are used for a huge array of military and civilian purposes.

Chilton said the Air Force was tracking more than 20,000 satellites, spent rocket stages and other objects in space, up from just 14,000 a few years ago.

But he said that was just what U.S. could "see" and there were estimates that the actual number was much greater, posing a potential threat to satellites on orbit.