ICBMs for everyone?

A private enterprise company, funded by a California internet entrepreneur, has successfully boosted a payload into orbit:

"Fourth time's a charm," said Elon Musk, the multimillionaire who started up Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to make space launches more affordable.

The Falcon 1 rocket carried a 364-pound dummy payload designed and built by SpaceX for the launch. Musk pledged to continue getting rockets into orbit, saying the company has resolved design issues that plagued previous attempts.

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Falcon 1, a 70-foot-long rocket powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, is the first in a family of low-cost launch vehicles priced at $7.9 million each.

Besides the Falcon 1, SpaceX is developing for NASA a larger launch vehicle, Falcon 9, capable of flying to the international space station when the current space shuttle fleet retires in 2010.

Although upfront development costs were undoubtedly substantial, $7.9 million for an orbital launcher does not seem much of an obstacle. The implication is that orbital payload capability would seem to be within reach for a long list of both state and non-state actors.

Such a prospect results in an immense challenge for defense planners. Although the U.S. has made great achievements over the past several years on missile defense, this progress was aided by being able to make certain reasonable assumptions about the enemy’s launch locations. Missile interception with kinetic kill vehicles is an exercise in physics and geometry. Locating interceptors in Alaska and California takes care of the North Korean threat, while interceptors in central Europe cover the future Iranian threat. But the interceptors at these sites cannot cover threats from other locations, due to the limitations of physics.

If non-state actors can establish intercontinental ballistic missile-range launch sites in any direction, the current U.S. missile defense scheme would become untenable. Pentagon planners would need to design an entirely new approach to the problem.

And the threat of proliferating ICBM capability makes the menace of an electro-magnetic pulse attack especially worrisome.

Naturally, potential terror adversaries still have many technical hurdles to overcome. Nuclear warheads are very complicated and very difficult to miniaturize. Rocket science isn’t easy. It would be very difficult for an adversary to keep secret his testing program and missile-basing projects.

But the lesson from the SpaceX success is that the barriers to entry for many dangerous technologies are falling rapidly. ICBMs used to be available to only the most wealthy and technically sophisticated nation-states. Soon, it seems like anyone will be able to get them.