Space Surveillance Network

Deep in the bowels of this Rocky Mountain granite fortress, in a windowless room full of color computers with large, round display screens, military men and women are working around the clock to prevent what many fear is the next lurking space disaster: a cataclysmic collision between a manned spacecraft and space debris. The U.S.

Deep in the bowels of this Rocky Mountain granite fortress, in a windowless room full of color computers with large, round display screens, military men and women are working around the clock to prevent what many fear is the next lurking space disaster: a cataclysmic collision between a manned spacecraft and space debris. The U.S.

When engineers and scientists discuss the vacuum of space these days, they may be yearning for a giant Hoover. Like other frontiers before it, the heavenly void has succumbed to human litter. Ground trackers report roughly 7,500 spent rocket stages, dead satellites, screwdrivers and other man-made objects whirling around the globe, passing each other at about 22,000 m.p.h. in relative velocity, at varying altitudes and in all directions. Most of the items are classified as junk.

Astronomers reported breathlessly this week that they had discovered a speeding object in space that will pass within 290,000 miles of Earth, but to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, it was all much ado about nothing. There are 100 million objects that pass through the Earth's orbit around the sun every year, and about five a day pass within 290,000 miles of the Earth, said Don Kessler, chief scientist on NASA's program to reduce the amount of debris in Earth orbit.

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union surprised the world by launching Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, into orbit. The satellite's unfettered "flight" over our country and around the world brought home the Soviet threat for millions of Americans, and it motivated the United States to regain the technological upper hand through education, advanced science and civilian-military aerospace efforts.

"This is a true story," former New York Times reporter Howard Blum assures his readers in the opening page of this book. "I verified every name, every incident, date and conversation." The publisher's blurb on the review copy characterizes the book as a "startling expose that reads with the dramatic narrative drive of a novel but . . . it is absolutely true!"

As President Reagan prepares to endorse a more ambitious civilian space program, a blue-ribbon government panel on long-term strategy has urged a more aggressive military space effort for the rest of the century to compensate for "our weakness in space." "In a war with the Soviet Union, we cannot count on space being a sanctuary," according to the bipartisan Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, created by the White House and the Pentagon. "More likely it would be a critical battlefield."

The haunting "beep-beep" emitted by a basketball-sized aluminum sphere circling the Earth in the winter of 1957 told a startled America that Sputnik had been launched into orbit and that the Soviets were far more advanced technologically than most had thought. Sputnik and other early Soviet space triumphs rallied a nation to action, and before it would end, Americans--not Soviets--would walk on the surface of the moon.