PENTAGON STILL SPOOKED BY SPACE ATTACK

Even before he became George Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld was spooked about a "space Pearl Harbor"-- a surprise attack on America's satellites. Now that he's headed for a likely second term at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his deputies are getting even more jittery about a hostile strike in orbit.

To begin with, nobody at the Pentagon – nobody anywhere, in fact – really has a firm grasp on what's actually out there, circling the Earth. There are dozens of satellites, thousands of pieces of man-made debris, as well as an array of space rocks. But no one's quite sure of where, exactly, it all is.

Aviation Week quotes a "nightmare" that the country's top military space officer sometimes shares with his colleagues: "A phone call from the White House asking, 'What happened to our satellite? And what are you doing about it?' With few exceptions, today's response will be the same as a former Cincspace [Command-in-Chief of Space Operations] gave the Vice President several years ago: 'We don't know, and there's not much we can do."'

[defenseTech]