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Posted on 01/23/2003 8:14:41 AM PST by yonif
Astronaut Ilan Ramon is not the only product of Israeli ingenuity in orbit, and Israel is not merely hitching a ride with Uncle Sam into outer space
The founders of Israel's space program periodically must want to pinch themselves. They remind anyone willing to listen that Israel is one of only eight true space powers. It has the capability to develop, produce, and launch spacecraft.
These scientists so often repeat this fact that it seems they are endeavoring to convince themselves of its veracity. But with Col. Ilan Ramon's blastoff into space late last week, Israel's space program put another important notch in its space belt. And careening somewhere out there around earth at about 28,000 km. per hour are four Israeli-made satellites, the scientists note with almost childlike glee.
Ramon's space flight has turned emotional. There was his live conversation on Tuesday with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which he held a wallet-sized Torah smuggled out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Ramon said it symbolized "more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive everything, including horrible periods, and go from the darkest days to days of hope and faith in the future." And there was the Shabbat service he held with his bemused crew members looking on.
Aside from swelling the chests of Israelis - at a time when their economic stability and personal security seem precarious - Ramon has provided Israel with valuable scientific experiments on such meteorological phenomenon as dust storms, giving scientists insights about the region in which we live. Why dust storms, one might ask? Well, scientists believe that dust storms suck good soil off the ground and transport it to a completely different region, while dumping inferior sand in poor soil areas.
But the jewel in the crown of Israel's space program is not Ramon's space flight, but the Ofek satellite program and its accompanying system of launchers. It is a subject about which Israeli experts and academics struggle to be reticent.
Orbiting the earth every hour and a half, the little Ofek-5 satellite - not much bigger than the Sputnik the Soviets heaved into space in 1957 - delivers color imaging at an extraordinarily high resolution of about half a meter (or perhaps even better); certainly good enough to detect, say, a Scud launcher in the western Iraqi desert.
While it is vital for Israel to learn about desertification, earthquakes and the region's too-few rain patterns, "obviously the real reason all of these projects were created is to provide the next generation of deterrent in the Middle East," says Dr. Reuven Pedatzur, the director of the Galili Center for Strategy and National Security.
With Iran just years or even months away from developing a nuclear weapon, and with former Soviet scientists scrambling for employment in Iranian nuclear plants and with their Russian comrades itching to build Syria a nuclear reactor, the Middle East is likely to heat up in the coming years, says Pedatzur. The next generation of Middle East wars could make the death toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict look like a margin-of-error statistic.
The key to delivering Israel's deterrent, which according to foreign sources consists of its large arsenal of sophisticated nuclear bombs, is the Shavit rocket and its successor, the Next Launcher. Both are based on the physical principles of ballistic missiles, which are essentially ground-to-ground projectiles capable of carrying some sort of payload, be it a satellite or a warhead, to another location on earth.
THE JERICHO was originally developed from a French prototype sold to Israel in 1965, just two years before the Six Day War. There is speculation, say foreign media sources, that Israel planned a more advanced version of the Shavit/Jericho II in cooperation with a previous South African regime. The ostensibly commercial project, which the South Africans called the RSA-4 ICBM, was grounded in 1994 when funding ran dry. These missiles could be reconfigured as intercontinental ballistic missiles. According to foreign sources, the powerful rocket could send a 700-kg. payload anywhere on earth. Nevertheless, it is believed that Israel might be keeping its version of the RSA-4 "in reserve."
But even so, Israel's Shavit/Jericho II, first tested in 1987, say Western sources, is powerful enough to send one-ton payloads up to well over 1,500 kilometers.
University of Maryland physicist Steve Fetter, author of Israeli Ballistic Missile Capabilities, has calculated that the Shavit could carry a 775-kg. payload 4,000 km., a distance long enough to hit every Arab capital. The calculation also puts Iran, and the Islamic world's only nuclear power, Pakistan, within easy range.
Not to be outdone, Prof. Moshe Gelman, head of the Asher Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, boasted last year to Ha'aretz that "From the moment that the State of Israel had the capability to launch a satellite into orbit around the earth at a height of hundreds of kilometers, it established [its] capability to launch, by means of a missile, a payload to any location on the face of the earth."
While the reasons for Israel's need for a missile that could travel anywhere on earth is debatable, what is generally considered fact is the threat Israel perceives from its one-time ally Iran. Israel and Iran, under Reza Shah Pahlavi, shared information on hi-tech weaponry until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Experts believe it was no coincidence that Israel launched the Ofek-5, just days after Iran reportedly launched its Shahab-3 missile that reportedly can reach Israel with a several hundred kilo payload.
Besides showing off its missiles, it was imperative to glean better data regarding Iran's nuclear buildup.
"Once radar systems provided us with a clear view and good warning for about 500-700 km. [radius]," Brig.-Gen. Chaim Eshed, head of the Israel Space Program tells The Jerusalem Post, "but regional developments demanded that we see a 1,500-km. radius or even more."
With its capacity of mapping territory and signal intelligence - picking up radio messages and other communications - the Ofek is handling superbly, says Eshed.
Nevertheless, the projected lifetime of Ofek-5 is approximately four years and the IAI is currently developing the next satellite in the series, Ofek-6. The new version, Eshed promises almost giddily, "will be better in every way," able to provide Israel with better real-time information. Through an elliptical orbit it will also be able to focus on specific regions for a longer period of time.
ACCORDING to Eshed, Israel's space program is no white elephant. In fact, he believes it to be Israel's next generation "cash crop."
"When we started out in the early 1980s we had to take a chance. Instead of waiting until each hi-tech element was tested over time [current American and European space technology is 10 years old], we decided to gamble and sent cutting-edge technology into space."
This enabled Israel to produce one of the best, size-for-price, satellites in the world, he says enthusiastically. Israel's satellites such as the Amos, the Eros imaging satellite, or Ofek are smaller and lighter than American satellites, but include up to 90 percent of the same hardware.
The miniaturization enables Israel to produce good quality craft for as low as $10 million each. (As a rough comparison, the launch alone of the shuttle Columbia which hurtled Ramon into space cost around half a billion dollars. The shuttle itself set American taxpayers back more than $2 billion.)
This makes Israeli spacecraft attractive items to buy for those with tens of millions to spend. Eshed confirmed that the price has even attracted Third World countries craving a foothold in space. And given that "the difference between military and commercial spacecraft is basically in the paint," as Eshed says, it is inexpensive to convert a product to desired specifications.
Israel Aircraft Industries nets about $250 million a year, part of which comes from its sales of aerospace materials.
One of the more interesting developments of Israel's space age is its attempts to develop a lighter, more efficient, nuclear reactor to power a space vehicle. By producing a super-light nuclear fuel in the form of americium-242 which weighs just 1 percent of the mass of uranium or plutonium, researchers at Ben-Gurion University are working on ways to make space flights cheaper and faster.
And of course such a fuel, still very much in the experimental stage, could be used for various other purposes, military and other.
Almost more important than the scientific experiments conducted by scientists on earth and by Ramon in space, is the infectious excitement it creates among Israel's young, says Aby Har-Even, director-general of the Israel Space Program.
"But it also combines the fields of bio-technology, physics, chemistry and others into a single discipline."
Despite the current euphoria, one of the things that rankles with Israel's space gurus is money, or more specifically, the lack thereof. Though the program is essentially self-sufficient, they claim additional government funding is required to move forward.
"Our budget was cut to $1 million from about $4 million," notes a disappointed Har-Even, a fact which severely limits the program's expansion. He remarks that NASA, is allotted about 15,000 times more ($15 billion) than its Israeli counterpart.
For his part, Eshed has a bigger ax to grind. He just stopped short of calling the government myopic in its refusal to fork over the $5m. necessary for Israel's participation in the International Space Station, which cost the international community tens of billions to build. That is barely the price of a single computer aboard one of Israel's $85 million F-15I fighter/bomber jets, points out a disappointed Eshed.
Nevertheless, he says, "it is full steam ahead," on Israel's space program. Asked if we are going to see an Israeli-made capsule or even an Israeli on the moon, Eshed replies, "Lots can be achieved in the future, but let's not get ahead of ourselves."
'One crazy imagination' In 1974, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his diary that the Defense Ministry's chief scientist, Professor Yuval Ne'eman, who constantly prophesied an Israeli space program, "has one crazy imagination."
By 1983, when Ne'eman, serving in the capacity of Israel's minister of science under Menachem Begin, launched the country's fledgling Space Agency, he seemed a little less crazy. By the time 1988 rolled around, and Ne'eman espied the diminutive Ofek-1 satellite being propelled 200 km. into the atmosphere, he seemed downright sane.
If anyone can be said to have introduced astronomy to Israel it is Ne'eman, who was instrumental in the Wise Observatory built in 1971.
Now 82 years old, the scientist, who serves as chairman of the board of the Israel Space Agency, continues to dream, though the images he conjures are hardly rosy. In a few decades, he believes, the "earth will look like a huge Calcutta"; a place overpopulated, toxin ridden, and on the verge of collapse.
This is why Israel must step up the pace of the valuable experiments it conducts in space, through its satellites and its astronauts, he says in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
"That is also why we have to follow John F. Kennedy's lead and forge ahead with the exploration of the solar system," he adds, his voice strong and unwavering.
But in the early 1980s he did not dare let himself think quite so big. Then Israel just hoped to get the program launched, primarily for geostrategic and commercial purposes.
Ne'eman likes to consider Israel a "doer country," and he tells this anecdote to hammer the notion home.
In 1996 he traveled to French Guiana for the launching of the Amos-1 communication satellite (it was heavier than the Ofek and required a heavier rocket). There he met the head of the Indonesian Space Agency, who began to boast about his Palapa-C2 satellite. He eventually confessed that the craft was built by Hughes Technologies in California. "Oh," retorted Ne'eman, simply, and gazed again at the Amos-1.
The Indonesian then boasted to his counterpart that his country, a state of more than 100 million, already had 50,000 cellphone users.
Ne'eman, well into his seventies at the time, pertly replied that Israel was a state of five million with one million cellphone users. Oh, and yes, all the parts of the launcher and satellite were made in Israel.
"We don't have many resources here in Israel. What we have is our brains, and on that we must capitalize," he adds.
It was these brains, and a little pride, says Ne'eman, that kept an Israeli astronaut out of space until this week.
"An American official offered in 1983 to send an Israeli into space, but we had to respectfully decline the offer."
Some two years later Saudi Arabia's Prince Sultan Salman Abdel Aziz Al-Saud became the first Arab in space. Following another offer, Ne'eman still refused, arguing that there was little point sending up another "glorified space tourist."
"We decided to wait until we had important experiments and until we could add something to the mission as attractive as the proposition was," he says.
With Ramon, "we can truthfully feel like we add vital scientific value to the mission."
Though a scientist to the core, Ne'eman has also played important political roles. He opposed the surrender of the Abu-Rodeis oil fields to Egypt in 1975 and supported the annexation of the areas conquered in the 1967 Six Day War. He became a critic of the Begin government after the peace deal with Egypt and helped establish the Tehiya party, serving as an MK in the 10th Knesset.
Ne'eman's greatest scientific disappointment is that Israel chose not to join the International Space Station.
"There are two types of states in the world, those that pull and those that are dragged along. We must be in the former category because we are the only country in the Middle East with no natural resources. But we do have brain power, and must take advantage of the talents we were given to be on the cutting edge of history."
little Ofek-5 satellite - not much bigger than the Sputnik the Soviets heaved into space in 1957 - delivers color imaging at an extraordinarily high resolution of about half a meter
I was under the impression that resolution depended on the focal length of the optics- i.e. high resolution required a long "tube"- any physics/astronomy mavens want to chime in?
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Why are there no Arabs on Star Trek?
Because it takes place in the future.
Here's a photo but without a scale: 
The solar panels ("wings") are for electrical power.I would guess that the aperture of the telescope is the diameter of the bottom of the satellite itself.
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