... Defense physics is generally ; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technolo… - Ann K. Finkbeiner

The fundamental necessity of space security is knowing where every satellite is and how it is behaving. ’s June 2020 doctrine calls this “space domain awareness.” Officially that awareness comes via a global network of sensors on satellites and telescopes on the ground that covers all orbits all the time and tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters: 3,200 live satellites, as well as 24,000 nonfunctioning “zombies” and pieces of space debris that, in a collision with a satellite at 35,400 kilometers an hour, would cause a catastrophic breakup.
The information is sent to Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at the Combined Space Operations Center at in California. Data on the secret satellites are set aside, and the rest go into a public, free, online catalog called Space-Track, from which “conjunction notifications” are issued when two satellites look like they might get too close.

In the end, I learned two things about the long-term effects of . One is that a child's death is disorienting. The human mind is wired to find patterns and attach meanings, to associate things that are alike, to generalize from one example to another, in short, to make sense of things. Your mind could no more consciously stop doing this than your heart could consciously stop beating. But children's deaths make no sense, have no precedents, are part of no pattern; their deaths are unnatural and wrong. So parents fight their wiring, change their perspectives, and adjust to a reality that makes little sense.
The other thing I learned is that letting go of a child is impossible. ...

The ’s first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescope's political shepherd, , found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomers—, Don Schneider, and particularly —and since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescope's perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescope's principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirror's shape, the telescope couldn't focus, the problem was irrevocable.
…
NASA, of course, pulled off an ingenious fix, installed by astronauts dangling improbably over the telescope up in space.