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Military Seeks Approval to Develop Space Weapons
ranson writes "The New York Times is reporting that U.S. Air Force officials are seeking Bush's Approval to begin researching and developing space arms. While analysts feel this move will be unwelcome in the international community, military officials believe that "Space superiority ... is our destiny, ... our vision for the future.""
You might need it some rainy day,
Dreams can come true again,
When ev'ry thing old is new again!
- Throw rock
- Hit other guy with stick
- Throw rock with stick on the end of it
- Shoot stick with rock on end of it at guy with curved stick
- Hit rock with fire, make copper, bronze, iron, steel rocks to put on ends of stick
- Put fire in tube, throw rock with fire.
- Put fire in metal tube, throw metal rock with fire.
- Put fire in metal rocks, drop exploding rocks on other guy
- Drop rocks made of unstable atomic metals on other guy
- Head for the asteroid belt. Throw rock
Nothing will defeat terrorism like billion dollar space weapons!!!
You never know when Al Qaeda is going to build a rocket.
Those kids in Explorers did.
Its sad to see that the 'militarization' of space is the only 'hope' that we have of making additional space ventures.
Enemies? Wake up. We're in the information age. The thing that controls these space weapons is information. We can spend all this money putting up creative technology in space, and all our enemies have to do is gather the information to control it.
My point is that we need to get rid of our enemies. And the only way to do that is to spend money on convincing our enemies that we're not their enemies at all.
When you think of the cost of putting such systems into orbit, let alone maintaining systems with enormous destructive power (remember what the Hubble and ISS pricetags have been so far?), it's enough to bankrupt many a nation. And of course we also have to ensure that they can't be tampered with by other satellites or massive EM storms like the recent one.
The point of all this is not to say that space should stay completely demilitarized--much as everyone would like that, the odds are that it's a pipe dream. If the United States decides to play the altruist and refrain on ideological grounds from militarizing space, that's just an invitation for less scrupulous powers like North Korea to try it at a future time. At some point the issue will inevitably come up.
But this does not necessarily mean that America needs to be proactive in the deployment (though it certainly does in the development) of such systems. The astronomical pricetag and tremendous practical issues associated with any space-based weapons deployment are such that any country attempting it, including hostile countries, could not do so without extensive difficulty and a very long time, and wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being clandestine about it.
In other words, it is unlikely given America's current military superiority that we need to militarize space at this point. We would likely (for the time being, when anti-missile lasers are not yet practical) have sufficient time to destroy any hostile nation's weapons systems and implement our own--sharing the cost with our allies instead of unliaterally bankrupting ourselves for the sake of pie-in-the-sky showboating. Frankly, now is not the time to start the arms race when we don't have to. Keep space weapons free until such time as we reasonably expect to need space-based weapons (are we really going to need tungsten rods with the kinetic energy of tactical nukes in order to take out guerilla fighters and small terrorist bands? What's the immediate large-scale military threat that requires this sort of tech?).
We can't kid ourselves that it will never happen, but we can for the time being avoid spending astronomical sums on an unproven system to address a threat that doesn't exist at the expense of international censure. The arms race doesn't need to happen now.
The original space ventures weren't exactly done for pure science you know. Superiority in space was seen as a major military objective in the 1950s and 1960s, which, combined with the propaganda value, is why the government was willing to pour so much money into it. Apollo would never have happened if we weren't trying to defeat the Soviets.
Being second won't be a major problem. The weapons will take time to develop and mature, so I doubt that the first generation will be perfect. That leaves a decent window for other nations to get going with their own 'death from above' systems.
I think that's a moot point, anyway. All it takes is a well-aimed bucket of gravel in the right orbit to take out a space-based system. Launching buckets of gravel is pretty cheap, so unless the US system is 100% effective, this system will suffer from the same flaws as the anti-missile system - it's easy to overwhelm it with a lot of cheap countermeasures.
You obviously.. ...haven't read the "Patriot Act" have you?
Neither did the Senate.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I hate this war and I hate the reasons for it and I hate those who perpetrated it. But I won't hate the man that saves legions of my fellow Americans by taking out the enemy from safe distance.
This isn't about "winning", it's about not provoking the rest of the world to hate us (that *certainly* doesn't help "secure peace" in the world!), it's about not militarizing *space* (once we do it, Russia and China will follow--how would *you* feel knowing the Chinese can nuke us from space? Now imagine Chinese space nukes when Taiwan declares independence.), and it's about not being grotesque monsters who nuke whole populations of innocent people.
Hell yeah, fight to win, but let's remain a people worthy of winning, if we can.
The neocons suffer from a severe case of hubris. No one's saying "don't fight to win", they're saying, "the only winning move is not to play the game". How can we be so utterly stupid as to be the ones to *start* the game? It's one thing to be forced into it (you can't help that), but voluntarily starting it?