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U.S. Announces New Space Security Policy
hey! writes "The Bush administration has announced a new space security policy, which includes the statement that 'Consistent with this policy, the United States will preserve its rights, capabilities and freedom of action in space ... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.'" More from the article: "Eisendrath, co-author of a forthcoming book, 'War in Heaven: Stopping an Arms Race in Outer Space Before It Is Too Late,' says the United States is wasting its time. 'Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says we need to protect against a 'space Pearl Harbor,'' he says. 'But we're still the dominant power there.'"
The Bush Jr. administration has already expressed interest in a Mars mission, and nuclear pulse propulsion might greatly simplify that project. The first step in achieving that capability is breaking the various treaties which prohibit the detonation of nuclear weapons in space.
Perhaps Bush finds it easier to sell the treaty breakage as a security measure than to sell it as a first step towards Mars.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Not that I'm defending the move, but I can see where, in some ways, it makes sense to defend certain portions of space (say the parts above your country) where satelite based weapons could make easy targets of important sites.
One of the many problems with this policy is that those "certain portions of space" are six dimensional and time-varying. What the U.S. is trying to "defend" amounts to certain orbits. This is not like defending your coastal waters, which have zero momentum relative to your nation's landmass. For one, it is possible to change from an orbit that does not overfly a given country to one that does with relatively trivial delta-v.
Because of this, there is little or no practical value in preventing others from accessing just some orbits. Now, the U.S. government, particularly the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld, has a long history of doing stuff that has no practical value (often at the cost of American lives.) So it is possible that this policy will be acted upon in an ineffectual but relatively harmless way. But given the grip of fear that still has a big hold in the U.S. it is a matter of some concern that those who would put security before all else might decide to deny everyone access to all orbits.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Basically, it says the USA can act in anyway it chooses in space, and others can't. It basically says no one can fuck with our space toys, but we can fuck with anyone else's space toys. It basically says that "Rules Don't Apply to Us".
It is, very simply, typical fascist horseshit that the Bush Junta has been coughing up for years, only this time it affects satellites. nice.
I'm not going to cough up line item to line item - /. It's not THAT much to read, and it's all there in black and white. DIY.
Now, I'll propose that 90% of the responses to THIS will be from pink neocon dupes of the conspiracy, and yes, Bush DOES deserve demonisation for this, as it is part and parcel of his evil Evil EVIL neocon agenda. And for that, the pink neocon dupes of the conspiracy will likely mod me "Flamebait" or "Overrated" and anyone with half an ounce of sense will mod me "Interesting" or "Insightful".
Imagine if the Bush Junta said "the laws of the sea no longer apply to us." Imagine what kind of a row that would make. It's just the same thing, only in orbit in the vacuum of space.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
...which isn't actually contained in the document.
How the hell do you know that? From the linked article "The document, much of which is classified..." Good chunks of the document are classified. People HAVE to read between the lines.
Not that I'm agreeing with the anti-Bush, knee-jerkers, but you are also making unsubstantiated claims.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I would have to provisionally disagree. Just because some launch profiles from certain countries in many circumstances are sufficiently ambiguous that there is no real value in taking action does not mean that all profiles from all countries are.
If the Iranians were to begin to launch satellites, or say they were, and there were sufficient evidence -- possibly some of it secret -- that their real intentions were to develop suborbital or quasi-orbital intercontinental ballistic missile technology, and the US decided it was possible to knock the test missiles down reasonably safely, then I'd have no problem with them doing so.
Where it gets tricky is if China wants to launch national technical means a.k.a. spy satellites that overfly US strategic assets, map out targets, et cetera, within the contintental US. Is this the kind of thing we'd want to knock down? It's hard to really say, for two reasons: (1) Experience in the Cold War showed that spy satellites were stabilizing technology, because they prevent hysteria and nasty surprises. When each side is well-informed about what the other has, and is up to, decisions tend to be calmer and better. (2) This business has been thrashed out before, in the 16th-17th centuries, with respect to navigation of the high seas. In addition to being a very expensive process, the end result was a general agreement that freedom to travel -- even for a warship -- peacefully anywhere in international waters is guaranteed, unless you are actually at war. Do we really need to repeat the bloody experiment in space to probably arrive at the same conclusion?