Slashdot Mirror
Does the Moon Have Military Value?
MarkWhittington writes "Despite the fact that under President Barack Obama's space policy, Americans will not be going back to the moon any time soon, discussions are occurring about what, if any, military value the Earth's nearest neighbor has. Opinions, as can be expected, vary on the subject."
Are you reading this, The U.S. Government? The moon is of endless strategic military value! You could be the most powerful military on earth if you had the most advanced space programs.
Divert some of that ridiculously high military funding toward space programs, as much as you can spare!
Low Earth Orbit? Yes!
Military wants the high ground, and in terms of Earth-focused warfare the most you need is LEO. Lunar puts you 3 days out at Apollo speeds, and at the bottom of a gravity well (even if it is significantly weaker.) LEO puts you over any potential target every 90 minutes and less than a day away from resupply.
Until you've got strategically valuable positions in space between the Earth and Moon, the Moon itself will hold no value militarily.
Read a great quote a while back. "There are two kinds of Libertarians: those who don't know Heinlein was writing fiction, and those who don't know Ayn Rand was writing fiction."
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
You don't need nuclear weapons from the moon, nor toxic weapons either. Apparently the moon has a rich supply of these mysterious city-killing weapons called "rocks" which, when catapulted out of the moon's gravity well naturally fall into Earth's. The Earth's gravity operates on the mass of the rocks, accelerating them to great terminal energy - enough to look as much like nuclear weapons as makes little difference. Done with sufficient precision, or simply enough quantity, it should be more than enough force to get the Earth to capitulate. Scary thought: the entire moon is made up of these disastrous weapons of mass destruction, which require no fine art to deploy. I read a book about it once, a long time ago. Wish I could remember the title.
Odd note of geek trivia: the "Toynbee Tiles" enigma is precisely about this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If they have a self-sufficient moon base, the whole "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) theory of avoiding nuclear war with the soviets go away.
As they described it to us -- since both the commies and the US had enough nukes to kill everyone, noone would be crazy enough to launch.
However if one country has a colony on the moon; the whole MAD equation changes. Suddenly instead of "everyone dies", the result is "hey, if everyone on earth dies; I and my 144000 other colonists on this base will own everything!!!!"
I am reminded of the Battle of Midway, where Midway island was thought of as an "unsinkable carrier" and the plans for defense included heavy use of the airstrips on the island. The island was also far from resupply or support. Once the battle started, the Japanese, who knew exactly where Midway was, bombed the hell out of it. The primary strength of aircraft carrier is their ability to move; when properly used they're hard to find even while employing their airpower in combat. The moon, I think, is analogous in both the unambiguous location and difficulty of resupply.
*force choke*
I find your lack of original conversation disturbing.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
"NASA's funding keeps getting cut, and yet we're spending trillions on war like it's nothing"
"War, eh? We can do that in space, sure."
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Actually, if we get nuclear fusion operational, that might not be too far from the truth. An ideal fusion fuel, Helium-3, is found on the moon in absurd quantities (due to it's constant exposure to solar radiation), and can literally be scooped up from the ground (ironically the richest deposits are surface, or just-below-surface deposits : no digging required, a spoon will do).
The advantage of Helium-3 ? It fuses without neutron radiation. This means no radioactivity has to be evacuated from the fusion reactor. You could eat the fusion products (after cooling them) and no harm would befall you.
A small scoop of helium-3 in a fusion reactor would produce enough power to transport all of humanity off the earth (by contrast, all the oil in the world could barely move a million people into orbit).
The helium-3 total on the moon contains enough energy, so that if released through fusion it could heat up the earth by 10.000 degrees. All the oil that ever was in the ground was barely enough to heat us (at least directly) 0.0001 degrees. And, the best part, suppose we strip-mine the entire moon blank, after 2 years we'll have another 20 cm of Helium-3 to mine.
So it would basically mean unlimited, "renewable" (as renewable as solar power at least) energy supply for the foreseeable future.
Great quote. Let me rephrase that: "There are two kinds of Socialists: those who don't know Karl Marx was writing fiction, and those who don't know John Maynard Keynes was writing fiction."
Everyone has biases, including reporters. The myth of objective journalism is just that, a myth. And your focus on Mr. Whittington's political leanings is nothing short of an ad hominem. Either his article and ideas have merit, or they do not. Attacking (which includes criticizing as well as simply "pointing them out") his politics is a distraction and waste of time.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Oh no not a Republican, I guess we can ignore everything he says then. Even though you point out he uses facts and draws conclusions from those facts we can't consider his point of view because he has an imaginary R at the end of his name. If you disagree with TFA then disagree with it, don't just not like someones politics and therefore dismiss TFA out of hand.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.