Bush To World - Support Our Policies, Or We Will Deny OuterSpace To You.

I'm waiting for G.W. Bush to declared war on the Asgards.

 

well, as quoted, it does say:"asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."

That's like not owning a house, but denying everyone else access to it...might as well say we own it.

 

Not really. It's more like saying we will deny access to sea lanes to anyone who would attempt to close our use of those sealanes.

 

No, no, no, I thought Mars was part of the "Coalition of the Willing".

Remember them, The Coalition of the Willing?

 

I don't see anything particularly wrong with the details of the policy in theory. All it's saying is that we aren't against military action on other country's satellites. In practice, this seems like more Star Wars to me. I think it is highly improbable that we shoot down anyone's satellite within the foreseeable future.

 

I was actually watching a show several months back on the Science Channel. In the program, they had demonstration footage of a test of maneuvering jets on what was described as essentially a satellite kinetic interceptor, IE a satellite designed to destroy other satellites by running into them. I’ve also read some thing about what the DoD does to get around the protocols requiring open international disclosure of trajectories of launched satellites.

I am almost positive that the United States has a significant existing (perhaps secret) capability to destroy satellites.

 

Unfortunately, NASA does not get any more money than it used to, they just spend it all on this BS dream of going to Mars that only Bush seems to like. As a scientist, I'm really pissed off by the decrease in funding to real science.

 

All your space are belong to us.

Someone needs to make a good photoshop with something like that.

 

did Bush and his cabal just invest more money in defense/space exploration corporations? maybe they just want to maximize their investments..

 

IIRC we developed simple capability in the Reagan years to destroys satellites with missles launched from aircraft.

What does this have to do with being a Republican?

I guess if you ignore context then you can 'spin' it any way you want.

 

"that's no moon."

 

In Congress, there was a huge battle during the late 80's/very early 90's over Anti-Satellite weapons. Those who favored production of "Asats" were those who were firm believers in Star Wars and favored the hard right in their approach to the Soviets. Those who were against it saw more value in civilian satellite technology, thought it a good idea to keep space open for everyone and thought the Soviets would immediately go to work on their Asat and anti-Asat technology, thus immediately growing another sector of the global arms race. Not to mention, the intentional or accidental attack on a sat could easily escalate an already tense situation.

Thankfully, those against Asats won the battle and were even able to open Landsat, GPS, and other sat operations up to the public and businesses (for the longest time, those favoring Star Wars were against allowing access to satellite remote sensing and good GPS data).

Like many other things over the last 40 years, the losers held a grudge and I've been waiting for this to come back up.

Note: During the mid/late 1980's I worked on the staff of Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., the leader in stopping Reagan/Bush I Asat funding. He believed in "Open Skies," a concept initially proposed by Eisenhower, and thought the kind of global openness, cooperation, and transparency that remote sensing seemed to promise was essential to an open society, and consistently opposed arbitrary “over-classification” of systems and their imagery data. To that end, Brown authored the "Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992" which eventually passed and led to such things as Google Earth.

Brown recognized the "dual use" of satellites and accepted that rogue states and terrorists might use sat imagery to plan attacks. However, he thought the benefits of having it available to everyone outweighed the risk. His opponents thought the opposite.

I suspect that this change in policy is indeed designed to put weapons into space and I also suspect this is the first step in rolling back some of the data to which the public has access while using sats to gather more info for the govt... all under the pretense of keeping us safe.

 

or


"I'm endangering the mission, I shouldn't have come."

 

If it's a small scale and controlled war between more powerful countries (God forbid!), I guess no one should worry about satellites being attacked. However, if it's a full scale war (God forbid again!), someone would launch a nuclear warhead or 2 into the open space. Well, then there is no need to worry about satellites being attacked, because basically, none of the satellites will work any more. Please correct me if I am wrong. What's the point to legislate your sealane or my spacelane?

 

Didn't that include Luxembourg or the Faeroe Islands?

 

"oh, i believe the death star will be fully operational by the time your friends arrrive."

 

I don't think its accurate to characterize supporters of star wars as the 'hard right,' since it was bipartisan. Also despite Reagan spending billions on star wars we didn't see a space arms race with the Soviets. On the contrary many have concluded that the decision to go ahead with the programs brought the conclusion of the Cold War because the Soviets couldn't spend the money to keep up.

 

Most definitely:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/asat.htm

And ASAT R&D in various areas has been going on pretty much continuously since:

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/msg00051i.htm

 

Those "many" are wrong...

From Frances Fitzgerald (2000), Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster: 0684844168).

pp. 473-476: "No one in Washington foresaw the collapse of the Soviet system, but the conservatives were the very last to see that the system was vulnerable and that it was changing. In his memoir, published in 1990, Caspar Weinberger wrote that, 'In a world in which there are two superpowers, one of which has the governmental structure and military might of the Soviet Union, it is essential for our very survival that we retain the military strength we acquired in the 1980s....' And 'My feeling has always been that no general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will be allowed to alter in any fundamental way the basically aggressive nature of Soviet behavior.'

"Yet, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, conservative pundits began to advance the argument that the Reagan administration had played a major role in its downfall. Among others, George Will and Irving Kristol argued that SDI, Reagan's military buildup and the ideological crusade against Communism had delivered the knockout punch to a system that had been on the ropes since the early 1980s. A parade of former Reagan administration officials, including Weinberger and Richard Perle, came forward to assert that Reagan had known all the time that the Soviet Union was on its last legs and had aggressively foreclosed Soviet military options while pushing the Soviet economy to the breaking point. According to conservatives, the combination of military and ideological pressures gave the Soviet Union little choice but to abandon expansionism abroad and repression at home, and SDI was the key to this winning strategy. The Star Wars initiative had put the Soviets on notice that the next arms race would be waged in areas where the U.S. had a decisive technological advantage.

"This argument contrasted sharply with previous conservative complaints about Reagan's embrace of Gorbachev, and it did not persuade scholars of the Soviet Union. Yet, since it is the inveterate propensity of Americans--or at least of American pundits--to relate the falls of sparrows in distant lands to some fault or virtue of American policy, it went against the grain to deny the argument entirely and to propose that the enormous military buildup of the Reagan years had no role at all in the demise of the Soviet Union.

"Thus a vague and unexamined version of the conservative thesis entered the public discourse: SDI and the U.S. military buildup forced the Soviets to spend more than they could afford on their defenses and/or convinced them of the inherent weaknesses of their system. But the evidence for this proposition is wanting.

"From 1983 to 1987 the Strategic Defense Initiative alarmed Soviet leaders because it threatened to reverse what they saw as the trend toward strategic stability and stable costs. Nonetheless, they did not respond to it by creating their own SDI program. That is, they continued their existing research programs on lasers and other advanced technologies, plus their existing design-work on space weaponry, but they did not mount an effort to test or develop SDI-type weapons. In addition they studied counter-measures to space-based weaponry, but since the SDIO never designed a plausible system, they had nothing specific to study, and their military spending was not affected. Between 1985 and 1987 Gorbacheve spent a great deal of effort trying to convince the Reagan administration to restrain the program, presumably because he thought his own military-industrial complex would eventually force him to adopt a program of some sort to counter SDI, but by the end of 1987 the Soviet leadership no longer regarded SDI as a threat.

"Then, too, the Soviets did not respond to the Reagan administration's military buildup.

"As CIA analysts discovered in 1983, Soviet military spending had leveled off in 1975 to a growth rate of 1.3 percent [per year], with spending for weapons procurements virtually flat. It remained that way for a decade. According to later CIA estimates, Soviet military spending rose in 1985 as a result of decisions taken earlier, and grew at a rate of 4.3 percent per year through 1987. Spending for procurements of offensive strategic weapons, however, increased by only 1.4 percent a year in that period. In 1988 Gorbachev began a round of budget cuts, bringing the defense budget back down to its 1980 level. In other words, while the U.S. military budget was growing at an average of 8 percent per year, the Soviets did not attempt to keep up, and their military spending did not rise even as might have been expected given the war they were fighting in Afghanistan.

"During Reagan's first term, some in the Kremlin were concerned that the U.S. might possibly be gaining a first-strike capability and might actually launch a nuclear war. This was, of course, the mirror image of the fears expressed in Washington in the mid-seventies. Nonetheless, though the strategic arsenals on both sides grew like Topsy in the 1980s, the strategic balance remained extremely stable. Without any spending increases, the Soviets continued to turn out and deploy strategic warheads at about the same rate the U.S. did. When the START I treaty was signed in 1991, the U.S. had deployed 12,646 strategic warheads, the Soviet Union 11,212--the numbers so large as to be almost meaningless in terms of deterence.

"At the beginning of Reagan's first term, some conservative enthusiasts in the administration might have believed that the U.S. could spend the Soviets under the table in an all-out strategic arms race. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff never thought this, nor did the CIA, for the simple reason that Soviet spending on strategic weapons was a very small fraction of the overall Soviet military budget. According to one MIT expert, Soviet spending for the procurement, operations, and maintenance of its strategic offensive forces amounted to only 8 percent of its entire defense budget. In other words, had Gorbachev achieved the 50 percent reductions he was seeking at Reykjavik, he woul not have made savings of any significance in terms of the Soviet economy.

"What happened during the 1980s was that the Soviet economy continued to deteriorate as it had during the 1970s. The economic decline, of course, resulted from the failures of the system created by Lenin and Stalin--not from any effort on the part of the Reagan administration. Without Gorbachev, however, the Soviet Union might have survived for many more years, for the system, thought on the decline, was nowhere near collapse. It was Gorbachev's efforts to reverse the decline and to modernize his country that knocked the props out from under the system. The revolution was in essence a series of decisions made by one man, and it came as a surprise precisely because it did not follow from a systemic breakdown.

"At the time the American public understood this better than most in Washington--and thanks in large part to Ronald Reaga. Reagan had no idea what Gorbachev was up ot, but he always described the world in terms of individuals rather than institutions and portrayed U.S.-Soviet relations as the personal relationship between two heads of state. His own officials considered this naive. But it was Gorbachev who changed the Soviet Union, and Reagan's 'embrace' of him as an individual was surely the most important contribution the United States made to the Soviet revolution..."

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/fitzgerald.html