Friday, January 17, 2014

Will The U.S. Dominate Space?

X-37B “space plane”. Air Force

U.S. In Space: Superiority, Not Dominance -- Travis C. Stalcup, The Diplomat

Trying for dominance in space is counterproductive. The U.S. should settle for a more modest goal.

Director Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film, Gravity is a sci-fi thriller about a lone astronaut fighting to live where “life is impossible.” Following a Russian missile strike against an aging spy satellite that shreds the American space shuttle and its crew, protagonist and mission scientist Sandra Bullock struggles to evade a predictable but lethal field of orbiting debris. Cuarón’s story dramatizes a stark future – one in which nations vie to control the cosmos and in doing so make life on earth as we know it considerably harder. Gravity makes an implicit argument about the folly of space dominance: operating in space is hard enough so why make it harder by testing and using kinetic kill anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons?

Read more ....

My Comment: Funding to NASA has been cut to the bone .... and the Pentagon's space program is becoming to expensive to maintain. Faced with this reality .... I have trouble visualizing any possibility of U.S. "superiority" in space .... let alone dominance.

Update: Pentagon’s Top Space Contractor Recognizes Imperative To Change -- Space News

1 comment:

Orion said...

Dominance in space? No.

But we will surely lead the world in high-priced subsidies to left-handed trans-gendered lesbian Inuit performance artists.

Orion