The U.S. Air Force's X-37B unmanned spaceplane that orbits for hundreds of days at a time on classified missions. 'It's really used and designed for doing things in orbit and then being able to bring experiments back down to Earth,' says Gen. Raymond. U.S. Air Force
Popular Mechanics: Space War: How the Air Force Plans to Defend the Final Frontier
Militarized space is already here, so Popular Mechanics sat down with the top general of Air Force Space Command to figure out what that really means.
If you ask the Pentagon, the first space war was more than 25 years ago.
"People reference Desert Storm as the first space war," General John W. "Jay" Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), said during a recent visit to the Popular Mechanics offices in New York. "It really was the first time that we took strategic space information and integrated it into a theater of operations."
The "left hook" of Operation Desert Storm, when U.S. and allied ground forces attacked the western flank of the Iraqi military in Kuwait, revealed the true power of satellites in wartime. "Going through a desert, at night, without roads and maps—it was all enabled by GPS," Raymond says.
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WNU Editor: The Chinese are trying to catch up .... Blast-off for China's new-generation Beidou-3 satellites to rival GPS (South China Morning Post).
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