U.S. Abandons Space

IBD Editorials ^ | September 30, 2011 | Staff

[Kaslin]

Exceptionalism: While the American space program is in a museum, Beijing orbits a nearly 9-ton space station module. Soon men will return to the moon, but they will likely be speaking Chinese.

While America was scanning the skies waiting for an aging satellite to fall to earth, China was looking to the skies and seeing its future.

On Thursday, Beijing launched into space aboard a Long March 2F rocket a space station module weighing 8.5 metric tons that will serve as a prototype for a 60-ton Chinese space lab to be in orbit by 2020.

Americans may yawn and say "been there, done that" and, besides, we have other things on our plate right now. But this latest nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism has serious implications for both U.S. leadership and security. China's space program is intimately connected to its military aspirations, and it views space as a venue for more than tadpole experiments.

Not long ago, Capt. Shen Zhong of the Chinese Navy Research Institute said: "The mastery of outer space will be requisite for military victory, with outer space becoming the new venue for combat."

Certainly the Chinese development of an operational anti-satellite program speaks to Beijing's view that space is not a demilitarized zone.

The Tiangong 1 module is expected to remain in orbit for two years. China, the third nation after Russia and America to put humans into space, plans to launch two Shenzhou spacecraft in 2012 for unmanned docking trials. A third may carry a crew to populate the Tiangong 1.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Kaslin.

[SoJoCo]

But... our military should also employ a space program... and it should be the best in the world.

So what space program are you suggesting? The military has used spy satellites for decades...and used NASA to get them into space. Why not let private enterprise do that? But the Air Force never had its own space shuttle. The Air Force didn't send people to the Moon or support the space station. NASA did that, badly and outrageously expensively. So why not give private industry a shot?

[spacewarp]

Did you know that the only properly hardened chips in their computers that NASA would approve for the Space Shuttle was the 386 processor since the late 80’s?

So, we had computers driving our shuttle fleet that were so old they couldn’t handle the capability of Angry Birds on my cell phone.

The US government has a duty to create space-based defense systems to protect the US and it’s citizens when they do get to space again.

On another note, when do you think there will be a company that decides to go to space and harvest the “space junk” we have in the skies right now? There’s a fortune in materials there.

[RKV]

I worked in manned space flight for 6 years and in payloads for 8 so, while not as current as I might like to be, I do know this material. Yes I am quite well aware of the class of microprocessors used by the shuttle. The US HAS space based defense systems as we speak, and ground based anti-missile systems. I live less than 60 miles from the Reagan Missile Defense Site. We have others. I could wish we had more, and more space based assets, but do you think that such assets just might be classified????? We certainly do surveillance and attack warning in space.