The United States considers space capabilities — including the ground and space segments and supporting links — vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests;
and
To achieve the goals of this policy, the Secretary of Defense shall:
…
Develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if
directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries;
This is the new USA space policy signed by Bush.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_10_06_usspace.pdf
I want to read through the whole thing and find out what other issues are in there but that deny part I noticed in a summary and scanned through the document and found it…
I don’t know, but maybe we should do this differently… How about instead… we just beat everyone there? Not hold others back? Better yet, maybe we work with others and get there? This is much cheaper per person when spread across more persons. The US has a lot of smart people but not necessarily the smartest nor the largest number of the smart people. Hate to see we rely more on the deny aspect of this than the go do something cool and new aspect.
Something that is really bothersome is there doesn’t seem to be any guidelines concerning implementation of those deny pieces though lots of other stuff on other aspects of implementation. So what does deny mean? We go to war over the fact that someone we don’t like at the moment may be further ahead? We start blasting their stuff to bits that makes it into orbit regardless of purpose? Kill off key technical resources for the “bad” guys? None of those are truly acceptable.
joe
