I’m stunned at this. Really.
President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China.
…
The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China’s space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty battlefield eyes of the military.
Does it really matter whose capsules are whizzing around the earth? The People’s Republic of China has made all of three manned spaceflights, and yet they are “a threat?” To whom? How many spy satellites or space shuttles has Finland, Uruguay or New Zealand? Are they not free? And unmolested by terrorists? And unplagued by doubts of global superiority?
Oh, but it gets better:
“If China puts a man on the moon, that in itself isn’t necessarily a threat to the U.S.,” said Dean Cheng, a senior Asia analyst with CNA Corp., an Alexandria, Virginia-based national-security research firm. “But it would suggest that China had reached a level of proficiency in space comparable to that of the United States.”
I’ve not seen anything the suggests a Chinese moon mission is all that close. But if they want to plant the PRC flag on the thing, let ’em. So China would be “proficient” in all things space. Bully for them. They want to spend gazillions on rockets and capsules and re-usable [sic] accident-prone spaceplanes, fine with me. They want to put up satellites to guide bombs, I’d rather they didn’t, but it would be nice if someone else had such satellites. Deterrence, you know.
Or are we afraid that the doo-dads we will see pictured flying through space won’t be ours, won’t have “USA! USA!” stenciled on them, but rather Chinese characters few of us can read?
4:05 pm on January 3, 2009
