Re: Final destinations in space

royls@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

>It is simply a fact that a significant space-faring
>civilization would be able to do whatever it wanted with the obsolete
>nations of the earth.

It is simply a fact that this "high ground" analogy -- bogus when
Heinlein & Laning peddled it in Collier's in 1947, bogus during
post-Sputnik alarums, bogus for SDI/High Frontier, bogus today -- has
an endless, zombie-like vitality. Space is strategically valuable only
for military surveillance and communications -- exactly the niche
where civilian satellites have been economically viable, and for the
same reasons.

If you're talking about neo-Mahan "control of the space lanes," Mahan
was writing in a context of 400 years when access to overseas
resources, markets and colonies had been economically important to
great powers. All space activity for the foreseeable future doesn't
add up to a fraction of that for any contemporary power.

If you're talking about space hardware for use against ground targets,
you need much, *much* cheaper access to space before you can put up
either significant munitions or power supplies adequate for
directed-energy weapons. And the same features of orbit that make it
"high ground" make it a highly visible and vulnerable place to be,
with no reverse slope and a fresh shot at your hardware every 90
minutes.

If you're talking about destructive (rather than jamming) conflict
between space hardware... think "debris." As I've said before, I'm
sure our descendants -- locked away from space by a million new chunks
in orbit -- will admire the bloodless resolution of the
Tehran-Pyongyang-Caracas Space Crisis of 2017.

But, of course, if you're talking about Space Power as a way of
fulfilling zoomy dogfight fantasies... of getting a piece of a DoD
budget 25x larger than NASA's... or as a scary pretext for *selling*
space, along with the killer asteroid, the lunar PGM/He3 boom, and
escape from the imminent gray goo catastrophe... you go, boy.





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