Google 'Bush Cheney militarizing space" and you'll see thousands of hits, many of them voicing their absolute opposition.
That should now change that Obama seems poised to do it:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, founded a year after Sputnik began bleeping its ominous warning of Soviet technological advances, owes its very existence to the fear of Space Communists. Now, history may be repeating itself as president-elect Barack Obama contemplates fusing military and civilian space programs in order to better counter China's great leap upward.
According to Bloomberg News, China's own burgeoning space program has lit a fire under the incoming administration's boosters. Between last year's spacewalk and plans to land a robot rover on the moon by 2012, the People's Republic is rapidly proving itself a peer competitor to the United States on the final frontier. In response, Obama's space transition team is considering stepping up collaboration between NASA and the Defense Department, in hopes of getting the next generation of spacecraft in the sky sooner—and at lower cost—than would be possible with NASA's ill-starred Ares rockets, currently slated to hit the launch pad in 2015. In the interim, the US would rent space on Russian vessels.
Ares, long plagued with problems, has been the heart pumping bad blood between current NASA administrator Michael Griffin, a staunch advocate of the program, and the Obama team, which is said to favor scrapping the rocket. Instead of having the agency develop its own rockets in house, the administration may have NASA rely on vehicles developed by the Pentagon's more lavishly endowed space program, such as the Atlas IV and Delta V rockets produced as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Stay tuned for one helluvanaboutface by many of those found in the aforementioned Google search.
The first American astronauts went into space riding ICBM's. Nothing new there. Maybe now? The people of this country will reconsider sharing their technology with communists.
On seconf thought? I don't think so.
Posted by: Locutisprime | Monday, January 05, 2009 at 05:55 AM
Shucks Locutisprime...I thought Bill C. already did just that...while president?
With China no less???
Isn't that where a good bit of the Clinton campaign money came from...China...for the technology?
Posted by: chuck aka xtnyoda | Monday, January 05, 2009 at 01:55 PM