Disgrace Into Space - analysis of commercial and military use of outer space - Statistical Data Included

Ecologist, The, March, 2001 by Karl Grossman

Vision for 2020, issued in 1996, compares the US effort to control space and the Earth below to how centuries ago 'nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests,' how the empires of Europe ruled the waves and thus the world.

And Vision for 2020 also stresses the global economy. 'The globalisation of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between 'haves' and 'have-nots',' says the US Space Command. The US Space Command is readying itself to be 'the enforcement arm for the global economy,' says Bill Sulzman, director of Citizens for Peace in Space, the group challenging US space military activities in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the US Space Command is headquartered.

The most recent report outlining US military space plans is Almanac 2000, an Air Force Space Command report that declares: 'The future of the Air Force is space.' 'Into the 21st Century,' it says, the US Air Force needs to be: 'Globally dominant -- Tomorrow's Air Force will likely dominate the air and space around the world... Selectively lethal -- The Air Force may fight intense, decisive wars with great precision... The future Air Force will be better able to monitor and shape world events.'

'Master of Space' Is a motto of tile Air Force Space Command. 'Master of Space' appears as a uniform patch and is featured in jumbo letters over the entrance of a major Space Command element, the 50th Space Wing in Colorado.

US military leaders are similarly blunt. As General Joseph Ashy, then commander in chief of the US Space Command, put it in 1996: 'It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen. Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but -- absolutely -- we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space.' Ashy spoke of 'space control,' the US military's term for controlling space, and space force application,' its definition for dominating Earth from space. Said General Ashy: 'We'll expand into these two missions because they will become increasingly important. We will engage terrestrial targets someday -- ships, airplanes, land targets -- from space. We will engage targets in space, from space.'

COMMERCIAL DRIVE

As hard-driven as the push to make space a new arena of war is the effort to make money from the heavens. Organisations including ProSpace, Archimedes Institute and Space Frontier busily lobby for unfettered capitalism in space.

Allan Wasser, a ProSpace board member, has been especially active in urging that 'the way to finesse the [Outer Space] Treaty is for the United States to pass a law directing American courts to grant recognition to an extra-terrestrial land claim made by any private entity that has established a true space settlement.' Wasser says: 'The 1967 OST is not the norm in human history. The right to claim newly settled property has always provided the economic incentive for human expansion. Would Europeans have settled America if they couldn't claim ownership of the land they settled?'