RED PLANET: THE MILITARIZATION OF SPACE

You know, I really, really support NASA and the exploration of space in general. I even posted about it last year in my essay "TO GO BOLDLY" when the Columbia exploded. But I have a few reservations about President Bush's new space initiative.

How are we going to pay for it? One answer is to cancel existing space programs and shift the funding to the new Moon-Mars program, as the Houston Chronicle reported Saturday:

Two days after President Bush redirected NASA toward the moon and Mars, the space agency on Friday announced the first casualty: the Hubble Space Telescope.

"This is a sad day," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's chief scientist and a four-time shuttle astronaut. The decision shook the astronomy world.

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Losing the Hubble Telescope is just awful, and it seemingly contradicts, and at the very least, undercuts, the overall goal of exploring space. What's going on here?

Furthermore, cutting funding for the Hubble project cannot possibly provide enough money for what the President is proposing. To add insult to injury, Bush's irresponsible tax giveaways for the rich have sent the federal government into massive deficit spending, and these tax cuts are supposed to be structural--that is, they are permenant, and there seems to be no relief in sight. Calling for a massive program to establish a Moon base and then to explore Mars while at the same time pissing away all possible sources of funding for that program strikes me as weird. This makes me suspect that there's more here than meets the eye. Is this simply a ruse? A diversionary tactic to bolster Bush's sagging approval ratings? I'm sure that Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, has thought of this, but there's got to be more to it than the political angle.

My mind keeps going back to statements made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other neo-cons about what they see as a need for American military domination of space. This BuzzFlash essay comes right out and says that Bush's Moon-Mars initiative is driven by that goal:

So suddenly Bush is JFK, and he has announced new plans for going to the moon and to Mars because he is an idealistic space visionary at heart?

While at least a few reporters are covering Ted Kennedy's speech about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the Project for a New American Century, would someone in the media please click on to PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" -- the classic in which a longing for another Pearl Harbor is expressed -- and then scroll down to the section about space? Read about their real plan for space -- as a battlefield under total military control of the US.

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Indeed, this memo from PNAC openly declares the neo-con goal of militarizing space:

But with the mushrooming of commercial space activities (more than 1,100 companies in more than 50 countries are developing, building and operating space systems), the line between military and civilian space use is blurring. America's advantages in space are keys to our exercise of global power, but also create vulnerabilities our adversaries are anxious to exploit. Space is fast becoming the high seas of the future, and space power the equivalent of the sea power that propelled first Great Britain and then the United States on the path to global leadership. Control of the emerging international commons of space will do much to determine the future shape of international politics here on earth.

It is clear that, in addition to seeking military domination of the world, the neo-cons also seek to militarily dominate space: Bush's newfound advocacy of space exploration can only be understood in that context. I'm sad to say it, but, given this perspective, I cannot support the Moon-Mars initiative. Space exploration should be about mankind's best qualities, not its worst. The Bush administration would have us export bloodshed and murder to the stars.

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