PENTAGON: SPACE IS FOR AMERICANS ONLY

The National Reconaissance Office — the gov­ern­ment agency in charge of all U.S. spy satel­lites — “is talk­ing openly… about actively deny­ing the use of space for intel­li­gence pur­poses to any other nation at any time — not just adver­saries, but even long­time allies,” EE Times reports.

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, (NRO direc­tor Peter) Teets pro­posed that U.S. resources from mil­i­tary, civil­ian and com­mer­cial satel­lites be com­bined to pro­vide ‘per­sis­tence in total sit­u­a­tional aware­ness, for the ben­e­fit of this nation’s war fight­ers.’ If allies don’t like the new par­a­digm of space dom­i­nance, said Air Force sec­re­tary James Roche, they’ll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the sym­po­sium, will have ‘no veto power.’

While empire-​​cheerleaders, like the fine folks at Winds of Change, are applaud­ing the move, such a denial seems sure to piss off America’s dwin­dling hand­ful of pals — again. And when fight­ing a global, decen­tral­ized enemy like Al Qaeda, don’t you need all the friends you can get?
THERE’S MORE: As if on cue, the European Space Agency has announced plans to move ahead with the 30-​​satellite Galileo sys­tem, which is widely seen as a rival to the U.S. military’s Global Positioning System (GPS) array. The plans call for Galileo to be oper­a­tional by 2008.
As Slashdot notes, the U.S. opened up access to GPS three years ago “partly to make GPS more use­ful for all mankind, but also to dis­suade other coun­tries from devel­op­ing their own nav­i­ga­tional satel­lite sys­tem, and thus be depen­dant on the U.S. for both peace­ful and mil­i­tary pur­poses.
“Since the demise of the Russian GLONASS sys­tem, GPS is the only game in town. Evidently recent events make Europe feel less com­fort­able about such things, and so they’re build­ing their own.” (empha­sis mine)

May 27th, 2003 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.