- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President
Bush's plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to
control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain.
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- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld long has pushed for
technology that could be used to attack or defend orbiting satellites as
well as a costly program, heavily reliant on space-based sensors, to thwart
incoming warheads.
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- Under a 1996 space policy adopted by then-President Bill
Clinton that remains in effect, the United States is committed to the exploration
and use of outer space "by all nations for peaceful purposes for the
benefit of all humanity."
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- "Peaceful purposes allow defense and intelligence-related
activities in pursuit of national security and other goals," according
to this policy. "Consistent with treaty obligations, the United States
will develop, operate and maintain space control capabilities to ensure
freedom of action in space, and if directed, deny such freedom of action
to adversaries."
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- No country depends on space and satellites as its eyes
and ears more than the United States, which accounted for as much as 95
percent of global military space spending in 1999, according to the French
space agency CNES.
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- "Yet the threat to the U.S. and its allies in and
from space does not command the attention it merits from the departments
and agencies of the U.S. government charged with national security responsibilities,"
a congressionally chartered task force headed by Rumsfeld reported 10 days
before Bush and he took office in 2001.
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- Theresa Hitchens of the private Center for Defense Information
said the capabilities to conduct space warfare would move out of the realm
of science fiction and into reality over the next 20 years or so.
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- "At the end of the day it will be political choices
by governments, not technology, that determines if the nearly 50- year
taboo against arming the heavens remains in place," she concluded
in a recent study.
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- Outlining his election-year vision for space exploration
last week, Bush called for a permanent base on the moon by 2020 as a launch
pad for piloted missions to Mars and beyond.
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- One unspoken motivation may have been China's milestone
launch in October of its first piloted spaceflight in earth orbit and its
announced plan to go to the moon.
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- "I think the new initiative is driven by a desire
to beat the Chinese to the moon," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org,
a defense and space policy research group.
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- Among companies that could cash in on Bush's space plans
are Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which
do big business with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
as well as with the Pentagon.
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- The moon, scientists have said, is a source of potentially
unlimited energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope -- a near perfect
fuel source: potent, nonpolluting and causing virtually no radioactive
byproduct in a fusion reactor.
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- "And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't
have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what
the price of energy was going to be," said Pike.
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- Gerald Kulcinski of the Fusion Technology Institute at
the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimated the moon's helium 3 would
have a cash value of perhaps $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent
in oil.
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- Scientists reckon there are about 1 million tons of helium
3 on the moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The equivalent
of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could meet all U.S. electric
power needs for a year, Kulcinski said by e-mail.
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- Bush's schedule for a U.S. return to the moon matches
what experts say may be a dramatic militarization of space over the next
two decades, even if the current ban on weapons holds.
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- Among other things, the Pentagon expects to spend at
least $50 billion over the next five years to develop and field a multi-layered
shield against incoming missiles that could deliver nuclear, biological
or chemical weapons.
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- Ultimately, this shield -- first proposed by President
Ronald Reagan and dubbed "Star Wars" by critics -- may include
space-based interceptors, the first weapons in space, as opposed to sensors
that guide weapons.
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- Last year, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency obtained
$14 million for research on basing three or more missile interceptors in
space by the end of the decade for tests.
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- The plan would field satellites armed with multiple "hit-to-kill"
interceptors capable of destroying a ballistic missile through a high-speed
collision shortly after its launch, according to Wade Boese, research director
of the private Arms Control Association. Such a system could also function
as an anti-satellite weapon.
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- No decision has been made yet to deploy space-based interceptors
as part of the U.S. missile defense program "although we are conducting
research and development activities in that area," a Defense Department
official said Friday.
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