Russian reaction to the national space policy

It’s a little late (nearly two months after the policy’s quiet release), but the AP, citing an Interfax article, reported Wednesday that a key Russian official criticized the new US national space policy, calling it “the first step toward a serious deepening of the military confrontation in space.” Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of Roskosmos, added that the policy indicated that Americans “want not only to go to space but they want to dictate to others who else is allowed to go there.” He claimed that if the US actually did deploy weapons in space, Russia “could respond”.

The AP article includes this curious statement near the end: “Moscow’s concerns about space-based weapons go back to the Soviet-era space race and U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s plans for a ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system.” Of course, the former Soviet Union seriously investigated, tested, and even deployed some devices that would be categorized as space weapons, as Jim Oberg noted in a recent TSR article.