It’s been almost exactly two months since the Bush Administration released the new national space policy, and people are still commenting on it. Yesterday the Council on Foreign Relations published a short synopsis on the idea of American “space supremacy” many see at the core of the new policy. The piece is primarily a review of a number of essays and position papers written on the policy from various points of view (including a couple of articles from The Space Review). One point where this analysis stumbles, though, is that it appears to link an incident earlier this year where a Chinese groundbased laser “dazzled” (or simply “illuminated”, depending on who you talked to) an American military satellite to the release of the policy itself: “The Pentagon has avoided specifics about the report, but soon afterward the Bush administration released an unclassified version of its new U.S. National Space Policy, which goes far beyond previous policies in asserting America’s right to respond forcefully to such threats.” Reading this, one might conclude that the new policy and its language is a reaction to that incident, when in fact the policy had been in the works for a long, long time.
Meanwhile, over at The Huffington Post, blogger RJ Esker is taking the credit—or the blame—for trumpeting the perceived militaristic slant of the policy in advance of the mainstream media. He takes issue with a James Oberg piece on MSNBC.com that claims that the media overhyped that slant: he is “sticking with my original interpretation on this one. The Administration has taken a dangerously aggressive stance regarding the militarization of space.”
