This weekend provided more opportunity for commentary about China’s ASAT test earlier this month, but also very little news. China continues to remain silent about the test, and that silence is the subject of much speculation in the US, the New York Times reports this morning. Some Americans officials, such as National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, suggested that while Chinese political leadership approved the test, they may have been unaware of its timing, and thus were caught off guard when it occurred. “It’s the kind of silence that makes you wonder what’s happening inside the country,” another official told the Times.
Other commentary and related items of note:
- Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the ASAT test “provocative” Sunday, but added that it’s not something to be “overly worried about this at this point”. Biden, on Fox News Sunday, also said we “should be talking about” ways to avoid an escalating arms race in space. (Transcript; the relevant section is at the end.)
- House Science and Technology Committee chairman Bart Gordon also condemned the test in a statement Friday. “I hope that this will be the last such test to occur.”
- Aviation Week, which broke the story about the ASAT test Wednesday night, follows up with a discussion of the effect the test will have on military programs, with a new emphasis on space surveillance and related programs.
- In an editorial in today’s Christian Science Monitor, Bruce MacDonald (who served in the Clinton White House) and Charles Ferguson offer a number of recommendations for the US in the wake of the test, from diplomacy (reconsidering the current unwillingness to negotiate a ban on space weapons) to military (taking measures to protect spacecraft from ASAT weapons, including both kinetic devices and lasers).
- A New York Post column by Peter Brookes takes a harder stance, saying that the Bush Administration should now reject any cooperation with China in civil space. (Brookes goes a little hyperbolic, claiming that the test makes vulnerable “low-Earth-orbit satellites, such as weather, communications, surveillance and global-positioning satellites”; many of those satellites, of course, aren’t in LEO and thus aren’t vulnerable to this particular ASAT.)
- A couple of pieces related to the ASAT test in this week’s issue of The Space Review: Christopher Stone says that this test illustrates why opponents of the new national space policy have it wrong, while Taylor Dinerman examines some new technology for ASATs that could have the same effect as conventional kinetic weapons without creating any messy space debris, one of the biggest objections to such weapons.
Of course, the neolithic conservatives are trying to make this into a national emergency. They live and thrive on fear…it is the main weapon they use to retain power.
Of course, the paleoliberal leftists are trying to make other things into national emergencies. They live and thrive on fear… it is themain weapon they use to gain power.
— anthropogenic climate change
— uninsured health care
— corporations
— Diebold
— etc, etc, et tired f’in cetera
….as opposed to the left whoes main weapons are the triple cannons of demonization of their opponents, dumbing down the debate to the greatest extent possible and by projecting their innermost motives onto their opposition as the above poster has done.
I am sure TLE will be along shortly to prove my points far beyond any reasonable doubts.
Just having you guys post here is a pure pleasure.
Your words speak for themselves. Keep up the good work!
Some have overreacted to the Chinese ASAT test but most are wishfully underreacting, eating up whatever morsels China is handing out. China said that this test was not meant as a threat or to spark a new space weapons race. Oh really? They must be using some kind of weird reverse psychology that only diplomats understand. Or maybe they’re so rich now that they just build billion-dollar satellite-busting missiles for fun. Not to threaten anybody! Sorry to alarm!
G’day Jeff,
I’m sorry to see that what I blogged about on the space cynics most recently seems to have come to pass here. Don’t let the trolls destroy your otherwise very informative and useful blog.
Cheers,
Shubber
I suppose I shouldn’t be surpized that certain people, mainly on the right, will forever blame Clinton for any and all problems. It really is sickening.
And yet amazingly, no one even mentioned Clinton in this thread until you did Ferris.
Are you going somewhee with that strawman or did you just cut n’ paste the closest one you could find?
From Christopher Stone’s paper, on the 5th papargraph, he talkes about “The Clinton model”, and specifically from this sentence
Ms. Samson’s reverence for the “Clinton model” of space policy will just lead to what the “Clinton model” toward global Islamic fascism led to: thousands of Americans dead.
Not really what I would call strawman