Detection is mostly a straightforward extension of our current space awareness capabiltities. It might also be possible to use x-ray spectroscopy, seismography, and/or other methods with non-cooperatively docked instruments to robotically inspect any suspicious spacecraft in or en route to most high earth orbits.

We might also have launch pad inspection regimes and ban the launching of payloads that have an ability to enter a restricted orbit and that have not undergone an inspection for hostile weaponry. Spacecraft headed to high earth orbits in violation of these regimes might be disabled or destroyed.

We’d be reforming EML2 (and perhaps even, much more controversially, GEO) into treaty territories accessible only to ourselves and select allies, making it (or them) off-limits to all powers that did not agree to abide by such inspection regimes.

Note that ITU is a civilian precedent for treaties allocating space regions and related resources among various parties. A wide variety of strategic orbits might be subject to similar reforms. But these inspection and spare regimes would have on-site teeth: they’d be security treaties, superceding any obsolete treaties that might be deemed to contradict them. And the treaty powers contributing the military teeth would also have far more control over these treaty territories, and other powers far less. The treaties could also lay down constitution-like rules for their civilian use, such as property rights, consistent with the inspection regimes. Orbital anarchy would be ended and our communications, intelligence, and navigation assets made secure.

Here’s another: EML2 would make a dandy parking spot for spare military satellites. Should an enemy damage or destroy communications, intelligence, and/or navigation satellites in their earth orbit(s) — a threat DoD increasingly worries about — we’d need to replace them quickly with spares.

One possibility is to keep Atlases or similar with such spares on board, or nearly so, ready to launch on demand — an expensive proposition and vulnerable to sabotage.

Another option: store spare satellites behind the moon, in tight EML2 halo orbits, where they would be protected from EMP or other energy weapons directed from earth or low earth orbits.

No astronauts needed, of course, nor need for any permanent infrastructure, although I don’t doubt the cult crazies can twist it into another nutty excuse to build their gigashrines. But it is an interesting and potentially very important use of our heavenly halos for profane purposes.

The stored satellites would be attached or docked when needed to upper stages which would be used when a spare is needed it to move it out of EML2 and to its operational earth orbit. These stages would have to store extra propellant on board over long periods. So either ample storable propellants would have to be included on these stages, or we’d have some research to do — figuring out long-term storage of cryogenic SEP propellants, or even more interesting figuring out a storable (non-cryogenic) propellant for SEP.

“God help us if Romney wins and puts these guys in charge. We’ll do nothing in space for the next 4-8 years.”

What does it say about everything else he wants to do for the US? Considering how simple space actually is!

But I am afraid that were we to elect Romney then God might just find something else to do for the next 4 years…

1) If political campaigns release bad news on Fridays so that the press doesn’t cover it (e.g., Romney’s tax returns), then what does the Saturday release of the Romney campaign’s space policy white paper say about that document?

2) The Obama Administration removes lunar return as a human space flight priority — “been there, done that” — at Obama’s KSC speech in April 2010. The Romney campaign removes lunar return as a human space flight priority — “‘colony on the moon…’You’re fired,’” — during the Florida primaries in January 2012.

The Obama Administration makes commercial cargo and crew transport a cornerstone of its space policy in the President’s FY 2011 Budget Request for NASA in February 2010. The Romney campaign makes commercial cargo and crew transport a cornerstone of its space policy in a white paper in September 2012.

The Obama Administration keeps NASA’s budgets flat. The Romney Administration promises no new money for NASA.

What’s the difference? If there is none, why bother releasing a white paper?

Don’t the staffers reviewing this document for the Romney campaign know that they’re suppossed to differentiate their candidate from his opponent, not endorse the opponent’s policies and viewpoints?

I wouldn’t let these folks run a campaign for high school class president.

3) It really took three former White House staffers, a former NASA Administrator, two former astronauts, a CEO, and a university professor to write a document that, at best, says nothing specific about what a Romney Administration would do in the space sector and, at worst, endorses the Obama Administration’s positions? Really?

These guys have been working on this paper for how many months? Really?

God help us if Romney wins and puts these guys in charge. We’ll do nothing in space for the next 4-8 years.

Cripes…

very well stated.

If NASA never built another launch vehicle, they could be the first to get people to the Moon, Mars, Asteroids, etc, wherever. NASA should spend billions on missions of exploration, not on launch vehicle development and operation. There will be plenty of affordable BEO launch options in the years to come, but those options will not result in any NASA missions of exploration if NASA wastes all its tax payer dollars on launch system development. SLS is the worst thing that can happen to a space program because it means the end of it. Not only will SLS fail, but it could very well take down NASA and the US manned space program with it.

That’s because:

1. Monies spent on an HLV prior to 2015 could instead be spent on mission development. It is not like you just build a HLV and bam! you can go to an asteroid and mars, there are many other things that need to be done that are also necessary and require budget and time to develop.

2. Not all HLV concepts are the same. Some cost less and take less time to bring online. If you wait a bit and then start developing a better HLV concept that costs less and takes less time to develop, you’ve freed up budget money for those other important things to do, and you still get your HLV in the end.

Let me give you an example of another HLV concept. The Atlas 5 Phase 2 is for all intents and purposes a superior version of the Shuttle C. It can put as much into orbit but also into beyond LEO orbits which the Shuttle C needs a further stage to do, development can be started at any time and the option to build it doesn’t go away, it shares costs with the Air Force launch usage, and it comes from an experienced launch vehicle program group that can develop it on time and on budget.

What’s more, is that the Atlas 5 Phase 2 was identified by the Augustine commission that informed Obama’s space plans as the most affordable HLV concept, not the Shuttle Derived HLVs. Cost effectiveness matters, because it impacts what you can get out of your limited budget. If Obama picked an HLV in 2011, then it wouldn’t even have been the SDHLV because the SDHLV was the worse of the two concepts.

But as I explain in the next point, there is no rush to build such a HLV because the missions for it won’t be ready for it if you do. The decision point in 2015 was better matched for when the resultant HLV would be actually used. And if you wait a few years, then you also give time for an even more affordable HLV option to make itself apparent. I’m sure that if a competition for an HLV were held in 2015, or even today, then SpaceX would give ULA a run for its money with a HLV concept of their own.

3. The missions for an HLV are in the 2020s, not in the immediate future. Even starting a SDHLV in 2011 didn’t gain you any time until then. It is not until the 2020s before SLS launches its first crewed mission, a few years after that before any actual payload missions take place. Starting a SDHLV in 2011 instead of another HLV in 2015 didn’t buy you any improvement in time, in fact it lengthened that wait because a bad SDHLV concept was forced on us and now we have to live with it and the mediocre plans to utilize it because it gobbled up all the money.

4. A giant HLV might not be the best way to go, and not rushing to lock in such an HLV program gives you time to consider your options. It’s 2012 now, not 2010, and what seems to you the better path for NASA space exploration:

a)Spending another decade and tens of billions of dollars to get the SLS and just the SLS.
b)Base an exploration architecture around the Falcon Heavy because nothing NASA builds is ever going to be more affordable than that, and start building missions now. Note with this option you don’t have to spend a dime on launchers until you have things to launch, it can all go to mission development.

Without even knowing about it beforehand, just by waiting to make a better decision, in 2015 you would have had a launch or two of the Falcon Heavy under the belt, and could consider that maybe spending so much on launch development isn’t the best idea when we have a perfectly good rocket, the most affordable ever made, and we can just use it to do space exploration and base an exploration program on that.

***

In summary, there are reasons why rushing to build a HLV, and a SDHLV at that, was a much worse decision than waiting a few years to select an HLV and doing other necessary things in the interim.

Taking that wrong path makes the resulting exploration program expensive and mediocre as we have to live with the impact the wrong choices have on the outcome.

Romney will give NASA a mission or goal??. Well, President Obama for better or worse) gave a mission to NASA 2 years ago.