From: Monte Davis 

Adam  wrote:

>The budget would reappear should the need resurface.

Ah, "the need"... well, there's the rub, isn't it, in military OR
civilian space affaits?

I must say there's a here-we-go-again flavor to the mini-brouhaha over
China's ASAT test AND over the [really not substantively new] "Bush
militarization of space" AND all the rest.

Anybody who thinks about it for longer than five minutes -- or did fifty
years ago -- has to *know* that once you can do ICBMs, real military space
capabilities are all about surveillance (including early warning of other
people's ICBMs) and communications.  Pending great declines in launch cost,
nobody can *afford* to put enough stuff (or enough power) in orbit to be
more than a bee-sting compared to what we deploy on and from the ground.

But the instinctive psychological ooga-booga power of "If they can be
up there LOOKING DOWN on us, they can DO BAD THINGS to us" never seems
to go away.

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com

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