From: Monte Davis 

"John Beamish"  wrote:

>I think you're misreading my point.
>
>As I said, once you've gone to orbit and then returned then there's little
>else that a military would want.  So why continue with a civilian
>program?  Because it brings propaganda benefits.  The mil benefits as you
>pointed out (and I took for granted so didn't bother mentioning them) come
> from sputnik-like operations (carried out by the mil) and clearly
>mil-focused operations (carried out, as you say, at Vandenberg and many
>other locations).

I don't think you and Adam disagree -- rather, you're approaching from
different angles the same zone of overlap, ambiguity and ambivalence that
has been central to "aerospace" for 50 years.

As you say, once past the ICBM "entry level" the real military
benefits come from unmanned satellites for surveillance, communications,
navigation -- in the same way (and for the same underlying reasons) that
the real civilian benefits -- those that pay for themselves and/or are
uncontroversial, broadly supported public programs -- come from unmanned
satellites for weather, remote sensing, communications, navigation. In both
domains, space is a "going concern" when (1) a payload can serve
a large user base for a long time, and (2) all it does is process data:
it's relatively small, with modest energy requitrments, and needs no life
support, no resupply of food and water, no re-entry (at least after the
early days when our spysats dropped film capsules).

It's when you step up the scale tenfold or more -- which comes with manned
activity, and/or all the military wet dreams from DynaSoar to SDI, with its
kilotons/megawatts of orbiting hardware, or wacko proposals to deliver a
Marine platoon anywhere on the planet in 45 minutes  -- that the cost goes
through the roof and the cost/benefit calculation turns to handwaving. What
MacNamara said when he killed DynaSoar in the early 1960s remains true: the
armed forces have yet to define a mission for soldiers or heavy (literally)
weapons in space that offers enough bang/buck over what we have to make
sense. Space is "high ground" in terms of *information*, but the
other part of the old military metaphor -- the advantage of sending rocks
or spears or bullets downward vs. upward -- simply doesn't apply.

That leaves enthusiasts for civilian space in a bit of a bind, somewhere between

"We come in peace for all mankind on NASA's $16B/yr"

 and (sotto voce)

"It sure would be nice if the Pentagon, with $400B/yr, would foot the
bill for more/bigger/better technology, like it did back in the
day..."

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com

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