Looney Tunes
When NASA created this patch for its Mars mission, I thought is was a cute cultural reference, but I was warned that the Shrubbery was about to go “Daffy.”
Back in 1967 we signed The Outer Space Treaty that made the militarization of space a big no-no. Space was to be used for peaceful purposes, not an alternate arena for war.
Via Shakespeare’s Sister I have found out that the Shrubbery has unilaterally decided that he can ignore that treaty.
According to the BBC article, US adopts tough new space policy, he authorized this change in August, but the policy was not released until now.
No consultation with anyone, he just did it.
4 comments
I’m thinking we might be getting a visit from a flying saucer with a erudite visitor named Klaatu sometime soon…
Klaatu barada nikto!…
Via Why Now? we find out that the Bush administration won’t rule out weaponizing space.
The US has adopted a tough new policy aimed at protecting its interests in space and denying “adversaries” access there for hostile purposes.
The document – …
It’s certainly in character for The Leader to unilaterally renounce the Outer Space Treaty by a secretive executive fiat. Spare the despair. Democracy was lost in December 2000.
For many years, my family was close to a university professor whose principle profession was psychology but who for several decdes devoted a substantial part of the rest of his time to work as a consultant on a super-secret Pentagon task work committee on “how to wage war in outer space.” He continued that long after retirement from teaching in the 1980’s.
Wasn’t so super-secret if I, as a teenager, knew about it, of course. Which brings me back to the secretiveness of Bush’s executive order. Without a doubt, as a nation we have been working on a number of outer space weapons, delivery vehicles, and strategies. Our allies and adversaries no doubt have better sources that tell them this than I had as a simple teenager. They had to know this was coming, de facto if not de jure.
The only ones kept in the dark were us, the citizens of the U.S.
You would have thought that he would have waited until we were no longer dependent on the “tender mercies” of the Russians to get hardware into space, before he announced this.