6. Space exploration is a platform for developing new weapons technology
The birth of space flight and the ideas behind this sick dream can be found in the fantasies of men who sought not scientific truths and understanding, but to master Mars: both the planet and the god.
The god of war, twinkling red in the sky. Scientists and engineers who wouldn’t be able to fund their projects without a lot of money. At the end of World War II, the only people with access to this kind of money were national armies and their generals.
We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
-Wernher Von Braun
Wernher Von Braun dreamed of space travel within the framework of conquest. He was willing to work with whomever would fund his rocketry. Wernher would go from bombing the UK to creating intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb payload delivery, to multi-warhead missiles.
A small step for one man, and a threat to all mankind.
Although Wernher escaped to the U.S.A. after WWII with his spacecraft full of explosives, his counterpart in the Soviet Union, a man named Sergei Korolev, would use Von Braun’s work, and his own brilliance, to beat the West into orbit. And with good reason: Korolev had spent almost a decade in gulag, forced labor camps, had lost all his teeth to scurvy and always expected a bullet. His life depended on successful space flight.
To the West, the race for space presented itself in megatons. And how Soviet missiles were somehow bigger than theirs. The nuclear arms race had been born: the child of Sputnik and the V-2.
*megaton: a unit of explosive power chiefly used for nuclear weapons, equivalent to one million tons of TNT.
The space race would lead to nothing but greed for these men and their militaries, and fear for the rest of us. The USSR would take the lead in space on so many levels and with such bravado that a panic-stricken U.S. would begin an arms race that has never let up to this day.
I regard space colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.
-Brand
Some other examples of weapons-based interest in space exploration comes from science fiction and, specifically, writer Jerry Pourelle, who envisioned Project Thor while employed at Boeing in the 1950’s during the Cold War.
Project Thor was an idea for a weapons system that launches telephone pole-sized kinetic projectiles made from tungsten from Earth's orbit to damage targets on the ground. This weapon was actually used against the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war.
In March 1983, after being told that the Russians had installed a gun turret on one of their numerous space stations, US president Ronald Reagan told the world that he was going to build a Strategic Defense Initiative in space to shoot down enemy missiles with lasers and missiles. The world would simply call this program Star Wars. It was never built, but 20 scientists who worked on the program from 1983-87 committed suicide, under fairly odd circumstances, including mysterious suicides and violent drownings in close time and place to each other.
The Soviet space program designed and built laser handguns to shoot navigation optics. They installed 23mm cannons on their stations, replaced these with missiles, and issued triple-barrelled pistols to their cosmonauts.
While it may seem as though the Soviets had all the weapons in space, we shouldn’t forget that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thus leading to the discovery of vast amounts of state secrets. Since the US government has not collapsed yet, all our secret space weaponry is still extremely classified and kept quiet.
And now, on the 19th of February 2019, the president of the U.S. has signed a new piece of paper declaring that the country will develop yet another branch of the military: a Space Force! Formally and officially militarizing space.
That’s right, a Space Force. A planning and commissioning agent to prepare for warfare in space, on the moon, on Mars. Kicking open the front door of the heavens and anticipating the use of weapons to defend stolen resources and stolen planets. A force designed to defend settlers and corporate interests.
. . .one of the other tenets of the Outer Space Treaty is that space will not be weaponized. I hope that lasts for a long, long, long time, but I mean, who knows, it seems like a pipe dream to think that would last forever.
Eric Anderson
It looks as though this dream has been wholly destroyed by the only nation to drop nuclear bombs on a civilian population--twice!
The same country which has never once apologized.
The space age has been a roaring success. Telecommunications, weather forecasting, agriculture, forestry, and even the search for minerals have all been revolutionized. So has warfare. No power can any longer mobilise its armed forces in secret. The exact location of every building on the planet can be known. And satellite-based global positioning systems will guide a smart bomb to that exact location on demand.
The Economist, June 2011
The GPS system is actually a military asset that is conveniently shared with all of us and that could be easily taken away from us.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to oversee all military space work. It is an advanced-technology branch of the U.S. Department of Defense first called the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA's first priority was to assert the United States' military presence in space. The agency was created in response to the Soviets launching Sputnik into space in 1957.
Project A119, also known as A Study of Lunar Research Flights, was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, to display U.S. superiority to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
Project Lunex envisioned an Airforce base on the moon. 1958
Project Horizon studied the idea of a military Moon Base.1959
The Soviet Union developed the R-36ORB Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) and Polyus Orbital weapons system, which used fucking nuclear space mines, recoilless cannons, and satellite and anti-satellite blinding lasers.
The US and Israel were the only countries to refuse to vote on renewing the Outer Space Treaty.
This treaty bans Nuclear weapons in space as well as weapons of mass destruction, and suggests that space be used for peaceful purposes.
Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. . . Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.
General Lance Lord-head of US Air Force Space Command, hopefully retired.
Since its very beginnings, the quest for space has been a quest for military supremacy full of powerful men terrorizing each other and the nations over which they rule. They plan on nothing less than dominating all of the world and space!
