I recall an Israeli official in 1967 vividly describing looking up at the looming Golan Heights in fear. I had never thought much about the word "heights," and the strategic value of holding the high ground. The French also were reminded of this geographical fact in 1954 when they permitted themselves to be surrounded by hilltop Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu, leading to the ignominious defeat that ended the French Indochinese war and colonies.
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| Carina Nebula, NASA |
The ultimate high ground is the sky. If you want to get mythological about it - the heavens. The military race for the high ground these days looks like it's in unmanned aircraft, with the drones made famous in Afghanistan. And we also have glimmerings of the possible use of such drones in the mainland USA - eyes in the sky to keep tabs on us all.
But as we say on late night TV, wait a minute, there's more. Since the very start of humanity's push into space we've seen the military reaching for the highest eyes - and possibly weapons as well, located in outer space. From World War II's V-2 rockets to the once super secret KH-11 surveillance satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office (whose very name was classified for many years), we've now come to the US's remaining space shuttles.
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| An X-37B |
Space shuttles, you ask? Didn't we retire them? That old technology is indeed the stuff of expensive museums, but our government has been working on less famous space shuttles for many years. In the 1990's NASA had Boeing build the X-40, a small unmanned reusable shuttle. It was scaled up 120% and gifted to the Air Force, which now flies two of these 30 foot cuties under the title X-37B. Since the X-37s aren't inconvenienced by having to carry us flesh and blood types, the X-37's can stay in orbit for up to nine months, they can fly in the atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound, and they land all by themselves while we humans watch, jaws dropped.
Remember my previous mentions of our (obvious) competition with China in trade and finance, and what appears to be a potential maritime war via giant aircraft carriers? In 2010, China reacted to our X-37 program with complaints about triggering a space weapons race. One might have been tempted to think, "Oh whine whine, China doesn't have much of a space program and they're just being paranoid."
Well maybe not so much. Tiangong-1, China's new space station, is flying 186 miles up at an orbital inclination of 42.79 degrees. The US Air Force's X-37 is at that altitude at an orbital inclination of 42.78 degrees. According to the British magazine Spaceflight, which is reporting on all this, that brings the Air Force within visual range of the Chinese station. The purpose of the X-37 is classified. For its part, Tiangon-1 is part of a stepped program of Chinese autonomous space station development; I haven't found evidence one way or the other about the involvement of China's military, but I'm willing to go out on a limb here since so much in China's ordinary course of business involves China's military, and say it would be likely that the Chinese military is involved in their space program too.
While we might be some years from Flash Gordon-type zapping rays, the technology to launch multiply-targeted warheads into space is old hat. If countries begin holding each other hostage with unstoppable warheads that can detonate on military targets or cities within a few minutes - we could see a new era of far-reaching confrontation that will make the old Cold War seem positively tropical. Not all military uses of space are intrinsically bad news - GPS is a military system that we map-impaired civilians get to use, and one could argue that the various satellite surveillance systems, some of which are public, can add an important degree of transparency to some aspects of modern international life.
Yet between space-based surveillance and looming catastrophic weapons, the escalating race to militarize space, paid for by us but without our knowledge or understanding, is clearly a precarious step towards planet-wide instability and even further degradation of our remaining precious liberties.
