Welcome to the arms race for the 21st century -- space!

[thewayne]

The Chinese apparently have successfully destroyed one of their aging weather satellites with a kinetic kill at an altitude of 500 miles.

Let the space wars begin!

http://www.aviationweek.com/avnow/news/channel_awst_story.jsp?id=news/CHI01177.xml

Comments

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Welll.....

On the one hand, good for them for having developed that kind of technology. That takes some doing.

On the other hand, oh SHIT.... That could end up making things really interesting, especially if we're going to be trying to get into an arms race with the Chinese while still trying to salvage the debacle that Iraq has become.

[silveradept]

Oy. Fighting land wars in Asia, and now people are going to want to revive some sort of space-based defence system. It's like China's trying to push us over the economic brink or something.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Interesting point. When you look at Ronald Reagan bankrupting the USSR largely through Star Wars, it could easily be the Chinese trying the same tactic against us. It wouldn't take a lot to break the country considering the current state of the nat'l debt and the poor condition the Army is in (in terms of overextended manpower). But he Army wouldn't be the main fighting force against the Chinese, it would be the Navy and Air Force, and they're in great shape.

[silveradept]

From what I hear, China is one of the biggest financiers of our debt. If they should suddenly decide to call in some loans, they could put some significant pressure on the U.S. to shape up or change policy.

As for not using the Army, that would be a smart thing to do, considering they'd be outnumbered significantly. As you mentioned below, though, we don't exactly have a rational government in place.

[fastlearner.livejournal.com]

Politically-savvy folks note that this is likely not any kind of actual push into militarizing space, but rather the Chinese trying to get the US to sign the non-militarization-of-space treaty that most of the world has signed but that the US has been balking on for years. China most likely doesn't want to spend the money on militarizing space, they just want the US to not screw with their satellites and to be bound by treaty to help enforce it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The problem is that a rational government would be willing to talk about it, and we don't have one of those right now.