Didn't see this posted on here so I thought I'd throw it up for comment. At the end of a short article talking about US and Chinese space and military relations.

Link

Sorry if this was already posted. Also not sure if it's the right section, but it does deal with the potential future of human presence in space.

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Science--can't live without it, but it makes everything so much more boring.

There's an old military saying, "He who controls the high ground, controls the field of battle."

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Nicely clipped headline, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf would be proud.

Seriously, though, the militarization of space isn't an inevitability, its a reality.

Various gummints can spout all the khumbaya rhetoric they want, but the truth remains that most folks going up topside are, in fact, trained military personnel "on loan". Throw that on top of the hundreds of tons of communications and surveillance hardware on station that form the backbone of modern military C₃I.

LEO may not be weaponized, but its sure as beans militarized.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Eh, it's probably a good thing on the grand scale. We wouldn't have half the polar and deep-ocean science stuff we do if it wasn't for Cold War efforts in those areas.

If we'd never signed that stupid treaty about not claiming celestial bodies, there'd probably be a US military base and associated colony (Fort Armstrong?) on the Moon by now.

Despite having signed that treaty, the Soviets were desperately trying to beat the US to the Moon and only gave up when their biggest rocket blew itself to pieces on the pad a few months before Apollo 11 took off. The treaty had nothing to do with the US abandoning the Moon. That rests firmly on the shoulders of one Richard M Nixon, who killed the follow on missions for Apollo, simply as a way to thumb his nose at JFK.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Thanks, I am quite a big fan of MSS--I too can be too far from reality! But please note I quote the whole thing right away. It's just a headline. Yeah, I agree it's been largely monopolized by the military. Look how hard it is even now for civilian agencies to do things on their own. Even tourists have to go up on military vehicles. Kind of a shame but practically I don't see a way around it for a while. Maybe if Japan builds that space-elevator they go on about...

Personally I'd rather build O'Neill type cylinders than colonize the moon. If nothing else they would prove an excellent testing ground for new technologies. Also I'd like someone to survive while we cook ourselves down here.

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Science--can't live without it, but it makes everything so much more boring.

Were those missions 12-17 (November 14, 1969 - December 7, 1972) that he killed? His term (January 20, 1969 – August 9, 1974) was inclusive of all manned lunar landings, as well as all four Skylab missions. He approved development of NASA's Space Shuttle Program on January 5, 1972.

While NASA budgets decline during Nixon's term, President's don't set the budgets, as that's Congress' role. The only thing Nixon killed was Thomas O. Paine's proposal for a manned expedition to Mars.

In 1972, he also approved the five-year cooperative NASA/Soviet program which resulted in the Apollo-Soyus Test Project, which took place in 1975. That lead to their cosmonauts being crewmembers on ISS missions, and our using their heavy lift in support of ISS, particularly during the time the Shuttle was grounded.

I doubt that we would have wasted that much money.

Oh my.

Someone help us if the Chinese militarise space.

Not good in my view.

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'Friendly fire - isn't' - Unknown.

The moon is a lousy location for a military installation. It's too far away to serve as a missile base or observation platform. An ICBM can reach anywhere on Earth in about 30 minutes. A missile from the moon would require hours to days to get to the target depending on how much delta-v you want to use.

The Nixon administration did eliminate the Apollo 18-20 missions but from what I read, NASA wasn't too upset. They were already getting pretty risk adverse by that time. However, the peak year of NASA budget allocations was about 1967 under the Johnson Administration. It was all downhill after that.

Back to the OP, space has been militarized since Sputnik was launched on a Soviet R-7 ICBM. While no country is currently operating offensive weapons in space, several countries are exploiting space assets to strengthen their militaries. The US military exploitation of space falls primarily in the areas of force enhancement (communications, precision navigation and timing, environmental monitoring, missile warning), and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). The paraphrase the commercial, We don't drop bombs from space but GPS allows us to drop bombs more accurately.