The spacegoing equivalent of a coast guard cutter may not match the Romance quotient of a 44-gun frigate close-reaching to windward, a bone in her teeth and her guns run out. I think we can draw a broader message from this. You can enjoy and agree with the message of another Kubrick movie of the 1960s those B-52 sequences still totally rock. But they were and are seriously cool airplanes, indeed acknowledged classics. This isn't just Armageddon aversion - their 1950s predecessors, the B-52 and TU-95 Bear intercontinental nuclear bombers (both still in front line service, though mainly in other roles) had just as horrific a mission. We call them ICBM forces, and neither as spacecraft nor as weapons are they really all that interesting. For that matter, armies have generally been 'organic' to the lands they defended, oppressed, or both.Įven more to the point, several great powers already have large military space armadas, and have for half a century. Navies have historically been 'organic' to sea trade (even if the first mission of the Royal Navy was and is to prevent another 1066). The distinction is important in more than one way. But here I specifically want to look at what may be called 'organic' military or at least quasi-military activity in space - missions that relate to other human space activity, not just earthly power politics. This blog does not encourage war in space (or anywhere else), but that certainly hasn't kept me from writing about space warfare, or kept you from reading about it. And like the Coast Guard and its cutters, the agency and ships will in some broad sense be quasi-military in character. The mission will eventually call for suitably configured and equipped spacecraft. On land these tasks are commonly divided between police and fire agencies at sea they are combined in the Coast Guard (at least in US practice). But as space traffic grows, so will the need for traffic management and enforcement, as well as emergency response services. A rudimentary framework for space traffic control already exists I believe that orbital slots, at least in geosynch, are assigned by the International Telecommunications Union. Orbit, the more positive control will be needed, traffic growing Longtime commenter Ferrell made an observation about growing space traffic in the discussion on Adventures in Orbital Space that fits neatly into the setting portrayed in The Weekly Moonship:Īt some point, traffic control and enforcement would be needed to
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