AN EXCUSE TO TEST ASAT WEAPONS

Just arrived in Alamosa, Colorado for my talk tonight at local college. My good friend Bill Sulzman is driving down from Colorado Springs and will drive me back to his house for the night. In the morning I will catch a plane from there to Boston.

I spoke this morning at the public high school in Taos and had 25 students in a class for over an hour. Much to my surprise they really intently listened to what I had to say and asked several excellent questions. They turned out to be much more interested and engaged than the kids at the "alternative" high school that I spoke at yesterday. After telling stories about my personal history/transformation via the Air Force during the Vietnam War, I talked alot about space and tried to show the connection to how funding Star Wars will help destroy social progress in America. The aerospace industry has long been saying that to pay for their space programs they intend to defund the "entitlement programs" which officially are Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and what is left of the Welfare program after Bill Clinton got through with it.

The internet is buzzing today with stories about the Pentagon (Missile Defense Agency) now saying that are going to shoot down the military satellite that is falling back to Earth in coming days. They will fire missiles into space from Aegis destroyers that are made where I live in Bath, Maine. The Navy is now deploying these Aegis destroyers, outfitted with "missile defense systems," in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia as the Pentagon begins to militarily surround China.

It is clear to me that the Pentagon is using the falling satellite as an excuse to test anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons in order to perfect the technology that would give the U.S. the ability to knock out other countries satellites. The military has been itching for a long time for a good excuse to field test ASAT technology. They are using this incident as an excuse to put into the public's mind that space weapons will be used to "protect" us. In fact these are offensive systems, part of the overall U.S. first-strike attack program now under development.

In a news conference yesterday we saw Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin make this announcement of this shoot-down. They said the falling satellite "could release much of its thousand-plus pounds of hydrazine fuel as a toxic gas."

Gen. Cartwright said, "On the first side of the equation, this is the first time we've used a tactical missile to engage a spacecraft, but not the first time that we've used a tactical missile to engage a body that is just reentering, okay. So the leap to move to catching it just before it hits the atmosphere really takes almost no modification at all. What we're talking about here is minor modification to software, both in the system that -- the Aegis system and in the missile itself. So that gives a reasonably high confidence that we understand all of the activities here."

I think the quote just above reenforces the point that with just minor "modification" the "missile defense" system on-board the Aegis becomes a ASAT weapon. The Pentagon is thrilled to have the opportunity to run this test.

Igor Barinov, first deputy chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, said he was informed by, "Russian military experts," that "the satellite could have an on-board nuclear power source."