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<title>Spacedebate.org: New Evidence</title>
<description>Latest evidence added to the database on Spacedebate.org</description>
<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/</link>

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	<title>U.S. Military Dominance in Outer Space Challenged by Rising Number of Space Actors</title>
	<description><![CDATA[The Air Force says goodbye to 50 years of tranquil, undisturbed operations "up there."

Our space capabilities will be contested," declared Gen. C. Robert Kehler, head of Air Force Space Command. "We have seen evidence [of the danger] from a number of places around the world."

USAF's senior space officer may have been matter-of-fact in his delivery, but his message was as serious as a stroke. He had just summarized a mortal challenge to the US—the growing threats to America's traditional dominance of the military high ground.

Once, such dangers were theoretical. No longer.

Space isn't a lonely place anymore. It is a crowded commons that attracts the attention of many national and commercial space actors. The list includes, but is not limited to, Russia, China, India, and a unified Europe, not to mention a host of medium-size nations.
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Grant, Rebecca. "Vulnerability in Space." Air Force Magazine. June 1, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:45:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3710</link>
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	<title>U.S. Air Force Refocusing their Space Surveillance Efforts towards Net-Centric Approach</title>
	<description><![CDATA[Only recently has the Air Force started to increase its capability to survey large volumes of space. Just as important is moving away from the tight focus on Russian space assets.

"A lot of what we're doing now is taking many of the systems that were built for one purpose, [such as] dealing with a missile warning against a potential Soviet attack, ... and trying to knit [them] together in a way in which we can really draw upon all kinds of sensing phenomena, whether that be radar systems [or] optical trackers," explained Hamel. The goal is to "put it into really a modern net-centric architecture so that we're able to provide much more rapid, current knowledge of all the objects in space."

Two approaches will help. One is a new program for space-based situational awareness. Packages of optical sensors will fly on satellites and enhance tracking abilities. First launch of this system is planned for 2009.

Second, space professionals plan to take advantage of heavy traffic in the geostationary orbits to fly payloads to assist with tracking. As Hamel described it, location is everything. Plans are under way to "ride-share or piggyback sensors on a variety of satellites, both military as well as possibly even commercial systems." These can provide a sort of "neighborhood watch program," tracking nearby objects and warning of close approaches before collision occurs.
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Grant, Rebecca. "Vulnerability in Space." Air Force Magazine. June 1, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:45:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3711</link>
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	<title>USAF has Shown Poor Initiative at Sharing Space Data with our Allies</title>
	<description><![CDATA[Just as troubling given the shortfall in resources for US military space is the lack of initiative in military-to-military relationships with spacefaring friends and allies including NATO, and with commercial interests. Congress had to order the Air Force to share space surveillance data with commercial and foreign entities (CFE), which the USAF does now with considerable reluctance. The failure to engage with European allies to encourage them to make their Galileo system more fully compatible with GPS is infamous. (This was consistent with White House policy at the time, so the Air Force can to some extent be legitimately excused.) Now, in their newly released defense policy, Europeans contemplate the development of their own space surveillance network since, again in part, they cannot rely on SSA support from the US. They also envision enhanced space support capabilities and an independent European space C2 infrastructure.
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Armor, James B. "The Air Force’s Other Blind Spot." The Space Review. September 15, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:45:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3694</link>
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	<title>Declining Space Surveillance Capabilities Invite Attack</title>
	<description><![CDATA[Although the Air Force has some extraordinary localized space surveillance capabilities, global space situational awareness (SSA) is barely rudimentary compared with that for the air domain. It can take weeks to find a satellite that changes its orbit, something that is especially important if you are trying to avoid conjunctions (collisions) in the increasingly crowded space domain. Lack of timely characterization of space debris, space weather, and capabilities of foreign satellites and anti-satellite systems is disconcerting at best. Lack of ability to promptly attribute the cause of an incident in space—a satellite that ceases to function, for example—is an invitation to bad behavior by those who know they can't be traced. Piracy and jamming of commercial satellite communications is already becoming commonplace. Keep in mind 80% of military satellite communication is over commercial satellites.
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Armor, James B. "The Air Force’s Other Blind Spot." The Space Review. September 15, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:30:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3692</link>
	<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3692</guid>
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	<title>U.S. Should Pursue some Kind of Space Agreement even if Ban is Unworkable</title>
	<description><![CDATA[Negotiating any sort of international understanding on ASAT activities would be fiendishly difficult. A draft treaty "on the prevention of the weaponization of outer space" proposed years ago by Russia and China has gotten nowhere because, even its sponsors admit, nobody can figure out how to define basic terms like "space weapons" or even "outer space." For similar reasons, a straightforward ban on ASAT weapons and activities is an impossible goal: nobody has ever been able to work out how it could be verified. But some rules could plausibly be negotiated, along with a ban on ASAT test shots like China's of last year. "The question for U.S. policy is what kind of feasible and stable space regime best serves U.S. long-term security interests," says the Council on Foreign Relations report. "This question should be addressed early in the new administration's tenure, if not earlier." The United States, which has at once the dominant commercial space industry and the military most dependent upon space assets, has every incentive to act.
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"Space Wars: U.S. Military Should Worry about China in Space." Newsweek. September 24, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:15:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3682</link>
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	<title>Self Reliance and National Prestige Driving India and China's Space Programs</title>
	<description><![CDATA[The two biggest forces driving the race between China and India are their insistence on self-reliance and the idea that space exploration feeds national prestige. Naturally, the two ideas work in tandem. India was shut out from NASA and European space missions for years after testing its first nuclear bomb in 1974; now many technologies for its space program have been developed by Indian engineers with little outside help. (India has agreed to carry U.S. and European payloads on its moon launch.) Beijing has watched U.S.- Russian cooperation on the International Space Station rise and fall with their diplomatic relations. "The most important thing is that China has developed and formed its own system for space aviation independently," says Huang Hai of the China Aviation Science and Research Institute. Ouyang Ziyuan, a space expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, summed it up to People's Daily: China's program "suggests comprehensive national strength …, increasing China's international prestige and the cohesive power of the Chinese nation."
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"The Real Space Race Is In Asia." Newsweek. September 20, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:15:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3679</link>
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	<title>India has Launched Ambitious Plan to Explore and Develop the Moon</title>
	<description><![CDATA[The repercussions of China's program were felt most strongly in Delhi, where the 36-year-old space program is now ramping up its moon project at launch speed. China first sent a man into space in 2003, and India won't achieve that goal until 2015, but according to unofficial schedules, China will beat India to a moon landing by only a year. Reaching the moon is the childhood dream of Madhavan Nair, chairman of India's space program, which is now spending about $1 billion per year, compared with an estimated $2.5 billion a year in China. If all goes well, at the end of October India will launch the $100 million Chandrayaan-I, its first lunar orbiter, using the workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The orbiter will fire a probe at the moon's surface, kicking up a cloud of lunar dust that scientists will analyze from afar—and it will plant the Indian flag in lunar soil. Its successor, Chandrayaan-II, a cooperative effort with Russia (and, therefore, one looked down upon by Chinese analysts), is expected to land a rover on the moon by 2012. The space agency, if it can persuade Parliament to fund all its dreams, aims to put a man on the moon by 2020, followed by robotic missions to Mars, a nearby asteroid and the sun—an agenda even more ambitious than China's.
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"The Real Space Race Is In Asia." Newsweek. September 20, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:15:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3678</link>
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	<title>India does not View its Civillian Space Program as a Nationalistic Response to China</title>
	<description><![CDATA[The Indian space agency is careful to defend the program as more than an ego competition with the Chinese. It argues that its space program has earned a return of $2 on every dollar invested by the government, according to Nair. For example, its remote sensing satellites, which map the Earth's surface at a resolution of close to one meter, have helped find well water in dry regions, saving the government's drill boring program $100 million. And, while only a few years ago Indian space officials ruled out manned missions as too expensive and of dubious scientific value, they now speak—just like the Chinese—of mapping the moon for deposits of aluminum, silicon, uranium and titanium, probably with an eye to lunar mining. "I don't think we're in any race as far as the space program is concerned," says Nair. "We have our own national priorities, and based on those priorities we try to concentrate on developments which will benefit the people."

Moon shots for the masses? "If you ask people [in the space agencies], they will never acknowledge there is a competition," says Pallava Bagla, the author of "Destination Moon," a book about India's moon mission. "But subliminally there is a definite race there." The two sides don't talk about it because, says the Stimson Center's Michael Krepon, "for Beijing, you don't want to put New Delhi on the same playing field. For New Delhi, you don't want to acknowledge anxiety." Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, a member of Parliament and Nair's predecessor, says that in addition to luring Indian engineers from the high-paying IT divisions into astrophysics, the space program will "establish our credentials in the international community." It makes India a player.
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"The Real Space Race Is In Asia." Newsweek. September 20, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:15:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3677</link>
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	<title>Space-Based Missile Defense Uniquely Capable of Breaking Will of Rouge Nations to Continue Fight</title>
	<description><![CDATA[Space-based interceptors, such as a new version of the Brilliant Pebbles program that was canceled in 1993, could, in combination with space- and ground-based sensors, knock down missiles of this type in the boost phase. Significantly, they would do so over the launching country’s own territory and at least some of the citizens would witness the destruction of their leader’s vengeance weapons. This news would spread through word of mouth. This might be one of the keys to undermining their will to make war and help shorten the conflict.
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Dinerman, Taylor. "Space-Based Missile Defense and the Psychology of Warfare." The Space Review. September 8, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:15:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3675</link>
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	<title>Missile Defense Necessary to Break the Will of Tryants to Continue the Fight</title>
	<description><![CDATA[It is exactly this need for revenge that should get the attention of those in the US government who are trying to design a realistic missile defense policy for the next fifty years. Tyrannical regimes and terrorist movements share the need to excite people with dramatic and violent events. The more spectacular the attack, the better. Firing long-range missiles at an enemy, even if you only hit an empty parking lot, can provide followers with a level of emotional satisfaction. This in turn can motivate them to continue to fight even in a seemingly hopeless battle.

In future wars, those who are fighting against the West—today Iran or North Korea, tomorrow, who knows?—will use ballistic missiles not only to terrorize enemy civilian populations but to build morale among their own forces and people. Missile defense is the key to winning this critical psychological battle. As long as their missiles are being shot out of the sky, claims that they are hurting the enemy and thus filling people’s need for revenge can be shown to be utterly empty.
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Dinerman, Taylor. "Space-Based Missile Defense and the Psychology of Warfare." The Space Review. September 8, 2008.	]]></description>
	<pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:15:00 -0700</pubDate>	<link>http://www.spacedebate.org/evidence/3674</link>
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