Since 1957, space has become an arena of active rivalry between scientific thought and economic-technical capabilities between Moscow and Washington. For a long time, the USSR was the leader in the peaceful exploration of space, launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, and sending the first human being into outer space (Yuri Gagarin), and…
When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 21, he will be faced with some very expensive problems, from bailing out the COVID-19 economy to getting a handle on climate change. Vaccinating over 300 million people will not be cheap, and wrestling the U.S.’s hydrocarbon-based economy in the direction of renewable energies will come with…
On 19 June, the unclassified section of the Pentagon’s new space defence strategy was released, and it clearly states that the US views the environment as a field of operations. The publicly available document is short in length, but it clearly shows the position and intentions of the US military with regards to space –…
US President Donald Trump is much taken with the bombastic and the exaggerated. In an interview with the Associated Press in April 2017, he spoke of his infamous if somewhat less than successful wall project on the US-Mexican border. Ever happy to stretch the record on costs, he took issue with those “opponents talking $25…
At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Palmerston stated what he thought was obvious, that “England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only eternal and perpetual interests.” Palmerston was saying that national interests should drive the relationships with foreigners. A nation will have amicable relations most of the time…
While the spats between President Trump and other NATO leaders at the rancorous 70th summit garnered most media attention, barely noticed was the alliance’s announcement to make “space an operational domain”. The move represents a grave assault on existing treaties forbidding the weaponization of space. The NATO announcement is doubly insidious because it gives the…
