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By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain.
Outlining his election-year vision for space exploration last week, Bush called for a permanent base on the moon by 2020 as a launch pad for piloted missions to Mars and beyond.
One unspoken motivation may have been China's milestone launch in October of its first piloted spaceflight in earth orbit and its announced plan to go to the moon.
Bush's schedule for a U.S. return to the moon matches what experts say may be a dramatic militarization of space over the next two decades, even if the current ban on weapons holds.
Observers say this explains last week's decision by the Bush Adminstration to stop servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. "Hubble may have been one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built," said Derk Nerdly, of the Agglomeration of American Science Types, "But it's pretty much useless in a war."
Pentagon observers agreed. "Shee-ite! That mother couldn't spot a Shiite Tribesman in a roomful of Mormon missionaries," said General Buck Turgidson III, of the Air Force's Space Orbital Whack Job Institute. "What the hell good is a bunch of pictures of gas clouds a million light years away? I can't feed that kind of data into the targeting computer on a Predator Drone."
Major Clench, of the 203rd Cislunar commandoes, agreed. "War is about killing, and as General Petain said as far back as WWI, 'Firepower Kills.' It's all about putting metal on the target. The damn telescope doesn't even have cross-hairs on it!." Clench leaned in close to stare at this reporter eye to eye at the shortest possible range, until I could see the crosshairs etched onto what I sincerely hoped was a contact lens. He then leaned back and continued. "I'm not saying that strategic reconnaissance can't be useful. Sure I want to know about an enemy's cities, crops, factories, and internal communications. But what I really want is target data. Where is the freighter carrying the missile components? Which rail car on the 100-car train is loaded with fissile material? Of the sixty armed men in the tree line, which five are issuing orders to the other 55? Hubble can't do that."
NASA was reported to be working through the night to find some way to reconfigure Hubble as a military asset, but had so far failed to find any relevant use. Unable to quantify an imminent military threat coming from the Horsehead Nebula, they reportedly resorted to using Photoshop to insert pictures of Chinese Space Marines into images of the M236 Globular Cluster. The effort failed when they discovered that Paul Wolfowitz "likes Dim Sum too much to ever declare war on China."
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