The Military in Space

As we become more technically able, countries will look to space to expand into, exploit and control. The first of these is the area above each country. The next is the moon and probably the third is Mars. Mercury and outlying satellites of the closest gas giants would give a big advantage.
But, where is the space race currently? The last successful manned mission was 52 years ago and recent ones have had setback after setback, failure after failure, the administrators of them marketing them as successful, but to outsiders in the same way a train crash would be regarded outside those management circles. It might just be that everybody no longer has the skills to manage distant space projects, low earth orbit one being the equivalent of just going down the shops, not exploring new worlds, and many fly pasts are just very limited probes, high on technology and hype, low on purpose or utility.
The current crop of space tourism is just that; no utility whatsoever except as a conspicuously expensive sightseeing exercise for the very rich. Going into space, a bucket list item to be ticked, but environmentally disastrous for the world with a million pound travel ticket cost. The sort of vanity money a small village in a developing country could survive a lifetime on.

Skynet-1A, a satellite launched in 1969, has unusually moved from its normal location that was about 140 degrees from where it is now, about 22,000 miles. Nobody seems to know why this is and is unexpected. This is on top of the Boeing Intelsat 33e satellite, part of its EpicNG system that seems to have shattered into something like 500 large pieces on October 17th, 23 days ago.
This is not singular occurrence as the Chinese satellite Yunhai 1-02 did the same on 18/03/2021 and was just put down to a collision with space junk, close calls such as with the Electronic Intelligence satellite Cosmos 2082 that was part of the 18 ELINT satellites that Russia launched quite common as all the upper stages were also mainly left in similar orbits. You do wonder if all those ‘discarded stages’ were just discarded and some may have been still active.

Alternatively it could be a symptom of a Kessler Syndrome where it becomes no longer safe to travel into space or position something there.

An intentional Kessler effect may be something that a society that is falling behind in technology and the space race may promote in a denial of access way. If they can’t have space security over their country, they will make sure nobody else can. Then again, it may be no coincidence that since the Skynet-1A has basically moved in position very close to the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly, this may be the main cause. In which case, if things get worse with it, all satellites and maybe the ISS may move into danger. Since most rocket launched for efficiency are around this area it could eventually unless moved to area of much lower efficiency mean the end of mankind’s space race window. Without space, mankind and all life on earth is just biding time until it’s guaranteed extinction. Resources are a fraction of what they were, much harder to get at every day, and dwindling fast, so it could be currently somewhere between little and no hope. Hopefully it’s still little hope of long term survival.

Some countries seem to be interested in advancement of their aims at any cost. The US shelving nuclear rockets as too big a risk to the world at the moment, but Russia going ahead and developing them with noticeable problems and environmental damage when they fail. And fail they have; as a few of their nuclear facilities have done due to negligence, documented records from many countries affected don’t lie.
The only country that seems to be having any success at the moment is China, but it looks like many of their launches, similar to the US ones, have an increasingly secret military purpose, not science or for extending general knowledge. Anti-satellite satellites, star wars programmes, possibly nuclear weapons in space, a military installation on the the moon seems to be the main target, and apart from China nobody seems to be getting anywhere. NASA seems to be full of political correctness and ‘correct’ opinions, forgetting why they are there, more concerned with making lots of acceptable stats, environmentally friendly and biodegradable rocket motors, and promoting a good marketing image than getting off the earth, so have little chance now of success.
When they went from simply reporting to trying to change opinions and making the world their ideology says would be a better place they permanently turned their eyes away from the skies.
Now they seem just really a big bunch of fantasists and impractical dreamers of a scientific utopia who have the occasional limited success practically.

What of the private sector? They now supply or are planning to supply the Western market, which is a break from Russia supplying most of the heavy space access. We have had European rockets launching satellites, but they have mainly been very light, most developed from the UK rockets of the 50’s and 60’s, the time when the UK government gave up on the future as too costly. Japan have had some very limited successes, but still within the single digit percentage of the others, so at the moment pretty inconsequential and merely duplicating stuff that was already done by them decades ago.

Space tourism accounts for nothing, and no real tangible advancement except for bragging rights. When the tourists leave, life goes on as normal, not any of the special stuff done for them just to impress. Space really starts around 300 miles up, where the atmosphere has virtually disappeared, or about 1700 miles up if you count it as less than half earth’s gravity acting on you, but it would annoy people through their self-assumed status if you said it.

My view is that there have only been 24 people in space, half of those who walked on the moon, the majority never having even been out of earth’s atmosphere, just really high altitude science.