In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Explode…

In a recent op-ed, James Carroll expressed his worries about a space arms race, comparing it to previous military build-ups into strategies such as aerial bombings (“Preventing a race in space“, IHT, May 14).

But the actual issue is the potential deployment of weapons not in outer space, rather here on the ground.

Nobody has the technology to build a spaceship Enterprise or a Battlestar Galactica. All we can do is send satellites into fixed orbits, and any change in height or inclination is very expensive.

An orbiting satellite is bound to follow a particular path eveybody can calculate in advance (and shoot at with arbitrary precision): more a sitting (or shall I say, circling) duck than the potential location for any kind of weaponry.