For the compltete report in the Times Online click on this link
America wants it all - life, the Universe and everything - by Bronwen Maddox
SPACE: no longer the final frontier but the 51st state of the United States. The new National Space Policy that President Bush has signed is comically proprietory in tone about the US’s right to control access to the rest of the solar system. The document makes a serious point about our growing dependence on satellites, the military threats to them and ways of protecting them. But America has rejected the desire by 160 other countries to have United Nations talks about banning an arms race in space, an extravagantly unilateral approach whose appeal you might have thought would have been tarnished by its experience in Iraq.
Its vision of the space programme, military more than scientific, is also undermined by its taste for manned missions — and the breathtaking cost.
The eyecatching declaration is that the US asserts the right to deny access to space to anyone “hostile to US interests”, although it gives no basis for that right. It also rejects arms control talks that would limit future US actions in space.
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