Expensive Access to Space has merit. Well, maybe? Hmm.

An interestng new point, but it appears that for a long time to come,
terrorists will have easier ways to distrupt society, while space-based
terrorism should be easier to counteract. In general, just about every
new technology can be used by terrorists. If we forgo progress
because of this threat, that in itself is a victory for terrorists.
-Michael Mautner

With so much of the US military advantage depending on
the multitude
of space systems it's deployed, I wonder if their is any
reticence
from military planners on the prospect of Cheap Access to
Space?

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/higher
_ground_0304
02.html

Consider how a genie unleashed is difficult to put back
in the
bottle.

In the 80's, the US supplied the Afghani Mujahadeen with
stinger
missiles so enable them to take down Soviet aircraft.
Last year, two
stinger missiles were fired at an El Al aircraft in
Kenya, and there
are palpatable fears of such missiles attacks on US
passenger
aircraft, so much so, that gov't funds have been
allocated to start
retrofitting passenger aircraft with flares and other
countermeasures.

Extrapolating from this one example, and I'm sure you can
come up
with others, to the CATS situation, consider a cheap
launch, perhaps
one that doesn't require a launch complex, and the
payload is a
kinetic weapon targeting US satellites. Poof! US military
supremacy
is taken down a notch.

Or, economic sabotage of commerical satellites. Terrorism
striking
the pocketbook rather than the lives of citizens.

If you were a policy maker would you encourage CATS? Your
own
budgets would benefit from lower launch costs, but you
would be
handing your enemies a stick to strike you with. You may
be intent
on keeping control of the technology, but I would bet
that once
available, other countries would also set up competing
concerns and
then proliferation of services would follow.

Would it be wiser to try to restrict access to space by
keeping it
expensive?

I hope this post gets a few responses!

TangoMan

of Service.Michael N. Mautner
Senior Research Fellow
Soil, Plant and Ecological Sciences Division
Lincoln University
Lincoln, New Zealand
Telephone (64) (3) 325-2811 ext 8352
Fax (64) (3) 325-3844
E-mail mautnerm@...

Senior Fellow
Department of Chemistry
University of Canterbury
Christchurch 8001
New Zealand
E-mail m.mautner@...