The empire strikes back

philip jacobson sees US space warfare return, two decades after Star Wars

Last week in Washington, the website of a little-known organisation called the US Office of Science and Technology Policy carried a low-key announcement about President George Bush signing an order that set out his administration's position on "freedom of action in space".

With the war in Iraq and the North Korea nuclear crisis dominating the headlines, this received relatively little play in the news media: since the moon landings, the final frontier has lost much of its former allure for the public.

Yet experts on the issue of deploying weapons beyond the earth's atmosphere were quick to interpret this new doctrine - the

first revision of US strategy for a decade - as a unilateral declaration of American hegemony.

And in far-flung corners of the world, those who noticed the announcement were aghast. "Now America wants it all," said the Asia Times. "The US is turning space into its personal colony."

The order makes it crystal clear that the US will deny access to outer space to anyone it classifies as "hostile to America's vital interests" - a definition not necessarily confined to the Axis of Evil club. Freedom of action in space, it adds, is considered to be as crucial to the US as conventional air and sea power. A spokesman for the National Security Council was happy to elaborate: "Space has become an even more important component of US economic, national and homeland security."

According to Michael Krepon