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7 March 2006 |
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http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?... |
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WASHINGTON, March 7 (UPI) -- The Bush administration is pushing ahead energetically with its space weapons program. The Pentagon's Fiscal Year 2007 (FY 07) budget request funds nearly a billion dollars in programs that could provide dual-use space weapons capabilities, according to a new joint-analysis by the World Security Institute's Center for Defense Information and the Henry L. Stimson Center. In the absence of a clear national strategy and policy on new military missions in outer space, the administration is funding these programs that would create "facts in orbit," the report says. These facts -- the development and testing of space weapon technologies and the deployment of dual-use systems without any codes of conduct or rules of the road for their operation -- will drive U.S. policy toward space weapons without a debate in either Congress or the public, it says. According to CDI Director Theresa Hitchens, one of the report's authors, "Congress must become more aware of these efforts, hidden in plain sight within the Pentagon's Byzantine budget request, and ensure that such programs do not go forward until a proper, in-depth and intergovernmental policy-making process, including congressional and public input, is concluded." Hitchens, Victoria Samson, CDI research analyst, and Michael Katz-Hyman, research assistant at the Henry L. Stimson Center, studied U.S. Air Force and Missile Defense Agency's budget requests and highlighted programs which merit further examination. Of most concern, they say, are the Missile Defense Agency's Space Test Bed and Near Field Infrared Experiment, or NFIRE, the Air Force's Experimental Satellite Series, known as XSS, the Autonomous Nanosatellite Guardian for Evaluating Local Space, known as ANGELS, and a new MDA Micro Satellite program.
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