A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
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Space... the final frontier... at least, it may be for NATO. But Joseph has some suspicions about what may be behind this latest attempt to expand NATO's remit:
NATO To Make Outer Space Next "Operational Domain"Space is essential to NATO’s defence and deterrence
Space is essential to NATO’s defence and deterrence
NATO Defence Ministers approve new space policy, discuss readiness and mission in Afghanistan
This was passed along by S.B., and it's definitely worth pondering. Most of the readership of this website is familiar with the USA's and Russia's remote viewing projects of the 1970s and 1980s. These projects were conducted in the greatest secrecy, and revealed some rather astonishing results, not the least of which was that humans possess, to varying degrees, a kind of natural faculty of being able to envision very remote locations and times simply by "tuning into" them according to certain carefully worked out protocols. There was nothing psychic or "occult" about it, but rather, it appeared to be a component of the natural rational faculty of human nature itself.
As is now known, the CIA sponsored a remote viewing of Mars in 1984, and here's the original document:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9.pdf
While the reviewer is not known according to the document, it is now assumed to be Joseph McMoneagle, one of the early and most successful of the US covert and secret remote viewing projects:
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vision_remota/esp_visionremota_35.htm
The initial coordinates given to McMoneagle were 40.89 degrees north and 9.55 degrees west on the planet Mars. This is where it gets interesting, because in the protocols of "coordinate remote viewing," the actual physical appearance of a site are not known to the viewer. All he or she is given is simply a set of coordinates, and then told to draw a picture, or describe what he or she sees there. What's remarkable about this set of coordinates is that the CIA was really asking McMoneagle to view the Cydonia region on Mars, home of the celebrated "Face" and "D&M Pyramid". McMoneagle described, as one can read, seeing not only pyramidal forms, but massive dust storms, and then very tall thin "people," a point in itself intriguing, for given Mars' much lower gravity than Earth, it is possible that its inhabitants, if any, might have been comparatively taller.
McMoneagle goes on to describe other pyramidal structures as structures from storms. He again describes a tall thin and ancient people, who realize their species is dying, and that it sent a group to look for another place to live, after a major cataclysm of some sort which he describes as "cosmic."
So why am I bothering you with this? After all, while interesting, it's only one document recording one such session. Beyond the transcript itself, we're told nothing of the session's specific protocols, nor if there were any follow-up sessions.
But I rather suspect my reasons for bringing this to the attention of the reader are evident: whatever one may think of such things as remote viewing, the fact that US intelligence was willing to resort to it as a means of space exploration means that in all likelihood this session was not a one-off, nor that McMoneagle was the only such viewer involved. In all likelihood, other viewers were tasked with viewing the same coordinates in the same time, and their results were probably not shared with the viewers, but correlated by those running the sessions. They could thus be used to determine landing sites and so on. And one may be relatively certain that similar experiments were being run in the Soviet Union, and in every other space program, as well.
But there's another possibility, one that surely must have occurred to those running these types of experiments, and that is suggested by the phenomenon of "coordinate viewing at a distance" of millions of miles, namely, that if there is a faculty in human nature permitting such things to be done, then that faculty may also hold the key to exotic means of propulsion as well. This implies that perhaps one reason that we're told the remote viewing program was "shut down" was simply that the program was not shut down, but rather, shunted into far more secret programs of research into exotic propulsion technologies.
Or to put it country simple: if it was part and parcel of a secret space program in 1984, you can bet your last nickel that it's a part of that secret space program now.
See you on the flip side...
This very important, and very intriguing, story was spotted and shared both by C.J.M. and G.B., and this one has my high octane speculation motor running in overdrive. The context? China wants to establish an Earth-Moon free trade zone that it estimates would net that country about $10 trillion in revenue. But there's something that caught my eye. Here's the Zero Hedge version of the story:
China To Establish $10 Trillion Economic Zone In Space
And by way of comparison, the RT version of the story:
Space economy: China wants to set up $10 trillion Earth-Moon economic zone
If one compares the RT vs Zero Hedge version of this story, one notes some rather significant omissions from the RT version. The question is, why. When one reads the Zero Hedge version, there are perhaps some hints, if one contemplates the implication of certain statements carefully:
... Beijing's next project to boost commerce is more ambitious than anything seen on earth before. Literally.
According to the Global Times, China plans to establish an Earth-moon space economic zone by 2050, which is expected to generate $10 trillion worth of services per year. The zone will cover areas of space near Earth, the moon and in between.
Bao Weimin, director of the Science and Technology Commission of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, revealed the ambitious plan at a seminar last week on the space economy, Chinese media reported Friday. CAST is a state-owned company focused on researching, making and launching carrier rockets, satellites, spacecraft and space stations.
Perhaps because by 2050 all of China will be one giant free trade zone (even though the US Trade war will still not be over), the proposed zone will cover areas of space near Earth, the moon and in between, Weimin said, adding that companies involved in basic industries, application exploration and development will feature at the zone, which will focus on three key fields: interspace transport, space resource detection and space-based infrastructure.
In a report on developing earth and moon space, Bao shared his thoughts on the economic potential in this field and pledged that the country would study its reliability, cost and flight-style transportation system between the Earth and moon, The Science and Technology Daily reported Friday.
He pledged to complete basic research and make a breakthrough on key technologies before 2030 and establish the transportation system by 2040. By 2050, China could successfully establish an earth-moon space economic zone, he said.
In other words, while the US contemplates a Green New Deal, China is set to counter with a "Space New Deal", which would likely cost tens of trillions too.
I've deliberately refrained from italicizing the two points that caught my eye, for the purpose of pointing out that there were indeed two points that caught my eye, and I'm wondering if they caught yours as well. Here is the relevant portion of the quotation again, this time with the emphasis on the two points:
In a report on developing earth and moon space, Bao shared his thoughts on the economic potential in this field and pledged that the country would study its reliability, cost and flight-style transportation system between the Earth and moon, The Science and Technology Daily reported Friday.
He pledged to complete basic research and make a breakthrough on key technologies before 2030 and establish the transportation system by 2040. By 2050, China could successfully establish an earth-moon space economic zone, he said.
In other words, while the US contemplates a Green New Deal, China is set to counter with a "Space New Deal", which would likely cost tens of trillions too. (Emphases added)
So in addition to costing trillions of dollars, China is studying the cost and "reliability," meaning the risk factors of such a trade zone. The implications of these statements is therefore rather stunning. Consider the cost-risk assessment angle alone. For China to be willing to invest such heavy long-term financial commitment, that will run to the trillions, must mean that on the positive-asset side of the balance sheet, there must be much "up there" both in terms of resources and commerce that outweighs any outlay. Ferdinand and Isabella did not invest massive amounts of their own money in Columbus on a lark: the dividends, they knew, far exceeded the outlay. The question is, what in terms of resources and more importantly, commerce, are the Chinese thinking about? Obviously, control of lunar resources for resale to terrestrial customers would be a huge monopoly, one requiring, incidentally, the minimalization of risk or threats to that commerce from any other party, requiring therefore a similar commitment to studying and developing the means of deep space protection of that trade, i.e., China's plans require the weaponization of space. But does China have in mind a free trade zone for "non-terrestrial" customers? Perhaps...
But there's something else about that cost-risk assessment that caught my eye, and that was Mr. Bao's pledge to "make a breakthrouogh on key technologies before 2030," and that strongly suggests that China is looking at transport technologies other than chemical or even nuclear rockets, for after all, those things, for all the sophistication that technology can bring to them, remain essentially risky technologies; they're prone to failure, open to sabotage, tend to blow up on launch pads, and so on. Additionally, the return cargoes they can carry are small. Some other method is needed, and that will require "a breakthrough on key technologies."
So China has from one point of view admitted it has its own "secret space program," one investigating more exotic methods of propulsion, and additionally, it's literally and to coin a pun banking on those technologies. In this respect, it's essential to recall that a few years ago China did its own successful test of the so-called electromagnetic or microwave drive. Perhaps in their experiments they obtained certain results that they are not sharing. Maybe, for example, they modified that EM microwave field by rotating it... who knows? But one does not spend trillions to make trillions in an Earth-Moon free trade zone, just on chemical rockets...
See you on the flip side...
V.T. spotted this one, and it's one of those articles that make you go "hmmm...". In my case, I'm not only going "hmmm," but my suspicion meter is into the red zone bordering on purple. But we'll get back to today's high octane speculative suspicion in a moment.
The article concerns itself with recently discovered "co-orbital objects" which have at least one scientist wondering if they might be "extraterrestrial probes" put in place to monitor us:
Newly Discovered “Co-Orbital Objects” Could Be Extraterrestrial Probes Watching Us
The article begins by noting the anomaly:
The Facts: A recently published paper by Physicist Dr James Benford in the Astronomical Journal hypothesizes that newly discovered near-Earth objects (there are many thousands) might be a hub for extraterrestrial 'probes' to monitor the human race.
It goes on to offer this:
Physicist Dr James Benford, a member of SETI, recently published a paper hypothesizing that we are perhaps being monitored. The study was published in the Astronomical Journal.
There are many who share this belief, including former Senator Mike Gravel, who said in an interview that ‘Something is monitoring the planet, and they Are monitoring it very cautiously.’ I personally believe that our race has been known about for a very long time and we are indeed being monitored by an extraterrestrial presence. Why? Well, perhaps the planet is more important than we are. Perhaps we are a threat to others and the planet? There are a number of different scenarios one could hypothesize.
Dr. Norman Bergrun, a scientist and engineer who was part of NASA’s voyager program and worked at NASA for decades at the Ames Research Centre, made it a clear point in his book, “Ringmakers of Saturn” to emphasize that these objects (which are intelligently controlled, according to him, by extraterrestrials) have probably been around much longer than we have. He also states that if there was any ill intent towards our planet, something probably would have happened by now .He also worked at Lockheed Martin where he managed the Polaris missile tests. Unfortunately, he recently passed. I was lucky enough to receive a copy of his book from one of his family members.
I share the belief that if there was any ill intent or that the ET presence represented some sort of threat, something would have already happened by now.
And toward the beginning of the article we get the usual "disclosure spin":
On the other hand, we have a great deal of information that has yet to hit the mainstream alluding to the fact that we, or at least some of us, know for a fact that we are not alone, and have been privy to the evidence suggesting that we have been visited in the past, and are being visited now.
This evidence comes in the form of witness testimony from astronauts like Dr. Edgar Mitchell, for example, who has told the world on multiple occasions that deep within the Department of Defense and the Military Industrial Complex, it’s well known that we are being visited and have been visited, and that a massive cover-up has been on going for a number of years. Dr. Brian O’Leary is another great example of an astronaut who has spoken out. There have been multiple insider leaks, as well as academicians and hundreds of high ranking military personnel from around the world who have also said the same thing.
...
Louis Elizondo, a former high ranking Department of Defense official and part of the TTSA academy that released multiple videos of UFOs from the Navy (which the Navy recently confirmed were real) has said that he believes these objects are extraterrestrial, but officially, they’ve purposefully stayed away from this question because a lot of people have “feelings” towards it.
Needless to say, I have problems with all of this kind of analysis, and that's the subject of today's high octane suspicion. In case you haven't noticed, there's been a slight "uptick" in this type of UFO reportage lately, even in the lamestream media. No less than the New York Times, for example, reported on the Louis Elizondo story, with its accompanying videos and pictures. Color me skeptical simply for the reason that we have known " connections between that paper, and between Elizondo, and that "community", and everyone knows that the the intelligence "community" doesn't lie, right? And as for Mitchell and O'Leary, we have a similar epistemological problem, for as astronauts they are connected to the government, and this government has never lied about anything, right, with maybe the exception of the JFK assassination, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the BCCI scandal, Iran Contra, the financial meltdown and bailouts, the missing trillions of dollars, and a few other minor things. So if tomorrow the government would suddenly "come clean" and announce the presence of ET, why should anyone believe them on this one issue? (And there's that pesky problem mentioned by Richard C. Hoagland in his book Dark Mission, that there are indicators that the Apollo astronauts may have been deliberately subjected to some sort of mind and memory manipulation. And those techniques and technologies certainly exist and did exist at the time. But I digress.)
My other problem is one which I've addressed previously, and that is the assumption that the "visitors" pose no threat. If they were a class III civilization on the Kardashev scale, probably not. But if class I or II, then maybe they do, especially if one factors in my speculations that humanity has already achieved the ability to engineer systems on planetary and perhaps even stellar scales. If that's the case, then one might be looking at a kind of "interplanetary" version of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Don't get me wrong: if the ancient cosmic war hypothesis, and its corollary, the ancient Versailles Template hypothesis, is true, then it stands to reason the victors would establish a network to "watch" the planet and its scrappy inhabitants to make sure they don't break out of the quarantine-demilitarized zone around some celestial version of the demilitarized Rhineland. And while we're speculating, there's also always the possibility that "they", like some celestial France, have simply grown tired and too weary to confront the upstarts across the river.
See you on the flip side...
There's a school of thought out there that has been gaining some traction in the past few years, and it's time to pay attention to it. That school of thought thinks that (1) the future of humanity is in space, and that we must "go to the stars", and (2) in order to do so, we need not only (a) exotic new technologies, things like ion propulsion, warp drives, "anti-gravity" and so on, but also (b) a fundamental "enhancement" or modification of the humans destined to do so. It is point (2(b)) with which we are concerned today. It could, perhaps, be argued that this point is the fusion of the transhumanist agenda with that of space. It's important to distinguish what's going on here, between the "technology traditionalists" - and I would definitely number myself in that camp - and the "transhumanist space explorers", which are newcomers in a certain sense to the debate on space.
For the "technology traditionalists", the idea of a sustainable and permanent human presence in space and an interplanetary extension of that presence is not possible without the achievement of exotic propulsion and artificial environment technologies. As I've stated on many occasions, chemical rockets and tiny little "space capsules" simply are not going to be adequate to the job. If you've wondered why, with all the talk of missions to Mars and space hotels and asteroid mining and returning to the Moon, nothing is ever actually accomplished towards those ends of any real practical nature, this is why, and everyone in the space agencies from India, to China, Russia, Japan, and NASA knows it. This is why NASA has a whole division investigating exotic propulsion technologies, including the idea of warp drives. In fact, as I've indicated on a number of occasions and blogs, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has made it a goal that the USA be "warp capable" in a century.
But the newer approach is that which I'm calling the "transhumanist space explorers," who admit the need for all the exotic propulsion, but who are also arguing that a sustained and permanent human presence in space requires not just the exotic technological modifications of our ideas of propulsion and space travel, artificial environments, life support, habitats, and so on, but also of the human being himself. It is this meme that one sees increasingly being argued and advanced in recent years, and the following article shared by G.L.R. can be seen as a kind of summary of this school of thought:
Why Human Enhancement is Necessary for Successful Human Deep-space Missions
The opening abstract says it all:
The principal challenges lie in current space technology and engineering which includes the protection of astronauts from the hazards of working and living in the space environment. These challenges may lead to a paradoxical situation where progress in space technology and the ability to ensure acceptable risk/benefit for human space exploration becomes dissociated and the rate of scientific discovery declines. In this paper, we discuss the predominant challenges of the space environment for human health and argue that development and deployment of a human enhancement policy, initially confined to astronauts – for the purpose of future human space programmes is a rational solution to these challenges. (Emphases added)
And there's much context to suggest that the authors of this paper - Konrad Szocik and Martin Braddock - may have something quite fundamental and perhaps "drastic" in mind:
In this paper, we argue that human astronauts should be augmented for deep-space mission at the pre-launch stage in an alternative way from that offered by space agencies today. Current procedures include the inclusion of countermeasures such as diet, exercise, pharmaceuticals and anti-radiation shielding. Pharmaceutical efficacy may be limited to missions which are not longer than 2 years which may challenge a human mission to Mars which may last about 3 years. Astronaut augmentation may include a human enhancement programme based in part on genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics and cognitive science adaptation (Roco and Bainbridge 2003, Chien and Wagstaff 2017, Gao and Chien 2017). If we assume that the space environment may require enhancement of future astronauts, it is essential to ensure a clear rationale1 for doing so as sending astronauts to such a hostile environment without consideration of appropriate countermeasures is unethical. Accepting that enhancement is a necessity, and assuming a favourable cost–benefit analysis, parameters such as invasiveness, reversibility or heritability must be considered. This will take into account long-term effects such as the risk of irreversibility of enhancements.
THe authors then discuss various methods of achieving this 'enhancement', including genetic modification, pharmaceutical enhancement of cognitive abilities, and so on. And lest the extent of their idea is not understood, toward the end of their article they state this:
What types of artificial capabilities could or should be applied to astronauts in future? One of the most desirable capacities in space may be living without a life support system. This opportunity would require breathing unaided in the Martian atmosphere but as terraforming appears even more challenging than previously thought, the only currently achievable solution is the life support system, at either an individual level or a population level such as in a biosphere.
In the final analysis, what their paper is really arguing is that space affords the opportunity to "enhance" humanity - that it to say, modify it so fundamentally - that one may question whether or not the result remains human. Indeed, from their point of view, it is an ethical requirement. One can easily see how the whole transhumanist-alchemical agenda of crawling back up the ladder from animal, to vegetable, to mineral man could be rationalized by an appeal to the necessity for it in order for humans to function in space: need to function in a radiation rich environment? modify the human genome by splicing in the genes of those plants and bacteria that actually feed on radiation; need a stable food supply? Splice in the genes responsible for photosynthesis in plants (and thereby make "green men"). Need to be able to expand cognitive function and inter-personal communications? Make the perfect cyborg-human with built-in bio-computer interfaces, chip the brain. Need to be able to make quick surgical repair of damaged cells and body parts? Fill the lymph and circulatory system with nanobots able to do so, and so on.
Ok, maybe so. But where is today's trademark high octane speculation? Well, for one thing, we've heard this story before. In fact, we've heard it thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - of years ago. The wars of the "gods" or of the angels and demons might not be mere metaphor, but an actual physical cosmic reality. Those ancient texts also say something else: we once lived a whole lot longer. And they also say something else yet again: that at some point, those gods or angels or demons, came down from their heavenly perch and mixed and mingled with us, and some would argue that we were genetically "tinkered with", and that we(or at least, some of us), now, are the result of that experiment. So the real question, for those lending credence to such ideas, is this: were those ancient "enhancements" made for precisely the same purpose, to permit a permanent "human" interplanetary presence? Or, conversely, were they made by the "interplanetary powers that were" to prevent it?
See you on the flip side...
India, as regular readers of this website are aware, is making a huge push to become a "space power" in recent years, having successfully made no less than 28 launches in a week, a few months ago. Stop and think about simply the management and logistical problems associated with doing so many (successful) launches in such a short time, even for a country like India with some of the finest scientists and mathematicians in the world. Messages were definitely being sent with that accomplishment, namely, that India can put a bunch of stuff up in space - in, say, an emergency - if it has to.
But like Israel, it recently lost, then (unlike Israel) found again, a lunar lander - Vikram - which it was attempting to land near the south pole of the Moon. As it turns out, there are a few things about this that are a little "puzzling," and as one might guess, they're the subject of today's high octane speculation. For one thing, nations other than the US, China, and Russia seem to be having a spot of trouble getting their landers down safely on Luna. Israel, for example, recently lost its lunar probe. But in the case of India's Vikram, all sorts of things have me wondering. For example, the selection of the south pole, ostensibly because it is looking for water strongly suspected to be there in craters, in the form of ice. But I have to wonder if there were possibly some other explanations for India's interest.
For example: recall NASA's "L-CROSS" mission a few years ago. Remember that one? NASA built up a lot of public hype about the fact that it intended to deliberately crash the L-CROSS near the south pole of the Moon, and we were all led to believe that the impact would be so great that one could see it "live" from the Earth, the message being "get out your telescopes and binoculars and cook the popcorn, this is going to be big fun!" Sure enough, L-CROSS slammed into the Moon alright, but... next to nothing, and certainly nothing visible from the Earth. But there was an unusual signature, that of something that had broken through a hard surface only to encounter empty space below. That, anyway, was the explanation of the alternative research field's well-known space and science analyst Richard C. Hoagland, who posted an extensive analysis of the (non-) event on his website, enterprisemission.com. To make a very long analysis and story short, what Mr. Hoagland argued was that the impact did not have nearly the visibility that it would have had had it impacted something solid, rather than something with an empty space beneath it. Later, it was discovered that all sorts of unusual stuff had been kicked up by the impact as well. And, lest we forget, Mr. Hoagland thought it extremely unusual and perhaps significant that "L-CROSS" may have had a sinister significance, for if one "crosses" four "L's" one gets... a swastika. So that provides a bit of a context for why, perhaps, India wanted to land its Vikram lander in the region... perhaps it was intending to explore for the possibilities of hollow spaces - caverns or other structures beneath the surface. Indeed, it rather strains the imagination to think that India was not aware of more than a little strangeness about NASA's L-CROSS mission.
Which brings us to Vikram itself. As most now know, India lost contact with the lander during its final descent phase, and then later discovered that its probe had indeed landed, but that it was probably not in any shape for them to make contact with it. Prime Minister Mohdi then appeared at a press conference with the project's head, when he made a point, on camera, to turn to the gentleman, hug him warmly, and tell him that it was not his fault. We'll get back to the idea that Mr. Mohdi may possibly have been sending messages with that statement. But first, J.H. spotted this graph of the lander's descent, and passed it along to me:
The comment accompanying this graph in the email said it all: "Fascinating amount of 'hang time'" for the last portion of Vikram's descent. Indeed, less than a kilometer from the lunar surface, apparently all contact was lost, and the Vikram crashed into the surface. "It's not your fault."
Now, before I crawl way out past the end of the high octane speculation twig once again, and speculate far beyond any publicly available evidence, take a look at this story shared by K.B.:
Orbiter has spotted Vikram lander, signals elusive: Isro
Consider for a moment the implication of the article, that India is somewhat optimistic about picking up the Vikram's transponder signal, and is trying to establish communications with the probe, even though it does not know the exact condition of the probe. Then consider this story shared by M.W.:
US Air Force Begins 2019 Space Wargame
Firstly, note this from the end of the article:
The scenario depicts a notional peer competitor seeking to achieve strategic goals by exploiting multi-domain operations.
Additionally, the scenario also includes a full spectrum of threats across diverse, multi-domain operating environments to challenge civilian and military leaders, planners and space system operators, as well as the capabilities they employ, Air Force officials said.
The Schriever Wargame 19 team is conducting this wargame on behalf of Air Force Space Command, which is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Last year's Schriever Wargame, which also took place at Maxwell Air Force Base, lasted two weeks.
And then note this curious thing about the author of the article:
Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
As one might imagine, the timing of this wargame, of this drill, to coincide with the landing of India's lunar probe near the south lunar pole - site of NASA's L-CROSS (non-) event - I find more than a little curious. In fact, you can call me crazy, but I think it's downright suspicious. As many people in the alternative research field have pointed out, drills or wargames are often used to cloak or piggy-back very real operations. Think only of 9/11. Then there's the fact that the author of the article, Leonard David, wrote a book on the new space race to the Moon. Couple that with the drill's ostensible purpose of depicting "a notional peer competitor" (like India, maybe?), and you get the idea.
Or to put it country simple: was this first wargame/drill of the US Space Command used to cloak an actual "take-out" of India's lunar probe? Possibly, for there is that graph of Vikram's descent, where everything appears to be going fine until the last kilometer or so, when India loses contact. And then there's Prime Minister Mohdi's public statement and behavior to the head of India's space agency: "I know it's not your fault." Perhaps Mr. Mohdi wasn't merely making a public show of support for his space agency's chief, but also sending a message: it was someone else's fault.
See you on the flip side...
There's a strange article out of Australia that a regular reader, J.D., shared, and it has my mind working at the end of the high octane speculation twig. The story concerns Australia and its space program. Normally, most people don't think of Australia as a country with much of an interest in space, nor infrastructure to sustain a large space program. We'll get back to that point in a moment, but just for the record, Australia, like most of the Allied countries in World War Two, made off with some Nazi technological loot in the form of a few V-2 rockets. So the interest has always been there. In the period after the war, Australia was the place chosen by Great Britain to test its independently developed a-bombs and later, h-bombs. More recently, there is quiet discussion in Australia about developing its own nuclear weapons, but that's another story for another time. The point of all this context is simply this: while the space infrastructure might be small, the talent pool is not, and things might be set for that small infrastructure to expand in coming years, and dramatically so. Again, we'll get back to that. Here's the story that J.D. caught and passed along:
Space jobs goal 'realistic' despite inclusion of lawyers, submarine builders and NBN workers
What caught my eye in this article and set me off on my trek to the end of the high octane speculation twig, was this:
Australia's fledgling space agency has "actually been noticed" by the international community, according to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
But questions remain over whether Australia can meets its goal of trebling jobs within the local space sector inside a decade.
Mr Morrison revealed the Australian Space Agency featured in talks with UK and Italian counterparts at the G7 meeting in France overnight.
He said he was "thrilled" and that there was a "keenness" from the United Kingdom and Italy to engage.
The Agency's goal is to add 20,000 jobs to the space sector (estimated to currently employ 10,000 people) by 2030. (Emphasis added)
This little bit of news - that the United Kingdom and Italy - expressed an interest in Australia's space agency during the recent G7 summit caught my eye, for those two countries are of course the two countries most at odds with Berlin ...er... the European Union. Recent events in Italy might change that in the short term, as the leader of the M5s party has entered into negotiations with the Democratic party to form a new coalition with (you guessed it) recently retired prime minister Giuseppi Conte as the prime minister. In the long term, however, if there is a return to the policies of Berlin Brussels, that government, I suspect, will not be long for the world, even for an Italian government. Which leaves Italy once again with the problem of with whom to do business, and what kinds of business it wants to do. Space is a natural choice, and if Italy does leave the EU, or modifies its commitments to it, its participation in the European Space Agency my be modified. In other words, in or out of the EU, Italy needs to not put all of its space eggs in one basket. Enter Australia.
Then there's the United Kingdom, and the new Johnson Government. As I will review in the News and Views from the Nefarium, Mr. Johnson has requested that the Crown suspend parliament in order to prevent any last minute law-making which would prevent a hard Brexit on October 31st. This the Queen has done. Mr. Johnson has reiterated his commitment to move forward with Brexit and demonstrated it by his request (though, as I shall mention in my News and Views, I suspect there might be some factors in play that run a bit counter to the public narrative). A hard Brexit would mean the departure of Great Britain from the European Space Agency, and for the British aerospace industry, a replacement has to be found. Prior to the Brexit referendum, I predicted that if indeed British voters approved a Brexit, that the response would be to revivify the Commonwealth in the form of a trading (and cultural) bloc, and this appears to be what might be behind these talks. So herewith a small prediction: look for Australia to beef up its space program - and especially its satellite launching capability - with bi-lateral trade and technology deals, and particularly with Britain. Italy, I suspect, will come along eventually.
Hovering in the background here, of course, is China, and from the geopolitical point of view, Australia needs that expansion of its own independent space capability, which such agreements could provide. If and when Trudeau's government falls in Canada, watch for some interesting meetings on space matters to take place between the big three of the Commonwealth: the U.K., Australia, and Canada.
See you on the flip side...
There's more space news out folks, courtesy of this story shared by K.M. And it's very intriguing space news at that, because France has announced that it plans to deploy satellites armed with powerful lasers to protect French space-based assets, and this comes shortly after the French President announced the formation of a French space force:
France to launch ‘fearsome’ satellites ‘armed with powerful lasers’ into space
There's more than meets the eye behind these lines:
It sounds like something out of a James Bond adventure, but France is to launch satellites armed with ‘powerful lasers’ into space.
The French Defense Minister Florence Parly said France was not being sucked into an arms race - and insisted the satellites would only be used to defend French space vehicles.
She said that the creation of a new French ‘space command’ announced by the president was central to a strategy to bolster defense capabilities, rather than offensive.
'If we want to be able to carry out real military operations in space, then we need to develop the ability to act alone,' Parly said, speaking at the Lyon-Mont Verdun air base.
'We reserve the right and the means to be able to respond: That could imply the use of powerful lasers deployed from our satellites or from patrolling nano-satellites.' (Emphasis added)
The rationale here is almost exactly the same as that behind President De Gaulle's decision to develop an independent French thermonuclear and strategic missile capability back in the late 1950s, the so-called force de frappe: France, if it was to remain truly sovereign and independent, and not subject to the dictates of Moscow or, more importantly, Washington, had to have the capability to "act alone" (to quote the current article) and to possess the "right and the means to be able to respond" (to quote the current article once again). As a result, France, which could not destroy either country "several times over" did develop the capability - which it still has, incidentally - to deal a crushing and perhaps fatal blow to both. It was the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine, French-style.
Something similar is operating here, particularly in the light of Mr. Trump's announcement of an American space force.
But there's something else operating, and it's even more important. Recently Europe completed a build out of its own financial clearing system independently of the American-dominated SWIFT system based (conveniently enough) in Brussels. Russia and China have been putting the final touches on their own system, and the Japanese of course have a clearing system in widespread use in the western Pacific, think of it as their World War Two "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," version 2.0. All of these clearing systems are heavily reliant upon space-based communications assets, and they need to be defended. The real question is, defended from whom? The answer, given recent opposition to American unipolarism, is that they need to be defended from American space-based weapons.
So where's the high octane speculation here? So far, there isn't any. These countries are acting in their national interests, and that's to be expected. The real question, in France's case, is whether this capability is to be included in the common European military that Paris and Berlin have signaled they want to create. That remains to be seen, but with the integration a few years ago of large French and German defense contractors (See: German, French defense companies to merge) it could be that this is another step in military integration. If not - and time alone will tell - then one can expect similar moves from the other European powers to create their own space forces.
Again, there's no high octane speculation here. So what, exactly, is my high octane speculation about all of this development of other systems of international financial clearing, with their inevitably corollary, the development of space forces to protect them? To understand my high octane speculation concerning all of this, one has to ignore the Earth-based geopolitics behind it all, and look at the development whole, and independently of that geopolitics. When one does so, an intriguing picture emerges, for what is being built out is redundancy in international financial clearing, with European, Russo-Chinese, and Japanese systems being added to the American-dominated SWIFT system. Four levels of redundancy. If, for whatever reason, the SWIFT system is taken out, three others remain to step into the void. And building out such redundancy - and the means to protect them - is exactly what one would do if one were trying to protect those planetary systems from interdiction by "someone else." In other words, what I am suggesting is that terrestrial geopolitical motivations for doing so, while legitimate, might not be the only nor the deepest reason for doing so. I'm reminded of the observation of the late Colonel Philip Corso in his well-known book The Day After Roswell, where he stated that the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine which lay behind the massive themonuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War (not to mention the nuclear stockpiles of the United Kingdom, France, China, and later India and Pakistan) was as much about deterring that "someone else" as it was about deterring each other. And while we're thinking along these lines, lasers may be adequate for defending satellites or taking others out. But the real question left unanswered in the French announcement is the frequency range of those satellite-based lasers. Might this be a cover for lasers operating in the gamma-ray range of the spectrum, for GRASERS? (Gamma-ray lasers). If so, then we're looking at a defensive capability that could easily become an offensive capability, and a potentially strategic one at that.
If that sounds like science fiction, then recall Reagan's "Star Wars" concept, and the fact that the USA at the time was talking about x-ray lasers, which would have required a nuclear explosion in space to create the x-rays to be cohered into a laser beam. The rumor at the time was that when Dr. Edward Teller phoned the White House after a nuclear underground test, he was phoning to inform Reagan that the concept had worked. The only problem with the idea was, of course, that such weapons were "one shot" affairs. But then an effect - the Mossbauer effect - was discovered that under certain conditions of acoustic stress, certain materials could be made to cohere x-rays and gamma rays into a laser beam... over and over again.
So, yes, I do suspect that behind all the denials that satellite based lasers are purely for defense, that they're not talking about lasers of any ordinary type, and that the real goal is to put weapons in space capable of an offensive and strategic use, zapping asteroids, or whatever (or whoever) else may come wandering into the neighborhood.
The USA and the Russian Federation have already made "space force" announcements, and now France has joined the club. And yes, I'm walking right off the end of the twig of speculation to say that this tends to confirm my view that this may be as much about what may be going on "out there" as it is about what's going on "down here."
See you on the flip side...
This story was spotted by many readers here, and passed along to me, and for good reason, because that internet of things just took another gigantic step, for Chinese scientists have now successfully teleported an electron from the ground to a satellite 300 miles up in space:
Before you start having visions of "beaming up to the Enterprise" and the goofy Gramscian empire-disguised-as-a-federation that it represents, the real import here, as the story relates, are the implications for a "quantum based internet" all based on the principles of entanglement, and if I may add, non-locality.
The real implications here are thus not for any "just around the corner" Star Trek fantasias, but rather for communications, security, and most importantly, secure financial clearing, for what the article is not telling you is that the Chinese have also been successful in similar photon-quantum entanglement experiments and "teleporting" them into space, sending and receiving them accurately 900 out of 900 times. Ponder that one, for it means there's (1) no signal to noise problem, (2) no attenuation of the signal, (3) no loss of data, and most importantly, (4) is utterly secure, for in the wonderful world of entanglement, one must know the exact waveform of the entanglement taking place. This mathematical description thus also functions as a kind of "encryption-decryption" key, making such communication methods much more secure than their current counterparts. Or at least, that's the theory (I remain skeptical of the claim for the simple reason that humans inevitably find ways around things, including the most secure bank vault. But that's a speculation for another time.)
The implications of that in turn are profound, for in a world where data, communications, and financial clearing are moving to space-based platforms, security and accurate data transmission are the key, and whoever cracks the problem first will dominate the future commercial and financial world; if you're planning to mine asteroids, or have a global currency or even several regional currencies, the advantage will accrue to that power which establishes those secure quantum networks. That "key" thus functions, in the emerging world, in a way analogous to the way navies have functioned in relationship to reserve currencies thus far: the country with the most powerful navy has been the country whose currency has reserve currency status. Entanglement permits not only the secure and accurate transmission of data, but also its rapid transmission.
But now, as always, let's crawl to the end of the twig of high octane speculation, and speculate wildly beyond the evidence. We're in Wile E. Coyote territory here, suspended above a chasm, arms and legs flailing, with nothing beneath us but, perhaps, an animated "kerplop" waiting for us at the end of our fall. As the article avers, the Chinese have now managed to "teleport" an electron, a thing, no matter how small or tiny in mass, from one point to another. We know the progression from our elementary school physics days (that is, if they're still teaching anything about physics in our schools): electrons, protons, neutrons, then atoms themselves, then molecules... you get the picture: the next steps in the technology tree, as we step from photons to electrons in our entanglement-teleportation experiments, will be the other sub-atomic particles, and from there (if successful), to whole atoms, then to molecules, then to... once again, you get the picture. And as I've said, if you plan to mine asteroids and have any sort of permanent presence in deep space, then chemical rockets are not - I repeat - simply are not adequate nor cost-effective to the job. The German physicist Burckhart Heim recognized this decades ago, and hence, one needs a "breakthrough" of some sort - a "warp drive" or a teleportation technology, or both - to make it genuinely practical and cost effective and (note) fraught with much less risk.
Which brings me back to the subject of yesterday's blog, and the story of an AI at Lawrence Livermore (no space-related connections there! [Cough]) that has been tasked with combing through old scientific papers looking for forgotten or anomalous data and concepts. I don't know about you, but it's a safe bet that one of the things it might be programmed to look for are clues that might help solve some of those entanglement/teleportation and "warp drive" mysteries, mysteries which might be solved by some sort of exotic matter, which, let us recall, was also one of the areas that the Livermore AI was also looking in: materials science.
See you on the (kerplop) flip side...
Yes you read that headline correctly: it's "Exploring Psyche" not "Exploring the Psyche" and if you're wondering what the big deal is, Psyche is the name of that iron-and-nickel asteroid whose estimated value is, according the the article linked below, $10,000 quadrillion dollars, or to put it differently, ten quintillion dollars, that's $10,000,000,000,000,000,ooo. But there's more.
When G.P. sent this article to me, the accompanying email stated: "I'm sensing an emerging theme!" Indeed, there is:
NASA readies mission to explore $10,000 QUADRILLION asteroid Psyche
Yes, it's official: NASA plans to launch a probe to the asteroid in 2022, and the reason we're given is the usual "we need to find out more about how the universe was formed, how planets were formed," &c &c, in other words, the usual scientific boilerplate.
The value of all the nickel and iron that NASA believes makes up 16-Psyche’s oddly-shaped space rock in the asteroid belt’s outer reaches is estimated at $10,000 quadrillion. This is a massive sum, but NASA’s Psyche mission, which has now received approval to enter the final development stages before manufacturing begins for its 2022 launch, is actually after a much bigger prize – revealing how Earth's origins. NASA researchers believe asteroid Psyche is key to understanding how planetary bodies are formed.
This boilerplate appears directly below a video purporting to show the asteroid. If one looks at the the video one notices a few "odd things" about that asteroid: square "craters", double craters, deep fissures, and so on. The video, is of course, an "artist's" rendering, but even that is suggestive that NASA might know about more about the asteroid than they're letting on. After all, NASA does stand for Never A Straight Answer.
But then there's this suggestive comment:
This is because the space scientists theorise Psyche is really the core of a planet which broke apart following a succession of apocalyptic collisions.
NASA experts hope they can observe the solar system’s distant past, when protoplanet encounters created Earth and destroyed other would-be terrestrial planets. (Emphasis added)
In other words, NASA is maintaining something that will look familiar to readers of my books (in particular, The Giza Death Star Destroyed and The Cosmic War), for if Psyche is the "core of a planet" which "broke apart" following "a succession of apocalyptic collisions" then that means there was once a planet in this solar system that Psyche was the core of. In short, NASA has now endorsed Dr. Van Flandern's "Exploded Planet Hypothesis." Interestingly, NASA has adopted the "catastrophe" model as the explanation for that explosion: a collision. This catastrophe model is made more explicit in the next sentence, that this all happened "when protoplanet encounters Created Earth and destroyed other would-be terrestrial planets." That too, is a backhanded admission that there were other "would-be" terrestrial planets. And while they're not saying it, you know what they're thinking: Mars.
So let's continue our journey to the end of the twig of high octane speculation. For those familiar with the "Philadelphia Experiment" story, the whole thing began when one Carlos Allende bought and read a copy of early Ufologist and astronomer Dr Morris K. Jessup's book, The Case for the UFO. Allende marked his copy of Jessup's book with marginalia written with various pens and in colored inks, and then mailed this along with a letter outlining his alleged experiences with the Philadelphia Experiment to Dr. Jessup and to the US Navy. To make a very long story short (for the fuller story one may consult my book Secrets of the Unified Field: The Philadelphia Experiment, the Nazi Bell, and the Discarded Theory), the Navy had a special edition of Jessup's book along with Allende's marginalia printed up by the Varo Company in Garland, Texas, and this became known as the "Varo Edition" of Jessup's book. This was then distributed to various people within the US black projects world. Significantly, I believe that one of the recipients of this edition was Dr.Wernher von Braun (again, see my Secrets of the Unified Field for the larger story.) What concerns us here is that one of Allende's marginal notes referred to an ancient interplanetary war fought in this solar system, and to the "great bombardment", which the context makes clear that Allende believed was fought by "the gods" hurling asteroids at each other. In other words, that ancient catastrophism was not natural, but the result of technology.
In other words, NASA is opening a very wide door with its reference to catastrophism and destroyed planets. And in doing so, it cannot be ignorant of Dr. van Flandern's original proposals for mechanisms of why a planet in the asteroid belt's orbit would suddenly break apart or explore. Those models, readers of my book The Cosmic War will recall, included a nuclear reaction in the core of the planet (which Dr. van Flandern was uncomfortable with), to a matter-antimatter reaction (which he is even more uncomfortable with), to the use of advanced technology in an experiment that "went wrong", and then, finally, "deliberate action," in other words, a war. Not mentioned by van Flandern is the idea of a bunch of rovering planetoids colliding with each other. The reason for his lack of mentioning of that model is, I highly suspect, is that the celestial mechanics doesn't appear to work, for in his model, it is precisely the explosion of that planet that created the conditions of the rovering planetoids of the asteroid belt and comets, not the other way around.
NASA, of course, won't go to "great bombardments" or van Flandern's "deliberate action" just yet, but with the apparent endorsement of the catastrophism model, they've opened the door to the question of what type of catastrophe it was, natural, or deliberate, and by going to Pysche, I suspect that their real motivation is to find out which, though they'd never admit that now.
See you on the flip side...
Now, before we get started on this one, I have a confession: I wasn't originally going to blog about this story at all. What changed my mind was the fact that so many regular contributors of articles here noticed the story, and passed it along. Clearly, something about it had the readers of this website exercised, and as you may or may not know, when I get large "pattern trends" of emails focusing on a story, I usually do blog about it. So, with a thank you to all of you who sent this story along, let's get started.
Scientists are now confirming that there's a strange mass anomaly under the moon's south pole, and they're attributing it to an iron-and-nickel rich asteroid that crashed into the planet approximately three billion years ago:
Huge mystery blob found under the moon's far side
What is the massive thing under the Moon’s surface?
As the first article notes, mass anomalies have been observed on the Moon since the 1960s, and they are usually associated with craters:
The data give a loose picture of what's happening both on the surface and underground. The more mass there is, like higher topography or denser rocks, the stronger the gravity. These maps highlight a striking difference between most of the moon's large craters and the South Pole-Aitken basin.
Other large craters have what are known as mascons, short for mass concentrations. Discovered in 1968 by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mascons show up in gravity maps as bullseyes—a central circle of strong gravity surrounded by a ring of weak gravity and then another ring of stronger gravity. The phenomenon is a consequence of the way low-density crust and high-density mantle adjust after an impact.
The trouble is, this mass anomaly at the South lunar pole is much bigger than previously thought. In fact, it's some 1500 miles wide. According to the second article, the real problemis not just it's size, but what it is:
"Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That's roughly how much unexpected mass we detected." That's Peter B. James of Baylor University talking about a gigantic anomaly found beneath the Moon's surface. He's the lead author of a study published in Geophysical Research Letters describing the odd find. There are a few theories about what it could be.
The thing sits beneath the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin, believed to be the largest intact crater in our solar system. The oval-shaped feature is thought to be about 4 billion years old, and it's big: about 2,000 kilometers across at some points.
Here's where it gets interesting, for in speculating on what it may be, the second article lists a number of possibilities:
The two most likely theories are that it's the iron-nickel core of a long-ago asteroid impact, or that it's a leftover clump of dense oxides from the cooling of the Moon's magma. Or, sure, a giant spaceship or hidden underground civilization, ahem.
It's that last joking possibility that, I suspect, was the center of everyone's attention on this story, and it is a strange thing to mention in an otherwise serious but somewhat dull article about asteroid impacts on the Moon. By mentioning it - even as a joke - I'm sure it was intended to draw people like me to it to speculate about it like flies to honey.
OK, I'm game; I'll bite and speculate. Consider the following timeline:
(1) From roughly February of 1994 to May of 1995, the USA's Clementine mission orbited the Moon, busily snapping pictures for the first complete photogrammetric mapping of that planet since the early days of the space race. Notably, Clementine was a joint mission of NASA and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the re-named institution that was initially President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. In other words, Clementine was a military mission, and given the nature of the sensors and mapping it did, plus the fact of its name - "Clementine" - recalling the mining-gold rush song ("in a cavern in a canyon excavating..." &c &c), one may reasonably speculate that Clementine was also trying to pinpoint those mass anomalies precisely for the purpose of eventual mining operations. Given that one of the images it took was precisely of the southern lunar pole, one may also reasonably assume that the massive mass anomaly was detected by it;
(2) Then, in 2009, we had the launch of the much-ballyhooed NASA "LCROSS" mission, which was to send one of its stages crashing into a crater in the southern polar region of the Moon so that scientists could snap pictures of the resulting plume from the kinetic impact, and determine if there was water lurking in the bottom of lunar polar craters. In fact, NASA played up the mission by hyping the idea that the impact would be visible on Earth. Many people gazed up, waiting for the flash of the impact, and ... nothing. The stage had impacted, but according to an analysis of Richard C. Hoagland, the impact may have occurred in the roof of a hollow chamber, thus confining most of the visible light inside of the hollow. The small visible signature of the impact was consistent with this view. (Mr. Hoagland also maintained that the most sensational picture from the LRO-LCROSS mission was this picture displaying a highly anomalous yellow Lunar LIM: LCROSS LRO Lunar LIM Picture).
So herewith my high octane speculation, which makes two assumptions: firstly, that the Clementine and LCROSS missions are intimately related, with the real mission of LCROSS not simply to detect water, but the presence of high concentrations of heavy metals in the southern polar region via the impact plume of the LCROSS mission. As a corollary of this purpose, one would also be trying to test for the idea that, if heavy metals are present, are they present in such a quality and degree as to indicate and intelligent, rather than merely natural, source for them. Secondly, those two missions are in turn related to this story of the mass anomaly at the southern pole.
In effect, what we may have just seen is that the beginning of the story - the mass anomaly itself, which perfectly connects and rationalizes the Clementine and LCROSS stories - has been deliberately withheld until now, and presented as a bit of unconnected "data" to the earlier events. In short, they've known about this mass anomaly for quite some time because Clementine in all likelihood alerted them to it. And depending on the results of that LCROSS spectroscopy, they may also know what ultimately is the cause of that mass anomaly: an asteroid, or (to quote the second article) "a giant spaceship or hidden underground civilization, ahem."
See you on the flip side...
I never underestimate the articles that readers and contributors to this website discover and pass along, but this one is a "whopper doozie" that was spotted by B.H. Reading it, I thought of an odd quartet of people: (1) Robert Heinlein, the famous science fiction author, (2) J. Michael Straczynski, creator and producer of the 1990s television sci-fi series Babylon Five, (3) Dr. Carol Rosin, and finally (4) Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. What made me think of them was this article, which almost begs that one "read between the lines" when reading it, especially since the article itself mentions Robert Heinlein specifically. We'll get back to that:
Could US Navy's Railgun Help Tap Moon's Resources?
Electric rail guns, or mass drivers as they are sometimes called: it is that technology which made me think of the above very strange and odd quartet. The article wants us to think that the rail gun will be tested on a US Navy ship. But the fact of the matter is, it already has been tested. Successfully. The only problem was the special projectiles that the weapon fires cost around $800,000 each so the Navy elected not to deploy the weapon (or so we're told... but that may not include that "space fleet" that British hacker Gary McKinnon says he saw when he hacked into American defense databases).
What's really worrying, however, is the talk of using such a device to "launch payloads" from the Moon:
Recent testing of the electromagnetic railgun under Navy auspices had the technology firing a projectile that exceeds Mach 6, approaching a velocity that hearkens back to early ideas of utilizing this machinery on the moon to hurl payloads from the lunar surface.
Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound — is about 4,600 mph (7,400 km/h) at sea level here on Earth. The escape velocity from the relatively small, nearly airless moon is about 5,300 mph (8,530 km/h).
In 1974, Princeton University professor and space visionary Gerard O'Neill proposed use of an electromagnetic railgun to lob payloads from the moon. (The basic idea, however, may originate with sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, who laid out something similar in his 1966 novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.")
"Mass drivers" based on a coilgun design were adapted to accelerate a nonmagnetic object. One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers: toss baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the moon into space. Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar-power satellites.
Whew! We can relax: it's being proposed simply as a means of launching stuff we mine on the Moon.
Except that little mention of Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress doesn't envision anything so calming. Rather, in Heinlein's novel, the "Mass driver" is used to hurl rocks from the Moon to a defenseless Earth, which soon capitulates to Heinlein's lunar rebels rather than suffer an interplanetary bombardment for which it has no defenses. It was a diabolical idea, since the gravity well of the Earth was used to accelerate the already enormous velocity of the lunar railgun's projectiles. Straczynski picked up on the idea in the second season of Babylon Five, where an alien space fleet uses mass drivers for planetary bombardment, literally using asteroids to bomb its enemy into a depopulated stone age.
That's science fiction. But if you've been following some of my blogs over the years related to the dangers of weaponizing space, you'll see the relevance of railguns/mass drivers to the affidavit of Dr. Carol Rosin, and to the statements of Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev shortly before the Chelyabinsk meteor incident in February 2013. Dr. Rosin, you'll recall, maintained that Dr. Wernher von Braun told her shortly before his death that the effort to weaponize space would be promoted in five phases in the following order: as a defense against (1) Communism, (2) terrorists, (3) "nations of concern", (4) asteroids, and finally (5) extra-terrestrials. Railguns/mass drivers are the original "rod of God" technology, able to fire projectiles whose sheer mass-energy kinetic impact can rip through the strongest armor, or, if large enough, asteroids. And as I've also pointed out, Dmitri Medvedev called for an international planetary asteroid defense system prior to the Chelyabinsk incident. When queried about what sorts of weapons would be involved, Medvedev stated that themornuclear armed missiles could be fired at asteroids to destroy them, and then went on to indicate other means, which were unspecified. Railguns/mass drivers would certainly fall into that unspecified category.
And let it be noted: this is not a technology that we need to guess at; it already exists. The real question is not whether it exists, but how far it has been taken. There are some - myself included - who entertain the idea that the Chinese chemical plant explosions may actually have been a demonstration of the "rod of God" techn0logy, for one simple reason: in the first of those explosions, the crater left was very narrow and deep, not the type of crater signature that would typically result from a chemical explosion. Then there were the strange remarks made by general Mattis to the reporter who asked him if a military response to North Korean provocations might include "kenetic weapons," i.e., railguns/mass drivers/"rod of God" weapons. Mattis' affirmative reply no doubt had them burning the midnight oil in Pyongyang and Beijing.
So why am I exercised about this article? Simple: because we've been given a clue how weaponizing space will be "sold" to a skeptical public: we need such technologies for mining and exploiting space assets. And, oh, look! This technology could not only launch stuff into space, but could do double duty as an asteroid-busting defense system. It's not a weapon; it's a launch system (shades of Gerald Bull).
The bottom line? I suspect this is the beginning of yet another "meme" that we'll be hearing more and more of, as talk about the technology is gradually ramped up to accustom the general population to the idea that it could be used to mine asteroids, as well as bust them apart if need be.
See you on the flip side...
