The 4-star Gen Tony McPeak, Bobby D’Ausilio, Jim Stuart, Frankin Willians ,Mark Sturza, (who essentially will make up management of http://www.IOSTARCORP.COM) will develop ongoing applications beyond “space tug boats” – including the power payloads and communications payloads for SWANSAT – delivering 600,000,000 connections per sat. (swansat.com)

Spurred in part by Steven’s post, I decided to do a point-by-point comparison of the 1996 and 2006 documents. It’s available in handy podcast form right
here.

My take: the new policy seems to largely just put in formal words a number of things that have been brought forward on previous occasions.

Lorne

Since you brought up the National Space Policy, let me give you some not-for-attribution background on a couple of issues you mentioned.

But in a rhetorical flight of fancy, the new Bush policy purports to adopt a new national “objective of extending human presence across the solar system,” no less.

Actually, this is similar to language in the Reagan 1988 and Bush Sr. 1989 space policies (which are so similar that they probably came from the same word-processing file). In both of those policies, there’s a section near the beginning called “Goals and Principles” where you’ll find that goal 6 reads, “to expand human presence and activity beyond Earth orbit into the solar system.” The Clinton administration decided to throttle back on that, resulting in the less ambitious statement you quoted from the 1996 policy. A related data point: Congress passed and Reagan signed the Space Settlement Act of 1988, which is still on the books (except for the requirement for biennial progress reports to Congress, which was repealed).

But it declares that the United States will “take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.”

The wording is a little different from previous policies, but this is nothing new.

“The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space,” the Bush policy warns.

This is nothing new. What’s new is that this time you can see it.

The most remarkable thing about this policy is that it took almost 3 years to develop it, and it says almost nothing new. The most noteworthy changes are the spectrum section and the nukes-in-space section that opens the door for private-sector development of nuclear power sources for satellites (I have no idea what prompted them to include this). Also note a format change that breaks with convention: for the first time, the national security section is in front of the civil space section. Not by accident, I suspect.

Not sure if you were aware that the Bush administration has been placing an appendix called “implementation actions” on many of its policies. These are never released publicly, even if the policies and implementation actions are unclassified.