Space Elevators Affirmative - Wikispacesthebinturongalliance.wikispaces.com/file/view/Novice+Aff… · Web viewWe might begin by asking about the global security order that the

Ruston Debate 11Novice Space Elevator

Space Elevators Affirmative

1AC......................................................................................................................................2Case Answers.....................................................................................................................182AC Politics.......................................................................................................................312AC Consult......................................................................................................................342AC Cap............................................................................................................................372AC Privatization (Generic)..............................................................................................432AC Security Kritik...........................................................................................................462AC ESA...........................................................................................................................50A2 Topicality.....................................................................................................................52

This is wave one of the affirmative - the affirmative that is run at the first tournament will be updated and a more inclusive. This aff will be used for practice and to assess what else needs to be added to the file. T blocks will definitely be updated, the one included in this file is generic

A couple notes. Read through the 2ac blocks before using them. Several sections ask you to insert an argument specific to the round, so make sure you have noted these areas.

A few words to know for the file 1. Realism - the belief that countries will always act in their self-interest, used for

describing a system of international relations 2. Capitalism - an economic system based on a free market approach 3. Security/securitizing - the act of describing a situation as a matter of national

security in order to justify a cause of action 4. ESA - European Space Agency 5. CCP - Chinese Communist Party 6. PLA - People's liberation army, the army of China 7. Power Projection - The act of displaying international prowess

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1AC

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Leadership Contention one is leadership -

U.S. Dominance in space is quickly dissipatingValerie Neal 7-6-11, writer for the Economic Times, “End of space shuttle, end to US dominanceofspace?<http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-07-06/news/29743674_1_valerie-neal-space-shuttle-shuttle-era>WASHINGTON: The flight into space by NASA's space shuttle Atlantis on this Friday will mark end of the shuttle era, but many believe it may also mean the end of US hegemony in the space. Although NASA has led numbers of manned flights into space for three decades, no additional such flights are planned for the moment. Top officials at the space agency, however, maintain this isn't the end of this country's manned effort in space, rather just the beginning of a new chapter.

"I don't think this means the end of US crewed flights, but we're in a period of uncertainty and we don't know for how long," Valerie Neal, the official in charge of the shuttle area at the National Air and Space

Museum in Washington, said. "I think that what's a little disappointing is that we really don't have a clear vision of what it is that's going to come after," Neal said. "There's uncertainty in NASA and among the general public." After this NASA shuttle flight, private companies will be in charge of developing the technology for future space vehicles. This will enable the US space agency to focus on other projects, like working out the logistics of a manned Mars mission or travelling to an asteroid, two of the goals President

Barack Obama set out in his new space strategy, says NASA director Charles Bolden. Although, the companies with which NASA has signed agreements to develop new spacecraft "are making some optimistic predictions" about when the new space vehicles

will be ready, Neal said, "the truth is that they have still not been prepared". As a nation, we are in "the final part of the second great era of space exploration," similar to what we went through in the 1970s after the last Apollo mission, the

programme that succeeded in putting men on the moon, he added. NASA took almost a decade to develop and launch the shuttle programme, and it was not until April 12, 1981 -

20 years after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space - that Columbia was sent into orbit, followed by Challenger (1983), Discovery (1984),

Atlantis (1985) and Endeavour (1992). Neal, whose museum will receive the Discovery to exhibit to the public in April 2012, said that the shuttles had been great spacecraft.

This makes challengers inevitable and threatens critical space assets. That risks war A. THOMAS YOUNG ET. AL 2008, DIRECTOR OF THE GOODRICH CORPORATION AND SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION, “LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND ORGANIZATION FOR NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE: REPORT TO CONGRESS OF THE INDEPENDENT ASSESSMENT PANEL ON THE ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT OF NATIONAL SECURITY SPACE”

Potential adversaries inevitably will employ available advanced capabilities to challenge current U.S. preeminence in space operations. The Russians are still the most capable space-faring people aside from us. They are not our enemy, and indeed we are working together with the Russians on the International Space Station. Still,

available Russian technologies pose the most important potential threat to American space operations. Over the years, they have developed an extensive stable of capable launch 6 LTC John L. Thurman, “National Security Space Industrial Base Study,” OSD Cost Analysis Improvement Group, September 19, 2006. See also Final Report of Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry (Walker Report, 2002) on aerospace industry

consolidation. vehicles, and in 1977 they demonstrated their capability to shoot down Earth orbiting satellites. China is clearly on the path to developing the capability to conduct sophisticated space operations. In 1964, they detonated their first nuclear weapon. This was followed by the “Long March” series of missiles, built first to carry nuclear weapons and then to achieve the capability to reach Earth orbit. Since 1999, China has initiated a national navigation system, launched a 3-meter-resolution imagery satellite, conducted its first manned space flight, exported a satellite to Nigeria, and launched its

first lunar probe.7 China also demonstrated the capability of an anti-satellite weapon when it destroyed one of its aging weather (Fengyun 1-C) satellites on January 11, 2007. In assessing the potential vulnerability of U.S. space systems, it is also essential to factor in potential adversaries’ growing cyber-attack capabilities, as well as the potential employment of land-based directed energy weapons that could attack satellites in lowearth- orbit. At this time, we do not believe either Russia or China poses a major threat, but the United States must be prepared to face

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adversaries who have obtained the available advanced capabilities. Both the Chinese and the Russians have an interest in common— to eventually remove the United States from its current dominant military and economic position in the world. The y

will continue to develop capabilities to deter or deny the employment of U.S. space assets, and they may also use surrogates to accomplish this objective . Continued investments in technical capabilities to attack space systems, and the proliferation of associated technologies, signal the capability and intent to intimidate, deter, and perhaps attack space-based systems.

Ultimately, the United States must be prepared to face challenges to our freedom of action in space, and perhaps actual conflict in space.

Scenario A—Power Projection

Securing and developing space capabilities is key to every facet of military activity and locks in hegemony-A. Thomas Young et. al 2008, Director of the Goodrich Corporation and Science Applications International Corporation, “Leadership, Management, and Organization for National Security Space: Report to Congress of the Independent Assessment Panel on the Organization and Management of National Security Space”

The IAP’s assessment, our findings, and our recommendations for aggressive action are based on the understanding that space-based capabilities are essential elements of the nation’s economic infrastructure and provide critical underpinnings for national security. Space-based capabilities should not be managed as derivative to other missions, or as a diffuse set of loosely related capabilities. Rather, they must be viewed as essential for restoring and preserving the health of our NSS enterprise. NSS requires top leadership focus and sustained attention. The U.S. space sector, in supporting commercial, scientific, and military applications of space, is embedded in our nation’s economy, providing technological leadership and sustainment of the industrial base. To cite one leading example, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is the world standard for precision navigation and timing, directly and indirectly affecting numerous aspects of everyday life. But other capabilities such as

weather services; space-based data, telephone and video communications; and television broadcasts have also become common, routine services. The Space Foundation’s 2008 Space Report indicates that

the U.S. commercial satellite services and space infrastructure sector is today approximately a $170 billion annual business. Manned

space flight and the unmanned exploration of space continue to represent both symbolic and substantive scientific “high ground” for the nation. The nation’s investments in the International Space Station, the Hubble Telescope, and scientific probes such as Pioneer, Voyager, and Spirit maintain and demonstrate our determination

and competence to operate in space. They also spark the interest of the technical, engineering, and scientific communities and capture the imaginations of our youth. The national security contributions of space-based capabilities have become increasingly pervasive, sophisticated, and

important. Global awareness provided from space—including intelligence on the military capabilities of

potential adversaries, intelligence on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and missile warning and defense—enables effective planning for and response to critical national security requirements. The communications bandwidth employed for Operation Iraqi Freedom today is over 100 times the bandwidth employed at the peak of the first Gulf war. Approximately 80 percent of this bandwidth is being provided by commercial satellite capacity. Military capabilities at all levels—strategic, operational, and tactical— increasingly rely upon the availability of space-based capabilities. Over the recent decades,

navigation and precision munitions were being developed and refined based on space-based technologies. Space systems,

including precision navigation, satellite communications, weather data, signals intelligence, and imagery, have increasingly provided essential support for military operations, including most recently from the very first days of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Similarly, the operational dominance of coalition forces in the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom provided a textbook application of the power of enhancing situational awareness through the use of space-based

services such as precision navigation, weather data management, and communications on the battlefield. These capabilities are continuing to provide major force-multipliers for the soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines performing stabilization, counter-improvised explosive device (IED), counterterrorism, and other irregular warfare missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. As the role and

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importance of space-based capabilities for military operations grows, the users are demanding that they be more highly integrated with land-, sea-, and air-based capabilities. During the first decades of the Cold War, the premier applications of space could be exemplified by the highly specialized systems that enabled exposed photographic film to be parachuted from space, developed and analyzed by intelligence experts, and rushed to the situation room in the White House for strategic purposes. Space-based capabilities were uniquely capable of providing visibility into areas of denied access. Today and in the future, the employment of space-based capabilities will increasingly support military operations. And for all users, the employment of spacebased capabilities will be more accurately exemplified by sophisticated database searches of a range of relevant commercially available and specialized national security digital information, using tools that

integrate such information across all sources. For all the reasons cited here—military, intelligence, commercial, scientific— there can be no doubt that continued leadership in space is a vital national interest that merits strong national leadership and careful stewardship.

And, credible power projection stops all wars from going nuclearKagan ‘11. Jan 24, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 18. Robert Kagan. Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace “The Price of Power: The benefits of U.S. defense spending far outweigh the costs.”<http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/price-power_533696.html?page=1>Today the international situation is also one of high risk. • The terrorists who would like to kill Americans on U.S. soil constantly search for safe havens from which to plan and carry out their attacks. American military actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere make it harder for them to strike and are a large part of the reason why for almost a decade there has been no repetition of September 11. To the degree that we limit our ability to deny them safe haven, we increase the chances they will succeed. •

American forces deployed in East Asia and the Western Pacific have for decades prevented the outbreak of major war, provided stability, and kept open international

trading routes, making possible an unprecedented era of growth and prosperity for Asians and Americans alike. Now the United States faces a new challenge and potential threat from a rising China which seeks eventually to push the U.S. military’s area of operations back to Hawaii and exercise hegemony over the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Meanwhile, a nuclear-armed North Korea threatens war with South Korea and fires ballistic missiles over Japan that will someday be capable of reaching the west coast of the United States. Democratic nations in the region, worried that the United States may be losing influence, turn to Washington for reassurance that the U.S. security guarantee remains firm. If the United States cannot provide that assurance because it is cutting back its military capabilities, they will have to choose between accepting Chinese dominance and striking out on their own, possibly by building nuclear weapons . • In the Middle East, Iran seeks to build its own nuclear arsenal, supports armed radical Islamic groups in Lebanon and Palestine, and has linked up with anti-American dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere. The prospects of new instability in the region grow every day as a decrepit regime in Egypt clings to power, crushes all moderate opposition, and drives the Muslim Brotherhood into the streets. A nuclear-armed Pakistan seems to be ever on the brink of collapse into anarchy and radicalism.

Turkey, once an ally, now seems bent on an increasingly anti-American Islamist course. The prospect of war between Hezbollah and Israel grows, and with it the possibility of war between Israel and Syria and possibly Iran. There, too, nations in the region

increasingly look to Washington for reassurance , and if they decide the United States cannot be relied upon they will have to decide whether to

succumb to Iranian influence or build their own nuclear weapons to resist it. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and the biggest problem in the world seemed to be ethnic conflict in the Balkans, it was at least plausible to talk about cutting back on American military capabilities. In the present, increasingly dangerous international environment, in which terrorism and great power rivalry vie as the greatest

threat to American security and interests, cutting military capacities is simply reckless. Would we increase the risk of strategic failure in an already risky world, despite the near irrelevance of the defense budget to American fiscal health , just so we could tell American voters that their military had suffered its “fair share” of the pain? The nature of the risk becomes plain when one considers the nature of the cuts that would have to be made to have even a marginal effect on the U.S. fiscal crisis. Many are under the illusion, for instance, that if the United States simply withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan and didn’t intervene anywhere else for a while, this would have a significant impact on future deficits. But, in fact, projections of future massive deficits already assume the winding down of these interventions.Withdrawal from the two wars would scarcely make a dent in the fiscal crisis. Nor can meaningful reductions be achieved by cutting back on waste at the Pentagon—which Secretary of Defense Gates has already begun to do and which has also been factored into deficit projections. If the United States withdrew from Iran and Afghanistan tomorrow, cut all the waste Gates can find, and even eliminated a few weapons programs—all this together would still not produce a 10 percent decrease in overall defense spending. In fact, the only way to get significant savings from the defense budget—and by “significant,” we are still talking about a tiny fraction of the cuts needed to bring down future deficits—is to cut force structure: fewer troops on the ground; fewer airplanes in the skies; fewer ships in the water; fewer soldiers, pilots, and sailors to feed and clothe and provide benefits for. To cut the size of the force, however, requires reducing or eliminating the missions those forces have been performing. Of course, there are any number of think tank experts who insist U.S. forces can be cut by a quarter or third or even by half and still perform those missions. But this is snake oil. Over the past two decades, the force has already been cut by a third. Yet no administration has reduced the missions that the larger force structures of the past were designed to meet. To fulfill existing security commitments, to remain the “world’s power balancer of choice,” as Leslie Gelb puts it, to act as “the only regional balancer against China in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, and Iran in the Middle East” requires at least the current force structure, and almost certainly more than current force levels. Those who recommend doing the same with less are only proposing a policy of insufficiency, where the United States makes commitments it cannot meet except at high risk of failure. The only way to find substantial savings in the defense budget, therefore, is to change American strategy fundamentally. The Simpson-Bowles commission suggests as much, by calling for a reexamination of America’s “21st century role,” although it doesn’t begin to define what that new

role might be. Others have. For decades “realist” analysts have called for a strategy of “offshore balancing.” Instead of the United States providing security in East Asia and the Persian Gulf, it would withdraw its forces from Japan, South Korea, and the Middle East and let the nations in those regions balance one another. If the balance broke down and war erupted, the United States would then intervene militarily until balance was restored. In the Middle East and Persian Gulf, for instance, Christopher Layne has long proposed “passing the mantle of regional stabilizer” to a consortium of “Russia, China, Iran, and India.” In East Asia offshore balancing would mean letting China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and others manage their own problems, without U.S. involvement—again, until the balance broke down and war erupted, at which point the United States would provide assistance to restore the balance and then, if necessary, intervene with its own forces to restore peace and stability. Before examining whether this would be a wise strategy, it is important to understand that this really is the only genuine alternative to the one the United States has pursued for the past 65 years. To their credit, Layne and others who support the concept of offshore balancing have eschewed halfway measures and airy assurances that we can do more with less, which are likely recipes for disaster. They recognize that either the United States is actively involved in providing security and stability in regions beyond the Western Hemisphere, which means maintaining a robust presence in those regions, or it is not. Layne and others are frank in calling for an end to the global security strategy developed in the aftermath of World War II, perpetuated through the Cold War, and continued by four

successive post-Cold War administrations. At the same time, it is not surprising that none of those administrations embraced offshore balancing as a strategy. The idea of relying on Russia, China, and Iran to jointly “stabilize” the Middle East and Persian Gulf will not strike many as an attractive proposition. Nor is U.S. withdrawal from East Asia and the Pacific likely to have a stabilizing effect on that region. The prospects of a war on the Korean Peninsula would increase. Japan and other nations in the region would face the choice of succumbing to Chinese hegemony or taking unilateral steps for self-defense, which in Japan’s case would mean the rapid creation of a formidable nuclear arsenal . Layne and other offshore balancing enthusiasts, like John Mearsheimer, point to two notable occasions when the United States allegedly practiced this strategy. One was the Iran-Iraq war, where the United States supported Iraq for years against Iran in the hope that the two would balance and weaken each other. The other was American policy in the 1920s and 1930s, when the United States allowed the great European powers to balance one another, occasionally providing economic aid, or military aid, as in the Lend-Lease program of assistance to Great Britain once war broke out. Whether this was really American strategy in that era is open for debate—most would argue the United States in this era was trying to stay out of war not as part of a considered strategic judgment but as an end in itself. Even if the United States had been pursuing offshore balancing in the first decades of the 20th century, however, would we really call that strategy a success? The United States wound up intervening with millions of troops, first in Europe, and then in Asia and Europe simultaneously, in the two most dreadful wars in human history. It was with the memory of those two wars in mind, and in the belief that American strategy in those interwar years had been mistaken, that American statesmen during and after World War II determined on the new global strategy that the United States has pursued ever since. Under Franklin Roosevelt, and then under the leadership of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, American leaders determined that the safest course was to build “situations of strength” (Acheson’s phrase) in strategic locations around the world, to build a “preponderance of power,” and to create an international system with American power at its center. They left substantial numbers of troops in East Asia and in Europe and built a globe-girdling system of naval and air bases to enable the rapid projection of force to strategically important parts of the world. They did not do this on a lark or out of a yearning for global dominion. They simply rejected the offshore balancing strategy, and they did so because they believed it had led to great, destructive wars in the past and would likely do so again. They believed their new global strategy was more likely to deter major war and therefore be less destructive and less expensive in the long run. Subsequent administrations, from both parties and with often differing perspectives on the proper course in many areas of foreign policy, have all agreed on this core strategic approach. From the beginning this strategy was assailed as too ambitious and too expensive. At the dawn of the Cold War, Walter Lippmann railed against Truman’s containment strategy as suffering from an unsustainable gap between ends and means that would bankrupt the United States and exhaust its power. Decades later, in the waning years of the Cold War, Paul Kennedy warned of “imperial overstretch,” arguing that American decline was inevitable “if the trends in national indebtedness, low productivity increases, [etc.]” were allowed to continue at the same time as “massive American commitments of men, money and materials are made in different parts of the globe.” Today, we are once again being told that this global strategy needs to give way to a more restrained and modest approach, even though the indebtedness crisis that we face in coming years is not caused by the present, largely successful global strategy. Of course it is precisely the success of that strategy that is taken for granted. The enormous benefits that this strategy has provided, including the financial benefits, somehow never appear on the ledger. They should. We might begin by asking about the global security order that the United States has sustained since Word War II—the prevention of major war, the support of an open trading system, and promotion of the liberal principles of free markets and free government. How much is that order worth? What would be the cost of its collapse or transformation into another type of order? Whatever the nature of the current economic difficulties, the past six decades have seen a greater increase in global prosperity than any time in human history. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. Once-backward nations have become economic dynamos. And the American economy, though suffering ups and downs throughout this period, has on the whole benefited immensely from this international order. One price of this success has been maintaining a sufficient military capacity to provide the essential security underpinnings of this order. But has the price not been worth it? In the first half of the 20th century, the United States found itself engaged in two world wars. In the second half, this global American strategy helped produce a peaceful end to the great-power struggle of the Cold War and then 20 more years of great-power peace. Looked at coldly, simply in terms of dollars and cents, the benefits of that strategy far outweigh the costs. The danger, as always, is that we don’t even realize the benefits our strategic choices have provided. Many assume that the world has simply become more peaceful, that great-power conflict has become impossible, that nations have learned that military force has little utility, that economic power is what counts. This belief in progress and the perfectibility of humankind and the institutions of international order is always alluring to Americans and Europeans and other children of the Enlightenment. It was the prevalent belief in the decade before World War I, in the first years after World War II, and in those heady days after the Cold War when people spoke

of the “end of history.” It is always tempting to believe that the international order the United States built and sustained

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with its power can exist in the absence of that power, or at least with much less of it. This is the hidden assumption of those who call for a change in American strategy: that the United States can stop playing its role and yet all the benefits that came from that role will keep pouring in. This is a great if recurring illusion, the idea that you can pull a leg out from under a table and the table will not fall over. Much of the present debate, it should be acknowledged, is not about the defense budget or the fiscal crisis at all. It is only the latest round in a long-running debate over the nature and purposes of American foreign policy. At the tactical level, some use the fiscal crisis as a justification for a different approach to, say, Afghanistan. Richard Haass, for instance, who has long favored a change of strategy from “counterinsurgency” to “counterterrorism,” now uses the budget crisis to bolster his case—although he leaves unclear how much money would be saved by such a shift in strategy. At the broader level of grand strategy, the current debate, though revived by the budget crisis, can be traced back a century or more, but its most recent expression came with the end of the Cold War. In the early 1990s, some critics, often calling themselves “realists,” expressed their unhappiness with a foreign policy—first under George H.W. Bush and then under Bill Clinton—that cast the United States as leader of a “new world order,” the “indispensable nation.” As early as 1992, Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson assailed President Bush for launching the first Persian Gulf war in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait. They charged him with pursuing “a new world role . . . required neither by security need nor by traditional conceptions of the nation’s purpose,” a role that gave “military force” an “excessive and disproportionate . . . position in our statecraft.” Tucker and Hendrickson were frank enough to acknowledge that, pace Paul Kennedy, the “peril” was not actually “to the nation’s purse” or even to “our interests” but to the nation’s “soul.” This has always been the core critique of expansive American foreign policy doctrines, from the time of the Founders to the present—not that a policy of extensive global involvement is necessarily impractical but that it is immoral and contrary to the nation’s true ideals. Today this alleged profligacy in the use of force is variously attributed to the influence of “neoconservatives” or to those Mearsheimer calls the “liberal imperialists” of the Clinton administration, who have presumably now taken hold of the Obama administration as well. But the critics share a common premise: that if only the United States would return to a more “normal” approach to the world, intervening abroad far less frequently and eschewing efforts at “nation-building,” then this would allow the United States to cut back on the resources it expends on foreign policy. Thanks to Haass’s clever formulation, there has been a great deal of talk lately about “wars of choice” as opposed to “wars of necessity.” Haass labels both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan “wars of choice.” Today, many ask whether the United States can simply avoid such allegedly optional interventions in the future, as well as the occupations and exercises in “nation-building” that often seem to follow. Although the idea of eliminating “wars of choice” appears sensible, the historical record suggests it will not be as simple as many think. The problem is, almost every war or intervention the United States has engaged in throughout its history has been optional—and not just the Bosnias, Haitis, Somalias, or Vietnams, but the Korean War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and even World War II (at least the war in Europe), not to mention the many armed interventions throughout Latin America and the Caribbean over the course of the past century, from Cuba in 1898 to Panama in 1989. A case can be made, and has been made by serious historians, that every one of these wars and interventions was avoidable and unnecessary. To note that our most recent wars have also been wars of choice, therefore, is not as useful as it seems. In theory, the United States could refrain from intervening abroad. But, in practice, will it? Many assume today that the American public has had it with interventions, and Alice Rivlin certainly reflects a strong current of opinion when she says that “much of the public does not believe that we need to go in and take over other people’s countries.” That sentiment has often been heard after interventions, especially those with mixed or dubious results. It was heard after the four-year-long war in the Philippines, which cost 4,000 American lives and untold Filipino casualties. It was heard after Korea and after Vietnam. It was heard after Somalia. Yet the reality has been that after each intervention, the sentiment against foreign involvement has faded, and the United States has intervened again. Depending on how one chooses to count, the United States has undertaken roughly 25 overseas interventions since 1898: Cuba, 1898 The Philippines, 1898-1902 China, 1900 Cuba, 1906 Nicaragua, 1910 & 1912 Mexico, 1914 Haiti, 1915 Dominican Republic, 1916 Mexico, 1917 World War I, 1917-1918 Nicaragua, 1927 World War II, 1941-1945 Korea, 1950-1953 Lebanon, 1958 Vietnam, 1963-1973 Dominican Republic, 1965 Grenada, 1983 Panama, 1989 First Persian Gulf war, 1991 Somalia, 1992 Haiti, 1994 Bosnia, 1995 Kosovo, 1999 Afghanistan, 2001-present Iraq, 2003-present That is one intervention every 4.5 years on average. Overall, the United States has intervened or been engaged in combat somewhere in 52 out of the last 112 years, or roughly 47

percent of the time. Since the end of the Cold War, it is true, the rate of U.S. interventions has increased, with an intervention roughly once every 2.5 years and American troops intervening or engaged in combat in 16 out of 22 years, or over 70 percent of the time , since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The argument for returning to “normal” begs the question: What is normal for the United States? The historical record of the last century suggests that it is not a policy of nonintervention. This record ought to raise doubts about the theory that American behavior these past two decades is the product of certain unique ideological or doctrinal movements, whether “liberal imperialism” or “neoconservatism.” Allegedly “realist” presidents in this era have been just as likely to order interventions as their more idealistic colleagues. George H.W. Bush was as profligate an intervener as Bill Clinton. He invaded Panama in 1989, intervened in Somalia in 1992—both on primarily idealistic and humanitarian grounds—which along with the first Persian Gulf war in 1991 made for three interventions in a single four-year term. Since 1898 the list of presidents who ordered armed interventions abroad has included William McKinley, Theodore Roose-velt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. One would be hard-pressed to find a common ideological or doctrinal thread among them—unless it is the doctrine and ideology of a mainstream American foreign policy that leans more toward intervention than many imagine or would care to admit. Many don’t want to admit it, and the only thing as consistent as this pattern of American behavior has been the claim by contemporary critics that it is abnormal and a departure from American traditions. The anti-imperialists of the late 1890s, the isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s, the critics of Korea and Vietnam, and the critics of the first Persian Gulf war, the interventions in the Balkans, and the more recent wars of the Bush years have all insisted that the nation had in those instances behaved unusually or irrationally. And yet the behavior has continued. To note this consistency is not the same as justifying it. The United States may have been wrong for much of the past 112 years. Some critics would endorse the sentiment expressed by the historian Howard K. Beale in the 1950s, that “the men of 1900” had steered the United States onto a disastrous course of world power which for the subsequent half-century had done the United States and the world no end of harm. But whether one lauds or condemns this past century of American foreign policy—and one can find reasons to do both—the fact of this consistency remains. It would require not just a modest reshaping of American foreign policy priorities but a sharp departure from this tradition to bring about the kinds of changes that would allow the United States to make do with a substantially smaller force structure. Is such a sharp departure in the offing? It is no doubt true that many Americans are unhappy with the on-going warfare in Afghanistan and to a lesser extent in Iraq, and that, if asked, a majority would say the United States should intervene less frequently in foreign nations, or perhaps not at all. It may also be true that the effect of long military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan may cause Americans and their leaders to shun further interventions at least for a few years—as they did for nine years after World War I, five years after World War II, and a decade after Vietnam. This may be further reinforced by the difficult economic times in which Americans are currently suffering. The longest period of nonintervention in the past century was during the 1930s, when unhappy memories of World War I combined with the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression to constrain American interventionism to an unusual degree and produce the first and perhaps only genuinely isolationist period in American history. So are we back to the mentality of the 1930s? It wouldn’t appear so. There is no great wave of isolationism sweeping the country. There is not even the equivalent of a Patrick Buchanan, who received 3 million votes in the 1992 Republican primaries. Any isolationist tendencies that might exist are severely tempered by continuing fears of terrorist attacks that might be launched from overseas. Nor are the vast majority of Americans suffering from economic calamity to nearly the degree that they did in the Great Depression. Even if we were to repeat the policies of the 1930s, however, it is worth recalling that the unusual restraint of those years was not sufficient to keep the United States out of war. On the contrary, the United States took actions which ultimately led to the

greatest and most costly foreign intervention in its history. Even the most determined and in those years powerful isolationists could not prevent it. Today there are a number of obvious possible contingencies that might lead the United States to substantial interventions overseas, notwithstanding the preference of the public and its political leaders to

avoid them. Few Americans want a war with Iran, for instance. But it is not implausible that a president—indeed, this president—might find himself in a situation where military conflict at some level is hard to avoid. The continued success of the international sanctions regime that the Obama administration has so skillfully put into place, for instance, might eventually cause the Iranian government to lash out in some way—perhaps by attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz. Recall that Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor in no small part as a response to oil sanctions imposed by a Roosevelt administration that had not the slightest interest or intention of fighting a war against Japan but was merely expressing moral outrage at Japanese behavior on the Chinese mainland. Perhaps in an Iranian contingency, the military actions would stay limited.

But perhaps, too, they would escalate. One could well imagine an American public, now so eager to avoid intervention, suddenly demanding that their president retaliate. Then there is the possibility that a military exchange between Israel and Iran, initiated by Israel, could drag the U nited States into conflict with Iran. Are such scenarios so farfetched that

they can be ruled out by Pentagon planners? Other possible contingencies include a war on the Korean Peninsula, where the United States is bound by treaty to come to the aid of its South Korean ally ; and possible interventions in Yemen or Somalia, should those states fail even

more than they already have and become even more fertile ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And what about those “humanitarian” interventions that are first on everyone’s list to be avoided? Should another earthquake or some other natural or man-made catastrophe strike, say, Haiti and present the looming prospect of mass starvation and disease and political anarchy just a few hundred miles off U.S. shores, with the possibility of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of refugees, can anyone be confident that an American president will not feel compelled to send an intervention force to help? Some may hope that a smaller U.S. military, compelled by the necessity of budget constraints, would prevent a president from intervening. More likely, however, it would simply prevent a president from intervening effectively. This, after all, was the experience of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both because of constraints and as a conscious strategic choice, the Bush administration sent too few troops to both countries. The results were lengthy, unsuccessful conflicts, burgeoning counterinsurgencies, and loss of confidence in American will and capacity, as well as large annual expenditures. Would it not have been better, and also cheaper, to have sent larger numbers of forces initially to both places and brought about a more rapid conclusion to the fighting? The point is, it may prove cheaper in the long run to have larger forces that can fight wars quickly and conclusively, as Colin Powell long ago suggested, than to have smaller forces that can’t. Would a defense planner trying to anticipate future American actions be wise to base planned force structure on the assumption that the United States is out of the intervention business? Or would that be the kind of

penny-wise, pound-foolish calculation that, in matters of national security, can prove so unfortunate? The debates over whether and how the United States should respond to the world’s strategic challenges will and should continue. Armed interventions overseas should be weighed carefully, as always, with an eye to whether the risk of inaction is greater than

the risks of action. And as always, these judgments will be merely that: judgments, made with inadequate information and intelligence and no certainty about the outcomes. No foreign policy doctrine can avoid errors of omission and commission. But history has provided some lessons, and for the United States the lesson has been fairly clear: The world is better off, and the United States is better off, in the kind of international system that American power has built and defended . As Haass

and Roger C. Altman have correctly noted, “it is not reckless American activity in the world that jeopardizes American solvency but American profligacy at home.” The United States may be in peril because of its spiraling deficits and mounting debt, but it will be in even greater peril if, out of some misguided sense that our national security budgets must “share the pain,” we weaken ourselves even further.

Unfortunately, decline in leadership causes lash out—The U.S. will go down fighting. Goldstein, 2007 Avery, Professor of Global Politics and International Relations @ University of Pennsylvania, “Power transitions, institutions, and China's rise in East Asia: Theoretical expectations and evidence,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Volume 30, Issue 4 & 5 AugustTwo closely related, though distinct, theoretical arguments focus explicitly on the consequences for international politics of a shift in power between a dominant state and a rising power. In War and Change in World Politics, Robert Gilpin suggested that peace prevails when a dominant state’s capabilities enable it to ‘govern’ an international order that it has shaped. Over time, however, as economic and technological diffusion proceeds during eras of peace and development, other states are empowered. Moreover, the burdens of international governance drain and distract the reigning hegemon, and challengers eventually emerge

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who seek to rewrite the rules of governance. As the power advantage of the erstwhile hegemon ebbs, it may become desperate enough to resort to the ultima ratio of international politics, force, to forestall the increasingly urgent demands of a rising challenger. Or as the power of the challenger rises, it may be tempted to press its case with threats to use force. It is the rise and fall of the great powers that creates the circumstances under which major wars, what Gilpin labels ‘hegemonic wars’, break out.13 Gilpin’s argument logically encourages pessimism about the implications of a rising China. It leads to the expectation that international trade, investment, and technology transfer will result in a steady diffusion of American economic power, benefiting the rapidly developing states of the world, including China. As the US simultaneously scurries to put out the many brushfires that threaten its far-flung global interests (i.e., the classic problem of overextension), it will be unable to devote sufficient resources to maintain or restore its former advantage over emerging competitors like China. While the erosion of the once clear American advantage plays itself out, the US will find it ever more difficult to preserve the order in Asia that it created during its era of preponderance. The expectation is an increase in the likelihood for the use of force – either by a Chinese challenger able to field a stronger military in support of its demands for greater influence over international arrangements in Asia, or by a besieged American hegemon desperate to head off further decline. Among the trends that alarm those who would look at Asia through the lens of Gilpin’s theory are China’s expanding share of world trade and wealth (much of it resulting from the gains made possible by the international economic order a dominant US established); its acquisition of technology in key sectors that have both civilian and military applications (e.g., information, communications, and electronics linked with the ‘revolution in military affairs’); and an expanding military burden for the US (as it copes with the challenges of its global war on terrorism and especially its struggle in Iraq) that limits the resources it can devote to preserving its interests in East Asia.14 Although similar to Gilpin’s work insofar as it emphasizes the importance of shifts in the capabilities of a dominant state and a rising challenger, the power-transition theory A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler present in The War Ledger focuses more closely on the allegedly dangerous phenomenon of ‘crossover’– the point at which a dissatisfied challenger is about to overtake the established leading state.15 In such cases, when the power gap narrows, the dominant state becomes increasingly desperate to forestall, and the challenger becomes increasingly determined to realize the transition to a new international order whose contours it will define. Though suggesting why a rising China may ultimately present grave dangers for international peace when its capabilities make it a peer competitor of America, Organski and Kugler’s power-transition theory is less clear about the dangers while a potential challenger still lags far behind and faces a difficult struggle to catch up. This clarification is important in thinking about the theory’s relevance to interpreting China’s rise because a broad consensus prevails among analysts that Chinese military capabilities are at a minimum two decades from putting it in a league with the US in Asia.16 Their theory, then, points with alarm to trends in China’s growing wealth and power relative to the United States, but especially looks ahead to what it sees as the period of maximum danger – that time when a dissatisfied China could be in a position to overtake the US on dimensions believed crucial for assessing power. Reports beginning in the mid-1990s that offered extrapolations suggesting China’s growth would give it the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP aggregate, not per capita) sometime in the first few decades of the twentieth century fed these sorts of concerns about a potentially dangerous challenge to American leadership in Asia.17 The huge gap between Chinese and American military capabilities (especially in terms of technological sophistication) has so far discouraged prediction of comparably disquieting trends on this dimension, but inklings of similar concerns may be reflected in occasionally alarmist reports about purchases of advanced Russian air and naval equipment, as well as concern that Chinese espionage may have undermined the American advantage in nuclear and missile technology, and speculation about the potential military purposes of China’s manned space program.18 Moreover, because a dominant state may react to the prospect of a crossover and believe that it is wiser to embrace the logic of preventive war and act early to delay a transition while the task is more manageable, Organski and Kugler’s powertransition theory also provides grounds for concern about the period prior to the possible crossover.19

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Scenario B—China

Locking in airpower and Upgrading conventional capabilities is key to strategic stability to combat China-Grant ‘9 Rebecca. Ph.D. Senior fellow of the Lexington Institute, a non-profit public-policy research organization based in Arlington, VA. “U.S. needs to deter China's mobile missile launchers.” UPI<http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2009/03/25/US-needs-to-deter-Chinas-mobile-missile-launchers/UPI-75531237999938/>China is a world power, a major trading partner and, without question, a potential military competitor for the United States. With China, the United States may face a decades-long balance between confrontation and cooperation. Conventional deterrence will be a big part of calibrating the balance. For the United States, relying on airpower's conventional deterrent will be a prime tool. China has already demarcated the realms of air, space and cyberspace as arenas for competition and de-emphasized its land forces. In 2004, China's defense white paper stated bluntly: "The army is streamlined by reducing the ordinary troops that are technologically backward while the navy, air force and Second Artillery Force (China's nuclear-weapons unit) are strengthened." Instead, current Chinese military doctrine focuses on local, or regional, war under high-technology conditions, which they define as "a limited war, fought in a restricted geographic area for limited objectives with limited means and a conscious effort to curtail destruction." Rapid defeat of the enemy is the main objective, and the preferred tool is to inflict strategic and operational paralysis or even defeat the enemy with one strike. The Chinese do not much worry about global power projection, stability operations or major land campaigns. Deterring China will be all about providing persistence to make clear that the armed forces of the United States and its allies will not back off until goals are met. Credible deterrence will include the ability to target mobile launches like the one China used to shoot a missile into orbit to destroy its defunct weather satellite. That launch brought home how difficult it could be to track, target and kill mobile launchers.

Otherwise unchecked Chinese expansionism collapses hegemony and risks warFisher ‘8. Richard Fisher, Senior Fellow on Asian Military Affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, 2008. “China’s Military Modernization,” p. 250-251In a brief but provocative book, journalist James Mann identifies and takes down one of the commanding myths in the American debate over policy toward China: “if we treat the like an enemy they become one.” It is a fear that has been oft repeated and one that Mann regards as part of a “Lexicon of Dismissal” in which China and its supporters conspire to deflect criticism and isolate critics. It is a fear that has riven U.S. policy debates on China, from economic policy, to strategic military engagement, to the more recent Bush

administration policies to limit its support for Taiwan’s potential desire for “independence,” even though it may emerge from a legitimately democratic process. But by giving in to this fear in the mistaken “hope” that China would behave responsibly or even as a “friend,” the United States has consistently lost leverage over China and has helped facilitate outcomes that may in the future threaten Americans, Chinese, Taiwanese, and many others. After debates over “Most Favored Nation” status of the early 1990’s that led to American approval for China’s membership in the World Trade Organization on very favorable terms ,

Beijing shows little inclination to reverse highly protectionist trade and financial policies which produce massive trade surpluses. After nearly two

decades of U.S. “engagement” witch China regarding nuclear and missile weapon proliferation , Beijing shows little inclination to halt this traffic to rogue states such as Iran. It also shows no willingness to reverse its

previous enabling of secondary nuclear proliferation from Pakistan and North Korea, which could lead to nuclear-armed terrorists. And after nearly three decades of U.S. “military engagement,” the PLA shows little inclination to become as “transparent” militarily as its democratic neighbors and shows the potential of becoming more hostile to the United States as its military power increases . It is hard for this analyst to conclude that, since the opening to China in the early 1970s, the United States has even approached treating China “like an enemy.” To the contrary, America’s welcome has facilitated China’s post-Mao integration into the world economy and has thus enabled China to gather the integration into the world economy and has thus enabled China to gather the indicators of power that may soon

math or exceed those of the United States. This volume has sought to document how China has used this period, especially since the early 1990s, to gather a level of military power that may soon place it in the predominant position among Asian powers and then, within the next two decades , give China a greater ability to exercise military power on a global scale . This transformation has occurred along with consistent criticisms from American as well as many others about the CCP’s opposition to democratic reform, its suppression of most dissent, and its support for dictatorial regimes around the world. China is not likely to change these attributes as long as the Communist Party remains in power. There is thus a clear danger that China’s gathering of a globally capable military will be wedded to an anti-democratic and even anti-American foreign policy agenda. In 2008 the United States may have a clear superiority in most measures of military power, but American power is also stretched dangerously thin. U.S.

policy makers have little choice but to sustain a large investment in ever more modern military capabilities lest the United States lose even more potential to deter China, first on the Taiwan Strait, and then perhaps well beyond.

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War with China would go nuclear and culminate in extinctionThe Strait Times, 2000 (“No one gains in war over Taiwan”, June 25, Lexis) The high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -horror of horrors -raise the possibility of a nuclear war . Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking

China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability,

there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures

from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilization. There would be no victors in such a war. While the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon over Taiwan might seem inconceivable, it cannot be ruled out entirely, for China puts sovereignty above everything else.

And, The plan will revolutionize the Armed Forces—Space elevators improve military readiness and provide unsurpassable battlefield advantages locking in airpower. Jason R. Kent, Major, USAF, PE, 2007, Getting to Space on a Thread …Space Elevator as Alternative Access to Space April 2007 Blue Horizons Paper Center for Strategy and Technology Air War College.Why the USAF should be interested in a space elevator The USAF will be able to use a space elevator to accomplish and enable current space missions and leverage this new capability for move into new mission areas. Eric Westling, a space elevator consultant says, “It [space elevator] will change the world economy. It’s worth what ever it costs to put it up.”37 The space elevator changes everything in space. For the Air Force, space elevators are all about the mission, and it will indeed be worth whatever the cost. Why should the USAF take the lead in developing a space elevator? Air Force Doctrine Document 1 provides an answer to this question quite well as it sums up the directives from DODD

5100.1. The USAF has the key organizational function to “organize, train, equip, and provide forces for…air and space support…”38 Furthermore, the USAF is “to provide launch and space support for the Department of Defense.”39 While AFDD 1 lays out the responsibilities of the USAF, the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) tasks the DoD to: “Improve responsive space access, satellite operations, and other space enabling capabilities such as the space industrial base, space science and technology efforts and the space professional cadre.”40 But why the need for the actions mentioned above? The QDR explains: 11 “Experience from recent operations, supported by the findings and recommendations in the 2001 QDR and a

number of studies and commissions chartered by the Congress and the President – including those on national security, space management, remote sensing, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism – have underscored the increasingly critical role that intelligence capabilities, including those in space, play in supporting military operations, policy and planning and acquisition in the Department [DoD].”41 The QDR goes on to say:

“The Department [DoD] will continue to develop responsive space capabilities in order to keep access to space unfettered, reliable and secure . Survivability of space capabilities will be assured by improving space situational awareness and protection, and through other space control measures.”42 The tasks laid before the USAF are daunting: responsive, unfettered, reliable access to space while supporting the wide range of satellite missions the DoD relies upon for its operations and in support of decision making. The writers of the QDR are asking for a space elevator and didn’t even know it! Just how would a space elevator answer all these tasks? Of the nine principles of war laid out in AFDD 1, three apply directly to the space elevator: mass, maneuver, and security. Mass means to “concentrate the effects of combat power at the most

advantageous place and time to achieve decisive results.”43 This means all the tools at the commanders fingertips are applied effectively not simply in overwhelming numbers. A space elevator would enable a commander to easily build up communications, surveillance, and other space assets over his theater for use when and where he deems necessary . Current methods of redistributing space assets are time consuming and drain away the life of those

assets as precious fuel is expended to change orbits. Adding to existing capabilities today is also challenging as surplus communications links or additional assets are simply in short supply or not available at all.Maneuver is simply the “flexible application” of air and space power.44 Again, with the ability to quickly place satellites into orbit or to have the logistics support in orbi t (enabled by an elevator) to move assets

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around as needed, the space elevator satisfies this basic principle of war. The space elevator provides the flexibility to use space in the precise manner a commander wishes to configure his battlespace. Along with mass and maneuver, one can not forget the principle of security. Security means “never permit the enemy to acquire unexpected advantage” and “embraces physical and information medium”45 With a space elevator and the sheer access to space it would provide, no enemy would be able to acquire an unexpected advantage either on the ground, in the air, or especially in orbit. Physical patrol and protection of space-borne assets would be possible while a massive increase in information transfer capabilities could be constructed cheaply meaning he could have all the bandwidth and information he could desire. Assets placed in orbit by the elevator would help a commander no matter

where he was located on the globe through increased communications, reconnaissance, surveillance capabilities. “While the principles of war provide general guidance on the application of military forces, the tenets [of air and space power] provide more specific considerations for air and space forces .”46 A space elevator supports many of these tenets, especially persistence and balance. Persistence as used here can be summed by saying, as “space systems advance and proliferate; they offer the potential for permanent presence over any part of the globe”47. The persistence provided by today’s systems should be

considered at risk, as mentioned earlier. The space elevator would provide greater numbers of more capable, more robust systems and a means to augment and easily replace systems lost to enemy actions. The tenet of balance is to “bring air and space power together to produce a synergistic effect”48 In other words, finite assets must be used to the best effect. The space elevator allows the placement and servicing of satellites allowing full battlespace awareness and support capabilities which serve as force multipliers.49

Every other method will be vulnerable to attacks—The plan avoids themJason R. Kent, Major, USAF, PE, 2007, Getting to Space on a Thread …Space Elevator as Alternative Access to Space April 2007 Blue Horizons Paper Center for Strategy and Technology Air War College.Should the U.S. Air Force pursue construction of a space elevator as an alternate means for accessing space? This question is critical considering the importance of space assets to the U.S. military and the nation.

Today, the military relies on satellite communications, reconnaissance, surveillance, weather, and global positioning systems in orbit to perform even the most basic of missions.2 The systems U.S. forces uses are not limited to government assets. Commercial and allied communications and imaging systems are

routinely used to bolster bandwidth and coverage areas.3 Unfortunately, these crown jewels of the military and commercial world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to enemy actions. Jamming4, direct attack using high powered lasers5 or kinetic kill weapons6, as well as attacks on ground sites7 are but a few of the dangers faced by space assets used by the U.S. military. What happens when an adversary is able to deny U.S. forces of its eyes, ears, timing, and maps (no e-mail!?) provided by satellites?

The current method of replacing an orbital asset requires months if not years of lead time and is extremely costly. In the mean-time, the loss of even a single satellite in orbit can greatly impact U.S. air, land, and

sea operations. There are neither rockets standing on call to launch nor many replacement satellites in the barn ready for a ride to orbit. It is imperative that the U.S. be prepared to maintain the readiness of its space forces. Launch on demand merely provides a stop-gap means to maintain those

capabilities already in place should they fail or be attacked. In order to maintain its superior position in space and to ensure the orbital assets it requires are available at all times, the U.S. must look 2 beyond conventional capabilities to provide cheap, easy, quick, and assured access to space. This method is the space elevator. ____________ Slamming the last crate into the cargo pod of the lifter, the loadmaster stepped back to admire his work. Ten dull gray packing crates crowded the pod. Each one bore the emblem of the United States Air Force. 8 - Thread to the Stars

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And, first one up wins—they can build multiple elevators before anyone elseBrad Lemley, July 2004, “Going up,” Discover Magazine, Vol. 25, Issue 7, ebscohost. IN EDWARDS'S VISION, THE FIRST PROJECT UNDERTAKEN BY A COMPLETED space elevator should be building more elevators. While he estimates that constructing the first one would be a six-year

$6 billion task, the second could cost as little as $2 billion and take just seven months because it could employ the first to boost construction materials into space. The requisite time and money would shrink for each subsequent elevator, and payload size could increase dramatically. Edwards's long-term plan calls for climbers on the third and fourth elevators, each hoisting 140 tons. He says that's why NASA needs

to get serious now: "The guy who builds the first one can have several built before anybody else can build a second one. Now the first guy has so much capacity, his payload price is down to zero. He can run the other guy out of business. Talk about grabbing the brass ring." And Edwards emphasizes that the United States is by no means fated to win this race. The first builder might not even be a government. "We have actually been told by private investors, 'If you can reduce the risk and prove it can be done, getting $10 billion is nothing.'" Having an international consortium of public and private entities pitch in may be the best scenario for ensuring the common good. A world blessed with a half-dozen space elevators constructed cooperatively, radiating from the equator like lotus

petals, could provide near-universal access to space at a payload cost of as little as $10 a pound. In the long run, "you wouldn't want the elevator only on Earth. A similar system would work on Mars or some other planetary body," says NASA's David Smitherman. Indeed, says Edwards, any large object in the solar system that spins could become a candidate for a space elevator . But for now, Edwards remains focused on getting the first one built. Along with all the other boons it would deliver to humankind, the elevator also has the potential to realize Edwards's personal dream of voyaging into space. "In 20 years, I'll be 60. I should still be plenty healthy enough to go on the space elevator. Maybe it will turn out that the only way I can get into space is to build the way to get there myself."

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Rockets Contention two is Rockets

Rockets make exploration and development impossible—Reducing payload cost is critical to future projects and reducing dependence on Launch vehicles.Jonathan Coopersmith, 2001, March 9, Texas A&M University, “The cost of reaching orbit: Ground-based launch systems,” Space Policy, Volume 27 Issue 2, ScienceDirect.The high cost of launching payloads into orbit – roughly $20,000/kg – continues to deter large-scale exploration and exploitation of space. Ground-based launch systems may radically reduce costs to $200/kg,

drastically altering the economics of spaceflight. Low costs will encourage the creation of new markets, including solar-based power satellites and disposal of nuclear waste. The US government should establish a goal of $200/kg by 2020 and provide the resources needed to develop such systems.Article Outline1. Introduction2. Why chemical rockets?3. Alternatives to chemical rockets4. Creating demand: if you build it, will they come?4.1. Space-based solar power4.2. Nuclear waste disposal5. The challenge6. Conclusion1. Introduction

When I fly from North America to Europe, I pay $6–12/ kg of me. When a satellite is launched into space, the customer (or taxpayer) pays roughly $20,000/kg. That figure is the major challenge

facing space flight: until the cost of reaching orbit drastically decreases, the large-scale exploration and exploitation of space will not occur. These high launch costs have restricted access to

space to those governments, corporations and organizations which can afford millions of dollars to launch a satellite. As a result, half a century after Sputnik, the annual total of all satellite launches is only a few hundred tons, the equivalent of two 747 freighter flights.1Ground-based alternatives to chemical rockets exist, such as beamed energy propulsion and space elevators. While promising, they are all technically immature and will not develop without a substantial government investment. Just as it pushed the development of rocket technology in the 1940s

and 1950s, the US government should set a grand challenge to radically reduce the cost of reaching orbit to $200 a kg by 2020. Meeting this goal must be accompanied by resources and institutional support to move the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) of these technologies from the laboratory to commercial fruition.2. Why chemical rockets?

Since Sputnik launched the Space Age on 4 October 1957, chemical rockets have propelled every payload into

orbit, a monopoly that will continue for the foreseeable future. Rockets have two major problems: cost and reliability. Reaching orbit today costs about $20,000/ kg, a daunting barrier.2 While very reliable, rockets are not fully reliable even after five decades of experience: the failure rate of rockets carrying

communications satellites to geosynchronous orbit (GEO) in 1997–2006 was 8%. One consequence is insurance rates of 11–20%, two orders of magnitude greater than for a Boeing 747.3

The high cost of reaching orbit means satellites are built to maximize yield per kilogram with the tradeoff of high costs to develop, assemble, and test them. The ISS cost $115,000 a kg and NEAR $181,000 in 2009 dollars, while the scores of Iridium satellites cost only $7300 a kg 4.If chemical rockets cost so much and are unreliable, why use them? The reality is that they work well enough and the entire infrastructure for space exploration and exploitation has developed around rockets. Nor is the technology static. Rockets and satellites have improved greatly in capability while the cost/kg has dropped. A 2010 Tauri Group study found that sending a kg to GEO

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dropped from $32,000 to $21,000 (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars) or by 34% from 1999 to 2008.5 New generations of rockets will lower costs, but not radically. The SpaceX Falcon 9 will cost some $5000 a kg to low-Earth orbit (LEO), almost twice the $2850 per kg expected in 2003 for its cancelled Falcon 5.6 Similarly, the 1997 Cassini cost $300,000 a kg in 1999 dollars compared with $480,000 for the 1975 Viking and $935,000 for the 1962 Mariner 4.7

What rockets have not done and cannot do is radically reduce the cost of reaching orbit .

Lack of effort is not the problem. Billions of dollars have been spent over the past decades in exploring rocket-based alternatives such as single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO), reusable launch vehicles (RLVs), and other unsuccessful lines of development.8 As Jim Maser,

President of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, stated in 2009, the technological base for reaching orbit in 2020 will be “Much like it is today. And that is not much different from what we were doing 50 years ago.”9

Scenario 1 is Ozone

Reducing reliance on launch vehicles is key to stop ozone depletionFoust ‘9, Editor of the Space Review (Jeff, June 15, “Space and (or versus) the Environment”, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1395/1)While the current rate of ozone loss is considered insignificant, the paper examined what would happen if there was a sharp increase in launch rates. If launch rates doubled every decade, they found, rising emissions from rockets would offset the decline in other ozone-depleting substances by around 2035, causing ozone depletion rates to rise again. The effect would be sooner and sharper if launch rates tripled every decade. The authors conclude that, in such a scenario, there would be a move to regulate rocket emissions that could, in the worst case, sharply restrict launch activity. With today’s launch systems, though, such an outcome seems unlikely: most forecasts for the next decade project relatively flat levels of launch activity—about 60–70 orbital launches a year—that is far short of a doubling or tripling. However, a wild card here is space tourism and other suborbital launch activity, which is projected to grow from effectively zero today to hundreds or even thousands of launches a year by the end of the next decade, if systems enter service as planned and demand for such flights matches existing projections. The Astropolitics paper doesn’t take such missions, or interest in point-to-point suborbital or hypersonic travel, into account. Martin Ross, lead author of the paper at the Aerospace Corporation, said in an email last week that this is an area they will be looking at. They will also be studying the effect on ozone by emissions from hybrid rocket motors like the one being developed for SS2, something that he said there currently isn’t any information about. In an op-ed in last week’s issue of Space News, Ross urged the space industry to address this issue head-on rather than avoid it in the hopes it might go away on its own. “It is clear that the risk of regulation that would cap or even tax space systems according to the amount of ozone depletion they cause is small, but it is real,” he wrote. He added: “Historically, technical activities with high visibility—such as space operations—often excite unpredictable public and regulatory attention. Combined with a lack of scientifically reliable environmental effects data, the risk of idiosyncratic and overly restrictive regulation is high.”

OZONE DEPLETION CAUSES EXTINCTIONGreenpeace, 1995 Full of Homes: The Montreal Protocol and the Continuing Destruction of the Ozone Layer, http://archive.greenpeace.org/ozone/holes/holebg.html. When chemists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina first postulated a link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone layer depletion in 1974, the news was greeted with scepticism, but taken seriously nonetheless. The vast majority of credible scientists have since confirmed this hypothesis. The ozone layer around the Earth shields us all from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without the ozone layer, life on earth would not exist . Exposure to increased levels of ultraviolet radiation can cause cataracts, skin cancer, and immune system suppression in humans as well as innumerable effects on other living systems . This is why Rowland's and Molina's theory was taken

so seriously, so quickly - the stakes are literally the continuation of life on earth .

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Scenario 2 is Space Junk

Dependence on launches means debris cascade effect is inevitable—this will make space unusable Lynda Williams 10, Professor of Physics @ Santa Rosa Junior College, “Irrational Dreams of Space Colonization” Peace Review, The New Arms Race in Outer Space 22.1 Spring 2010 [HT]Available Online @ <http://www.scientainment.com/lwilliams_peacereview.pdf> Since the space race began 50 years ago with the launch of Sputnik, the space environment around Earth has become overcrowded with satellites and space debris, so much so, that circumterrestrial space has become a dangerous place with an increasing risk of collision and destruction. Thousands of pieces of space junk created from launches orbit the Earth in the same orbit as satellites, putting them at risk of collision. Every time a rocket is launched, debris from the rocket stages are put into orbital space. In 2009 there was a disastrous collision between an Iridium satellite and a piece of space junk that destroyed the satellite. In 2007 China blew up one of its defunct satellites to demonstrate its antiballistic missile capabilities, increasing the debris field by 15%. There are no international laws prohibiting anti-satellite actions. Every year, since the mid 1980s, a treaty has been introduced into the UN for a Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS), with all parties including Russia and China voting for it except for the US. How can we hope to pursue a peaceful and environmentally sound route of space exploration without international laws in place that protect space and Earth environments and guarantee that the space race to the moon and beyond does not foster a war over space resources? Indeed, if the space debris problem continues to grow unfettered or if there is war in space, space will become too trashed for launches to take place without risk of destruction.

This independently causes miscalculation and accidental nuclear war David Ritchie, IT Business Relationship Manager at SELEX S&AS, 19 82, Spacewar, http://spacedebate.org/evidence/1768/ Perhaps the greatest danger posed by the militarization of space is that of war by accident . At any given time, several thousand satellites and other pieces of equipment -- spent booster stages and the like -- are circling the earth, most of them in low orbit. The space immediately above the atmosphere has begun to resemble an expressway at rush hour. It is not uncommon for satellites to miss each other by only a kilometer or two, and satellites crashing into each other may explain some of the mysterious incidents in which space vehicles simply vanish from the skies . One civillian TV satellite has been lost in space; it never entered its intended orbit, and no signals were heard from it to indicate where it might have gone. Collision with something else in space seems a reasonable explanation of this disappearance. Even a tiny fragment of metal striking a satellite at a relative velocity of a few kilometers per second would wreck the satellite, ripping through it like a Magnum slug through a tin can. Now suppose that kind of mishap befell a military satellite -- in the worst possible situation, during a time of international tension with all players in the spacewar game braced for attacks on their spacecraft. The culpable fragment might be invisible from the ground; even something as small and light as a paper clip could inflict massive damage on a satellite at high velocity. Unaware of the accident, a less than cautious leader might interpret it as a preconceived attack. Wars have begun over smaller incidents.

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Plan

Thus my partner and I present the following plan: The United States federal government should construct a space elevator

15


SolvencyThe space elevator has lower costs, environmental, and exploration benefits.Kate Burkett and Nari Kim, 2010, University of Kansas, Celestial Railroad – The Space Elevator, http://www.kateburkett.com/SpaceElevator.pdf Whybuildaspaceelevator?Reducedcosts

Although the space elevator takes longer to reach GEO than a traditional space shuttle, the cost of transporting the cargo to space would decrease significantly. Instead of costing $10,000 per pound, supporters of the space elevator predict that the invention will lower the price tag by 99- percent, to $100 a pound (Chang, 2003). In addition, the advancement of recent research has lowered the estimate for building the elevator to $6 billion. This is in comparison to the estimated total cost of the International Space Station, which has exceeded $100 billion (Chang, 2003). If Dr. Edwards were to receive $5 billion in funding today he estimates that, "In 15 years we could have a dozen cables running full

steam putting 50 tons in space every day for even less” than $100 a pound. Each space elevator built will make the next one cheaper, lowering the cost to $2 billion, because the first elevator would be the vehicle lifting the materials into space (Dorneanu, 2007). ThegreenelevatorThe easier economical access to space would also allow important projects not currently practical to be further considered.

Undertaking actions helpful to the environment like sending large numbers of solar powered satellites into space to collect sunlight and beam energy back down to Earth would be seen as less lavish. Others suggest that the elevator could be used to shuttle and dispose of nuclear waste (Steere, 2008). Earth’sorbitandbeyond

Much like the transcontinental railroad, proponents of the space elevator believe it will usher in a new era of human civilization. Like the American west was opened by the transcontinental railroad, the space elevator has the capability to open up transportation to the stars and revolutionize space travel by creating a permanent connection between Earth and space. Since the problem of defeating

Earth’s gravity will be overcome, trips beyond the moon will become actual possibilities. If supported, the space elevator could become the vehicle to explore a new frontier.9

And, the elevator can overcome all technical and security problems—no risk of their case turnsB.C. Edwards, 2005, “A hoist to the heavens [space elevator],” director of research at the Institute for Scientific Research in West Virginia and president of Carbon Designs, Inc., ieee spectrum, volume 42 issue 8, UT Austin Library.Some of these challenges would be met merely by locating the elevator’s Earth anchor in the eastern equatorial Pacific, west of the Galapagos Islands, where the weather is unusually calm and the threats from hurricanes, torna-does, lightning, jet streams, and wind are greatly reduced. This location is also about 650 km from any current air routes or sea lanes, significantly reducing the chance of an accidental collision and making the site easier to secure against terrorists. An anchor in the Pacific obviously implies a floating platform, but such structures are already commercially available, thanks to the offshore oil industry [see illustration, “Elevator Ahoy”].

These platforms would be mobile, which would allow the elevator, with sufficient warning, to avoid orbiting satellites and debris by moving the anchor end of the cable back and forth about 1 km,

pulling the ribbon out of the path of an oncoming object. While debris and other objects down to 10 cm in

diameter are currently tracked, objects with diam- eters as small as 1 cm are a potential threat to the elevator. As a

consequence, the current elevator system design includes a high-sensitivity ground-based radar facility to track all objects in low-Earth orbit that are at least 1 cm wide [see illustration, “Watching the Skies”]. A system like this was designed for the International Space Station but never implemented.

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Eliminating erosion from atomic oxygen at altitudes of 100 to 800 km would be the job of thin metal coatings applied to the cable.

Radiation damage would be mitigated by using carbon nanotubes and plastic polymer materials that are inherently radiation resistant.To avoid problems with cable oscillations induced by tidal forces, my ribbon design calls for a natural resonant period--7.2 hours--that does not resonate with the 24-hour periods of the moon and sun. Any oscillations that do occur would be damped by the mobile anchor station.

Induced electrical currents would be generated only if the ribbon cut through Earth's, or an interplanetary, magnetic field. Because the ribbon would be stationary relative to Earth's magnetic field, only dynamic changes in the magnetic field could cause currents in the ribbon, and these would be small. The interplanetary magnetic field is also small, except in cases of extreme solar activity, and even then, the currents generated would be on the order of milliwatts and easily dissipated. Currents caused by charged plasma in Earth's ionosphere would also be negligible, because the ribbon's composite material would have high electrical resistance.The last challenge, and the one that sparks the most interest in today's geopolitical climate, is terrorism. Despite the elevator anchor's

remoteness and defensibility, an attack that severs the elevator cable--for example, by detonating a bomb planted

on an elevator car--is a possibility. So what would happen if the cable were cut?Science-fiction scenarios have portrayed a space-elevator cable failure as a global disaster ,

but the reality, for my design, would be nothing of the sort. Remember that the ribbon's center of gravity is in

geostationary orbit, and the entire cable is under tension as the counterweight swings around Earth. If the ribbon were to be severed near the bottom, all the cable above the cut would float up and start to drift. Calculations show that the ribbon and counterweight would most likely be thrown out of Earth orbit into open space. Of course, the cable below the severed point would fall. But because the linear density of the ribbon would be just

8 kg/km, literally lighter than a feather, proportionally speaking, it would be unlikely to do much, if any,

physical damage. In the worst- case scenario, where the cable is severed near the top, in

space, the released counterweight would fly out of Earth orbit and nearly the entire ribbon would begin to fall down and wrap around the planet. As the ribbon fell it would gain velocity, and any ribbon above the

first 1000 km would burn up when it hit the atmosphere, producing long, light ribbons that are meters to

kilometers in length. It would be a mess and a financial loss, and probably an impres- sive light show in the upper

atmosphere, but nothing like a planetary disaster. Some toxicity issues are being investigated in connection with inhalation of ribbon debris, but initial results indicate that the health risks would be small.

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Case Answers

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Leadership

UNIQUENESS - THE US FACES SPACE CHALLENGES – PUBLIC SUPPORT, MONEY, LABOR.DAVID HEYMAN, 2005, SENIOR FELLOW AND DIRECTOR OF THE CSIS HOMELAND SECURITY PROGRAM, ET AL, “THE STILL UNTRODDEN HEIGHTS: GLOBAL IMPERATIVES FOR SPACE EXPLORATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY,” CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, HTTP://CSIS.ORG/FILES/MEDIA/CSIS/PUBS/SUTH.PDF Challenges: The United States finds itself in an enviable position in the world of human space exploration today, in possession of the

political will and many of the capabilities to carry out a new generation of human space activities. However, the Columbia accident in 2003 has paralyzed NASA’s human space activities for the last two years, and cost the agency billions to remedy the problems with its aging space transportation system. The country’s long-term financial imbalances are a threat to government funding of space activity, and a new Presidential administration in 2008 or 2012 could decide to scuttle the new initiative entirely.

Public support for human space exploration also rests upon a thin layer of support; initial

public support of Bush’s announcement last year was tepid, and space exploration is seen by many to be a “luxury item” in comparison with priorities such as education and medical research. Finally, the country’s aerospace workforce is aging and not being replaced at a sustainable rate. New hurdles and restrictions on foreign student visas could further dilute the labor force in coming years.

Now is Key Timeframe – Space Policy is At a Critical Juncture – Failure to Act Ensures Weakness

Valerie Neal, writer for the Economic Times, “End of space shuttle, end to US dominance of space? 7-6-2011 http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-07-06/news/29743674_1_valerie-neal-space-shuttle-shuttle-eraWASHINGTON: The flight into space by NASA's space shuttle Atlantis on this Friday will mark end of the shuttle era, but many believe it may also mean the end of US hegemony in the space. Although NASA has led numbers of manned flights into space for three decades, no additional such flights are planned for the moment. Top officials at the space agency, however, maintain this isn't the end of this

country's manned effort in space, rather just the beginning of a new chapter. "I don't think this means the end of US crewed flights, but we're in a period of uncertainty and we don't know for how long," Valerie Neal, the official in charge of the shuttle area at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said. "I think that what's a little disappointing is that we really don't have a clear vision of what it is that's going to come after," Neal said. "There's uncertainty in NASA and among the general public." After this NASA shuttle flight, private companies will be in charge of developing the technology for future space vehicles. This will enable the US space agency to focus on other projects, like working out the logistics of a manned Mars mission or travelling to an asteroid, two of the goals President

Barack Obama set out in his new space strategy, says NASA director Charles Bolden. Although, the companies with which NASA has signed agreements to develop new spacecraft "are making some optimistic

predictions" about when the new space vehicles will be ready, Neal said, "the truth is that they have still not been prepared". As a nation, we are in "the final part of the second great era of space exploration,"

similar to what we went through in the 1970s after the last Apollo mission, the programme that succeeded in putting men on the moon,

he added. NASA took almost a decade to develop and launch the shuttle programme, and it was not until April 12, 1981 - 20 years

after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space - that Columbia was sent into orbit, followed by

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Challenger (1983), Discovery (1984), Atlantis (1985) and Endeavour (1992). Neal, whose museum will receive the Discovery to

exhibit to the public in April 2012, said that the shuttles had been great spacecraft.

Hegemony—China Challenging Now

CHINA’S SPACE POWER HAS LEFT TENSIONS HIGH-CONFLICT IS ON THE BRINK NOWWILLIAM C. MARTEL AND TOSHI YOSHIHARA AUTUMN 2003, WILLIAM C. MARTEL IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES AT THE FLETCHER SCHOOL, TUFTS UNIVERSITY, TOSHI YOSHIHARA HOLDS THE JOHN A. VAN BEUREN CHAIR OF ASIA-PACIFIC STUDIES AND IS AN AFFILIATE MEMBER OF THE CHINA MARITIME STUDIES INSTITUTE AT THE U.S.

NAVAL WAR COLLEGE., “AVERTING A SINO-U.S SPACE RACE”, HTTP://WWW.TWQ.COM/03AUTUMN/DOCS/03AUTUMN_MARTEL.PDFWhen China successfully launched its fourth and final test flight of an unmanned spacecraft on December 30, 2002,

the c ount r y ’ s l e ade r s hailed this accomplishment as a major technological triumph. Senior officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) predicted that the manned s p a c e p r o g r am would l aunch China’ s first astronaut (yuhangyuan) in l a t e 2003. The Chinese media predictably brimmed with national pride, while some international media questioned whether such a prestige project was a waste of resources. More generally, international attention to China’s space program has been sporadic and patronizing at best, either denigrating it or treating it nonchalantly, predominantly because it has come so late. This

prevailing indifference, however, risks overlooking the longer-term consequences of China’s growing

space power and, more dangerously, the potential collision of U.S. and Chinese interests in space. From China’s perspective, the United States’ self-appointed guardianship of space is presumptuous and represents a genuine challenge to China’s national security concerns. For the United States, China’s extension into space symbolizes its ambitions to challenge U.S. national security. Deeply seated, mutual suspicions are evident in both countries’ strategic assessments as the contours of potential strategic competition between Washington and Beijing emerge. In essence, both sides agree that the other represents a challenge. Although this potential clash of interests is not yet

sufficiently severe to be visible to c a sua l o b s e r v e r s , the United States and China are on the threshold of a space race that could radically influence international security.

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Heg Solvency

ELEVATOR KEY TO SECURE HEG – 95% ADVANTAGE OVER OTHER COUNTRIES

BRADLEY C. EDWARDS , PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF CARBON DESIGNS INCORPORATED, AND PHILIP RAGAN , SPACE EXPERT, 2006, “LEAVING THE PLANET BY SPACE ELEVATOR”]Will America win the race?

In various discussions, individuals have told us definitively that the United States will build the first Space Elevator. Others have stated just as definitively that a private entity will build the first Elevator. As we will see, there is little that is certain about the future.It is true that a country such as the United States might build the Space Elevator but when the cost and technological difficulty is reduced sufficiently it will open the way for a number of entities to consider undertaking the endeavor.

A clear example is seen in rocket technology. The United States and Russia both perfected rocket technology in

the 1960s and conducted extensive space programs. In addition, China, Japan, France, India, Pakistan, England, Germany and a handful of other countries have various levels of rocket technology. The United States rockets have been built by a set of large aerospace companies.Since 2004, individuals have built and flown rockets to carry people to space. Rocket technology has matured and spread across the globe. The technology for the Space Elevator is much less complex than that for rockets. Technology in our current society is now chased, developed and distributed with vigor.

The process that took rockets from a national level to the hands of individuals will be short circuited for the Space Elevator. The cost and technology are well within reach of countries, corporations,

and individuals. The question is which entity is most likely to overcome the political hurdles, the capital costs and the technical challenges to succeed first.Americans will of course assume that their country will be the builder, but at this stage nothing is certain. Perhaps “which country?” is not even the right question: with the levels of wealth of the 21st century is it within the reach of the worlds’ richest individuals and the largest Edwards - Ragan 127 companies? The

prospect of a Microsoft Space Elevator is not inconceivable, as is a Shell or Exxon Elevator.Today’s space enabled nations include the USA, Russia, China, Europe, Japan and India. In 20 years time the list may have expanded

to include other countries. Private venture space operators are already beginning plans for their first flights and by then may be in a position to fight for market share.Well before then, it will be apparent that the country launching the first Elevator will take control of space. This is the reverse of today’s technology, where it is often the case that the first-in company bears all the costs of development while others take the idea and build on it. For the Space Elevator, it is, to use an Australian expression, “first-in-bestdressed”.

Whoever owns the first Elevator will have a 95% cost advantage over competitors who still depend on rocket launches, and that advantage translates into the cost of constructing second and subsequent Elevators. So

there is a clear economic imperative to win the race and be first. It is not just construction and launch costs: the economic and territorial benefits of expansion into space will accrue to the owner of the Elevator and the owning Country or Company may become the dominant power of the late 21 st century.

SPACE ELEVATORS KEY TO SUSTAINABLE DOD INVOLVEMENT IN SPACE

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FOUST 4 (JEFF, THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER OF THE SPACE REVIEW, “ELEVATORS AND EXPLORATION”, SEPTEMBER)

Work to reduce the cost of space access does continue in the private sector, although those efforts, such as SpaceX’s Falcon and the gaggle of suborbital vehicle developers, are

still in the nascent stage. The US military’s recent interest in “responsive space” may lead to vehicles that can not only launch on short notice, but also for lower cost . These efforts, though, largely offer evolutionary,

not revolutionary, reductions in launch costs. One innovation that has promised such revolutionary reductions is the space elevator: long consigned to the realm of science fiction, the concept has gained support in recent years thanks to new developments such as carbon nanotubes. (See “The space elevator: going up?” Part 1 and Part 2, September 15 and 22, 2003). With NASA’s focus towards the Vision and not on low-cost space transportation, though, is there any hope to get the agency, or some other entity, to fund continued development of the space elevator idea? Seeking other supporters That’s the question a panel of experts considered during the closing session of the

Third International Space Elevator Conference in Washington DC in late June. With NASA being focused—at least for the time being—on the new exploration plan, to the point of canceling or cutting back technology programs not related to it, who else is out there that could pick up the slack? With the Vision, NASA

has effectively abandoned its decades-long quest for the Holy Grail of cheap access to space. One obvious alternative, at least in terms of the size of its pocketbook and its interest in space access, is the Defense Department .

The ability to launch large amounts of mass inexpensively would certainly reshape how the military operates in space. Moreover, the early stage of development of space elevator technologies would seem to be a natural fit for DARPA, the military agency that funds technology development that may take years to come to fruition. “The military will have to be a major factor, I believe, in whatever way we go, whether it is a space elevator or a combination of things, said Robert Sackheim, assistant director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “It won’t happen without the DoD.” “The space elevator is a fully reusable vehicle, and we’re all agreed that that’s the kind of booster that we need,” said Tom Rogers, chief engineer of the Space Transportation Association. He added that

besides offering funding to support the project, the DoD can also provide a sense of fiscal discipline when dealing with large, expensive programs. “There are people in the Defense Department who do pay attention to dollars. Defense can bring that to the table.” Neither Rogers nor Sackheim, though, offered any thoughts about exactly how the Defense Department might get involved, or even if there were people there in positions of influence who might be interested in the concept.

Current military space systems aren’t sustainable-The plan is key to maintain leadership.Jason R. Kent, Major, USAF, PE, 2007, Getting to Space on a Thread …Space Elevator as Alternative Access to Space April 2007 Blue Horizons Paper Center for Strategy and Technology Air War College.

Should the U.S. Air Force pursue construction of a space elevator as an alternate means for accessing space? This question is critical considering the importance of space assets to the U.S. military and the nation. Today, the military relies on satellite communications, reconnaissance, surveillance, weather, and global positioning systems in orbit to perform even the most basic of missions .2 The systems U.S. forces uses are

not limited to government assets. Commercial and allied communications and imaging systems are routinely used to bolster bandwidth and coverage areas.3 Unfortunately, these crown jewels of the military and commercial world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to enemy actions. Jamming4, direct attack using high powered lasers5 or kinetic kill weapons6, as well as attacks on ground sites7 are but a few of the dangers faced by space assets used by the U.S. military. What happens when an adversary is able to deny U.S. forces of its eyes, ears, timing,

and maps (no e-mail!?) provided by satellites? The current method of replacing an orbital asset requires months if not years of lead time and is extremely costly. In the mean-time, the loss of even a single satellite in orbit can greatly impact

U.S. air, land, and sea operations. There are neither rockets standing on call to launch nor many replacement satellites in the barn ready for a ride to orbit. It is imperative that the U.S. be prepared to maintain the readiness of its space forces . Launch on demand merely provides a stop-gap means to maintain those

capabilities already in place should they fail or be attacked. In order to maintain its superior position in space and to ensure the orbital assets it requires are available at all times, the U.S. must look 2 beyond

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conventional capabilities to provide cheap, easy, quick, and assured access to space. This method is the space elevator. ____________ Slamming the last crate into the cargo pod of the lifter, the loadmaster stepped back to admire his work. Ten dull gray packing crates crowded the pod. Each one bore the emblem of the United States Air Force. 8 - Thread to the Stars

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Rockets

SPACE ELEVATORS SOLVE ROCKET-DRIVEN LAUNCH COSTSJonathan Coopersmith, 2001, March 9, Texas A&M University, “The cost of reaching orbit: Ground-based launch systems,” Space Policy, Volume 27 Issue 2, ScienceDirect.3. Alternatives to chemical rockets

Only non-rocket ground-based systems (GBS) can drastically reduce the cost of reaching orbit. GBS keep the engine and most of the fuel on the ground so the spacecraft is almost all payload, not propellant. As well as being more efficient, GBS are inherently safer than rockets because the capsules will not carry liquid fuels and their complex equipment, eliminating the danger of an explosion.A large GBS system could launch thousands of tons a year, an order of magnitude more than current launchers. Unlike a rocket launch pad, ground systems would launch hundreds of payloads annually, payloads weighing tens or hundreds of kilograms instead of tons. Most importantly, the cost/kg should drop by two orders of magnitude to $200.10Like any technology in its formative phase, a range of possibilities exists, including beamed energy propulsion (BEP), space elevators, light gas guns, and magnetic levitation. The good news is that concepts for these ground-based systems exist; the bad news is that these concepts remain in the laboratory.In BEP a microwave or laser beam from the ground station strikes the bottom of the capsule. The resultant heat compresses and explodes the air or solid fuel there, providing lift and guidance. The concept is more than theoretical. In October 2000 a 10-kW laser boosted a 50-g lightcraft over 70 m at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, proving the underlying feasibility of the concept.11 Researchers at the University of Tokyo demonstrated the feasibility of microwave transmission in 2010.12

Space elevators employ a thin tether attached to a satellite serving as a counterbalance thousands of kms above the Earth. A platform would crawl up the elevator. Generating more publicity than BEP,

this concept depends on advances in materials strong and light enough to serve as the tether. Magnetic levitation and magnetic propulsion systems would provide a high initial velocity for capsules which would then propel themselves into orbit.13

Space debris increasing now—new action necessaryDavid Heyman, 2005, Senior Fellow and Director of the CSIS Homeland Security Program, et al, “The Still Untrodden Heights: Global Imperatives for Space Exploration in the 21st Century,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/suth.pdf2. Debris in Earth orbitDebris objects are increasingly polluting near-Earth orbits. The probability of a spacecraft colliding with Earth-orbiting objects remains low, but is steadily increasing. To avoid a major increase in the amount of debris accumulating near earth, new international standards for the design of space

systems that minimize the probability of spacecraft or satellite break-up in orbit should be developed. This will have an impact on the cost of space systems in the near term, but may reduce the prospect of more catastrophic costs in the longer term, including, for example, reducing similar risks down the road around lunar orbit (or the orbits of other celestial bodies). Current discussion regarding space debris centers on creating obligations to de-orbit or re-orbit non-functional spacecraft. Also, there is talk of strengthening the liability and registration regimes to enhance their effectiveness against debris-generated damage, and salvage rights.

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Space Elevator Collects and Removes Debris From SpaceV. A. Chobotov, 2004, The Aerospace Corporation, Disposal of Geosynchronous Satellites By Earth Oriented Tethers, 55th International Astronautical Congress IAC-04-1AA.3.8.2.05.Abstract An extended-length gravity-gradient-stabilized geosynchronous tether system is described that can be used to collect and dispose of space debris objects in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO). The debris objects are released from the tether at various distances from GEO for deployment to escape or Earth reentry type trajectories. Tether length,

mass, and counterweight (upper and lower tip mass) requirements are determined for Kevlar and carbon nanotube materials. Tether extension to the Earth surface is examined (the space elevator concept) for the carbon nanotube material and the relevant design parameters established.1. INTRODUCTION

Although the present annual collision probability for average operational spacecraft in GEO is only on the order of 10–5 it is considered necessary to limit future accumulation of space debris to minimize the collision hazard in the future. All current methods for object disposal in GEO involve the expenditure of propellant either to maneuver satellites at their end-of-life above the geostationary altitude or to use a dedicated space tug, which could rendezvous and collect dead objects for deorbit. An alternative approach, which eliminates or greatly reduces the need for propellant

expenditure for debris removal is the application of the momentum exchange tether-based systems.

The well-known space elevator concept could be used for this purpose, or a shorter variant of it, as

described in this study, is an even more practical application of the tether-based momentum exchange system. It can be designed to remove debris objects from GEO without expenditure of any propellant other than that required to rendezvous with non-cooperative debris objects and deliver them to the tether-based system for disposal.The advantage of the GEO-based tether system over that of the space elevator is its significantly reduced mass, size, and the ability to maneuver via momentum exchange, if

necessary. This is accomplished by reeling in the tethers above and below the GEO altitude in order to transfer the attitude momentum to orbital momentum. Also, the collision risk in GEO is much lower than that at low altitudes where the space elevator is more vulnerable. The

absence of the radiation belts in GEO is similarly a considerable advantage for the GEO tether system compared to the space elevator concept.The principal issues to be resolved are those related to the collection of space debris in GEO. Even though the GEO space tether can be placed in any desired GEO location and relocated as needed by reeling in and out the tethers, it can also be deployed in the invariant plane (at about 7° to the equator) where it will not be subject to the sun/moon

perturbations as much as at other inclinations. Moreover, future missions may be designed to rendezvous the rocket stages with the tether station for disposals. Another possibility is the use of a free-flyer debris collector, which can rendezvous with noncooperative objects and deliver them to the tether station for disposal.These and other approaches to the debris collection procedure must be examined and assessed regarding practicality, cost, and efficiency before a viable design of the tether collection system can be defined. The first mention of a space tower and geosynchronous altitude equatorial orbit (GEO) appeared in a 1895 book by K. E. Tsiolkovski. In the 1959 re-publication,1 Tsiolkovski reveals his thoughts about a science fiction voyage

through the universe and talks about different physical phenomena, including the idea of an artificial satellite of the Earth. A space tower is described, which when located in the equatorial plane of a planet, experiences decreasing gravity with altitude, becoming zero at 5.5 Earth radii. The idea of a space elevator is later described by Y. N. Artsutanov, who proposed a bootstrap construction of a cable from geosynchronous altitude to the Earth surface.2 His “cosmic lift” or a “heavenly funicular” was calculated to be able to deliver 500 tons an hour to orbit. A. C. Clark3 examined the concept in detail and showed that only a cable material with an “escape length” of 5000 km could support such an elevator. This meant that a material strong enough to hang 5000 km under sea-level gravity would be required for the elevator. No such material was available until recently when carbon nanotube

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was discovered. The carbon nanotube material is estimated to have a tensile strength of 130 GPa compared to <5 GPa for steel and 3.6 GPa for Kevlar. The density of the carbon nanotubes is 1300 kg/m3

compared to 7900 kg/m3 for steel and 1440 kg/m3 for Kevlar, which makes it an ideal material for the space elevator. Sutton and Diderich4 consider a satellite system that is synchronous using a long, tapered cable that extends toward the Earth with a satellite attached at the end of the cable. They showed that for a boron steel material (with a tensile strength of 500,000 psi and density of 2.4 g/cm3), a satellite may be suspended at an altitude halfway between GEO and Earth requiring a mass of a cable and counterweight of about 85 times that of the suspended satellite mass. Chobotov5 extended the results of Sutton and Diderich using

a viscoelastic organic material Kevlar that has nearly twice the strength-to-weight ratio of boron steel. It showed that the mass of the cable and counterweight is on the order of 25 times that of the suspended satellite at halfway to the GEO altitude. Pearson6 re-examines the space elevator concept and shows that it can be used to launch probes by extracting energy from the Earth’s rotation. Penzo7 applies the same principle to transport satellites to different orbits by using long gravity gradient stabilized tethers in space. B. C. Edwards8 describes the design and deployment of a space elevator using a carbon nanotube tape and discusses how the various problems of the space elevator concept can be solved using current or near-future technology.The present study examines the momentum exchange capability of a geosynchronous tether satellite system to dispose of (i.e., reorbit)

a dead satellite in GEO. The satellite disposal system consists of a geosynchronous satellite (base) from which long tethers are extended up and down along the local vertical. The tether is in tension due to the difference of the gravitational and inertial forces acting along the local vertical. A spent satellite or a debris object can be grappled by the base satellite and allowed to slide up or down the tether for release at a selected distance from GEO. The

resulting orbit of the released satellite may be on an Earth reentry trajectory (when released at the lower

altitude) or an escape orbit if released at the upper end. Simultaneous release of two or more objects can be used

to balance the angular momentum of the tether satellite system and thus maintain its geosynchronous orbit. A change of longitude (i.e., repositioning) can be performed either by a small thruster attached to the base or by a transfer of the system attitude angular momentum into orbital momentum. The latter can be accomplished by collapsing (i.e., reeling in) the upper and lower tethers into the base satellite. This results in an increase of the center of mass orbital velocity in a higher energy elliptical orbit. Re-extending the tethers again after several revolutions in the new “phasing” orbit will return the base satellite to GEO at another longitude. The study considers the length, mass, and tether cross-section requirements for the debris disposal tether system deployed in geosynchronous orbit. Two tether materials are used: Kevlar with a design strength of 3.66 GPa (530,700 psi) and a carbon nanotube material with a strength of 100 GPa (14,500,000 psi). Extension of the tether to the surface of the Earth (the space elevator concept) is shown to be theoretically feasible with the use of the carbon nano tube material for the tether.

2. PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION Consider a schematic representation of a GEO debris disposal system as shown in Figure 1. The Tether Satellite system deployed in GEO consists of the base satellite and two tethers with end masses deployed along the local vertical downward and upward from GEO. The system can be located either at stable or the unstable longitudes. If an unstable longitude is selected, the system will have a slow drift and may thus encounter all objects in GEO with time. Once a debris object DB1 is located and collected by the base satellite (by grappling or

other means) it is given a slight impulse downward along the tether so that it begins sliding under the influence of the gravitational and the inertial accelerations. These are the accelerations that keep the radially deployed tether in tension. Simultaneously, another debris object DB2 is collected by the base satellite and is given an upward impulse to initiate the slide of the object up and away from GEO. At the end of the tether the counterweight mass M2 stops the object motion. When both debris objects are at their end M2 (counterweight tip mass) Debris Object 2 (DB2) Base Satellite (Debris Collector) GEO 2 1 Debris Object 1 (DB1) r2 r1 r Earth

Center Re = 6,378 km M1 (support mass) Fig. 1: System Schematic Diagram masses , they are released from the tether simultaneously. The lower object re-enters the Earth atmosphere in a short time while the upper object is injected into an escape trajectory from the Earth. The tether satellite system will remain in GEO or will acquire a slight drift rate relative to GEO due to the conservation of angular momentum of all satellites. The drift may be used to locate

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additional debris objects to be released as before. By proper balancing of the debris object masses, the system drift rate relative to GEO can be controlled.

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Nuke Propulsion Add-onObama Is Reviving Nuclear Propulsion for Space Exploration and Development With PlutoniumKarl Grossman, 6/25/2010, Investigative Reporter, Professor of journalism at the State University of New York College, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/obama-seeks-to-revive-spa_b_625356.htmlDespite its huge dangers, the Obama administration is seeking to revive the use of nuclear power in space. It wants the U.S. to produce the plutonium isotope that has been used for electric generation in space and is also looking to build nuclear-propelled rockets for

missions to Mars... Plutonium-238 has been used to generate electricity on space probes and rovers and also satellites. But in 1964 a satellite with a plutonium-fueled generator, after failing to achieve orbit, fell to Earth, breaking up as it hit the atmosphere and dispersing 2.1 pounds of Pu-238 from its SNAP -- (for Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power) 9A system. A study by a group of European health and radiation protection agencies reported that "a worldwide soil sampling program in 1970 showed SNAP-9A debris present at all continents and at all latitudes." Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked that fall-out to an increase of lung cancer on Earth. The accident caused NASA to pioneer the use of solar panels on satellites. NASA still used Pu-238 for space probes claiming there was no alternative -- even when there was. For example, NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) insisted, including in court testimony, that there was no choice but plutonium power on the Galileo mission to Jupiter launched in 1989. Subsequently, through the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained a study done by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory finding that solar panels could have worked. Currently, NASA is preparing to send its Juno space probe to Jupiter next year -- and it's to get all its on board electricity from solar panels. Rovers have also used solar panels. Still, in a report titled "Start-up Plan for Plutonium-

238 Production for Radioisotope Power Systems" just sent to Congress, the DOE, noting it was acting "consistent with the President's request," is calling for a return of Pu-238 production by the U.S. Nine space missions which DOE says need Pu-238-generated electricity are listed. This includes the Mars Science Laboratory, the name given to a rover to be launched in November, and other missions to the Moon, Mars and other planets through 2030. The report proposes that Pu-238 be produced at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory. "DOE's preliminary cost range estimate to implement this Pu-238 production scheme is $75-90 million," it says. The total for the fiscal year 2011 is $30 million. Facilities in the U.S. for making plutonium-238 have been closed and the nation since 1992 has been purchasing it from Russia. The processing of plutonium-238, an especially hot variant of plutonium, itself the most toxic radioactive substance known, led to worker contamination and environmental pollution here. The notion of nuclear-powered rockets goes back more than a half century. Starting in the 1950s, there was a program called NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) followed by

Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. No nuclear rocket ever flew, although billions of dollars were spent. There were worries about an atomic rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth. During the Reagan presidency there was development of the "Timberwind" nuclear-powered rocket for lofting heavy equipment for the "Star Wars" space weapons program and also for trips to Mars. NASA in 2003 began Project Prometheus to build nuclear rockets but canceled it three years later. Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and Marine major general appointed NASA administrator by Obama, favors nuclear-powered rockets -- specifically a design of Franklin Chang-Diaz, a fellow ex-astronaut. Bolden acknowledges public opposition to nuclear rockets. In an address before the Council on Foreign Relations on May 24, he said "most people... in the United States are never going to agree to allow nuclear rockets to launch things from Earth." He proposed instead having a nuclear rocket launched conventionally and then in space moving with atomic energy. "If we can convince people that we can contain it and not put masses of

people in jeopardy, nuclear propulsion for in-space propulsion" would make, stressed Bolden, for a faster trip to Mars. Chang-Diaz's ion engine, he said, "would enable us to go from Earth to Mars in a matter of some time significantly less than it takes us now." Having nuclear systems activated only after space devices were in orbit was the procedure of the Soviet Union -- because of having undergone many launch pad explosions. That didn't help, however, when a satellite, Cosmos 954, with an on board atomic reactor activated only after launch, fell from orbit in 1978, disintegrating and spreading radioactive debris over 124,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada. Obama, in a speech on "Space Exploration in the 2lst Century" at the Kennedy Space Center on April 15, avoided saying nuclear rocket when he declared "we will increase investment... in groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often, to travel farther and faster" and by 2025 "we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space." "I want

to repeat this," he added. "Critical to deep space exploration will be the development of breakthrough propulsion systems and other advanced technologies."

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Nuclear space propulsion coming nowDavid Heyman, 2005, Senior Fellow and Director of the CSIS Homeland Security Program, et al, “The Still Untrodden Heights: Global Imperatives for Space Exploration in the 21st Century,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/suth.pdfUnless fusion technologies or other unforeseen energy innovations become viable, future interplanetary missions are likely to utilize nuclear power. Compared with the best chemical rockets, nuclear propulsion systems are more reliable and flexible for long-distance missions, and can help to lower the cost of space missions. Nuclear power missions are also optimal for missions to

explore the outer solar system, beyond the range where solar-electric power systems are effective. Project Prometheus is a well-funded US initiative to develop these technologies for future missions in the solar system such as the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO). But the use of nuclear power for space activities is controversial all over the world today. When the Cassini-Huygens mission was launched in 1997, a global hue and cry was raised about the mission’s use of plutonium for power generation. In Germany today, the anti-nuclear Green Party is a key member of the country’s coalition government and is staking out an aggressive stance against nuclear power in space. In addition, there is a UN Resolution being

formulated which is endeavoring to establish a set of guidelines for the safe usage of nuclear power in space. However, until technological alternatives are developed or environmental concerns can be fully addressed, this issue is unlikely to go away and thus must be managed if nuclear power options are to remain viable in the long-term.

Nuclear Propulsion Causes Space Militarization – ExtinctionBruce K. Gagnon, 1/27/2003, Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03b.htmlCritics of NASA have long stated that in addition to potential health concerns from radiation exposure, the NASA space nukes initiative represents the Bush administration's covert move to develop power systems for space-based weapons such as lasers on satellites. The military has often stated that their planned lasers in space will require enormous power projection capability and that nuclear reactors in orbit are the only practical way of providing such power. The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

maintains that just like missile defense is a Trojan horse for the Pentagon's real agenda for control and domination of space, NASA's

nuclear rocket is a Trojan horse for the militarization of space. NASA's new chief,

former Navy Secretary Sean O'Keefe said soon after Bush appointed him to head the space agency that, "I don't think we have a

choice, I think it's imperative that we have a more direct association between the Defense Department and NASA. Technology has taken us to a point where you really can't differentiate between that which is purely military in application and those capabilities which are civil and commercial in nature." In the end hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars will be wasted on plans for the nuclearization and weaponization of space. In order to fund these missions Bush and Congress will have to cut programs like social security, education, health care, child care, public transit and environmental protection. In the name of progress and security the lives of future generations will become more insecure. For the third year in a row the Global Network (GN) will organize two days of protests on February 3-4, 2003 in Albuquerque, N.M. at the 20th Annual Symposium on Space Nuclear Power & Propulsion. This event draws the top players from NASA, DoE, DoD, nuclear academia and nuclear aerospace each year to plan the push of nuclear power into space. Hundreds of middle and high school students are brought to the symposium for indoctrination and the GN has been able to speak to many of these young people at our protests. NASA, DoE, and the Pentagon are not asking the tax paying public if we want to suffer the risk and costs of nuclear power in space. Their corporate and military interests make it necessary to push ahead without real citizen input . Scientists and technologists are out

of control. Their plans now literally threaten the life of the entire planetary ecosystem . The time has come for vigorous global public debate around the space nuclear power issue.

And it would destroy NASAKarl Grossman, 2003, Investigative Reporter, Professor of journalism at the State University of New York College, http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/articles/03/0224176.htmlIn contrast, NASA’s renewed emphasis on nuclear power in space “is not only dangerous but politically unwise,” says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of

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New York. “The only thing that can kill the U.S. space program is a nuclear disaster. The American people will not tolerate a Chernobyl in the sky. That would doom the space program.” “NASA hasn’t learned its lesson from its history involving space nuclear power,” says Kaku, “and a hallmark of science is that you learn from previous mistakes. NASA doggedly pursues its

fantasy of nuclear power in space. We have to save NASA from itself.” He cites “alternatives” space nuclear power. “Some of these alternatives may delay the space program a bit. But the planets are not going to go away. What’s the rush? I’d rather explore the universe slower than not at all if there is a nuclear disaster.”

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2AC Politics

1. Case outweighs – We win timeframe. Our Grant evidence indicates that China is rising in the status quo, new technologies are necessary to deal with their rise. Unchecked China leads to nuclear war, that’s the Strait Times evidence from the 1ac. China is rising now, any perception of U.S. weakness can cause miscalculation and war. Prefer timeframe because war with China causes gridlock in congress meaning nothing gets passed which makes the 1nc impacts inevitable

2. Case solves the impact. Our Kagan 11 evidence from the 1ac indicates that strong power protection keeps all wars from going nuclear. This means the disad has no terminal impact.

3. [Insert Non-Unique, will be updated from tournament to tournament]

4. Space policies popular despite fiscal pressuresRaju and Bresnahan, 11 (4/20/11, Manu Raju and John Bresnahan, Politico, “Shooting for the moon amid cuts,” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53495.html)

For all the rhetoric about cutting government spending, NASA’s space mission remains sacred in Congress. A handful of powerful lawmakers are so eager to see an

American on the moon — or even Mars — that they effectively mandated NASA to spend “not less than” $3 billion for a new rocket project and space capsule in the 2011 budget bill signed by the president last week . NASA has repeatedly raised concerns about the timeframe for building a smaller rocket — but the new law expresses Congress’s will for the space agency to make a massive “heavy-lift” rocket that can haul 130 metric tons, like the ones from the days of the Apollo.

Congressional approval of the plan — all while $38 billion is being cut elsewhere in the federal government — reflects not only the power of key lawmakers from NASA-friendly states, but the enduring influence of major contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing in those states.

5. Congress supports space policies – Parochial and national security concernsRaju and Bresnahan, 11 (4/20/11, Manu Raju and John Bresnahan, Politico, “Shooting for the moon amid cuts,” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53495.html, JMP)

While some praise Congress for pushing the United States to remain a world leader in space science, critics say the national space program is effectively run by lawmakers protecting jobs in their home states . “Manned spaceflight is prohibitively expensive, especially considering our budgetary woes,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. “At one point, the administration was trying to lead NASA out of that, but congressional politics protecting parochial interests have forced the agency to waste money in the recent short-term continuing resolutions and are forcing a specific approach down NASA’s throat in the yearlong spending bill.” The latest $3 billion will likely be awarded to the same major companies that had contracts under the Bush-era Constellation program, most notably Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Alliant Techsystems — firms with extensive operations in Alabama, Maryland, Texas and Utah. As a whole, NASA is facing its own budget crunch, with its $18.5 billion budget recently trimmed by about $275 million. A top space expert, Scott Pace of The George Washington University, testified last month that NASA spent at least $21 billion over the past two

decades for various programs, including manned space flight, that were later canceled. But Congress has no desire to

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let the agency slow down its work to return to the moon and beyond, even if that potentially could take decades to accomplish. Lawmakers from those states say their push is not parochial — that it’s rooted in the national interest to ensure the U.S. remains the base for an industry that supports thousands of highly skilled jobs. Moreover, they say it makes sense to give money to contractors with proven track records in this technical field, especially ones who have already begun work on the next generation of rockets. “Dismissing [the 130-ton rocket], or the capsule work, as constituent concerns misses the point that these are unique, national capabilities necessary to remain a leader in space exploration,” said Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.). “The Chinese are building a 130-ton rocket to go to the moon. We are dependent on the Russians for access to the International Space Station. The greatest nation on Earth, the one who stunned the world and inspired a generation by sending a man to walk on the moon, cannot afford to be eclipsed by Russia or China.”

6. Strong congressional support for space policiesPowell, 9 (12/21/09, Stewart M., Houston Chronicle, “ Moon mission gets help in Congress; Lawmakers insert wording into bill signed by Obama to get leverage over funds for manned spaceflights,” http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/6780240.html, JMP)

WASHINGTON — Fearful that the White House might scale back manned space exploration, a bipartisan group of lawmakers slipped a provision into a massive government spending package last week that would force President Barack Obama to seek congressional approval for any changes to the ambitious Bush-era, back-to-the-moon program. The little-noticed legislative maneuver could yield massive payoffs for the Houston area, which has tens of thousands of jobs tied to manned space exploration. The congressional action hands NASA supporters additional leverage in their behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade Obama to budget an extra $3 billion a year to finance the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020 rather than revamping — and cutting — the manned space

effort. “Congress' commitment to our nation's human spaceflight program is unwavering with respect to the path we have already charted,” says Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, whose congressional district includes Johnson Space Center. “The debate should not be if we are moving forward, but how we are going to pay for it.”

7. NASA policies don’t require political capital- bipartisan support ensures popularity SpacePolitics.com, 5/25/2011, “Congressional support for NASA’s MPCV decision”, http://www.spacepolitics.com/category/congress/page/2/

The “key decision” that NASA announced Tuesday regarding the agency’s space exploration plans was not too surprising, and perhaps a bit underwhelming: NASA is transitioning its existing work on the Orion spacecraft to the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). In the NASA statement and media teleconference later that day, NASA indicated there would be effectively no major modifications to Orion to become MPCV, but offered little in the way of specifics on the cost of the MPCV or when it would be ready to begin flights. The MPCV was included in the NASA authorization act last year with a specific requirement to “continue to advance development of the human safety features, designs, and systems in the Orion project.” There was, then, an expectation that NASA would do what it announced yesterday, and transition its existing Orion contract to the MPCV; there was also some frustration in Congress that NASA was taking a long time to make that decision. Now,

though, that NASA has done just that, members of Congress are expressing their support for that move, while pressing NASA to also make a decision soon on the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lifter. “This is a good thing,” Sen. Bill

Nelson (D-FL) said in a statement. The decision “shows real progress towards the goal of exploring deep space” and also helps Florida, he added, since hundreds will be employed at the Kennedy Space Center to process the MPCV for launch. The release also notes that NASA administrator Charles Bolden called Nelson personally to inform him of the decision. In that call, Bolden told the senator that soon “NASA will be making further decisions with regard to the ‘transportation architecture’ of a big deep space rocket.” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) also supported the decision. “After more than a year of uncertainty and delay, NASA has come to the same conclusion that it reached years ago — Orion is the vehicle that will advance our human exploration in space,” she said in a statement (not yet posted online.) She reminded NASA, though, that it “must continue to follow law” and announce plans for the SLS. “NASA needs to follow this important step by quickly finalizing and announcing the heavy lift launch vehicle configuration so that work can accelerate and the requirements of the law can be met.” “This was the only fiscally and technologically prudent decision that NASA could make,” Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) said in a statement. “With this decision NASA can continue to build on current projects and investments rather than further delay with unnecessary procurements.” NASA’s decision means that Lockheed Martin’s contract to work on Orion/MPCV will continue, and that’s a relief for

people in Colorado, where much of that work is taking place. In a joint statement, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO)

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and Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) noted the decision protects over 1,000 aerospace jobs, and nearly 4,000 total jobs, in the state , which to them appeared to be just as important as the MPCV’s role in future human space exploration. “With the Space Shuttle Endeavor’s [sic] final launch, Orion represents the next frontier in human space exploration and has the potential to stir the imagination of a new generation of young scientists while giving our economy a much needed boost,” Bennet said.

8. No risk of a link – a logical policy maker can pass both the plan and congress bill if both are advantageous. Just because the plan may be unpopular, that doesn’t mean lawmakers will backlash against a bill they would have previously voted for

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2AC Consult

1. Theory

Interpretation – Negative doesn’t get consult counterplans

Standards -

a. They steal 1AC – It’s just the plan with something else tacked onto it. The only way for the aff to win is to prove ZERO risk of a net benefit, which is ridiculous.

b. Regressive – we could never account for every possible instance of consultation – they crush predictability which is the gateway to fairness and education. 190+ countries, thousands of international organizations, and billions of humans could all be consulted about the plan.

Voter for fairness and education

2. Perm: Do both

3. Perm: Do the plan and consult on other space policy; that’s best for science and technologyMIT 8 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “The Future of Human Spaceflight”, December, http://web.mit.edu/mitsps/MITFutureofHumanSpaceflight.pdf) The primary objectives of exploration, national, and international prestige do not dictate exclusively national programs. Human spaceflight is sufficiently difficult and expensive that international collaboration may be the only way to accomplish certain goals. Although most countries’ space programs contain nationalistic rhetoric, most also recognize the benefits of cooperation. The United States has a long history of collaboration with the European, Japanese, Canadian, and other space agencies, which should of course continue. International partnerships in human spaceflight represent the best use of science and technology to advance broad human goals and bring nations together around common values, hence they are a primary objective. The 1975 Apollo -Soyuz Test Project, for example, showcased an international gesture of cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union at a time of tension between the nations. Through these and similar means, human spaceflight can be an effective instrument of global diplomacy. United States should reaffirm its long standing policy of international leadership in human spaceflight and remain committed to its existing international partners. In a significant shift from current policies, such leadership should not be defined only as “first, largest, and in charge.” Leadership should also represent foresight in building new relationships and collaborations , and in setting an example for human spaceflight as a civilian enterprise. Given the public enthusiasm for human spaceflight around the globe, a clear perception of the United States as collaborating with other countries to accomplish goals in space would have far reaching benefits. The United States should invite international and commercial partners to participate in its new exploration initiatives to build a truly global exploration effort, with significant cost sharing.

PERM: DO THE COUNTERPLAN

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5. THE PERMS SOLVE

A. WE CAN DO BOTH; AS LONG AS THE US IS HEADING THE PROJECT WE STILL GET OUR ADVANTAGES

B. NO REASON CONSULTING ON SPACE ELEVATORS IS UNIQUELY KEYC. THEY STEAL THE 1AC, THAT JUSTIFIES PERM: DO THE COUNTERPLAN. AS

LONG AS THEY ARE JUST PLAN PLUS, THEN THE PERM IS NOT SEVERANCE.

6. SOLVENCY DEFICIT:

1) THEY DON’T SOLVE FOR US HEGEMONYA) CAN’T SOLVE ALL NUCLEAR WAR SCENARIOS , THAT’S KAGANB) EVEN IF THEY CAN SOLVE, DECLINE IN HEGEMONY MEANS MASSIVE WAR,

THAT’S GOLDSTEIN

2) CAN’T SOLVE CHINAA) GRANT EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT US IS KEYB) THAT MEANS THEY CAN’T SOLVE EXTINCTION ; THAT’S STRAIT TIMES

7. Turn: Binding consultation crushes U.S. leadershipCarroll 9 (James FF, Notes & Comments Editor â€“ Emory International Law Review, J.D. with Honors â€“ Emory University School of Law, â€œBack to the Future: Redefining the Foreign Investment and National Security Act's Conception of National Securityâ€, Emory International Law Review, 23 Emory Int'l L. Rev. 167, Lexis)n221. See Thomas Friedman, Op-Ed., 9/11 is Over, N.Y. Times, Sept. 30, 2007, Â§ 4, at 12. This does not mean, however, that foreign countries should hold a veto over U.S. foreign or domestic policies, particularly policies that are not directly related to their national survival. Allowing foreign countries or international institutions to veto or modify unrelated U.S. policies would make a mockery of our foreign policy and destroy the credibility of American leadership. International cooperation does not require making our policy subservient to the whims of other nations. See generally The Allies and Arms Control (F.O. Hampson et al. eds., 1992). See also Khalilzad, supra note 177.

And, Heg solves global nuclear warZalmay Khalilzad, RAND, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1995Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

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2AC Cap 1. Framework

A) Interpretation – The negative should have to defend the status quo or a competitive policy option.

B) Violation – The negative introduces a kritik

C) Reasons to prefer1) Aff Choice – The affirmative gets the first speech; the affirmative introduces

the plan; the affirmative should decide the framework to be debated under. 2) Predictability – There are an infinite number of advocacies that the negative

could choose to defend. The aff could never hope to meet that research burden.

3) Moots the 1AC – Kritiks always shift the focus of a debate from the actual substance of the plan to whatever critical impact they’re trying to link us into. Plan education is critical to TOPIC education, and education is the only objective way to value debate.

D) Voters1) Fairness – Our model of predictability is the best way to allow for fair

debate. By limiting out kritikal arguments, we allow debates to be more focused and specific.

2) Education – Fairness allows us to have more focused and specific debates, meaning better education overall. The kritik ruins our ability to have topic-specific education.

2. No link – Our affirmative does nothing to reify the capitalist economy: saving the atmosphere; allowing for universal space access -- such things may even weaken capitalism.

3. Capitalism key to sustainable growth for all—provides incentive Butters 7 (Roger B., Ph.D., President – Nebraska Council on Economic Education, Assistant Professor of Economics – University of Nebraska at Lincoln, “Teaching the Benefits of Capitalism”, http://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/afolsom/Page_6281/Butters.pdf)The miracle of market competition is that not only does it reduce material scarcity it creates wealth for every participant. Both the buyer and seller are wealthier for having participated: The seller for having sold something for more than the opportunity cost of production, the buyer for having acquired something for less than the value it imparts. Entrepreneurial activity, the second consequence of capitalism, is inextricably connected to competition. In competitive markets the only way to accrue wealth to oneself is by creating and providing a product that others value . Furthermore, you must create and provide that product at a cost that is less than the value perceived by your customer. In order to capture a profit the entrepreneur must create something newer, better, cheaper or more appealing. He must find a way to induce someone to voluntarily surrender value to him and to do that he must create value himself. The creative process is risky and as a result people will only assume risk if the expected reward exceeds the expected costs. Property rights, via a patent or copyright, guarantee that if the entrepreneur creates something of value he will be able to capture, and retain, the profits from its sale. Without that guarantee, entrepreneurial activity slows and innovation and invention

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cease. The former Soviet Union created some of the greatest minds in the world and yet little or no invention and innovation occurred. The reason why is simple; there was no incentive to do so. Since the scientists had no right to their creation, since businessmen stood to earn no profits, and since entrepreneurs would never be allowed to compete in the marketplace no innovation occurred. The institutions of capitalism, on the other hand, conspire to find new and better ways to do everything in an effort to impart a fractional advantage when competing in the market place

4. Growth key to prevent extinction Zey 98 (Michael, Executive Director – Expansionary Institute, Professor of Management – Montclair State University, Seizing the Future, p. 34, 39-40)However, no outside force guarantees the continued progress of the human species, nor does anything mandate that the human species must even continue to exist. In fact, history is littered with races and civilizations that have disappeared without a trace. So, too, could the human species. There is no guarantee that the human species will survive even if we posit, as many have, a special purpose to the species’ existence. Therefore, the species innately comprehends that it must engage in purposive actions in order to maintain its level of growth and progress. Humanity’s future is conditioned by what I call the Imperative of Growth, a principle I will herewith describe along with its several corollaries. The Imperative of Growth states that in order to survive, any nation, indeed, the human race, must grow, both materially and intellectually. The Macroindustrial Era represents growth in the areas of both technology and human development, a natural stage in the evolution of the species ’ continued extension of its control over itself and its environment. Although 5 billion strong, our continued existence depends on our ability to continue the progress we have been making at higher and higher levels . Systems, whether organizations, societies, or cells, have three basic directions in which to move. They can grow, decline, or temporarily reside in a state of equilibrium. These are the choices. Choosing any alternative to growth, for instance, stabilization of production/consumption through zero-growth policies, could have alarmingly pernicious side effects, including extinction . The fifth corollary of the Imperative of Growth claims that a society can remain in a state of equilibrium only temporarily. In reality, a society seemingly in a phase where it neither improves nor regresses is actually in a transition to either growth or decline. Such periods easily seduce their contemporaries into a false sense of security, that their institutions will last forever , they have all the science they need, and there are no more challenges. In fact, during such periods some imagine that they have reached their “golden age,” perhaps even the “end of history.” During such periods of supposed equilibrium, the population ceases to prepare itself for new challenges and becomes risk averse. Importantly, they reject the idea that growth and progress are necessary for their survival. The sixth corollary evolves from the fifth. If the system chooses not to grow, it will decline and eventually disappear, either because other organisms or systems overtake it or because it is impossible to maintain itself even at static levels without in some way deteriorating. This is the Law of Spiraling Regression. It is indeed a curiosity of the late-twentieth-century culture that this truism has been ignored. In the morass of claims

about the risks of technological growth and its impact on the ecosystem, the mainstream media and orthodox academics have decided not to consider what harm the full pursuance of zero growth or non growth might inflict on the sociotechnical system, which includes our technological infrastructure, culture, and standard of living

5. Capitalism key to the environment Wilson 97 (James Q., Professor of Government – Harvard University, “The Morality of Capitalism”, 10-15, http://www.cis.org.au/Events/ JBL/JBL97.htm#Wilson)Capitalism brings three advantages to the environmental task: (i) It creates and maintains a private sphere of action . A private sphere of action makes capitalism possible because you can operate free of government control. But by maintaining a private sphere you also provide a protected place for people to stand who wish to make controversial proposals. You create a world in which the critics of capitalism – those who wish to see capitalism restrained in order to protect the environment – have an opportunity to move. No such world existed for them in the Soviet Union, and no such world exists for them today in the People’s Republic of China. The absence of a private sphere means the absence of an environmental ethic. (ii) Secondly, capitalism produces prosperity , and prosperity changes the minds of people , especially young people. It endows them what we in the social science business call in our professional journals, post-materialist or post-industrial goals. That is a fancy way of saying that when society becomes rich enough for everybody to be fed and where no-one has to struggle day and night to put food on their table, we begin to think of other things we can use resources for. Those other things include taking care of animals, protecting the

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environment, preserving land and the like. The prosperity induced by capitalism produces of necessity an environmental movement. How that environ-mental movement is managed of course is a very real question; sometimes it is managed very badly, other times it is managed reasonably well. Environmental policies in capitalist systems will vary greatly – from the inconsequential through the prudent to the loony – but they will scarcely exist at all in non-capitalist ones . (iii) The final thing capitalism brings to this

task is that it creates firms that can be regulated . You may think that this is a trivial statement. You all know that business firms are regulated – sometimes to the advantage of the firm, sometimes to its disadvantage. But I don’t think you realise the importance of this fact. Consider the alternative. Suppose the government ran everything. What would be regulated? The main reason why Eastern Europe was a vast toxic waste dump, and why many parts of China are becoming a vast toxic waste dump, is because the government owns the enterprises and one government agency does not – cannot – regulate another government agency. This is because neither the regulator nor the regulatee has any personal motives to accept regulation. But they can regulate firms, and so when firms are producing wealth and people decide that the distribution of wealth ought to be made to accord to an environmental ethic, capitalism makes that possible.

6. Capitalism is ethical—provides means to better lives Saunders 7 – fellow, Center for Independent Studies (Peter, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul, http://www.cis.org.au/POLICY/summer%2007-08/saunders_summer07.html)

What Clive Hamilton airily dismisses as a ‘growth fetish’ has resulted in one hour of work today delivering twenty-five times more value than it did in 1850. This has freed huge chunks of our time for leisure, art, sport, learning, and other ‘soul-enriching’ pursuits. Despite all the exaggerated talk of an ‘imbalance’ between work and family life, the average Australian today spends a much greater proportion of his or her lifetime free of work than they would had they belonged to any previous generation in history. There is another sense, too, in which capitalism has freed individuals so they can pursue worthwhile lives , and that lies in its record of undermining tyrannies and dictatorships. As examples like Pinochet’s Chile and Putin’s Russia vividly demonstrate, a free economy does not guarantee a democratic polity or a society governed by the rule of law. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, these latter conditions are never found in the absence of a free economy.(12) Historically, it was capitalism that delivered humanity from the ‘soul-destroying’ weight of feudalism. Later, it freed millions from the dead hand of totalitarian socialism. While capitalism may not be a sufficient condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one. [continues] Wherever populations have a chance to move, the flow is always towards capitalism, not away from it. The authorities never had a problem keeping West Germans out of East Germany, South Koreans out of North Korea, or Taiwanese out of Communist China. The attraction of living in a capitalist society is not just that the economy works. It is also that if your version of the good life leads you to turn your back on capitalism , you don’t have to pick up sticks and move away. If you don’t like capitalism, there is no need to bribe people-smugglers to get you out of the country. You simply buy a plot of land, build your mud-brick house, and drop out (or, like Clive, you set up your own think tank and sell books urging others to drop out).

7. They can’t solve -- dominant hierarchies are inevitable. Only in a free capitalist society can effective limits be placed on these organizations. Wilkinson, policy analyst at the Cato institute, 2005 (Will, “Capitalism and Human Nature,” Cato Policy Report Vol. XXVII No. 1 January/February 2005, DS)Emory professor of economics and law Paul Rubin usefully distinguishes between "productive" and "allocative" hierarchies. Productive hierarchies are those that organize cooperative efforts to achieve otherwise unattainable mutually advantageous gains. Business organizations are a prime example. Allocative hierarchies, on the other hand, exist mainly to transfer resources to the top. Aristocracies and dictatorships are extreme examples. Although the nation-state can perform productive functions, there is the constant risk that it becomes dominated by allocative hierarchies. Rubin warns that our natural wariness of zero-sum allocative hierarchies, which helps us to guard against the concentration of power in too few hands, is often directed at modern positive-sum productive hierarchies, like corporations, thereby threatening the viability of enterprises that tend to make everyone better off. There is no way to stop dominance-seeking behavior. We may hope only to channel it to non-harmful uses. A free society therefore requires that positions of dominance and status be widely available in a multitude of productive hierarchies, and that opportunities for greater status and dominance through predation are limited by the constant vigilance of "the people"—the ultimate reverse dominance hierarchy. A flourishing civil society permits almost everyone to be the leader of something, whether the local Star Trek fan club or the city council, thereby somewhat satisfying the human taste for hierarchical status, but to no one's serious detriment.

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8. Alternative:1. Perm : Do the plan as a commitment to the communist hypothesis 2. Perm: Do the plan with the mindset of the kritik

Perm solves best:

The negative depictions of capitalism are totalizing. This discourse erases the complexity of the economy eliminating the multiple identities that are present in todays economy. Vote affirmative to endorse a new kind of local ethical subject.

Gibson-Graham, feminist economic geographers, 2001 (Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, “An Ethics of the Local” in Rethinking Marxism, May 2001)I want to turn now to thinking about how we as local subjects might cultivate ourselves in accordance with the principles of a local ethics, and to describe as a vehicle for that cultivation process a multi-continental program of research that is attempting to create social and discursive spaces in which ethical practices of self-formation can occur. In introducing that research program, I invoke the term “politics”—because I see these practices of resubjectivation or making ourselves anew as ultimately (if not simply) political (Connolly 1999).7 The research projects I will describe are focused on transforming ourselves as local economic subjects, who are acted upon and subsumed by the global economy, into subjects with economic capacities, who enact and create a diverse economy through daily practices both habitual (and thus unconscious) and consciously intentional. But these practices of self transformation rely on an initial and somewhat difficult move. If we are to cultivate a new range of capacities in the domain of economy, we need first to be able to see noncapitalist activities and subjects (including ones we admire) as visible and viable in the economic terrain. This involves supplanting representations of economic sameness and replication with images of economic difference and diversification. Feminist economic theorists have bolstered our confidence that such a representation is both possible and productive. Based on a variety of empirical undertakings, they argue that the noncommodity sector (in which unpaid labor produces goods and services for nonmarket circulation) accounts for 30-50 percent of total output in both rich and poor 7 This research program has strong affinities with the work of Arturo Escobar (2001) and Arif Dirlik (2000b) on the politics of place. 11 countries (Ironmonger 1996). According to the familiar definition of capitalism as a type of commodity production, this means that a large portion of social wealth is noncapitalist in origin. And even the commodity sector is not necessarily capitalist—commodities are just goods and services produced for a market. Slaves in the antebellum U.S. south produced cotton and other commodities, and in the contemporary U.S. worker-owned collectives, self employed people, and slaves in the prison industry all produce goods and services for the market, but not under capitalist relations of production.8 Arguably, then, less than half of the total product of the U.S. economy is produced under capitalism . From this perspective, referring to the U.S. or any economy as capitalist is a violent act of naming that erases from view the heterogeneous complexity of the economy. Working against this process of erasure, our research is trying to produce a discourse of economic difference as a contribution to the ethical and political practice of cultivating a diverse economy. In projects underway in Australia, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States, we are attempting to generate and circulate an alternative language of economy, one in which capitalism is not the master signifier, the dominant or only identity in economic space. This eclectic language, emerging from conversations both academic and popular, provides the conceptual infrastructure for re-presenting economic subjects and multiplying economic identities (Gibson-Graham 2001). Two of our projects have moved beyond the planning and early implementation phase and are beginning to reveal their specificity as ethical practices and political experiments.9 One is based in the Latrobe Valley in southeastern Australia (Cameron and Gibson 2001). 8 There is a tendency to conflate all market-oriented (i.e., commodity) production with capitalism. We need to resist that tendency if we are to theorize economic difference in the market sphere, and to acknowledge the many types of economic organization that are compatible with commodity production. 12 The other is underway in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, the region that stretches north-south along the Connecticut River in the northeastern U.S. (Community Economies Collective 2001). While the Latrobe Valley is a single industry region (based on mining and power generation) with a recent history of downsizing and privatization, the Pioneer Valley mixes agriculture, higher education, and recognized economic alternatives, supplementing this unusual mixture with a small manufacturing sector that is suffering the lingering effects of deindustrialization. In both of these regions globalization sets the economic agenda—we are all being asked to become better subjects of capitalist development (though the path to such a becoming does not readily present itself) and to subsume ourselves more thoroughly to the global economy. The two research projects provide a social context for Foucault’s second moment of morality—cultivating the ethical subject—which involves working on our local/regional selves to become something other than what the global economy wants us to be. But what actual processes or techniques of self (and other) invention do we have at our disposal? Foucault is not forthcoming here, at the microlevel of actual practices. And when we embarked on these projects we did not imagine how difficult the process of resubjectivation would be. In both the U.S. and Australia, for example, we have come up against the

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patent lack of desire for economic difference in the regions where we are working. We have encountered instead the fixation of desires upon capitalism—individuals want employment as wage workers, policymakers want conventional economic development. It was only after months of resistance, setbacks, and surprising successes that we could see the deeply etched contours of existing subjectivities and the complexity of the task of “re-subjecting” we were 9 Here it has become necessary to shift to the first person plural since the projects we are discussing are collective efforts involving large numbers of people (see acknowledgments below). Invaluable in helping us to conceptualize and negotiate this complexity was the work of William Connolly. Whereas we had stumbled through the process of cultivating alternative economic subjects, Connolly’s work on self-artistry and micropolitics allowed us retrospectively to see steps and stages, techniques and strategies. Connolly is concerned with the subject as a being that is already shaped and as one that is always (and sometimes deliberately) becoming. In his view active selftransformation— working on oneself in the way that Foucault has described—functions as a micropolitical process that makes macropolitical settlements possible. If we are to succeed in promoting a diverse economy and producing new subjects and practices of economic development, there must be selves who are receptive to such an economy and to transforming themselves within it. How do we nurture the micropolitical receptivity of subjects to new becomings, both of themselves and of their economies? Micropolitics can be understood as an “assemblage of techniques and disciplines that impinge on the lower registers of sensibility and judgment without necessarily or immediately engaging the conscious intellect” (Connolly 2001, 33). One object of such a politics is what Connolly calls the “visceral” domain where “thought-imbued intensities below the reach of feeling” (1999, 148) dispose the individual in particular ways, with a seldom acknowledged impact on macropolitical interactions. In a discussion of the public sphere, where he argues that the visceral register cannot be excluded from public discourse and the process of coming to public consensus, Connolly (1999, 35-36) puts forward a set of norms for discourse across differences. Instead of attempting to tame or exclude the body, reducing public discourse to rational argument, he advocates developing an appreciation of “positive possibilities in the visceral register of thinking and discourse” as a way of 14 beginning to creatively produce and respond to the emergence of new identities . This appreciation of positive possibilities in the body, he suggests, might be supplemented by an “ethic of cultivation” that works against the bodily feelings of panic experienced when naturalized identities are called into question. And rather than expecting people to transcend their differences in order to be or behave like a community, he suggests the possibility of a “generous ethos of engagement” between constituencies in which differences are honored and bonds are forged around and upon them. All these attitudes and practices could make possible ethically sensitive, negotiated settlements between potentially antagonistic groups and individuals in the construction of communities. We are drawn to Connolly’s italicized arsenal of stances and strategies because they take into account the stubborn, unspoken bodily resistances that stand in the way of individual becoming and social possibility; and at the same time they acknowledge the visceral register of discourse as a positive resource for social creativity. For us, retrospectively, they offer a “cultivator’s manual” for the ethical practice of cultivating different local economic subjects—subjects of capacity rather than debility, subjects whose range of economic identifications exceeds the capitalist order. Though Connolly did not intend them this way, for us they have become a way of organizing our narrative of local resubjectivation in the Latrobe and Pioneer Valleys

Their alternative fails—Marxist regimes have caused more violence than any other event in human history. Rummel, prof. emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, 2004 (Rudolph, The Killing Machine that is Marxism, Online, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1588725/posts, DS)Of all religions, secular and otherwise, that of Marxism has been by far the bloodiest – bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants . In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide. In total, Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million. That is, when Marxists control states, Marxism is more deadly then all the wars of the 20th century, including World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And what did Marxism, this greatest of human social experiments, achieve for its poor citizens, at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing positive. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social and cultural disaster. The Khmer Rouge – (Cambodian communists) who ruled Cambodia for four years – provide insight into why Marxists believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow humans. Their Marxism was married to absolute power. They believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and Buddhist culture, and then totally rebuild a communist society. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this achievement. Government – the Communist Party – was above any law. All other institutions, religions, cultural norms, traditions and sentiments were expendable. The Marxists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality – and, as in a real war, noncombatants would

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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1588725/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1588725/posts


unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, "wreckers," intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords . As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths. The irony is that in practice, even after decades of total control, Marxism did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the world's greatest famines have happened within the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921-23 and 7 million from 1932-3, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist China (about 30 million dead from 1959-61). Overall, in the last century almost 55 million people died in various Marxist famines and associated epidemics – a little over 10 million of them were intentionally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of Marxist collectivization and agricultural policies. What is astonishing is that this "currency" of death by Marxism is not thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but millions of deaths. This is almost incomprehensible – it is as though the whole population of the American New England and Middle Atlantic States, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around 35 million people escaped Marxist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against Marxist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all human beings. There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite, or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens

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2AC Privatization (Generic) 1. Perm do both

Cooperation between private and public solvesZervos & Seigel, 2008 [Vasilis, Professor of economics and space policy at the International Space University with a BA in Economics from the American College of Greece, an M.Sc. from the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Ph.D from the University of York, UK, and David, Dean and Professor School of Business, University at Albany, “Technology, Security, and policy implications of future transatlantic partnerships in space: lessons from Galileo”, Research Policy Volume 37, Issue 9, October 2008, Pages 1630-1642]

US efforts to privatize space capabilities have focused on key markets, such as space telecommunications, space transportation and earth observation. However, full privatization of assets such as the Space Shuttle is controversial, given the investment entailed and security concerns (Macauley, 2003). In Europe, the focus on more civil-oriented programs facilitates public–private partnerships and the formation of European multinationals in similar key markets . A breakdown of the consolidated turnover of the European space manufacturing industry in 2002 is illustrative, with Telecommunications, Launching and Earth Observations activities accounting for over €3.5 billion out of a total €4.7 billion, which includes Navigation (€80 million) and scientific activities (Eurospace, 2004). The navigation market was expected to grow rapidly by 2010, based on novel technological uses of navigation and positioning services by automobiles, mobile

communication users and commercial airliners (EC, 2002), and other commercial applications. Despite encouraging market projections for navigation markets for example, such industries are subject to numerous market failures. The most prominent market failures are related to early-stage technology and risks associated with future market size, as well as uncertainties in the development of competing and existing publicly developed and owned systems and future security restrictions. Thus, it is unlikely that such a project can be undertaken by industry alone despite the existence of optimistic market projections and returns (see Section 3). For example, in the presence of conflict, such as war between two nations or civil war, where adversaries utilize the signals for military purposes, the stakeholders exercising political pressure for or against regionally jamming the signal could

range from the UN and the authorities in the country in question, to financial institutions owning shares in the enterprise. Although ultimately the commercial entity is responsible for obeying the laws and regulations of the licensing country, numerous issues relating to politics and international law are likely to turn potential investors with no public involvement away into ‘safer’ and less strategically significant investments. Multi-public–private partnerships (MP3) spread the financial risk associated with high-technology requirements, while easing investor concerns over politically sensitive security issues and decisions. Moreover, the presence of multiple countries in space projects results in more resilient public commitments, reassuring the private firms.

Complete shift to the private sector causes imposition of new government regulation – collapses innovation and tech.Sterner 2010, (Eric R. George C. Marshall Institute, April, “Worthy of a Great Nation? NASA’s Change of Strategic Direction,” George C. Marshall Institute Policy Outlook, http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/797.pdf)

The Obama administration’s approach will undo that balance . While it has retained and expanded COTS, in many ways

to its credit, its cancellation of Constellation raises the stakes for COTS and commercial human spaceflight in general. It will no longer be an experiment in promoting innovation with the potential to evolve into something more comprehensive. Instead, it will become the government’s primary means of sending people to space. As such, there will be strong pressure on the government to exercise increased oversight and accountability, undermining, if not eventually eliminating, the very flexibility built into the COTS concept. Indeed, this is already happening. A Congressional hearing revealed an already extant conflict over responsibilities between the Federal Aviation administration, which has legal responsibility for regulating commercial human spaceflight, and NASA, which is responsible for the safety of its astronauts. Given the nature of bureaucratic politics, it is quite likely that both agencies will impose different sets of standards on commercial human spaceflight service providers. Those regulatory burdens may well flow down to suborbital service providers as well, since NASA has raised the possibility of using those service providers to enable

government research. A mature industry with a healthy demand for its services may be able to respond to and carry such burdens. The commercial human spaceflight industry, which is still in its infancy, may be

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stifled by them. Of equal concern, it should be noted that the Congress imposed several non-mission related requirements on Constellation, such as maintaining the workforce and using as much shuttle-heritage hardware as possible. These kinds of requirements do not usually contribute to performance or cost-

effectiveness, but serve other legitimate public policy goals. There is some indication that leading members of Congress will seek to impose them on the commercial industry if the industry becomes the primary means of carrying Americans to orbit.

2. CP doesn’t access the heg impact. Private corporations don’t necessarily represent the US which means it will be seen as a projection of power

3. Traditional models don’t apply- too much capital and no pay out means no one will invest.Hearsey 2008 (Christopher M. Graduate Student, The American University, Department of Justice, Law & Society The American University, Washington, A Review Of Challenges To Corporate Expansion Into Outer Space http://www.astrosociology.org/Library/PDF/Hearsey_CorporateExpansion.pdf)

Gangale, et al., believe the greatest problem to commercial space corporations “is the huge capital investment that is required to develop a trans-planetary infrastructure.” While some may believe that “government is the problem,” the reality is that developing a private infrastructure will require the utilization of a great amount of resources. Free-market economics cannot operate in such high cost and high risk environments, nor can private firms be expected to take on such large projects alone. Building partnerships between governments and corporations to develop such infrastructure will enable an economic and legal balance providing sufficient solutions without economically overburdening either the public or private sector. To achieve any profit in outer space an economic incentive must be established. Therefore, it will take the collective will of governments and corporations to find the best strategies to implement a viable commercial market for corporations and sustain human presence in outer space. The international norms promulgated by the

ius gentium are not directly a barrier for corporations, but merely an element of the market since it can only be the political will that may reshape the commercial space industry.

4. Privatization fails- Empirically proven for space exploration/developmentButler 2010 (Katherine, Butler is a leader writer at greenopia.com and at MNN, “The Pros and Cons of Commercializing Space Travel”, http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/the-pros-and-cons-of-commercializing-space-travel, 3-8)

Further, Dinerman points out that private efforts into space have failed again and again. He refers to dozens of private start-ups that never got off the ground, let alone into space . Dinerman points to

Lockheed Martin's X-33 design, which was supposed to replace the space shuttle in 1996. The design never succeeded and ultimately cost the government $912 million and Lockheed Martin $357 million. Amazon.com Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin set up the DC-X program in the early 1990s. Its suborbital test vehicle was initially successful but was destroyed in a landing accident . Dinerman claims, “The Clinton administration saw the DC-X as a Reagan/Bush legacy program, and was happy to cancel it after the accident.”

5. Privatization fails Businesses aren’t held accountableSalin 2001 (Patrick A, Professor at the Institute of Air and Space Law McGill University, Montreal, Canada, “Privatization and militarization in the space business environment,” Space Policy 17 (2001) 19}26 Online)

Private corporations have a de facto equal status to that of public space agencies. The worrying factor in the development of outer space exploitation is that * so far * there has been little in the way of an effective international responsibility (or liability) for wrongful acts that are committed or that bear consequences in outer space. This is the consequence of the fact that no litigation has ever been pursued on the basis of the 1972 Liability Convention or of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty , neither of which has yet been tested in terms of benefit sharing [10]. This means that, for practical purposes, the Liability Convention is unworkable. Large private corporations are on an equal footing with public bodies and behave as if they were enjoying a kind of &national' immunity that is commensurate with the size of their project. A good illustration of that observation was provided in March 1997 with the licensing of

Teledesic Corp. by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), after intense diplomatic pressure had been exercised by the US delegation during WARC- 95.8 Contrary to its actions over much smaller projects, the FCC did not check any of Teledesic's technical or financial parameters, nor did it even impose an agenda for a project of the magnitude of close to 1000 satellites, according to its original plan, i.e. more than three times the total number of US civilian satellites that were in outer space at that time. Since then, this project has been scaled down two or three times and we are not even sure that it will ever be launched. So far, the fully licensed

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Teledesic project is nothing more than a huge &paper satellite' system, while the competing SkyBridge project still awaits FCC authorization in order to be operated

over North America as part of its global coverage of the Earth. That shows there is always a national state that backs up a satellite operator * public or private

* that is active in Outer Space at a global scale. Here we have a paradox consisting in having &national' regulators that license &global' operators, thanks to

technology. This paradox fully explains the difficulties that global operators are facing in their relationship with other national authorities [11]. This is inevitable as long as there is no such thing as a World Space Organization under which global satellite operators must be registered and to which they must be liable. The ITU does not provide such a commitment because it is only a technical organization; we may say that global satellite systems have no accountability towards the international

community and, even worse, behave by taking into account the ITU's own weaknesses.9 Reforms have been proposed in order to restructure the ITU organization

[12}14]. But others think it is better to keep things as they are, with outer space being exploited almost like a lawless &wild outer space', with minimal supervision,

under benevolent home state licensing and passive ITU registration. If this situation remains unchanged, no doubt such private operators will inevitably drag their licensing state to the forefront. Unfortunately, in outer space we won't talk about oil spills, but we may in the future see satellite explosions, or satellites colliding with one another, or we may simply notice malfunctions causing a satellite to cease functioning properly, sometimes without being able to really identify the cause of the malfunction or of the incident [15].10 And what about a nuclear accident in outer space?

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2AC Security Kritik 1. Framework: Our interpretation is that the negative gets to defend a competitive policy alternative

a. Predictability – there are millions of representations that we can’t predict – the resolution says USFG so we should debate that – predictability is key to fairness

b. Education – policy discussions foster better informed debate that can be adapted to the real world

Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European University, “The enduring dilemmas of realism in International

Relations,” Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, December 2001, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/gus02/gus02.pdf, accessed 8/13/02

Contrary to Waltz, Gunther Hellmann does not leave the debate at this unfinished stage. Starting from the same Friedmanian pragmatist grounding that a theory is good as long as it works or functions, he wants a return to the common language of academia and practice by pushing academia back to the language of the practitioner, yet by keeping the advantage of the outside observer. More openly than Waltz, he plays down the need for scientific respectability, but by offering a more philosophically grounded argument. The grounding is provided by the recourse to the philosophy of science, more particularly to modern versions of “pragmatism”, represented in particular, but not only, by Richard Rorty. For Hellmann, pragmatism has done the job in undermining the credentials of positivism and all what comes with it. This move takes the ground away for the need of any of the classical justifications in IR theory . Any version of the correspondence theory of truth, any version of scientific realism, any version of falsification is wrong-headed, if understood in a logical theoretical way. Such devices are just this: scholarly habits devised through the tradition of a scientific community. But pragmatism is also not succumbing to the sirens of poststructuralism whose theorising, according to him, is purely de-constructing and has lost any major connection with real problems.

2. PERM DO BOTH

Threats are real and Weezey ain’t racist– not all politicians would make the same mistake and their evidence is based on out-dated Cold War theoriesKnudsen, ‘1 [Olav F., Sodertorn University College, Security Dialogue, 32.3, “Desecuritizing Securitization”]

This argument is convincing as far as its description of the military establishment and decisionmakers goes, but its heyday is gone. It was a Cold War phenomenon, and things just aren’t so anymore. In the post-Cold War period, agenda-setting has been much easier to influence than the securitization approach assumes. That change cannot be credited to the concept; the change in security politics was

already taking place in defense ministries and parliaments before the concept was first launched. Indeed, securitizatio n in my view is more appropriate to the security politics of the Cold War years than to the post- Cold War period . Moreover, I have a problem with the underlying implication that it is unimportant whether states ‘really’ face dangers from other states or groups. In the Copenhagen school, threats are seen as coming mainly from the actors’ own fears, or

from what happens when the fears of individuals turn into paranoid political action. In my view, this emphasis on the subjective is a misleading conception of threat, in that it discounts an independent existence for whatever is perceived as a threat. Granted, political life is often marked by misperceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts, or mirages, but such phenomena do not occur simultaneously to large numbers of politicians and hardly most of the time . During the Cold War, threats – in the sense of plausible possibilities of danger – referred to ‘real’ phenomena, and they refer to ‘real’ phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that is a different matter.

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Threats have to be dealt with both in terms of perceptions and in terms of the phenomena which are perceived to be threatening.

3. Perm Do Plan without Security Representations. You can only determine the value of policies by their outcomes and not intentions or premisesWaever 1998 [Ole, professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, “Securitization and Desecuritization,” On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]

From a more Nietzschean perspective, I should also mention that politics always involves an element of exclusion, in which one has to do violence to the inherent openness of situations, to impose a pattern--and one has not only to remember but also to forget selectively.

77 To act politically means to take responsibility for leaving an impact, for forcing things in one direction instead of another. Whether such an act is "good" or "bad" is not defined by any inner qualities of the act or its premises, but by its effects (which depend on the actions of others, interaction and, therefore, an element of coincidence). As Hannah Arendt pointed out, "Action reveals itself fully only to the

storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian." 78 Acting politically can , consequently, never be risk-free, and "progressiveness" is never guaranteed by one's political or philosophical attitude. Theoretical practices, as well as any political ones, have to risk their own respectability and leave traces, letting posterity tell the story about the meaning of an act. Post-structuralists have usually been arguing that their project is about opening up, implicitly arguing that a situation was too closed,

too self-reproducing. Politics is inherently about closing off options, about forcing the stream of history in particular directions. 79 In the present context, politics and responsibility can involve prevention and limitation and, at times, the tool of securitization may seem necessary. It is thus not impossible that a post-structuralist concerned about risks of power rivalry and wars will end up supporting a (re)securitization of "Europe" through rhetorics such as that of integration/fragmentation. The purpose of this would be to impose limits, but it would have as a side-effect some elements of state-building linked to the EU project. This could therefore imply that national communities might have to engage in a certain degree of securitization of identity questions in order to handle the stress from Europeanization. Under such circumstances, there might emerge a complementarity between nations engaging in societal security and the new quasi-state engaging in "European security." Neither of these two moves are reflections of some objective "security" that is threatened; they are, instead, possible speech acts , moving issues into a security frame so as to achieve effects different from those that would ensue if handled in a nonsecurity mode.

4. Even in the context of cooperation, the history of the space programs across the world is best explained and navigated by realismSheehan 2007 [Michael The International Politics of Space Series: Space Power and Politics Series editors: Everett C. Dolman and John Sheldon Both School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, USAF Air, Maxwell, USA http://bib.tiera.ru/dvd64/Sheehan%20M.%20-%20The%20International%20Politics%20of%20Space%282007%29%28248%29.pdf

As with the skies in the early twentieth century, space evolved from being seen simply as an environment in which the use of force on the ground might be aided, to a dimension in which combat would take place, as each side sought to exploit the military use of space, and deny its use to the enemy. The logic of the inevitability of such developments is in line with the realist approach to international relations , and it is similarly a self-fulfi lling prophecy to

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the extent that states act as if it was true. Neorealism can also be felt to be validated by the convergence in goals that has occurred over the same period. By the mid-1980s the various space programmes had obvious similarities, but also important differences. A key feature of the neorealist explanation of international relations is the argument that the security dilemma compels states to behave in essentially similar ways if they are to survive and prosper. The constraints of the system drive states to become functionally alike in the security realm. There is evidence to support this claim in the evolution of several space programmes in the past three decades. The programmes of Japan and the European Space Agency, for example, originally had no military dimension, while those of China and India lacked a manned presence in space, nor did any of these national and international programmes seem to feel that these absences constituted a signifi cant weakness. In the past two decades, however, the various programmes have become increasingly similar in terms of their content and objectives. Europe and Japan have now added a military dimension, while China has acquired a manned programme and India has announced its intention to do so. These developments appear to validate the neorealist argument that states in the international system differ in capability, but exhibit a similarity in objectives and process, and indeed are obliged to do so by the nature of the system.25 Neorealists like Waltz argue that states are obliged to be functionally alike, that they tend to operate with a similar range of instruments and to use them in remarkably similar ways, constrained only by the comparative resources available to them. Against this, realist assumptions about the likelihood of competition in the international anarchy are not necessarily borne out by the history of space policy. For realists, states are not inclined to cooperate unless there are compelling reasons to do so, because of the mutual insecurity they experience under the security dilemma. Weber, for example, argues that international cooperation is likely to be limited, and where it does occur, will be ‘tenuous, unstable and limited to issues of peripheral importance’.26 In space policy, however, states have frequently sought out opportunities to cooperate and have often self-consciously seen this as a possible way to mitigate the dangers inherent in an adversarial relationship such as that between the superpowers during the Cold War,27 or between China and Russia. Some realist proponents allow for such cooperation. Glaser, for example ,argues that there will be circumstances where a state’s best security strategy will be cooperation rather than competition.28 For realists, statesmanship is about ‘mitigating and managing, not eliminating confl ict; seeking a less dangerous world, rather than a safe, just or peaceful one’.29 There is clearly an appropriate place for international cooperation in such a world view, though it is not seen as overcoming the essentially confl ictual nature of international relations. Thus, space activity brought an alteration in the visible measurement of power, in its image, but not in the underlying fundamentals. Given the dominance of realist thinking in the early years of the space age therefore, it was always likely that competition, rather than cooperation, would be the dominant political theme.30

5. REALISM IS THE ONLY WAY TO PREVENT WAR.Mearsheimer 1 (John, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, It should be apparent from this discussion that offensIve realism is mainly a descriptive theory. It explains how great powers have beHAved in the past and how ThEy are likely to behave in the future. But it is also a prescriptive theory. States should behave according to the dictates of offensive realism, because it outlines the best way to survive in a dangerous world. One might ask, if the theory describes how great powers act, why is it necessary to stipulate

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how they should act? THe imposing constraints of the system should leave great powers with little choice but to act as the theory predicts. Although there is much truth in this description of great powers as prisoners trapped in an iron cage, the fact remains that they sometimes—although not often—act in contradiction to the theory. These are the anomalous cases discussed above. As we shall see, such foolish behavior invariably has negative consequences. In short, if they want to survive, great powers should always act like good offensive realists.

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2AC ESA 1. Perm Do Both

Only the Perm works-US involvement is key Peter 8 (Nicolas, Research Fellow at European Space Policy Institute, “Space Exploration 2025: Global Perspectives and Options for Europe” http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/leagilewg2008/presentations/oct29pmSalonIII/Peter4088.pdf, 8/14/2008) SVUp-to-now, the EU and the European Commission (EC) has been reluctant to get involved in space exploration but this is evolving. As indicated in April 2008 by Vice President of the European Commission Günter Verheugen, Commissioner for Industry and Enterprise in charge of space policy in the EC, while acknowledging that relatively little resources are allocated for space exploration from the EC budget, indicated that this needs to change. For him, in the context of the international situation, it is perceived that space exploration done in cooperation could be a way to ensure the competitiveness of the industrial and scientific sector in Europe. This echoes the space policy speech given by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on 11 February 2008 that encourages the EU’s involvement in space and underlines that France considers the EU as the right vector for large projects with ambitions that go beyond the reach of any member State, but also to strengthen Europe’s assets in space exploration. Space exploration could therefore become a new Community initiative. As underlined by Vice President Günter Verheugen, space exploration (to Mars) should be done in the context of international cooperation with Europe’s main partners. President Nicolas Sarkozy indicated also that a stand alone European exploration programme should not be considered insofar as it should only be elaborated in collaboration with the United States and other space-faring countries, since space exploration can be only a global endeavor

2. Internal divisions between EU members means no solvencySelding 10 (Peter B. de Selding, Staff Writer at Space News, “Mistrust Dilutes Goodwill at Global Space Exploration Conference”, http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101021-mistrust-global-exploration-conference.html, 10/22/2010) SVPARIS — An Oct. 21 conference of the world’s spacefaring nations to discuss space exploration featured a heavy dose of good feelings but also highlighted the mistrust that will slow the effort: Germany’s suspicions of France, France’s fear of being dominated by the United States, Russia’s distrust of long-term U.S. government policy, the U.S. distaste for new international bureaucracies and many governments’ refusal to start multibillion-dollar investments. Organized by the European Union, of which Belgium holds the six-month rotating presidency, the second International Conference on Space Exploration in Brussels, Belgium, confirmed the results of the first conference, held in Prague, Czech Republic, a year ago: It is difficult to discuss a space exploration strategy in the absence of one. The meeting ended with an agreement to meet in Italy in 2011 to

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pursue discussions, and to consider the creation of a group of experts to guide the effort. But alongside the statements that space exploration is of necessity a global enterprise calling for global cooperation, individual governments used the conference to raise less-noble issues that lurk beneath the surface. Peter Hintze, state secretary in the German Ministry of Economics, which leads German space policy, said Germany wanted Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket to be center stage in Europe’s exploration strategy. But he also threw a dart at France: “If the Ariane 5 is needed for an institutional mission and is not available, then this is a major problem in terms of cooperation. If it is required for an institutional mission, it should be available for that mission,” Hintze said, referring to the fact that the Ariane 5 launch of Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle-2 (ATV-2) to the international space station scheduled for December has been moved to February to permit the vehicle to conduct three commercial launches.

3. ESA space policy is spun as military policy, causes an arms raceSynon 8 (Mary Ellen Synon, Freelance Journalist, “EU military space policy could lead to expensive 'Star Wars' arms drive, say experts”, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087939/EU-military-space-policy-lead-expensive-Star-Wars-arms-drive-say-experts.html#ixzz1QscopyGY, 11/20/2008) SVThe European Union is pursuing a secretive military space policy which could lead to a costly 'Star Wars' arms drive, a report warned yesterday. It accused Brussels of using the European Space Agency to develop technologies - including a multimillion- pound EU Satellite Centre in Spain - for use by military as well as civilian authorities. The Transnational Institute, a Dutch think-tank, said: 'EU-financed communication and spy satellites are slowly becoming reality and in the long term the inclusion of space-based missile defence and other more offensive uses of space are real options for an increasingly ambitious EU military space policy.' Next week, ministers from all ESA member states will meet in The Hague to implement a new European space policy which identifies military 'security' as a priority. A driving force behind the switch in policy is President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, which holds the European presidency until December 31. In July, he said the space agenda was one of his priorities. The think-tank report also said French ambitions for the militarisation of space have caused rows with Britain - particularly over Galileo, the much-delayed European global positioning system.

4. SOLVENCY DEFICIT - Cross Apply the Leadership Advantage, There is no way that the ESA doing the plan can Promote the US leadership that the Young in ’08 Evidence calls for. Which means the CP allows for the United States to be perceived as weak locking us out of the race for Hegemony. That leads to global nuclear war, that’s Kagan

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A2 Topicality 1. We meet:

2. Counter definition: Exploration is the expansion of human influence in outer spaceFaith 9 (G. Ryan Faith is an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Giving NASA a Clear Mission,” August 31, 2009. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1456/1)If neither technology-oriented nor destination-oriented objectives seem able to provide a sense of direction to guide the nation’s efforts in space, then what can? To approach this question, it is useful to ask why President Kennedy’s challenge to go to the Moon was so effective in providing NASA with leadership. The critical element of this challenge that, although never explicit, was so important to NASA’s health and growth during this period was the transformation—at least in fact, if not in law—into an exploration agency. If we wish to see NASA act effectively as a space exploration agency, then the most direct way to

do this is to amend the Space Act to explicitly task the agency with the job of space exploration. However, before we do so, we must define what space exploration actually is.Space exploration is the expansion of human influence in space.This definition of exploration is inherently one of capacity building. Human influence in space is a measure of our ability to do

useful things beyond the Earth’s surface. In order to do something useful, there has to be some sort of human presence, either humans themselves or their robotic proxies. Once some measure of human influence has been established at some destination in space, there are two ways a space exploration agency can expand that influence. One, the agency can decrease the costs and increase the benefits of human influence at a given location until such influence becomes sufficiently useful that it is economically self-sustaining, at which point continued use of agency resources is unnecessary. Alternately, human influence can be extended to some new place that may in future become home to some form of self-supporting human influence. The key element is that such a mandate compels each step to build on past accomplishments and lay the groundwork for future missions.

And, exploration can be either manned or unmannedEncyclopedia Britannica 11 (“Britannica Online Encyclopedia – Space Exploration,” July 12, 2011. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/557348/space-exploration)Space exploration - Investigation of the universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere by means of manned and unmanned spacecraft.

We meet counterdefinition: a space elevator constitutes significant human presence in outer space

3. Counter Standardsa. Intent do define – both our definitions come from sources writing

with the intent to define what is and isn’t space exploration b. Predictable limits – our definitions provides adequate ground for

both the aff and the neg c. literature base – their definition cuts out space elevators from the

topic, this skews aff ground because our case is at the heart of the topic

4. T is not a voter a. good is good enough – if we are reasonable topical don’t vote us

down because we found a good case that they didn’t prep for

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b. predictability – tons of camps put this aff out meaning that it is predictable and they should have known about it

c. clash checks – there is plenty of clash in the round so don’t vote us down

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