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The Politics of Near Space
| Article
# : |
13311 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
5,812 Words |
| Author
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Duncan Lunan
Duncan Lunan is a Scottish science fiction writer who has also
published widely on telecommunications. |
In 1950 Robert A. Heinlein published "The Man Who Sold the Moon," the title story of his first volume of Future Histories. In the preface to the British edition, published in 1953, Heinlein noted that his scenario sets the first moon landing in 1978, "but I will not bet that it will not be sooner." Not even Heinlein foresaw that the United States would have turned its back on the moon by 1978, dismantling the factories and launch facilities on Earth and switching off the instruments left on the moon. Then again, Heinlein supposed that the mission would be organized by commercial interests, not by politicians. At the end of the book, lunar exploitation is in the hands of a nonprofit corporation under the auspices of the United Nations. This concept, like that of the moon landing, may also prove prophetic, for aspects of this remarkable story are already matters of international concern.
One of the first steps taken by Heinlein's big-business hero in order to prevent tiresome future lawsuits is to investigate the ownership of the moon. He learns that the territorial rights attached to a piece of land extend downward to the center of the Earth and upward to infinity. Therefore, since the moon goes no further north or south than 28'45' latitude over Earth, he toys with the idea of buying up all the land it passes over. He settles, however, for quiet deals with the equatorial countries for their rights to the moon's resources.
When Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, there were some short-lived protests about infringement of territorial space; these protests might never have occurred had the United States been first into space. There was talk of lawsuits to stop the satellite passing over one piece of land or another, but this came to nothing. The principle of territorial rights became modified, in effect, to allow free traffic beyond the atmosphere. The legal attitude was that territorial rights were limited to the air space overhead that could be effectively controlled, and international law appeared content with this attitude. But the writing was on the wall as far back as the U-2 incident in 1969, when a new class of ground-to-air missiles put an end to spy plane flights over Soviet territory. Even in the seventies there was evidence that U.S. satellites had been blinded by Soviet lasers, and that the United States had demonstrated air-to-space interception with missiles fired from F-15 fighters.
Not all satellites are limited to brief passes overhead. Some U.S. reconnaissance satellites had very elliptical orbits, which allowed them to spend most of their time high over the Soviet Union. This move caused a stir in late
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