Space Is Where Spirits Soar.

• Author: Gagnon, Bruce K.

What is our vision for the heavens? On a beautiful starry night do you look up to the moon and the stars and feel the connection to the ages?

Can you imagine military bases on the moon and constellations of space-based lasers orbiting our planet? Can you envision the new military space plane, the successor to the shuttle, dropping off new space-based weapons systems and then returning to earth?

We are at a defining moment in history as the US leads the rest of the world into this new space age that ripples with technological advances and challenges the peace and environmental movements to update our thinking and our organizing.

In 1989 I organized a demonstration at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The keynote speaker that day was an Apollo astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. Mitchell spoke out against Star Wars and told us that if we allow the Pentagon to put weapons into space and test them against old satellites, we will create so much space junk that we will not be able to get a rocket off this planet. Mitchell said that we would be entombed to the earth.

Currently there are 110,000 pieces of "space junk" larger than a half-inch orbiting the earth at 18,000 mph. They are tracked on radar screens inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Recently the International Space Station, which will cost taxpayers well over $100 billion, had to be moved to a higher orbit because space junk was moving dangerously near to it. On its last mission prior to its fatal launch, the shuttle Challenger had its windshield cracked by a tiny speck of paint that hit it while orbiting earth.

We once viewed the oceans, lakes, and rivers as vast and limitless. It was official policy to pour raw sewage and industrial pollution into these bodies because no one imagined that any harm could come from doing so. Dilution was the solution to pollution.

Today, some view space the same way. The heavens are vast and limitless and it is assumed it won't matter what we throw up there in the name of national security. NASA, DoE, and the Pentagon do not worry about the consequences of plans to dramatically increase deployments of nuclear materials into space to power space probes and space-based weapons.

The ballistic missile defense system is sold to the American people as a way to protect us from attack by "rogue" states. National missile defense (NMD) is the $60 billion program to protect the continental US from "attack." North Korea, one so-called...