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• 1 IN S P A C E IS OUR TRUST How and Why Does Space Impact the United States? Space is America's passion. As an endless and virtually unexplored frontier, accessible only once we have availed ourselves of our collective technological and engineering genius, space also is a truly American passion. Satellites, the flowers of our obsession, have spawned a global social revolution, affecting how we think and go about our daily business, entertain ourselves, and relate at home and abroad to our family, friends, and business associates. Space, in fact, has affected in a fundamental way how we function governmentally—even how we fight wars and guard the peace. Feeding off the computer revolution, robots orbiting overhead bestow upon us a historically unique means to connect to one another globally and deliver information with uncanny speed and reliability. Satellites are largely responsible for the exponential growth of information products and services.1 The space bridges constructed over the years are particularly desirable to Americans, whose family members commonly are spread across the United States and even around the world. Satellites, we shall see, are a boon for business. Indeed, space has become a prosperous business in its own right. From the Fortune 500 companies to the local "mom-and-pop" stores, unless you've got a hook-up to space, your business operations antedate the 1960s and clearly are not geared for the high-tech, competitive economy of the twenty-first century. Although integral to our everyday lives, space operations are transparent. We take for granted having at our fingertips devices that send and receive voice and video data in any combination to and from practically anywhere in the world. We routinely view breathtaking overhead perspectives of cities and nature's geologi- 6 The Vital Force cal formations from hundreds or even thousands of miles above the planet. We accept as commonplace the possibilities of worldwide navigation. There are untold national security, civil, and commercial implications in all of this, a reality that relentlessly and beyond any force of will that we possess intertwines the prosperity and security of the United States ever more tightly with activities in outer space. Only within the last hundred years or so have scientists and engineers attempted space travel. Manned and unmanned spacecraft have skirted the edges of Earth along the highways that crisscross the skies only for slightly more than four decades. We have found over these forty years that space allows us to do better, in some cases a lot better, many of the things we have always done well. In many instances, satellites have permitted us to do things we never would have imagined only a generation or two ago. The United States places its hope for the future, its care for its people, its confidence, its interest, and its trust in space precisely because space sustains and expands national industry, economy, science, and security. With more that $100 billion invested in space as of 1999, the incentive to gain access to Earth orbits and protect national space property and activities will continue to expand.2 While we Americans certainly could live well enough without satellites (not a really viable option today in any case), thus enervated we could not thrive, nor prosper, nor live in our accustomed states of comfort and safety. How Did We Reach Space? Now as in the beginning, space enthralls us. The cold, hard vacuum enveloping Mother Earth beckons us, as would an oracle, to approach it for answers to our most profound and fanciful curiosities. Largely dark (though peppered with explosions of radiant light), shapeless (though characterized by magnificent celestial formations), transparent (yet ultimately nebulous to our intellects), without measurable depth or limited substance (its distances best measured in time or the speed of light—186,000 miles per second), timeless (at least to humans accustomed to day-night cycles), a container of all material things (though with no definable edges), void of recognizable direction (no north, south, east, or west to speak of), the living force (and, with planet-destroying asteroids, dying suns, and black holes, the reason for our ultimate destruction), outer space is the greatest of all enigmas.3 Throughout human history, intense theological wonderment, scientific investigation and exploration, philosophical reflections, imaginative flights of fancy, and practical national missions have allowed our minds to dance around the mysteries of this vast realm. Indeed, our interrogations and observations of space began with basic and eternal questions dealing with the existence of...

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