Oct 6 1985
From The Space Library
As five military officers on the Space Shuttle Atlantis orbited earth on the secret 51-J mission, a debate was growing in the U.S. over how much secrecy was necessary in the civilian-run space program and what the military's role in it should be, the NY Times reported.
Proponents of an expanded role for the Defense Department (DOD) said the U.S. needed to counter a growing Soviet threat in space. They pointed out that the USSR launched four to five times as many spacecraft a year as the U.S., with the majority of missions devoted to military objectives, and that Soviet military officers had logged years in space, while the U.S. military had logged days.
Critics of an expanded DOD role said the U.S. already had an advantage in military space technology. They said U.S. systems worked better and lasted longer, pointing out the USSR was still trying to perfect a vehicle similar to the Space Shuttle. The critics also argued that the U.S. military's assertions about the Soviet Union were often veiled excuses to try to edge civilians out of the astronaut corps and to classify the most mundane Space Shuttle payloads. This goal of secrecy, they said, was not heightened security but was intended to protect DOD's plans and programs from public scrutiny.
The debate was likely to become more vocal, the Times said, as the military expanded its manned space activity when secret military missions would account for 25 to 30% of all Space Shuttle flights in the next decade.
Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, said there was a “fundamental tension” between open scientific inquiry and “the necessarily closed world of military activities . . . As military programs expand,” he said, “there's a huge deflection of resources, financial and intellectual, from peaceful uses into the production of weapons.” Daniel Graham, a retired Army lieutenant general who formerly headed the Defense Intelligence Agency, disagreed, saying the military had been at the forefront of U.S. space exploration since its earliest days. “The myth since the Eisenhower Administration is that there's a distinction between military and civilian matters in space,” he said. “That's a pretense that a lot of people in NASA would like to believe, that all their activities are sweetness and light,” he insisted.
However, even military proponents saw emerging tensions in the manned space program, the Times reported. William Gregory, editor of Aviation Week & Technology said in an editorial, “The original legislation creating [NASA] specified a civilian space program, separate from the military . . . That line is being crossed now not so much as a formal policy change as out of simple economic necessity. The shuttle needs the military as a customer to spread the system's overhead costs.” Some critics feared that NASA's charter for free and open dissemination of scientific information was eroding as the military's role grew. Scientists ineffectually protested last year when NASA announced that its Defense Department Affairs Division would review and possibly censor images from a large camera and radar carried on a civilian Space Shuttle mission.
There's a real question of how the decision was made to move the space agency from being open to substantially closed,” the Times quoted Morton Halperin, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “What's at stake is the public's right to participate in the process of making government policy.” (NY Times, Oct 6/85, Al)
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