Here’s a piece by a Greg Autrey in the Baltimore Sun on space policy. It’s kind of a mess:

Why should we care about missiles threatening low Earth orbit? When the Chinese get on with reabsorbing Taiwan – the most likely trigger for a U.S.-China confrontation – U.S. drivers may find that the navigation systems in their SUVs (not to mention their ambulances) aren’t working. Low-flying U.S. military spy satellites are the first target of the new weapon, but the slightly higher GPS (global positioning system) satellites that guide our weapons systems are also attractive to Chinese war planners.

Or, what about when the censorship-savvy Chinese government decides it has had enough of Howard Stern corrupting the youth and takes out Sirius satellite radio?

GPS isn’t “slightly higher.” It’s thousands of miles higher. GEO, where satellite radio satellites reside is thousand of miles higher than that.

But the real problem is that the whole thing is incoherent. What does the “sands of the moon” have to do with ASATs? Just what is it that he’s recommending, policy-wise? More money for NASA? More encouragement of private enterprise? How?

You’d think that with all the knowledge out here on the web, newspapers could find better commentators on space than “a lecturer on business strategy and entrepreneurship.”

As I noted in my TCSDaily piece, I’m not a space lawyer, but Jesse Londin is, and she has some thoughts on the legalities of the Chinese ASAT test.

You know, if your world view was really “shaken up by China’s ASAT demonstration, you couldn’t have been paying attention. China is a very real threat in military space (though not manned space), and has been for some time.

You know, if your world view was really “shaken up by China’s ASAT demonstration, you couldn’t have been paying attention. China is a very real threat in military space (though not manned space), and has been for some time.

You know, if your world view was really “shaken up by China’s ASAT demonstration, you couldn’t have been paying attention. China is a very real threat in military space (though not manned space), and has been for some time.

I first met Katherine Mangu-Ward at a debate on bioethics in DC a year and a half ago. She was working for the New York Times, as a research assistant for (closet libertarian) John Tierney.

I next saw her in Las Vegas, last summer, at the Space Frontier Conference. She was working on a space piece for Reason, for whom she has apparently left the Gray Lady and gone to work as an associate editor. She’s finished the piece, and it came out pretty well, other than that COTS isn’t a prize, and SpaceX and RpK are competing, not cooperating.

Ed Kyle has a comprehensive description of it, with the history of “the Stick.”

The Chinese have finally admitted that they blew up their weathersat. But no worries:

Liu Jianchao told reporters that China had notified “other parties and… the American side” of its test.

“But China stresses that it has consistently advocated the peaceful development of outer space and it opposes the arming of space and military competition in space,” he told a news conference.

“China has never, and will never, participate in any form of space arms race.”

Well, that’s that, then. I feel much better now.

Jeff Foust has a roundup. With (so far) one idiotic comment.

Is China in control of its own military?

In interviews over the past two days, American officials with access to the intelligence on the test said the United States kept mum about it in hopes that China would come forth with an explanation.

It was more than a week before the intelligence leaked out: a Chinese missile had been launched and an aging weather satellite in its path, more than 500 miles above the earth, had been reduced to rubble. But protests filed by the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, among others, were met with silence