Upcoming Militarization of Space Will Finally Make It Interesting

I was standing outside the other evening looking at the clear sky, full of the bright wintertime stars and recognizing old celestial friends from my childhood...they never seem to change.  But the vastness of space, the great distances between stars and even the planets in our solar system, and the lengthy span of time it times to travel in anywhere in space...combined with that seldom (or very slowly) changing nighttime celestial theater...all contribute, sad to say, to a general apathy toward astronomy and space exploration on the part of the general public.  Instead, people would rather go watch the latest Star Wars movie, where the fictional characters can cross vast regions of space in the blink of an eye and...well, since there's always a war going on, then that's exciting, right?  And so with what seems to be an incremental militarization of space and our president's call for a "space force" to counter actions by Russia and China we may be finally...and dismally...finding a way of looking at astronomy and the space program as something more interesting...and deadly.  But let's face it: every crucial development in human transportation, from riding horses and other animals through steam locomotion, trains, ships, motorized vehicles, dirigibles, planes, and submarines, has always been quickly applied to war-making and gaining an advantage over the adversary...sooner or later we should have known that space would be the next military frontier.  As a matter of fact, shooting rockets into space was a direct outgrowth of the Nazi Germans' V-2 rocket program whereby scientists and engineers like Wernher Von Braun developed a new type of locomotion for war use...after World War II he and others were picked up by the U.S. and the Soviets to work on their own Cold War projects.  And being able to project missiles accurately over very long distances directly led to the race to the moon between the two sides in the 1960s...

Well, the people have spoken and they think space warfare is interesting and maybe a nonmilitarized space future with comprehensive international cooperation and goodwill would be just too boring to attract their attention and enthusiasm.  And since...at least here in America...public opinion counts for a lot in what our elected politicians decide to spend money on, I'm afraid that folks are in danger of getting in "real" life what they happily spend their money to achieve in "reel" life.  Now I'm not criticizing the president's 2018 plan for a space force...it may indeed be necessary and I'm not in a position to go over all the classified information about what other countries are doing up there...but maybe it's not going as planned as the current spending deal just negotiated between the politically-divided Congress and the White House cut a whopping $32 million in appropriations for it from the $72 million the administration asked for...