Russian Cosmos VS American Space

On April 12^th, Russia celebrates Cosmonautics Day. The first manned space flight happened in 1961 with the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The US responded to the Soviet space program with the creation of ARPANET, which would lay the foundations for the Internet. In fact, we can see in the superiority race not only technological competition with ideological slogans.

The term “cosmos”, which is primarily used in Russia, has its origins in Greek and means “order”. In English, the word “space” dealing with idea of expansion, i.e. some sphere that is regarded as the next step to conquer the land, sea and the air. 

Space flights introduced cosmocracy into geopolitics, and at the end of the 20^th century the Professor of Comparative Military Studies at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air/Space Studies Everett Dolman suggested the introduction of the term “Astropolitik”. He said: “Society must consider space conquest as a moral imperative, necessary for the survival of the human race, and must also perceive themselves as best equipped to dominate this arena (…).” He means not the abstract human race, but its Anglo-Saxon subspecies, formed after the fight with the others on the wide fields of the Earth. This is known as “frontier spirit”, praised by Frederick Jackson Turner at the end of the 19^th century, streaming now to stellar heights . If, in the pioneer time, the “Frontier spirit” claimed to destroy many Indian tribes, now the US is able to repeat this experiment at the space level. It is not at all by chance that the US created the "Star Wars" series and other classic and famous epic science fiction films like "Avatar"; this is another set-back to the Collective Unconscious of the “Frontier spirit” carriers, which transformed into the a man-made form and was equipped with methods of cultural-informational manipulation. 

The US tries to implement such fantasies into a reality; even its strategies are often approved by scientific research and optimistic globalism.

On April 22th, 2010, Colonel in the United States Army and maintainer Timothy Creamer, together with his colleagues onboard the ISS (its members were the other American – the captain, two Russian maintainers, and one Japanese) sent a message to Earth using Twitter.

Their first tweet in space was quite inoffensive to all twitter users: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your s.”

Let’s remember that Twitter was actively used in the massive riots in Iran in 2009, the same year demonstrations in Moldova were named the Twitter revolution. 

The other cluster of cosmocracy is the basis of outer space control. The American network of outer space control is located on all the continents and islands.  Its goal is to stimulate situational awareness as one of the main elements of the network war. According to the American military, it will allow the US to reach full space superiority and to “prevent a space Pearl Harbor”. The American scientific elite describes it in a more delicate way: to detect and track space objects such as satellites and orbital debris. Former astronaut and Air Force General, the head of the strategic command Kevin Hilton said that the issue of space debris is out of control: the Earth has, in orbit, more than 15,000 debris and parts of satellites and other spacecraft. “The estimation is that these numbers could grow upward of 50,000 in total numbers in the not-too-distant future,” he said, and called for the other countries to jointly solve this issue.

It is interesting that the idea to use space to dump waste in was offered both by the USSR and the US. In 1959, Soviet scientist Kapitsa offered to send nuclear waste into space. In 1972, Schlesinger offered the same thing by using a reusable shuttle. This issue remains unsolved even today.

However, the militarization of space is still a serious problem. In the mid 2000’s, the Pentagon set new goals in this sphere: the creation of an air Anti-satellite weapon, the defeat of telecommunication satellite systems, air and space lasers, deep space studying crafts, and more powerful cargo spacecraft. Satellites with different means for monitoring were launched, as well as the creation of laser systems. 

George Friedman, in his book The Next 100 Years, fanaticizes that soon the aim of military and political control of space will be the implementation of satellites carrying weapons of mass destruction. The miniaturization of weapons and different automatic systems is being conducted. Experts say that soon the new nano and pico-satellites will be about 3.9 inches in diameter. 

This has caused a response: Vladimir Putin called for the prevention of a militarized outer space, and was supported by the UN General Assembly, who adopted a resolution called International cooperation in the peaceful use of outer space. However, due to the creation of its WMD system, the US refused to sign the documents, and now accuses the other states of space militarization.

The US has now shown the weakness of its own space program (for example, the dependence on the Russian rocket engine), and Russia, on the contrary, is reclaiming the status of space power. A new spaceport will soon be ready, and soon the first satellites will be sent into the Earth’s orbit.

Thus, Immanuel Kant’s thesis in the context of Astropolitik on “the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us” has become urgent again.