![]() Space assets give the Coast Guard the vision that clouds, storms and cascading seas often obscure. Satellite monitoring of financial transactions between international terrorist groups, human traffickers, and drug cartels, as well as GPS tagging of them is critically important to intelligence gathering, subsequent prosecution of those criminals and the overall safeguarding of our population. He’s also looking at what is happening around the world – be it in Japan or Haiti – to see if there is a crisis or situation where he and his team might be able to assist. Here’s a sampling of what space means to homeland security.īesides the nationwide weather reports DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano gets briefed on every morning to know where Mother Nature may be looking to inflict a bad day, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate also takes note of the space weather report so as to see how solar storms and flares might affect not just satellite communications but other weather patterns here in the United States. ![]() Our nation, whether we realize it or not, has made space an interdependent infrastructure to life here on Earth. In the new chapter of America’s space history we cannot afford such singular or “silo-ed” approaches. While each may be distinct, with its own workforce, technologies and operational culture, each infrastructure is also related to others.Īll too often we have looked at space from a single focus, such as a NASA focus, a military focus, or an intelligence focus. Infrastructures are those individual elements that make up our country’s operations and economic potential such as government, transportation, financial services, communications, health care and so on. Interdependencies are the connections that exist from one part to the next, and connect processes, people, operations and networks together. ![]() While I have learned a lot in navigating those two very different, but also complementary worlds, it has taught me an awful lot about interdependencies and infrastructures. All are important and essential, but we cannot afford to sit back when it comes to America’s place in space.įor the past two decades I have been fortunate to work within the aerospace and homeland security communities in both the public and the private sectors. It would be easy to go on listing examples that show a direct relationship between the lives we live today and the civil, defense and private sector investments in space that have made all of these things and more possible. From the weather report that models approaching storms, to the GPS system that guides us to a weekend destination from the remote sensing system that detects stressful environmental and soil conditions jeopardizing a crop of soybeans at a farm in Mississippi, to the Skype call that is coming from loved ones on the other side of the planet to tell of news that that really matters to you from the digital photo that you took of your friends this past weekend, to the post of it on Facebook that has generated at least 23 “likes” … To do so would not just put us in a museum, but would lock us inside with no way out.Ī day without space puts our daily lives, with all of their monotony and spontaneity, at risk. ![]() Advances in circuitry, battery power, computer memory and more continue to cascade like falling dominoes, but we cannot take these advances or our achievements in space for granted. ![]() As novel and trivial as that might sound, it is worth noting that none of that was by accident. Each of them has many times more computer power in their hands today than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had with them as the lunar module Eagle landed on the moon nearly 42 years ago. My 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son are both proud owners of Apple’s iPod touch. The legacy of the nation’s space program continues to exist on launch pads, in research laboratories, in new, smaller and more versatile ground stations, in the marketplace, in our homes, and ultimately in our own hands. As impressive as it is to marvel at all of her history and that of the entire shuttle program, we are entering a period where America’s future in space is, for lack of a better word, “cloudy.” The ships we have used to enter Earth orbit since April 12, 1981, will ultimately be parked at the Smithsonian and a few other museums around the United States.Īs novel as it will be to go and see these multi-million mile machines, museums are not the places in which our nation’s place in space should be heralded. With 39 flights behind her, she logged a cumulative total of a full year in space. On March 9, 2011, the Space Shuttle Discovery landed for the final time at Kennedy Space Center. ![]()
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