particularly regarding AU’s proposal that an international group should codify rules governing the use of outer space. However, the AU study further recommended that any space vehicle on an orbit, trajectory, or unapproved flight plan deemed inimical to the interests of national security should be considered hostile and that appropriate military countermeasures be taken.[1] However, to many Air Force leaders the policy of promoting the “peaceful uses of space” meant a diminished role for Air Force space interests and a threat to the nation’s security.[2]
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Internal DOD Strife and Movement toward a National Outer Space Policy
Despite the Eisenhower administration’s 1956 gag order on military comments regarding space, disagreements within DOD began surfacing outside the department by 1958. These disagreements were between the military services and DOD civilians. The disagreements were due in large measure to the fact that the Eisenhower administration’s stalking-horse agenda of establishing the principle of freedom of passage for spy satellites in outer space had been created apparently, as discussed above, by DOD civilians and perhaps a selected few in the uniformed military services. These officials had not shared this information with most of the uniformed military. As a result, when the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration raised the issue in 1958 of how to deal with Soviet “spy” satellites, Lt Gen Donald L. Putt, Air Force deputy
- ↑ Bowen, 185; History, Directorate of Plans, DCS Plans and Programs. HQ USAF, 166-67; and Col Martin B. Schofield, USAF, “Control of Outer Space,” Air University Quarterly Review 10, no. 1 (Spring 1958): 101, and attachment, Evaluation Staff, Air War College, “A Position on the International Use of Space,” 104.
- ↑ David N. Spires, Beyond Horizons: A Half-Century of Air Force Space Leadership, rev. ed. (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1998), 93.
