The Moon Was Shining, The Stars Were Bright…

... manned spacecraft have failed (such projects have been culled by successive administrations). The slogan “Victory at Any Cost” that was common during the first space race has been replaced by the revisionist motto, all too familiar to the Russian reader, “The Goal is Nothing, Movement is Everything.” This change did not happen by accident. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union looked into the possibility of developing a fully functioning “space weapon” on an orbital station that would have been capable of destroying the enemy’s ballistic missiles [2] . Similar discussions took place in the United States during the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative in the mid-1980s ...