These advances will enable lasers with reasonable mass and cost to effect very many kills. . . . Setting the emotional issues of nuclear power aside, this technology offers a viable alternative for large amounts of power in space. It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen. We're going to fight from space, and we're going to fight into space. It's a threat to our economic well-being.
Space is in the nation's economic interest.
In Congress, one avid booster of U.S. space dominance is Senator Bob Smith, Republican of New Hampshire. In 1998, it published a booklet entitled Space, Commerce, and National Security, written by Air Force Colonel Frank Klotz, a military fellow at the council. The most immediate task of the United States in the years ahead is to sustain and extend its leadership in the increasingly intertwined fields of military and commercial space. And the United States has signed a multimillion dollar contract with TRW and Boeing to build a Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator. The military's poster for this laser shows it firing a ray into space while above it an American flag somehow manages to wave.