Features space-based superweapons and their architects, along with the
high-stakes politics that reined them in.
Orbital fortresses poised to fry entire cities with no warning using
giant mirrors. Bombers that take off from Earth, punch through the thin
border between the atmosphere and vacuum and take advantage of that
lofty altitude to speed across the globe on missions of mass
destruction.
These and other exotic orbital weapons were under consideration, or even
active development, in the early decades of humanity's push into
space.
And no wonder. The era of frantic, dueling, American and Soviet
space-exploration efforts -- which stretched from the end of World War
II to the United States' successful Moon landing in July 1969 -- had its
roots in Nazi Germany, a country that pinned its hope for global
conquest on equally ambitious superweapons.
In the decades following World War II, the top scientists in the U.S.
and Soviet space programs were ex-Nazis--most notably rocket-designer
Wernher von Braun, who sided with the Americans. The basic technologies
of the space race derived from Nazi superweapons, in particular von
Braun's V-2 rocket.
But orbital war never broke out in those heady decades of intense space
competition. It's possible to triangulate the moment the seemingly
inevitable became evitable. July 29, 1958. The day U.S. president Dwight
Eisenhower reluctantly signed the law creating the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.
Starting that day, the U.S. military gradually ceded to NASA, a civilian
agency, leadership of American efforts in space. Even von Braun, once a
leading advocate of orbital warfare, went along. Space-based
superweapons and their architects, and the high-stakes politics that
reined them in, are the subject of this brief book.
