Obama Bans Space Weapons

Well, not really. The language is a little unclear, but we are headed in the right direction. I like the final paragraph from this article:

The likeliest possibility, though, is that this is mostly about atmospherics. As China’s interception demonstrated, attacks on satellites generate dangerous levels of orbital debris—shrapnel that continues to orbit the Earth for days, weeks or even years, and that menaces anything in its path. (And because the debris consists of small, fast-moving and widely-dispersed fragments, it’s almost impossible to clean up). This means that no spacefaring power is likely to want to mount wholesale attacks on another power’s satellites. The result of any such attack would make space as unusable for the attacker as for the target. In the next decade or two, the biggest threats are likely to come from rogue nations with some space capability, like Iran (which last week launched a satellite on its own), or North Korea—countries that have the ability to attack spacecraft from the ground, but not a lot of their own satellites at risk. Perhaps Obama thinks that a space-weapon ban among the spacefaring nations will encourage them to close ranks against rogue states that are a threat to everyone. That would certainly be a positive development.