1ac cascade effect advantage



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EXT. LEADERSHIP LOW NOW



Obama has abandoned space leadership.

Wolf 2010 [Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), ranking member of the U.S. House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, “Don’t Forsake U.S. Leadership in Space”, http://spacenews.com/commentaries/100425-dont-forsake-leadership-space.html]
Space exploration has been the guiding star of American innovation. The Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs have rallied generations of Americans to devote their careers to science and engineering, and NASA’s achievements in exploration and manned spaceflight have rallied our nation in a way that no other federal program — aside from our armed services — can.

Yet today our country stands at a crossroad in the future of U.S. leadership in space. President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget proposal not only scraps the Constellation program but radically scales back U.S. ambition, access, control and exploration in space. Once we forsake these opportunities, it will be very hard to win them back. As Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan noted on the eve of the president’s recent speech at Kennedy Space Center, Fla.: “For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.”

In terms of national security and global leadership, the White House’s budget plan all but abdicates U.S. leadership in exploration and manned spaceflight at a time when other countries, such as China and Russia, are turning to space programs to drive innovation and promote economic growth.

Last month, China Daily reported that China is accelerating its manned spaceflight development while the U.S. cuts back. According to Bao Weimin with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, “A moon landing program is very necessary, because it could drive the country’s scientific and technological development.”

In a recent special advertising section in The Washington Post, the Russian government boasted of its renewed commitment to human spaceflight and exploration. Noting the White House’s recent budget proposal, the piece said, “NASA has long spent more money on more programs than Russia’s space agency. But President Barack Obama has slashed NASA’s dreams of going to the moon again. … At the same time, the Russian space industry is feeling the warm glow of state backing once again. There has been concerted investment in recent years, an investment that fits in well with the [Vladimir] Putin doctrine of trying to restore Russian pride through capacity.”

Manned spaceflight and exploration are one of the last remaining fields in which the United States maintains an undeniable competitive advantage over other nations. To walk away is shortsighted and irresponsible. Our global competitors have no intention of scaling back their ambitions in space.



EXT. DEBRIS KILLS ECON


Reliable access to space is key to the global economy.

Logsdon 2011 (John M., Space policy institute, “Change and continuity in US space policy”, http://www.gwu.edu/~spi/assets/docs/Logsdon_Space_Policy_Viewpoint.pdf) RKS
As public and private space efforts continue to increase, there is the very real possibility that proliferation of orbital debris, accidental collisions, or unintended radio-frequency interference could limit access to specific orbits. As the global economy becomes ever more dependent on space-based services, the possibility of disruptions of the ability to make reliable use of space could have profound economic consequences. As more countries make space systems an important element of their national security posture, the possibility of purposeful interference with, or the disabling or destruction of, those systems is a threat to global stability. Thus steps to limit these possibilities are of paramount importance in keeping the space environment a global commons available for all to use for peaceful and productive purposes. Recognizing the need for international norms to govern activities in space could be the most lasting heritage of the new US national space policy.
A cascade effect in GEO orbit alone would cost trillions of dollars

Foust 2009 [Jeff Foust, editor and publisher of The Space Review, “Putting a bounty on orbital debris”, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1427/1]
Keeping GEO relatively clean is essential to maintaining the long-term viability of that orbit for communications and other applications. While guidelines are in place to require spacecraft to boost themselves up several hundred kilometers into a “graveyard” orbit at the end of their lives, every year spacecraft fail or are otherwise abandoned in GEO, a key example being the DSP 23 early warning satellite that failed in GEO last year and is now drifting through the GEO arc, posing a small but non-zero collision risk to other satellites.

Wingo said there was a risk that a collision between two large GEO satellites could create a cascade of debris that could threaten the hundreds of other satellites there. “If you had a cascade event in GEO that rendered GEO useless,” he warned, “it would probably cost on the order of a couple trillion dollars in GNP over the next couple of decades while we tried to figure out how to clean it up.”

Wingo also said that vehicles that could help move spacecraft out of GEO could also serve a very different market: salvage. “There’s well over half a million kilos’ worth of hardware in GEO,” he said. “There’s big solar arrays, there’s transponders: you could actually go up there and bring some of this stuff together, create a big transponder park, recycle this hardware,” he said.
Space debris threatens the global economy.

Greene 2010 (Ben, chief executive of Electro Optic Systems Holdings Limited, “US and Australia Initiate Space Partnership”, http://www.eostech.com/documents/announcements/ASX_announcement_reSpace_Debris_20101110.pdf) RKS
Most advanced global economies are highly dependent on satellites in space for communication, navigation, entertainment, internet, resource management, global monitoring, weather forecasting and defence. These satellites represent a collective investment of more than $600 billion. “Space debris is a serious threat to this infrastructure and these applications, and EOS has been developing cost-effective debris solutions for more than a decade, based on its world-leading laser tracking capabilities.




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