“Did you know that the soviet Sputnik 1 was not a spacecraft built specifically to orbit the Earth, but in fact an emptied intercontinental ballistic missile whose warhead was replaced with a radio transmitter?” asks Dmytro Natalukha, the Chairman of the Committee on Economic Development.
Or that the legendary American reconnaissance and strike UAV MQ-1 Predator, which had the greatest impact on the development of the military drone industry, according to its designer Abraham Karem ("the father of drones"), appeared solely due to the progress of space technology?
Today, the perception of space in Ukraine as a "peaceful whim" does not stand up to criticism, both from the point of view of the history of the founding and development of the world's most famous space agency, the American NASA, and from the point of view of how the space industry has provided military defence complexes around the world with leading weapons that are now successfully used by their armies for deterrence, attack or intelligence gathering.
The current situation in Ukraine – against the backdrop of a shortage of weapons and technologies in the bloodiest war of our time – once again underlines the critical role that the space industry can play in the national defence and security of our country.
Therefore, when, in the second year of a full-scale war, I still hear from some representatives of the executive branch that "space should be dealt with in peacetime", I understand that if this is not amateurishness, it is simply a lack of understanding of the basic cause-and-effect relationships in global military dynamics, the role of space technology in national security and the potential for using space technology for military purposes. Space technologies in their broadest sense.