Nexus - 1106 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

PREVENTING THE WEAPONISATION OF SPACE PREVENTING THE SPACE WEAPONISATION Carol Rosin, colleague of the famous German rocket scientist Dr Wernher von Braun, continues his work to have weapons banned from space. German Scientist Wernher von Braun Anticipated Terrorists, Asteroids and ETs on America's "Enemies List", says Carol Rosin une 18, 2004, Ventura, California — One of the most famous names from the beginning of the American rocket and missile programs after World War II is Dr Wernher von Braun. With the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 after the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dr von Braun and 126 other German rocket scientists were brought to the United States under a government project called Paperclip. They were based at Fort Bliss, Texas, and their work was focused at the White Sands Missile Range north of Fort Bliss in southern New Mexico. Dr von Braun became famous for his expertise and his visionary goal to expand man's knowledge through the exploration of space. His pioneering work led to the development of the Explorer satellites, the Jupiter and Jupiter-C rockets, Pershing, the Redstone rocket, the Saturn rockets and Skylab, the world's first space station. Additionally, his determination to "go where no man has gone before" led to America's first landing on the Moon in 1969 during the Nixon administration. In 1970, NASA asked Dr von Braun to move to Washington, DC, to head up the strategic planning effort for the government space agency. But in less than two years he decided to retire from NASA and went to work for Fairchild Industries of Germantown, Maryland, where he met a sixth-grade school teacher named Carol Rosin. She was famous for producing a "Students Studying on Spaceship Earth" project for her school classes. Dr von Braun asked Carol to join him at Fairchild Industries to help him create a ban of weapons in space. As President Eisenhower had warned about the threat of the "military-industrial complex" to America's future, likewise Dr von Braun warned that space should be kept free from intrusion by that same military-industrial power. Carol left her teaching job and went to work for Dr von Braun in 1974. He was her mentor until he died in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977. For nearly 30 years since then, Carol Rosin has persisted in trying to carry out Dr von Braun's request to get weapons banned from space. She is now President of the Institute for Cooperation in Space and of the Space Preservation Trust Foundation. Last year on December 8, 2003, her US Space Preservation Act was placed by Representative Dennis Kucinich as House Bill 3657 in the 108th Congress. Its statement of purpose: "To pre- serve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by prohibit- ing the basing of weapons in space and the use of weapons to destroy or damage objects in space that are in orbit, and for other purposes". Further, she has written a Space Preservation Treaty to be introduced to nations of the world for signing through the United Nations to ban permanently the basing of weapons in space. In the past 30 years, as Carol has worked hard to carry out Dr von Braun's challenge to her, she has often thought of his warnings about the misuse of space and an "Enemies List" that he said the American government was using to keep the media and public in support of Pentagon budgets. Following is the interview I conducted with Carol Rosin. Interview with Carol Rosin by Linda Moulton Howe © June 2004 All Rights Reserved Webpage: http:/www.earthfiles.com/news/ news.cfm?ID=734&category=Science by Linda Moulton Howe © June 2004 All Rights Reserved Carol Rosin (CR): The message that he [Wernher von Braun] was giving me continually was that we must prevent the weaponisation of space from happening because otherwise the truth would never be officially acknowledged about who we were, who we are, as a human species in the universes. NEXUS +19 Interview with Carol Rosin — Linda Moulton Howe OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2004 www.nexusmagazine.com