The document makes a serious point about our growing dependence on satellites, the military threats to them and ways of protecting them. But America has rejected the desire by 160 other countries to have United Nations talks about banning an arms race in space, an extravagantly unilateral approach whose appeal you might have thought would have been tarnished by its experience in Iraq.

Its vision of the space programme, military more than scientific, is also undermined by its taste for manned missions — and the breathtaking cost.

Bush signed the document on August 31, and the White House released the text this month in the late afternoon of the Friday of a holiday weekend. So the first full revision of space policy for ten years has provoked controversy abroad as much as at home. The eyecatching declaration is that the US asserts the right to deny access to space to anyone “hostile to US interests”, although it gives no basis for that right. It also rejects arms control talks that would limit future US actions in space.

Military, commercial and personal communication has become more dependent on satellites. The US fears that its satellites are vulnerable to attack.

It does not name its potential enemies, but China and Russia clearly have the capability and even Iran has its own satellite and plans for a launch vehicle, while there are about 40 countries with a presence in space.

This focus on defence springs from the American strategy for space, which exchanged President Clinton’s goals of understanding the Universe for ones of security. But in scrapping Clinton’s plans for unmanned probes in favour of manned missions to the Moon and Mars, it drew attacks that it would discover little and spend too much.

When the US last year dismissed other countries’ wish to talk about banning weapons in space (the UN vote was 160-1), it presumably intended to keep its options open, even though it says that it has no intention of putting up space weapons. But instead it may have missed the chance of securing a ban when countries were willing to sign it — at the very least, a cheaper option than eventually putting its own weapons in space.

BODY POLITIC IN REVOLT

How much of Bush’s agenda will stick if the Democrats win one or both Houses of Congress in the elections next month? His new law on the imprisonment, interrogation and trial of terrorist suspects must be a prime contender for attack — by the courts, if not by Congress. Bush signed the Bill just before Congress rose for the home stretch of the campaign, as if that were the last word.

For his own party, it was. Once the opposition by senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and John Warner folded, the version passed was bound to end up close to the original wishes of the White House. But it now strips away the right to challenge detention without charge from all non-US citizens — not just for those detained outside the US, as in the original. That applies to the 12 million permanent residents who are not citizens.

Legal challenges saying that it is unconstitutional to remove the right of habeas corpus from anyone are already in train. But the potential application to 12 million people within the US will add political heat that was absent when it covered only 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

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