ABSTRACT
The chapter demonstrates how the superpower race for the moon was soon superseded by a military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space. In the 1970s, both countries were developing weapons that could shoot down satellites. Additionally, they had begun using reconnaissance satellites to provide targeting information directly to deployed military forces. In March 1983, Ronald Reagan announced the creation of a missile defense strategy, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), that called for interceptors to be deployed in space. The US government used the existence of Soviet military space weapons as a primary justification for both the US anti-satellite and SDI programs. The declassified archival record reveals, however, that US space weapons policies were motivated by a variety of political and strategic factors rather than responding to the perceived Soviet military space threat alone.
