Our development philosophy includes two elements: a philosophy of testing and a dual approach. Stated simply, the test philosophy requires a great de… - Bernard Adolph Schriever

Space capabilities provide reconnaissance, surveillance, communications, weather and navigation. They greatly augment our warning and intelligence capabilities. If we fail to deter war, space systems will improve our ability to deliver weapons, and to assess damage.

Perhaps not only initially but for all time, space technology will include as its most characteristic problem the need for going from the surface of one celestial body to another with successful passage through the atmosphere of each.

So we have a challenge of optimizing our capability in a completely new environment. Space has intruded, you might say, in many ways, and in other ways it can bring about what I consider a spread in our deterrent overall capability. We can deter by—deterrence requires the deterrer to have the credibility that what he has is something that an enemy can't really do anything but, in the end, lose. Then he's deterred. But if he doesn't, for any reason at all, believe that we can do it, then deterrence flies right out the window.