It's establishing (assuming it gets passed and signed) the work for a demonstration program on active debris removal from orbit. It's not imposing the US government's will on anyone else.
You could literally say this about anything the government does. If 100% citizen agreement was required for everything, government would do nothing. This is why we’re a republic - you elect your leaders that you best trust to make society-level decisions.
We empowered federal government in Constitution to do a limited list of things, with everything else explicitly reserved to the States and the people. Space Janitor can be put in Constitution via an amendment.
The federal government can do what it likes with the legislative process, as long as it’s not unconstitutional. As this isn’t unconstitutional and is voted in by both houses, it then becomes law.
It seems to me you have some major misunderstandings about how the government works, and misattributing things left and right. The government funds all kinds of things none of which are written in the constitution. That’s the entire point of congress and taxes. None of this has anything to do with abortions and body scanners.
Also, there are no “abortion shops,” and that kind of rhetoric is inflammatory and has no place here on HN.
Unless a lot of people have serious religious objections to janitoring, there's nothing to stop it.
Even if you had standing, what would you sue for? The government is spending its own money on the program. If it didn't spend that money, it would just sit around in the treasury. Not go through some kind of reverse tax process.
> Can federal government force me
Government spending doesn't mandate that you or anyone else has to do anything.
It happens. Sue the government and stop it on Constitutional grounds. Vote in November and maybe change things. Run if you're sufficiently motivated. You also have the option of leaving the country and renouncing your citizenship. Or do like a guy I knew and don't pay taxes, though what happens after that may not be to your liking either (he didn't).
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Are you some kind of sovereign citizen? If you don't pay taxes then the USA government isn't spending your tax dollars like you said they were in your first post, is it?
I am not trying to attack the grandparent poster or anything, I seriously think that's what they intended to say. They are basically saying "I only have to pay income tax if I work, and the government cannot force me to work so they can extract tax money from me.".
On an off-hand chance that they indeed just earn money under the table and do not report the income, it was probably not the sharpest idea to admit it on a large-visibility public form.
It works the same way in space as it does in the ocean. You can mess with other people's stuff under the pretext of doing something legitimate, and you might get away with it or you might provoke a conflict.
It depends on who you are, who you're messing with, who your friends and their friends are, whether they stand to lose face or can pretend they didn't notice it, etc. The US once tried to steal the wreck of an entire Soviet nuclear-armed submarine off the bottom of the ocean (and mostly failed.) The Soviet response was a request to stop talking about it, because it wasn't worth a war and Soviet leadership didn't want to explain the incident to their own public.
Depends. If they're building satellites that grapple dead satellites, that can certainly be used to attack active satellites too. But laser brooms wouldn't be effective against anything larger than a few centimeters. A space broom might be a cover for a more powerful directed energy weapon, but not necessarily so.
Anyway, China is already toying around with the first sort, and they didn't ask anybody for permission. Their 'authority' to do it is being a sovereign nation.
