Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, told a gathering at Washington's Heritage Foundation that China's destruction of an agingsatellite with a ground-based ballistic missile was a "wake-up call" that should make the U.S. get serious about threats in space.
President Bush made absolutely no mention of missile defense in his State of the Union address, an astonishing omission at a time when the war against Islamic fanaticism is at the forefront of American politics and only days after China finally acknowledged that on Jan. 11 it had tested a missile in space by destroying an aging weather satellite.