Since the time when man first rubbed two sticks together and sparked fire, it’s been a fact of life: He who masters a new technology has an obvious edge over he who doesn’t.

The United States has mastered the technology required to put into space sophisticated objects that give this country military and economic advantages.

Gen. Lance Lord, commander of the Air Force Space Command, is bound and determined to keep that edge.

“America uses and America needs space,” Lord said last week while in Fort Worth to deliver a speech to the Fort Worth Airpower Council. His command’s No. 1 priority is “to protect that advantage.”

Lord’s desire to carry out that directive has been construed by some to indicate that the United States claims sole rights to space.

“The United States doesn’t own space – nobody owns space,” Teresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, was reported as saying in a May 18 report in the New York Times. CDI is a policy analysis group in Washington that finds more reasons than not to criticize the Pentagon. “Space is a global commons under international treaty and international law.”

Lord wouldn’t argue with Hitchens on that point.

“The United States should operate in the commons of space with due regard for others,” he said. But in Lord’s mind – and in the thoughts of the Bush administration and Pentagon leaders – that doesn’t conflict with the American goal of wanting to maintain air superiority. Nor should it.

The United States thus far has managed to hold a military advantage in space without putting Star Wars-type weapons on geostational platforms. Just consider the movement and positioning of U.S. troops in Iraq.

In the words of war, Lord said, “We no longer talk in terms of mass. Our global positioning system allows a precision that means less troops needed in a specific theater, less people – civilian and military – put in harm’s way. We kill less, damage less.”

But who knows what the future may bring as other nations develop their space capabilities.

Frankly, I prefer to know that “our guys” are thinking about the possibilities of a weaponized space, if for no other reason than you know darn well “their guys” are thinking about it.

I want someone like Lord envisioning space as an offensive platform in order to keep it from happening, to deny others the ability to use space against us.

One of the Space Command’s primary missions is called space situational awareness: to determine what’s floating around in the space above the Earth.

What is it? Whose is it? Where is it going? The command tracks about 13,000 objects in space. Ten percent are satellites, Lord said. “Sixty-five to 70 countries have their flags decaled on satellites.”

The rest is debris of one sort or another, and not all of it stays in space. Some of it – “from rocket bodies to an astronaut’s camera,” Lord said – falls out of orbit. Most often, the object will bounce along the Earth’s atmosphere “not unlike a rock on the surface of a lake,” Lord said.

During the launch of the shuttle Discovery last Tuesday, 31 space surveillance sensors made sure commander Eileen Collins and her crew had a clear path to their destination. The space command establishes a “zone of exclusion” around the shuttle and the International Space Station, and informs NASA if anything appears threatening enough for evasive action.

In addition to constantly looking at what’s overhead, a satellite-based missile warning system constantly looks down at the planet’s surface, watching for unusual, unexplained events. North America’s aerospace defense system depends on these “Earth starers” as an early warning system for possible offensive launches.

The system picks up any heat-generating event – forest fires, missile launches, even the explosion and fire at the Valley Solvents & Chemical Co. in Fort Worth last Thursday.

Most of us on terra firma don’t realize how integrated space is into our daily lives and how much of the American economy depends on our continued unfettered access to it.

Use a credit card at the gas pump? Have satellite TV at home? Like the convenience of immediate financial transactions at ATMs? Have GPS in your spiffy new car? Amazed by the precision of the timing at professional auto races? Wonder how the snowplows in the Rocky Mountains can navigate the roads when the drivers can’t see lane markers?

All of this is possible because of U.S. mastery of satellites and communications technology.

Lord and the nearly 40,000 Americans who work for him in the Air Force Space Command want to assure our continued access to the territory that makes that happen: space.