Posted on 06/18/2018 9:25:38 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he has ordered the creation of a new military branch, adding the "Space Force" to the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard.
"It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. Very importantly I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces, that is a big statement," Trump said at a meeting of the National Space Council on Monday. "We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the space force, separate but equal, it is going to be something."
Chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement that the military will work with Congress and other stakeholders to move forward with the policy. "We understand the President's guidance. Our Policy Board will begin working on this issue, which has implications for intelligence operations for the Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy," White said in the statement. The head of NASA said the agency strongly supports Trump's position "forging a sustainable and focused space policy that strengthens American leadership."
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Where will they build the Space Academy? (USSA)
It’s a great move. Never underestimate the impact of a President proposing something really cool.
Hollywood...where else can you find so many space cadets?
hmmm wonder why it didnt show up
Well, Starfleet Academy is in San Francisco.
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Not to quibble but, shouldn’t Congress be the ones making that decision?
For instance: appropriations to pay for snappy uniforms. Not to mention, say, weapons?
[ Well, Starfleet Academy is in San Francisco. ]
What better place to train to withstand strange new microbes on strange new worlds....????
Or alien lifeforms.
this is brilliant, Trump has strengthened the Left’s belief that he is crazy, and said leftists will continue to underestimate him.
Trump truly knows to get you to hang yourself. LOL
Space Rangers
wow i missed that to must be all the space dust floating around !
Actually a pretty smart move on Trump’s part. With China making no bones about the militarization of space, Trump has effectively told the Chicoms to “go ahead” and he will use the US military to block their initiative. Once again, Trump is playing 3-D chess while Congress is still playing checkers.
Actually, I wonder if the Space Force will initially be formed from existing units operating in space. For example, we have satellites in orbit for surveillance and communication, as well as the GPS constellation. I wonder if the Space Force would take over management of those assets? Then to put some teeth in space, they could become the primary military interface to the Missile Defense Agency. The MDA, working with the Army, Navy, and Air Force currently has interceptors that work both endo-atmospheric and exo-atmospheric as well as space surveillance radar systems (as does the Air Force).
However, I'm sure the existing branches and intel agencies are not going to be too willing to give up assets, budget, prestige, capability, and control. This will probably be an uphill battle not just with Congress and the leftists 'rats who will oppose anything President Trump does.
The net is - I bet the Air Force is the least excited about this proposal as they stand to lose the most to the new branch.
The President can’t simply direct this, a new service requires legislation. More likely, he is planning on forming a new joint command along the lines of US SOCOM.
StarLink determined that in-house manufacture of the satellite was the better option in placing their constellation into orbit. The satellites have laser interlink to communicate between all space assets, a very high total system bandwidth to mesh ground terminals, connections formed by a synthetic aperture steerable beam, and optics for ground observation.
Interferometry allows combining light or radio waves from multiple sources to generate a composite image of observations, giving in effect an instrument resolving power as if a lens or antenna were the diameter of the most widely separated elements in a group.
SpaceX was chastised for releasing live video of the Earth from a camera onboard their second stage in low orbit. Why would such a simple camera’s view be considered a security risk on a commercial launch, unless it was too revealing of a potential capability?
An Arpanet distributed in space around the Earth, consisting of over ten thousand nodes in final configuration, could present the possibility toward surviving a total communications-and-control loss in a per-emptive first-strike. This likely would require hardened electronic design to remain useful more than mere hours.
What would be the job description of a space force? What mission gap are they to fill that requires a specialized service be created, rather than adding another task to the Air Force. The AF already are tasked with the military space mission launch and operation of assets. Strictly off-world posting for a tour of duty?
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