11 thoughts on “Space Force”

1. …Department of Space?
   Eventually, certainly. Now and in the next 10 years it seems premature. Like establishing the Department of the Air Force at Kitty Hawk…

   1. In the past discussions about a Department of Space wasn’t about a branch of the military, but a new cabinet-level department. Which would be a terrible idea now, and maybe forever.

      1. IIRC, the “Department of Space” in the transition plan that Deputy Assistant Secretary Shanahan released was to be grouping together the disparate personnel elements within the Pentagon that have to do with MilSpace before the Congress authorizes a new fully independent military service. Its elements would then be transformed into the Space Force by the act of Congress.

         Also, IIRC there is to be an R&D equivalent for this as well. If it works, it will get everyone who will be in the new Space Force lined up and marching in the same direction as much as possible, before te new service is authorized and funded.

      2. Department of the Exterior?

         1. Awesome +1

2. A Department of Space would be like having a Department of Air, not Air Force.

   There is such a wide variety of potential activity in space that almost every one of the existing Cabinet departments would be involved. Why cut space commerce out of Commerce, or the prosecution of crimes committed in space out of Justice? Never mind Transportation and Defense.

   1. Hmmm? Department of Space? Is that like having a “Department of Terrorism” so we can have a War on Terrorism ? Oh, we do have a war on terrorism.

      We have too many “Departments” all ready. Way too many. G.Washington had all we needed. And I’m not sure a Space Force is the right way to go. A larger question is why is NASA running space missions? NACA did not run missions. NASA needs to get back to doing research. Maybe the Space Force/Corp could do manned missions?

      NASA is too invested in Space Opera and Performance Art. I’m afraid a Space Force/Corp would be too.

      1. “NASA is too invested in Space Opera and Performance Art. I’m afraid a Space Force/Corp would be too.”

         NASA was formed as a reply to Kruschev’s Space Propaganda campaign of 1957-69. Once that was answered conclusively on July 20th 1969, the incentives to keep NASA focused started drifting. The Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and his Democratic and Republican colleagues, find that convenient.

         By contrast, the MilSpace assets of the US military have profound daily effects on the ability of the US to defend itself and its interests around the world. Whether it is reconsats, comsats, or NavSats, every military operation is supported by the information they gather as “force multipliers”. That ability is now coming under threat from the PLA’s newly established “Strategic Support Force”, specializing in Space warfare and Cyber warfare, alongside “the Space Troops of the Russian AeroSpace Force”, as a Russian general called them recently.

         To ameliorate these counter-space asset activities will require far more focus on MilSpace than the USAF Air Staff has been willing to attend to. They have used the USAF Space Command budget as a dipping well, through “reprogramming”, for funds to use in things like keeping the majority of USAF fighter squadrons combat ready. This has left Space Command ill-prepared to respond to the current testing of Russian and Chinese ASAT assets.

         For instance, it is 11 years since the first successful PLA ASAT test, and the hoped for “responsive launch” system to replace assets within 72 hours still remains a DARPA program, that has launched nothing. Its last attempt ended badly because of the USAF requirement that it be launched from any *unmodified* USAF F-15 Strike Eagle strike fighter. DARPA has a new attempt under contract with Boeing.

         As long as the responses to counter-space assets are constrained by the other institutional demands of DoD, rather than by what survival of assets in Space requires, then we will remain vulnerable to the leverage of the sort offered by “stalking” operations under test currently by the Russians and the PLASSF.

      2. We have too many “Departments” all ready.

         Damn straight. I wasn’t even all that impressed with the idea of the Office of Homeland Security — why not just a council like the NSC, but with one or two different departments represented? The Department of Homeland Security came about as an exercise of pure bureaucratic rent-seeking, IMHO.

         And then there was the TSA…

3. NASA was formed as a reply to Kruschev’s Space Propaganda campaign of 1957-69. Once that was answered conclusively on July 20th 1969, the incentives to keep NASA focused started drifting. The Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and his Democratic and Republican colleagues, find that convenient.

   You know, I do tire of people explaining away the motivation for human spaceflight and space exploration as being just an elaborate piece of political theater. Maybe for some narrow Washington bureaucrats it was. For everyone who made the thing work? It’s cynical trivialization of their efforts.

   For the astronauts and rocket scientists (von Braun included) – if you look at their motivations from their earliest days, it was clear they wanted to explore the universe and open it to mankind. That politics was an occasional vehicle (and sometimes hijacking) of their efforts – that was the accident of history for them, not the vision of mankind moving out into the universe.

   1. You are quite correct about the desires of the people who did the job.

      I watched as they did it. However, in talking about why the institution of Congress was willing to pay for it, understanding *their* motivations requires understanding the intense need to win the psychological aspects of WW3, in which the Apollo program played a substantive part. If we had lost that portion of the conflict, with nothing to balance out the US political collapse in the SE Asia conflict, then far larger portions of humanity could have fallen to the Pol Pots of the world.

      Today, the 75 years long experiment that Stalin named “the socialist camp” has been shown up as a failure, all the way back to its basic changes to the definitions we use to discuss society. That was not at all obvious to many I spoke with in 1965. NASA was a *very* good thing in many ways, primarily in showing that a totalitarian State was *not* better at organizing technical activity than societies with greater levels of industrial freedoms of action. That was contested in 1962 quite strongly.

      That is *not* what we are discussing in talking about the Space News article, however. Instead we are discussing the need for a Space Force in a post-socialist camp world, where the remnants of that wave of reaction are still trying to demonstrate justifications for restricting the freedoms of action needed in industrial society around the world. We are talking about the institution of Congress approving a new US Military Service, and who is in favor, …and who against, …and for what reasons.

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