Nope.
But if we were going to swap an air force base to a space base Vandenberg is the right choice. Not only is it the only con US launching point for polar orbits it also has a space shuttle launch facility and run way for landing. Base number two has to be in orbit or on the moon though.
Those would probably be more useful if we still had space shuttles.
Military still has the X-37 (Boeing X-37 - Wikipedia) which lands there.
No new information, but how did you originally conclude that it’s a waste of money?
Because AIUI it’s one part reorganizing of existing functions, such of those previously handled by the Air Force Space Command. Yes, reorganizing costs money, but this is the US military we’re talking about, it’s going to be a fraction of 1% of the budget.
And the other part is concentrating more effort on neglected areas of defence, like satellite defence including GPS, asteroid strikes, orbiting junk and so on. These things tend to fall through the cracks right now.
It’s no part building manned space fighters, more’s the pity 
Does reinforcing it count as a change?
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/15/politics/space-force-lohmeier-fired-after-comments/index.html
Reviving the topic in that, this week, the Space Force uniform has been unveiled.
There are photos of Billy Mitchell’s court martial, showing the recalcitrant old horse soldiers who judged him all wearing stock collar tunics while Mitchell wore a necktie and notched lapels. It was a sartorial statement on backward vs forward thinking.
In WWI, American soldiers fought in those stiff tunics, but in the next war they fought in herringbone twill fatigues that had been originally intended for hauling garbage and digging ditches. Notice in From Here to Eternity how Montgomery Cliff drills and marches in khaki shirt and tie, but does “fatigue” duty in the blue denim working clothes that would soon be replaced by the herringbone twill. (Like the white tents, the blue fatigues were replaced with olive drab because of air reconnaissance). The Army (except for Patton) said “screw it: this is better for the battlefield.”
My point being that as organizations drop the bullshit, their clothes become more utilitarian and less ornamental. These new Space Force uniforms don’t give me a sense of confidence.
They look like dress uniforms to me. Probably have something more practical to wear day to day flying around in their spaceships.
Well that’s the thing. It’s not actually going to be starship troopers; I would guess that most of the space force guys will be doing technical and administrative roles. They are not in need of combat fatigues.
That said, these do indeed look ceremonial, and I presume they’ll be something a bit more comfortable for day to day (please please please TNG style).
At this point in history, Space Force Guardians mostly pilot desks, not spacecraft. All the assets in space are unmanned satellites.
I’m sure they’ll get (or have gotten) battledress equivalents, which are probably going to be used as fatigue/work uniforms. I’m sure Space Force will continue the honorable Air Force practice of assigning additional duty to junior enlisteds to keep the bases sparkling, and you turn out in fatigues for that. The Traditions of the Service demand weeds-n-seeds assignments.
The are Class A ‘Service Dress’ uniforms (actually the USAF no longer calls them “Class A”s but same standard). I cannot recall the last time I saw an Air Force personnel, even senior officers, in service dress outside of the Pentagon or some political function that didn’t quite require formal mess dress. Literally everybody wears some kind of utilities even if they are no where near a battlefield; for the USAF it was Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) but going forward is Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP), and I would assume the same for the USSF since they are actually a subordinate service and will actually share and rotate personnel between the services. (Some years ago there was a ‘style’ of officers wearing flight suits for daily dress but apparently word came down from on high that only personnel actually working on the flight line should be wearing flight suits, so that trend ended.)
Anyway, even for working dress those uniforms look uncomfortable and impractical even in comparison to the cinematic sci-fi uniforms they are clearly intended to mimic. The full panel front means that there are two layers of fabric in front (for…extra ‘salad bar’ space? to function as a bib?), which isn’t so much a problem for the guys but for full figured women is going to require a lot of fitting to align properly, and I don’t understand the point of wearing a tie when the only thing that can be seen is the upper half of the knot. And for some reason, the woman’s pants are extremely baggy in the crotch region. You’d think for presentation purposes that these would be fitted to the actual models even if the PX off the rack uniforms come in the usual military sizing (too large, too small, too short, and just right in the chest but three inches too wide in the shoulders) but these actually look like they pulled in two random people and jammed them into whatever the designer just cranked out on her Singer this morning. I mean, the Space Force probably can’t afford Alexandra Bryne‘s consulting fee but I feel like the cosplay community could have come up with something better than this in both design and execution.
As for “flying around in their spaceships” (I’m morally certain you’re just being hyperbolic about that but I never miss a chance to mock the “Space Force”) they do not have and have no plans for a crewed presence in space. In fact, the Air Force hasn’t had any plans for an independent crewed space program since the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program in the 1960s and only very reluctantly entered into the agreement for a joint NASA-USAF ‘Blue Shuttle’ program, using the Space Transportation System (STS or “Space Shuttle” in common parlance) for polar orbit missions out of Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6 or “Slick-Six”) from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which it abandoned after spending over US$4B on SLC-6 construction, the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, and various other infrastructure upgrades to support shuttle operations. Since the Space Force is just literally carving USSPACECOM off into a separate branch (albeit still under the Department of the Air Force) this is really just an administrative ‘realignment’ that creates an extra labor of bureaucracy within the already highly bureaucratic Air Force. And I mean that literally, as in there are now extra layers of contracting and ‘oversight’, even though the Space Force is doing pretty much everything and nothing more than USSPACECOM was doing before.
Nor should the “Space Force” or anyone else be engaged in crewed operations in space, as it was evident since the 1960s that uncrewed vehicles could do a wider array of activities for less cost, effort, and risk. The notion of ‘space marines’ blasting away at enemies in orbit is a very ‘Fifties sci-fi Buck Rogers scenario, but the reality is that >90% of the cost and effort in putting people into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) goes to just keeping them alive and marginally functional, so if there is something that can be done by an uncrewed system just as well it is by default an order of magnitude less expensive even before you get to the issue of having to bring a crew back to Earth safely. The only reason to create a “Space Force” was to explicitly militarize space operations, which is something we should be trying to reduce because access to LEO is a shared resource for which denial of one nation or party is denial of all. We have and continue to use space for military operations (satellite imaging, communications, weather surveillance, et cetera) but we should strive to avoid LEO from becoming a battleground because we literally cannot gain the upper hand against anyone who can also access it and create debris hazards.
Anyway, stupid uniforms, bureaucratic nonsense, wasted opportunities, et cetera; basically fodder for a Joseph Heller novel were he still alive.
Stranger
Those look like shit.
I’ve seen several articles pointing out that the new uniforms look a lot like the dress blues from the reboot of Battlestar Galactica:
As well as being somewhat reminiscent of the Starfleet uniform from the 1980s Star Trek films:
Video on the Space Force rank insignia:
At least it improves on Air Force enlisted insignia by clearly distinguishing the junior enlisted from NCOs; I’m often squinting at distance or in poor light to tell whether someone is a Senior Airman, Staff Sergeant, or Tech Sergeant .
Those are actually great looking uniforms, arguably the best of the Star Trek franchise. It’s pretty amazing how Wrath of Khan—originally intended to be a low budget TV movie—pretty much reset the entire Star Trek franchise in terms of visual style and tone. A shame the Space Force couldn’t hire the same designer for their uniforms.
Stranger