Or that he has a plan at all beyond “I’m gonna open my mouth and say words”.
We have to do something with all that money that is rolling in from the tax cuts. What do you want to do, spend it on poor people?
You beat me to it! This guy would be perfect as the chairman and the leading mind of Trump’s Joint Chiefs of Staff!
As long as they wear space pants, I’m all for it.
One wonders where the money will come from. Assuming Trump doesn’t plan to gut the Air Force’s budget but instead plans to have a new agency with a roughly similar budget, that would mean this new Space Force would have an annual budget of roughly $150 billion…an order of magnitude more than NASA has. It’s hard to imagine what the US could do in space with an agency funded to that level annually.
Repel the Space-Mexicans hiding on the dark side of the moon?
You Gotta Fight
For Your Right
For Pew Pew Guns and Tights
A sixth branch of the military requires congressional authorization. Even the most senior political and governmental officials are publicly stating it is a ridiculous idea. Ain’t gonna happen.
Duh!
Where else would you suppose illegal aliens come from? :rolleyes:
We need a space wall like the shield in Spaceballs.
He needs to force something into the space between his ears.
Doesn’t anyone think this is a great idea?
Well, I was thinking of things like a permanent and scalable space station, orbital space craft permanently stationed in space and able to be refueled for various missions in the inner solar system, stations on asteroids or the moon…things like that. Perhaps even something to start cleaning up the orbit or our own junk, since that has pretty vast national security ramifications. With that sort of annual budget there is quite a bit we could do. Of course, what this would probably really be besides a huge waste of money is more armed satellites or other space borne weapons systems.
It’s a great idea with vast potential that will almost certainly be a huge waste of resources and effort for little to no gain.
I know some military personnel who like it because it will supposedly be easier to get funding for space things.
If they are already in the service, then unless they transfer over to this new military branch they aren’t going to get jack. In fact, any space projects their particular branch have going on will probably be transferred to this new branch.
There used to be a U.S. Space Command, for which all of the services could nominally provide troops, staff, and other support, just like they do SOCOM, CENTCOM, etc. It was downgraded and folded under U.S. Strategic Command a few years ago. Looks like its remnants now exist as Joint Force Space Component under STRATCOM.
Dusting off that concept would presumably be a better idea than creating a Space Corps. IMO.
http://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Command
If they ACTUALLY DO THIS, it could be a really useful project. The military knows how to get shit done. At the height of the American space exploration program, NASA was heavily intertwined with the military. All of the original Mercury and Apollo astronauts came from the military, as did most of the scientists and engineers. If this means that some of the ENORMOUS budget of the military is now going to trickle into space exploration, I can’t see that as anything but a good thing. Trump’s announcement of it is bizarre; it seems surreal, and I have no idea if it’s actually going to come to pass or not. But there are about a million other ideas from him that are far worse than this - it might actually be more worthwhile than people are giving it credit for.
Congressman Mike Rogers of Alabama. As best as I can tell, he wanted the Air Force to buy a new rocket engine, called the AR-1, that would be made in his state. The Air Force decided that they wanted to have a competition for the new engine, between AR-1 and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. This didn’t go over well with Rogers, and ever since, in an amazing coincidence, he has supported creating a Space Corps or Space Force that would be broken off from the Air Force.
But I’m sure that was just a massive coincidence in terms of timing.
I bet you they can’t answer where the new money going to come from. Just because there’s a Space Force of maybe 50,000 troops, doesn’t mean that they are going to have more money. It is still a zero sum game: if you want more space stuff, you have to cut the Army, Navy, Marines, or other parts of the Air Force. It’s just as much a zero sum game if there is a Space Force or there is not.