US space force

It's just a big shiny object to distract us from the corruption in Washington.

Runestone, I'm sure there were people who thought that the building of dreadnoughts was a terrible distraction from the more pressing issues of the time. 

We never see what we don't want to see.

And sure, with the Mueller investigation going full steam, Trump isn't all that likely to start a major war soon, he's got other things to keep him busy. But what about Pence (who announced the space force), or if he's also caught on the net, the next president?

Take it from someone who knows people who know people within the military hierarchy: as soon as Twitler is gone, Space Force will also be gone. It's just a distraction, to give the Trumpers more to crow about. And for those who don't know, the Nazis had the same idea -- they wanted to militarize space and establish [Nazi] colonies on other planets. Phillip K. Dick elaborates well on this in "Man in the High Castle".

Considering the Trumpian propaganda around their space force (It will tell us the truth where NASA won't!) it's just another attempt to avoid dealing with reality. Rocket science doesn't work without the 'science' part. 

Boondoggle.

Vaporware.

Yeah, Laura--the military types I've known (mid-level careerists) have all been rock solid pragmatists. Upper echelons may be political and play games, grunts may be susceptible to right-wing-nuttery, but mid-level careerists know trajectory calculations and bullets are real things, not leftist deep-state science-propaganda. 

R1

Can somebody spell out what they say is not actually happening, or won't last long?

Military space projects? Surely nobody is so naive to believe that. Apart from plenty of spy satellites, there are also a number of classified space-planes, and rumors include the intriguing Blackstar space-plane. I'm a space buff, but not enough of one to tell you whether Blackstar is credible.

Keeping all military space projects unified under one command? Well, there's already "Palladium At Night", a military satellite not claimed by any specific military department. So it looks like maybe there are already assets generic enough to justify creating a new unified space force. But what do I know about classified US space projects?

Separating military space projects from NASA? I didn't see any US government official saying that's what the space force was about. I don't know what other people may have said, but if they weren't in government, their opinions don't count. Companies that make planes, like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, do both commercial and military planes. Presumably the same will happen when it comes to space projects: they'll still be built by people who do all three: scientific, commercial and military projects. The difference with a space force is that there will be a top military official in charge of all military space projects. NASA probably wouldn't like it, because it leaves them with less bargaining power when it comes to arguing that a particular space technology should be declassified, and even on setting overall strategy and priorities. I think the civilian head of NASA out-ranks the heads of all military space projects, but probably would be on equal terms to the head of a space force. In any case, the decision to have a unified military space command is mainly political, and Republicans are generally hawks and likely to approve of the idea.

Somebody, somewhere, having weapons ready to launch from space? I wouldn't know, but a first potential step is somebody demonstrating a controlled fall from orbit. Which the Heavenly Abode Chinese space station did a few months ago. NASA was claiming the descent was uncontrolled. I thought I'd watch it on a website that tracks satellites. It was interesting. On the last orbit, the space station passed just underneath the sun, near the equator. The re-entry was close to the International Date Line, close to the equator, and a few minutes after midnight GMT. Maybe there's still a large margin of error, but then, the Russians once proved the point with the Tsar Bomb that in some cases, you can have large margins of error. And whether the US have or not their own weapons that can be launched from space, surely somebody has to deal with the possibility of other countries doing that to the US, and it's probably easiest to deal with those threats from space as well.

Have I missed anything? Is there anything else that somebody wants to say it isn't happening, or will stop happening as soon as Trump is out? I'm trying to understand where your thinking is coming from.

Some recent developments that indicate the Space Force is definitely happening: Pence recently convened a meeting of the National Space Council at Fort McNair, where cabinet secretaries, members of the national space and security councils, and policy officials discussed recommendations to begin forming the Department of the Space Force. Pence has also been recently at Roswell, the famous location of the UFO incident in the 40s, in case anyone thinks it might be related to this. Pence was also the man who announced the creation of the Space Force. It definitely looks like this isn't Trump's idea, but more like Pence's, so even after Trump is indicted/impeached/resigns, this will keep going.

I did a bit of research on what weapons may already exist in space, and one in particular got my attention. It's been described as Thor's hammer and Zeus' lightning bolt. Projectiles made of tungsten would be thrown from space, with the acceleration of the fall possibly increased with a basic rocket engine, so they would hit the Earth with enormous speed and cause a big crater. Not even the deepest bunkers would be safe from something like this. When I read about this, I got a very strong feeling that a weapon like this is already in place on orbit around the Earth.