President Donald Trump on Tuesday said his new governmental security strategy recognizes that space is a theater of war, and he floated the picture of creating a Space Force, a branch of the military that would carry on outside of earth’s atmosphere.
“Space is a war-fighting domain, just as if the land, air, and sea,” Trump told a an audience of service members at the Marine Cadre Air Station Miramar. “We may even have a Space Force, develop another one, Intermission Force. We have the Air Force, we’ll have the Space Force.”
The president traced how he’d originally coined the term as a joke, while discussing U.S. government allotting and private investment in space. “I said, ‘maybe we need a new force, we’ll entitle it the Space Force,’ and I was not really serious. Then I said, ‘what a superlative idea,’ maybe we’ll have to do that,” Trump told the crowd of Marines.
“So ponder of that, Space Force,” Trump continued, “because we are spending a lot and we procure a lot of private money coming in, tremendous. You saw what happened the other day, and tremendous attainment. From the very beginning, many of our astronauts have been soldiers and air men, sail guard men and marines. And our service members will be vital to ensuring America carry ons to lead the way into the stars.”
It was unclear whether the president was still joking by the heyday he finished his off script remarks about a Space Force. The White Legislature did not respond to a request for comment.
But Trump is not the only political leader in Washington who is mulling the philosophy of a Space Force. In June of 2017, a contingent of House lawmakers sexual advanced dividing the Air Force into two separate branches, one dedicated to aviation and a espouse, new branch dedicated to space ventures.
Language to create a new military subsidiary called the Space Corps did not make it into the final national defense authorization tally in November, but there were several new directives included in the legislation that could ease the Space Corps plan in the future.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the biggest patron in Congress of a military space branch, said these directives reproduce progress. “This is just the first step,” he said in a statement at the pro tem. “We will not allow the United States national security space effort to continue to drift toward a space Pearl Harbor.”