In a speech last week at the Pentagon, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the Trump administration is working with the Department of Defense to create the United Space Command. The Administration is asking Congress for an additional $8 billion for space security systems over the next five years, and signaling that it is ready to work with Congress to create a sixth branch of the armed forces—the U.S. Space Force.
The idea of a Space Force, first floated by the President last March, has drawn mixed reactions from politicians and left some space advocates perplexed. Do we not want to keep outer space a domain where nations peacefully gather to conduct scientific exploration and deploy services such as weather monitoring? Isn’t that what the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was all about?
In truth, space has always been a military arena. Many nations depend on sophisticated and expensive satellites to keep them informed and secure, and the satellites themselves require protection. The United States, Russia and China have all launched and tested anti-satellite weapons—interceptors that can destroy a satellite in space. China demonstrated as recently as 2007 how easily satellites could be damaged by an enemy.