By Kate DiGuglielmo, Staff Writer
SPACE: What is the point of a Space Force?
Many people around the world are wondering the same thing: what is a Space Force? According to Eric Mack, a news reporter for Cnet.org, President Donald Trump described the United States’s Space Force for being a “call to arms for a new way of dealing with military matters in Earth’s orbit.” The Space Force is expected to be approved by 2020, but may face trouble due to the 2020 elections. However, Trump has began proposing the idea to multiple people, including those in the Department of Defense.
Trump was not the first person to come up with the idea of a Space Force former President, Ronald Reagan, first had the idea. Reagan had the idea in 1985, but it went away after being merged with US Strategic Command in 2002 following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
One may think that Reagan was the person who influenced Trump to build a Space Force, but according to Trump, the idea came to him while making a speech to the Marines in 2018. This speech triggered the idea for the Space Force Military Branch after Trump said,“‘We’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space, and I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force. We’ll call it the Space Force.’” Though he was not serious about the idea at the time, three months later, Trump decided to make it clear that he did want the Force to be established. Trump made it clear that he was serious when saying, “‘It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space,’” Trump said. “‘We must have American dominance in space,’” he said to the Department of Defense.
What the Space Force is doing remains unclear, but it seems that instead of sending troops to space, they would be controlling items going into space. For example, troops would be commanding unmanned spacecrafts like satellites. To join this military branch, all one would do is enlist.
The Space Force is needed because of countries, such as Russia and China, treating space as a militarized domain. The Air Force has stated this multiple times and people are now beginning to hear them out. The livelihoods of many people are dependent on orbital mechanisms. People rely on their GPS and weather forecasters controlled by satellites in space. Without anyone protecting our satellites, bad things can happen.
The United States has witnessed China doing target practice on one of their own satellites. This poses a threat due to the unknown intentions behind their actions. The Space Force may not sound like it will do much, but Donald Trump is planning on it making a great impact on the United States with this force. Our involvement in space, along with the development of new technologies, can advance our scientific knowledge and world as we know it.