Debating the creation of a US space corps
The US Air Force’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle sits on a runway at Kennedy Space Center in May 2017 following a two-year mission in low-Earth orbit.
DOD/United Launch Alliance
“America’s military needs a space corps,” asserted the headline on a 22 December Wall Street Journal op-ed . The National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Trump on 12 December, had established no such new US military branch. An early version of that annual bill, however, one which passed the House, did call for a space corps. The space-corps concept may be deferred legislatively, but it’s drawing media attention.
The op-ed warned that “swarms of antisatellite weapons” could quickly destroy America’s capabilities for communication, early warning, navigation, and surveillance, rendering the military “blind, deaf and lost.” Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN), one of the House’s two leading space-corps advocates, told the Atlantic that it’s not just a military threat. “Everything from ATM machines to Zumwalt destroyers would be paralyzed,” he declared.
The House’s other leading advocate, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), told National Public Radio that Russia and China have realized that maybe “they can take our eyes and ears out.” A new US National Security Strategy document reports that potential adversaries, seeing that “asymmetric advantage,” are pursuing anti-satellite weaponry.
The WSJ op-ed noted that China first conducted an antisatellite “hard-kill test” in 2007. Ten years ago, under the headline “China raises stakes on space arms race ,” Physics Today summarized NASA’s estimates that the resulting thousands of space-debris shards could damage other satellites.
But even back then, the strategic concern wasn’t new. It had been around long before a congressional commission warned , in 2001, of a Pearl Harbor in space. That commission also warned that bureaucratically, the US was “not yet arranged or focused to meet the national security space needs of the 21st century.” What the New York Times called a “hodgepodge of offices” remains a central issue in the discussion now.
In 2001 the Times also noted a common belief in a “taboo” about weaponizing space. In fact an Outer Space Treaty has been in effect since 1967, though according to a report that appeared at The Conversation and at Space.com , it doesn’t apply to antisatellite weapons.
But that was then—back when comparable idealism about the Internet was also easier to sustain. Last month, National Review quoted what it called the “new thought” of General John Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, that there is no “war in space. There is only war, and space is one of the domains in which it will be fought.”
In the summer of 2017, the contested political domain for a possible space corps was the US Congress, where Rogers chairs the Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee for strategic forces, with Cooper as ranking member. In a 20 June press release , they warned of “eroding” strategic advantages in space and of “a crippling organizational and management structure” impeding correction.
The present US Space Command is within the Air Force. The two congressmen called for creating a space corps separate from the Air Force but within the Department of the Air Force, much as the Marine Corps is a separate service within the Navy Department. They also called for “a space-based sensor layer for ballistic missile defense.”
About the space corps, the Pentagon balked energetically. On 21 June, the day after the press release appeared, the online magazine Breaking Defense quoted Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson. She saw the Pentagon as “complicated enough.” A space corps, she insisted, “will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart, and cost more money.” She added, “And if I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.”
No one disagrees about the threat that might or might not require a space corps. A 2 December CNN online report began this way:
A senior US general said Saturday that countries like Russia and China are actively building weapons that can target space-based US military assets like satellites.
“They’ve been building weapons, testing weapons, building weapons to operate from the earth in space, jamming weapons, laser weapons, and they have not kept it secret,” Gen. John Hyten, the head of US Strategic Command, told an audience at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California.
CNN also reported something that Rogers said at the forum:
“Most folks aren’t thinking about the fact that our first way of detecting a launch by North Korea, so that we can turn our radars to start tracking it and start aiming our interceptors to be able to get it in time, is a satellite up there waiting for that heat signature,” said Rogers, a vocal advocate of creating a separate US military space corps.
“We can not let that satellite be dazzled for 10 or 15 minutes; it would be too late,” he added.
But “vigorous debate” about the space corps concept flourished at the forum, according to National Review—as illustrated in this snippet about a panel discussion involving Rogers and Wilson:
Rogers asserted that space is being rapidly militarized, with competitor nations making huge investments in attempts to catch up to and overtake the United States in a domain it has long dominated, and that the Air Force, as a bureaucratic entity, was stifling the evolution of the nation’s space forces. Wilson pushed back vigorously, stating that the Air Force was manned by a superb cadre of space professionals and that the service had dramatically increased its budgetary investments in space.
In an 18 December Washington Times op-ed , after the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act had become law without establishing a space corps, Heritage Foundation defense analyst John Venable argued that all talk of a space corps is premature anyhow. What’s needed first, he said—and what’s missing from the new law—is a plan to examine “all 60 Pentagon entities that control or influence” US space assets. Since 57 aren’t even owned by the Air Force, Venable predicts, the “storm of opposition” would be all the more intense, but necessary to weather all the same.
Space News emphasized that at the Reagan National Defense Forum, Rogers insisted that a space corps is inevitable. But National Review reported that the forum’s “space conversation, though lively, was ultimately a debate without a conclusion.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.