(Note: While science and sci-fi writing motivated this post, some readers might find the following material offensive. Tough.)
The U.S. president wanted a Space Force. The U.S. military capitulated. And the U.S. Congress gave it to him on December 20. Sounds neat. Does it make sense?
Traditionally the USAF took care of most things happening above the Earth’s surface, including spy satellites and whatever secret weapons are up there (yep, and they’re just as dangerous as the U.N.’s black helicopters that will invade the U.S.). Astronauts have generally been a mix of USAF and Navy pilots, discounting civilian scientists, so there was already a lot of overlap with other services. And the U.S. NASA wasn’t above getting into the militaristic aspects either. So forget tradition. Maybe we should call a spade a spade? The military is in space, so maybe we should admit it and wrap it up in one tidy package?
Is there some savings to be had? Even if the answer were yes, that’s probably not an argument most reasonable persons would make…or believe. The current administration will have created a trillion dollar U.S. debt very soon, so what’s a few more dollars here and there? A precedent might be the moving of the Coast Guard into Homeland Security, but the creation of Homeland Security also increased federal bureaucracy and incompetence (not to mention murderous enforcement on the southern border where thousand of illegals are invading). Maybe they should have put anything to do with protecting the U.S., including what’s now in Space Force, into Homeland Security? Isn’t Space Force about protecting the homeland and not invading ETs or killer asteroids? U.S. of A., uber alles!
Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Smaller isn’t either. (Seems like the Goldilocks Principle needs to be applied here, but the Pentagon’s good ole boys would never listen to a girl.) And where does the Earth’s atmosphere become space? Where does it end and space start? I can’t wait for scramjet technology, where intercontinental flights hop and skip across the atmosphere, going from the USAF’s domain to the USSF’s and back. Who will have authority over those flights? Or might that be the FSA (not to be confused with the Russian equivalent of the FBI) instead of the FAA?
And adding a fourth component to the Pentagon’s already bloated three (four if you count the Marines separately, who also fly in the air and into space along with the Air Force, Army, and Navy boys—their planes just landed atop the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, while an Air Force drone took out an Iranian general—none of that bodes well for efficiency in the DoD). And the Space Force will surely weaken scientific programs in NASA, bleeding off its already depleted funding. The anti-science forces here and around the planet move on.
And what about all those free enterprise solutions for space exploration? Boeing and Space-X at the service of NASA—will they be canceled now with Space Force taking over? (That might be a good thing considering Boeing’s track record, some of which the FAA has to take the blame for.) As a person who claims to be a savvy business person and certainly isn’t an ex-military man, you’d think the president would want space to be in the private sector and not part of the government, but his Space Force will backtrack that. Will their members also march down Pennsylvania Avenue in the future? Or fly along on hover-boards?
Whatever the future holds, a better solution is now impossible, at least in our immediate future. Maybe I shouldn’t look for logic in governmental decision making. “Logical politicians” is as much an oxymoron as “military intelligence,” albeit the military won here if their goal was more bureaucracy and increasing the national debt, instead of the president’s goal. The logical step? We should have forgotten about the militaristic Space Force, taken space completely out of the USAF, and let corporations and NASA do their things. The less militarization of space there is, the better off humanity will be.
This is all a clumsy, verbose segue to sci-fi. Its authors have offered various versions about how Earth governments will use space. The president’s solution is more like how militaristic sci-fi authors handle it. There’s a wide variety in that subgenre from fascist thuggery and imperial conquest to benign protection for Earth’s teeming billions. But sometimes the scientists are in charge, not the military, but they often still have to put up with incompetent bureaucrats and evil government conspiracies. And then there’s the dystopian and apocalyptic sci-fi subgenres, where space exploration and exploitation is the last thing on everyone’s mind, a faint memory of more exciting times or a better future for mankind. Or perhaps survivors are fleeing a wasted Earth destroyed by human beings’ failure to manage climate change due to anti-science viewpoints? And yes, there’s also the excitement of exploring new worlds and discovering new intelligent lifeforms, learning that we’re not alone and being humbled by the greatness of God’s creation.
In my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (see below) and other related novels (including A. B. Carolan’s YA sci-fi mysteries–see the previous post) that follow the events leading to the creation of ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) and beyond, the SEB (“Space Exploration Bureau”) plays a more important role than the fleets of battle cruisers of militaristic sci-fi. Its main charter is mostly to explore near-Earth space looking for planets that might make good colonies. It’s generally not defensive, preferring to quarantine planets that exhibit a bellicose nature. Maybe the stories only represent my wish and a prayer that we can overcome our own bellicose natures and arrive at something akin to that, but that’s the way I wrote it. I won’t live long enough to see how it all turns out.
But sci-fi has always had all the possibilities covered, even bureaucratic creations like the so-called Space Force. It remains to be seen which sci-fi version will become our reality, and whether that reality will be good, bad, or ugly. (Play that Morricone theme again, Sam.)
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Comments are always welcome.
The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Many possible futures are covered in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” now a three-novel bargain bundle. In Survivors of the Chaos, human beings suffer through the Chaos in a dystopian world created by multinational corporations and controlled by their mercenaries until a bargain is made that leads to three colony ships traveling to the stars. In Sing a Zamba Galactica, readers follow the historical progression from first contact to saving a strange, collective intelligence. And in Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, humans and their ET friends have to battle a mad industrialist who wants to control near-Earth space by destroying the fledgling trade union that binds the near-Earth solar systems together. Writ large, most of the sci-fi topics mentioned above are covered in this epic future history about what could be. Available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
