Everything You Need to Know About the United States Space Force
The sixth branch of military you didn’t know existed…
I recently stumbled upon an article titled “Former Israeli space chief says aliens exist, and Trump knows about it”, and I was instantly intrigued — I mean, how could you not be?
The article goes on to explain how Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life, as well as human interaction with the species.
As mind-blowing as some of the claims in that article are, the confirmation of alien life wasn’t the only thing in the article that fiercely caught my attention.
As I got deeper into the article, there’s a quote given by President Trump, back in May of 2020 stating, “Space is going to be the future, both in terms of defense and offense … we’re now the leader on space”.
At first, I had no idea what this quote was in regard to, but the article goes on to state that the quote was given by the President “as he was presented with the official flag of a newly created military branch, Space Force.”
Up until this point, I’d never even heard of Space Force. I had no idea what it was, nor what its objectives were.
Upon further research, I came to find out that the US Space Force (USSF) is a new branch of the military, established only a year ago, on December 20, 2019.
Shocked to find out that a sixth branch of military was created, seemingly unbeknownst to majority of the US people, I had to dive into research about what exactly this new branch of military is and what it stands for.
Here’s everything you need to know…
The Mission of the United States Space Force
As stated above, the US Space Force was created in December of 2019, and is the first new armed service to be created since 1947. The USSF is, however, a direct descendant of the Air Force Space Command, a program made with the intent to expand America’s space advantage during the Cold War.
After all, Space Command did play a vital part in establishing the GPS, which improved the ability to monitor military movements worldwide and gave the improved ability to quickly detect missile launches — two abilities that have given the US a major leg-up in combat for decades, at this point.
When you think of things this way, the creation of the USSF seems more practical and less like a panic-attempt at defense against alien life forms (which is the way that it came across to me, when reading the article mentioned above).
This being said, when the USSF was officially instated as a branch of US military back in December of 2019, their mission statement claimed that “the USSF is a military service that organizes, trains, and equips space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force.”
Overall, Space Force hopes to expand on the work started by the Air Force Space Command decades ago. They have intent to create a further lead for the United States, over other countries, in regard to satellite use and capabilities, by providing real-time satellite reconnaissance access to battlefield commanders, among other things.
They also hope to protect US satellites already existent in space, as the importance of these satellites is crucial to US military success, in addition to launching new and improved satellites for future use.
What Space Force Has Done So Far
Now that we know the mission of the USSF and why they were created, it’s safe to wonder what exactly they’ve done in the first year since being established.
Firstly, since their creation a year ago, the space force has acquired about 2,000 military members, officially named “Guardians” in a press conference speech given by Mike Pence on December 18, 2020.
The first members of the new branch were commissioned out of the US Air Force’s graduating class in April of 2020, and by May 1st active duty members could volunteer for transfer to the USSF.
New recruits only started being allowed in October 2020, the first seven of which graduated on December 10th. The hopes of the USSF is to reach 16,000 Guardians when the full potential of the branch is eventually fulfilled.
The USSF launched its first military communications satellite (part of a six satellite network of supposedly unbreakable systems) on March 26, 2020, and its first “space plane” on May 17.
Space Force’s second mission, the space plane launched in mid-May, included a secretive, unmanned, mini-shuttle that’s said to have been worked on by the Air Force for years. Its mission includes a 2-year stay in space, where it’ll deploy a small satellite called FalconSat-8 which carries several experiments on behalf of the US Air Force, NASA, and the US Naval Research Lab.
Other than that, there’s not much else regarding what the Space Force has accomplished thus far. The only other Space Force news easily found on the internet is their plans to nearly triple in size and add a Reserve element, in the year 2021(assuming President-elect Joe Biden doesn’t scrap the new program altogether).
Without having ever heard of the US Space Force before the former Israeli space chief made the alleged confirmation of human contact with aliens, it seemed that the Space Force was a not-so-subtle attempt by Donald Trump to get a leg up on potential interplanetary conflict to come.
On one hand, assuming that Haim Eshed’s claim of alien life is true, the Space Force would tend to fall in line with this claim, considering that the USSF was only created a year before Eshed’s interview, and the fact that the former space chief made specific mention that Trump knew of the extraterrestrial life.
The sequence of these events, partnered with the fact that so far the USSF has been relatively quiet about what it’s actually been doing, seem to point to the assumption that the Space Force may have been created as a protection against otherworldly beings.
On the other hand, considering that the United States is the only country to make an official branch of its military dedicated to space and the mission statements given by the USSF, it seems that maybe the Space Force really is just a means of protecting our assets in space.
Whatever the reason is — protection from extraterrestrial life or satellite advantage for the military here on earth — it’s almost certain that when it comes to the US Space Force, similarly to most other things controlled by the US government, we just aren’t getting the whole story…
